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The Pecman

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  1. Yes, exactly. I agree with 100% of what you say. My time is so limited these days, if I'm confused or put off by the first chapter of any novel, there's very little chance I can get convinced to read further. I don't doubt that the later chapters of the story reveal more about the character and explain the situation, but I think there's a way to provide significantly more clues and more detail to make the story more interesting. Harrod200 didn't address my other notes -- adding more description, giving us more details about where and when the story takes place and so on -- and those would go a long way towards improving the story. Strictly IMHO.
  2. I believe this is absolutely true. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single great novel, by any author, that doesn't grab my attention fairly quickly. If you doubt me, read Noah Lukeman's terrific book The First Five Pages, which provides numerous examples on precisely why it's important to put as much as you can in the opening scene of your novel. And at the same time, I confess to breaking this rule with both of my novels here on Awesomedude, neither of which grabs the reader that quickly with the first five pages. I've considered going back and rewriting them, but for the moment, I'm trying to concentrate my energies on a new novel. That one starts with a bang, right in the opening paragraph, so no one will be able to say that it wastes any time getting started. There are good and bad ways to submit manuscripts. Some publishers and agents only want a query letter, where you provide a one paragraph summary of your novel, then offer to send some sample chapters or the complete manuscript if they'd like to read it further. Others will take the entire manuscript immediately. But the synopsis alone is not enough to sell a book. It might be less difficult than you think. Try another draft, rewrite the first chapter to give it more emphasis as quickly as possible, and then see what happens. Renumbering chapters is easy; rewriting (and writing) is hard.
  3. If all or part of your story is available, I'd be willing to read the first chapter over the next week or so. Tell me where it is, and I'll give it a shot. Otherwise, email me one chapter as an MS Word file to: thepecman@yahoo.com and I'll give it a once-over. If I think it has potential, and I can find the time, I'll give you a detailed edit. At worst, I'll jot down some overall thoughts on whether I thought the open works, if the characters are interesting, and if the plot makes sense, and make my comments more general. You might want to read my Gay Writing Tips piece elsewhere first. I do get cranky when I see a half-dozen violations of those ideas, especially when the story invokes tiresome old cliches done in a predictable way. (And that's assuming there aren't any drastic problems with spelling, grammar, or syntax.)
  4. Be careful what you ask for! But since you asked for feedback, and I have temporary insomnia at the moment, here's a few overall comments: 1) the text you're using is hard to read -- IMHO -- at least, using Safari 2.0 under Mac OSX. Sure, the background is cool on its own, and the white typeface is large and clear enough, but the two clash together in a way that makes it hard to absorb the story with such a busy background. Maybe I'm a fuddy-duddy, but I believe fiction (and even non-fiction articles) should be presented with a plain background, resembling as close as possible typeset copy in a printed book. To me, text superimposed over a picture only works as a title page, a cover graphic, or an advertisement -- not for an entire novel. 2) I have no clue *when* or *where* the opening chapter takes place. I'd like a little more information on the surroundings and time of where we are. Is it the future? The past? The present? What country are we in? We know the language is English, but are they speaking with an accent? What do the people wear? Are there guards with guns? Is the lead character in handcuffs or prison garb? I need more visual clues. What does the place smell like... feel like... look like? Is it plain? Modern or old fashioned? Steel walls or stone? Painted or dull? Dusty or clean? Is it like a hospital or a jail, or more like a school? Locked doors or open? Any posted signs anywhere? Any clocks? Any noises going on, like alarms or background people? We have utterly no clue from your lack of description. I need more information to believe this place really exists. 3) We know little or nothing about your protagonist other than he's older than 6. Find a way to tell us more without going into blatant self-description. At worse, have him look in the mirror and tell us what he sees. Is he tall or short? Fat or thin? Young or old? Any scars, physical problems or deformities? I'm not even sure if he's even human for that matter, though the judge does call him "Mr." (And what does the judge look like? Where does he sit? Is he a judge from the 1800s with a white wig, or a modern judge in regular black robes?) Alternately, at least have the psychiatrist give Longley a few shreds of information. Otherwise, the opening chapter is so cold and detached, it doesn't grab me and make me want to read more. 4) finally, if the lead character is charged with a crime, I bet it's written down somewhere. Everybody arrested (at least in the U.S., and I assume in the UK) is given a piece of paper that lists the charges. At least then, he'd know exactly what's going on. Or if he's not sure, have him actually ask the psychiatrist or another character. As is, your story might be great, it might be terrible, or it might be somewhere inbetween. But from what I've seen so far, it's hard to make me want to read more after so much is left unsaid in the first chapter. If you can fix these problems, or at least try a new approach that isn't so frustrating for the reader, I think you'd make the story much more accessible to more people.
  5. I stumbled on this one tonight, and was really, really impressed, both with the plot and the characters. Hunter did a terrific job with it, and it's reminiscent of the best of Phillip K. Dick's stories of the 1950s and 1960s. Dynamite stuff! My only quibble -- and it's a very small one -- is that the author takes his sweet time in working in the gay element. Only deep into the story do we find out that our narrator is gay; up until then, we only know he's a 14 year-old computer geek with low self-esteem. But this is a minor point. It's highly recommended, if only for the fact that it kept me guessing throughout, and made me want to read more. There were more surprises in four chapters than in the last two or three entire novels I've read recently.
  6. OK, I gotta tell you up front, there ain't any gay stuff in this novel. It's a very thin, slim pocket-sized book, very short, but I found it to be one of the most profound and moving stories I've read all year. The plot is deceptively simple: an elderly amusement park maintenance man dies while trying to save a small child on a malfunctioning ride. After he dies, he meets several people who basically tell him what the point of his life was, and how everybody's lives intersect on some level, along with the lessons learned from each experience. Much of the story is told in flashback, and as the tale unfolds, we learn about the man's family, his relationships, and the people around him, and how all of them are affected by events (good and terrible) over the years. I had stayed away from this book for years, partly because it was an enormous best-seller, and partly because I thought it'd be one of those cornball, new-agey "feel good" kinds of things, like a printed version of cotton candy. I was totally wrong. Five People has moments that are downright mean and gritty, even horrifying, and there's not a false note or anything corny to be found anywhere. All the emotions ring very true, and the story ultimately leads to a very moving finale, but perhaps not what you'd expect. A lot of it reads like an excellent hour-long episode of the old Twilight Zone show, but presenting the audience with a lot of profound moral issues that really make you stop and think. Author Mitch Albom is an exceptionally-talented man; the subtleties and descriptive power of his prose are impeccable. Every character seems very alive and real, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem. Any budding author could learn a great deal just by observing how beautifully Albom crafts each sentence. Anybody who reads Five People and doesn't come away affected in some way has got to be made of stone. I'm buying a half-dozen copies and giving 'em away as Xmas gifts.
  7. The very, very fine writer Rod Serling was the first author I knew of who did most of his writing (at least during the 1960s and early 1970s) by dictation. He'd have a secretary transcribe it later. He was comfortable enough with it that he actually did an episode of Twilight Zone about a writer who dictated all his books, only in that case, what he dictated began to materialize in real-life, like magic. It doesn't work for me, because I get too self-concious having to speak the dialog of several different characters. But I have to confess, if you read what you write out loud, you find out very quickly what has a natural rhythm to it, and what sounds stilted and phony. At the same time, there's something I enjoy about pondering a blank page, then hitting the keys as I hear the voice in my head. That works for me, but I can see where voice recognition could work if you were going for speed.
  8. To me, it's not so much a mistake as it is simply an ambiguous sentence. Ahead by one what? One game, or one point? I'd have to see it in context to understand it. I absolutely abhor ambiguity in writing. Express a complete thought, and make it clear, epecially when it's something arcane (like sports) or technical, on a subject the audience might not understand. So in this case, I'd say, "After four games, we'd won two, lost one, and tied for the last one. The final match would make or break us." No ambiguity there. I have no clue on pool, so if it's billiards, I'd have to read a Dummies guide and learn enough terminology that I could at least fake it on the page. I know absolutely zip about football, but I did enough research to bluff my way through the team scenes in ANGEL. My readers seem to think I pulled it off, though a couple of readers spotted some minor gaffes (like a quarterback running his own touchdown, which is extremely rare). But it worked for the story, so screw 'em.
  9. Man, ain't that the truth! I have some horrendous gaffes that I occasionally repeat in my chapters, and my good buddy Keith Morrisette slaps me silly on them. One of them is when I have characters *wincing* or rolling their eyes. :roll: He allows me maybe one of those per chapter, but no more. Keith's got his share of pecadillos, too, but I'll take the fifth on revealing them, since he's not here to defend himself. I think the bottom line is that it's good to get a nonpartisan 3rd party to read early drafts of what you write -- somebody you trust and respect -- and can give you feedback and tough criticism. You go into this as a partnership, knowing that they're not insulting you with their opinions, they're just trying to make the story better. Every time I've done this, some of my toughest critics have forced me to make choices that ultimately made the work better. In some cases, I wound up not going in the direction they advised me, but also veering away from my original approach, coming up with a third method that was arguably better still. So it's all worth it in the end.
  10. I don't think a technique that limiting is necessary. I think if you just mainly center on the perspective of one character per scene, you'll be safe. I found with the one (and so far, the only) 3rd person omniscient story I've written so far, ANGEL, that what worked for me was to stick with showing the inner thoughts of only one person per scene. The moment I tried to get inside somebody else's head, it got very confusing, very quickly. What did work was, you could start a scene in an empty room, revealing the thoughts of one character in that room, then change to another perspective the moment a new character enters. But I quickly realized, you can't switch back once you've gone over to a new character. The other thing is transitions -- opening the scene and closing the scene, or when a key character enters or leaves the room. That's where you can get a way with this kind of trickery. Once I was aware of the technique, I began noticing how other authors do the same thing. J.K. Rowling is a big one on this in her Harry Potter series. Once you're inside Potter's head, you don't immediately jump inside Dumbledore, or any of the other characters. Makes total sense to me.
  11. Luckily for the people for whom I've done some editing and proofing, I consider myself a Word Jedi. What I do before I send them the corrected copy is, I go through it using the Doc Compare mode, using Accept/Reject, and then eliminate the "unnecessary" changes, like when I altered a word but then changed it back to the way it was originally. This way, they get a very clean copy that only shows the legitimate changes. It takes more time to do it this way, but I think it ultimately helps the writer more. At a real publishing house, I think the editor wouldn't have time to do an actual rewrite, but would make notations in the margins to indicate sections that he or she felt should be rewritten by the writer, and give them pointers on the direction on which to go.
  12. I edited professionally for five different newsstand magazines for 20 years, and routinely re-wrote all kinds of people. The biggest name was Rex Reed, when he did movie reviews for Video Review magazine in the 1980s. I believe I rewrote about a dozen reviews he did, some drastically, some only a touch-up. My feeling on editing is, I have two basic levels: a "once-over" where I just make an overall comment every few paragraphs when I'm confused about direction, when something makes no sense, or when I think something is lacking, and then a "line edit" where I dig into every word that's there. Nothing's sacred, and I'll rewrite the living crap out of it if I think something can be said in a better way. I use MS Word's Track Changes/Compare Documents mode to highlight everything I add or delete to a file, then send it back to the author so they can see and judge what was changed. Then they use the "Accept or Reject Changes" mode to zip through the document and decide if what I did should be kept. I'll fight an author up to a point if he wants to throw away a really strong suggestion, but I'd say more than half of my suggestions amount to judgement calls (like the spelling of "judgement") and matters of style & taste. I'm also a stickler on making dialog natural, like a snapshot of the way real people actually speak, and I insist that authors find a way to carve their characters out in a way that makes each of them very distinct from the other. I'm also a raving lunatic about insisting on maintaining the internal logic of the plot throughout the story. Nothing makes me madder than when a story suddenly takes a bizarre turn, and something is either unbelievable, makes no sense, or otherwise veers in a totally implausible direction. I also do everything I can to make sure the author realizes there has to be a solid reason for the existance of every chapter. If you can drop a chapter from a story and still have it make sense, then chances are, that chapter is just treading water. And I think keeping the conflict and drama as high as possible is a necessary ingredient for any good story. I've actually done some editing for a few published authors, including my friend Mark Roeder, for whom I did some pinch-hitting for his books The Soccer Field Is Empty and Keeper of Secrets (which he acknowledges in his intro). In the case of the former, I like to think I improved on his original ending, and added a key element that he hadn't thought of that I felt made the finale much more poignant. The rest were stylistic things, mainly adding and enhancing some description where I felt things could be more visual, and cleaning up some language. I was gratified to see that both books got the best reviews he's received, out of the dozen or so he's published. Keeper of Secrets indirectly inspired the book I'm about to write now. In Roeder's novel, the ghosts of two murdered gay teenagers from the late 1800s help some contemporary teens solve a mystery. I told Mark I felt there was probably a more interesting story in the tale of the two teens -- whom we get to know through a series of diaries found buried in the walls of an old house -- but he responded he felt it would be horrendously complicated and time-consuming to do the historical research to do that kind of story justice. I finally elected to tell the story of a gay contemporary teen who winds up falling in love with another kid 100 years ago, and their adventures together at the end of the Civil War. Mark was right: the idea has taken an unbelievable amount of research, but I'm now itching to get started, so maybe we can actually start seeing some chapters on this thing in the next few weeks.
  13. While part of my reluctance to work on the story can be chalked down to semi-Writers' Block, the reality is that I'm overwhelmed with projects at the moment. Working an average of 72 hours a week at my day job hasn't helped matters. I agree, though, that over-working or over-thinking out a story can kill it before it's written. That almost happened to me with Jagged Angel, in that I dilligently plotted out the entire thing in advance, then sat down to write it. Unfortunately, I discovered that doing all that preliminary work had taken a lot of the fun -- the joy of discovering -- in the actual writing. That made writing some of it quite tedious. But I was eventually able to overcome it. In this case, I'm just reading some historical books about Lincoln and Sam Clemens (and Jesse James, all of whom figure in the story), and will file that away as background material. When I'm finally in the mood to jump in, I'm confident that I'll be able to do it.
  14. I never had a car try to kill me before, but I once parked my old VW at a bookstore in Tampa, then had it roll right out into a big highway and block the road! You can be sure I never forgot the emergency brake from then on. Thank de lawd the stupid car didn't hit anybody. And (back to the meat story), I've heard from several friends who managed to leave portable laptop computers on the hood or sitting on the trunk of their cars, then they drove away, while the computer slid off and hit the road at about 30 miles per hour. One guy actually rolled over the computer, then later brought it to me to see if I could get it fixed! Yeeesh...
  15. United States from the fall of 1864 to the spring of 1865, all the way from Missouri to Arizona to Nevada, then cross-country back to Washington, D.C. and then Missouri again, probably by rail. It turns out that Writers Digest has an entire series of books on Everyday Life in different eras. That's provided many of the answers I was looking for, as far as the 1800s go, but it's still daunting to write about a world that is so foreign to where (and when) we are now. Sam Clemens own books (like the classic Roughing It) fill in some more blanks, as do some others that I've picked up recently. The key for me is to figure out a way to avoid letting the story become a broken record, endlessly repeating variations of "gee, things are a lot different in 1865 than they were in 2006." That's a tough dramatic hurdle, and I'm not satisfied with the solutions to overcome it yet.
  16. I don't think it's possible to write any other way. I think any character a writer creates is going to share some traits with his (or her) creator, or at least someone we know closely. It's not unlike an actor having the ability to momentarily bury their personality and become a totally different person on-stage. Only we do it with a pen (or a word processor). Yeah, that's an old chestnut, but the reality is, there's always room for us to know more. I knew absolutely zip about karate, prison life, or football when I started writing Angel, but I did weeks of research so that I learned enough about them to the point that I could write about them in a convincing and vivid way. I still can't throw a pass or execute a roundhouse kick, nor have I ever been inside a prison cell (except for a tourist visit to Alcatraz), but the reader will at least believe what happens in the story. I'm still doing research on my time-travel novel, which continues to be stalled. Part of the reason is that I'm terrified of starting to write before I'm really ready, and trying to capture the verisimilitude of everyday life in 1865 is a daunting task. For example, I don't want somebody to point out -- "hey, dip-shit! There were no such things as shoelaces in 1865, yet you describe somebody tying up their shoes!" Getting the language right is difficult, too. Little things like that will kill ya, every time. I have a whole bookshelf of mid-1800's reference books -- including several on Sam Clemens -- to help me capture the spirit of that era. The point is, yeah, you have to write what you know... but what you know can have an almost unlimited potential. I know a lot more now than I did ten years ago, that's for sure.
  17. I think AJ has hit closest to the truth here. To me, the thing that makes characters memorable is often their flaws, and how they ultimately overcome them (or not). I didn't realize this until halfway through writing Angel, but I felt it applied to not only what I was writing, but also many other favorite stories I've read in the past. The other thing I look for in a story is how the characters change from the beginning to the end. I look to see what they've learned from their experience, if they're better or worse, and if maybe they won't make the same mistakes again. My buddy Keith Morrisette has noted before that a big turn-off for him are characters in gay fiction that are "too perfect," who are always understanding, never temperamental, and never make mistakes. To me, he's 100% right. I think characters with flaws make them more human, provided the flaws are believable and work with the plot. I also agree with AJ's assessment of David Buffet's work. Many (if not all) of the characters in his stories meet the above guidelines. Buffet also tends to make some of his characters fairly complex in that you think of them one way at the beginning, then they become something very different by the end. The characterizations are part of the reason I enjoy reading his work.
  18. Very good story, or at least a very good start to one. I'd definitely nominate this guy for the "Best Off-Nifty" list, for sure.
  19. I'll agree to look over the drafts and make some suggestions, though I'm too swamped to do a line-by-line edit. Talk to me in email at thepecman@yahoo.com. Always glad to help. I have a close friend who has all the symptoms of A.S., but won't go see a doctor to get it checked out. He's now refusing to go out in public places, and my partner and I have to go by and bring the guy groceries every week or two. Very strange (and sad) case, but unfortunately, you can only help people who want to be helped.
  20. When it comes to meat, you can never be too careful. :twisted:
  21. I come in contact with very, very few actors in my post-production work. (But then there's my Faye Dunaway story, which I'll omit for now...) Because more than half of the lead actors in Angel would have to be under 18, I think it would be almost impossible to cast. You might possibly be able to get 18 year-olds that "looked" younger, but again, it's a money and reality thing more than anything else. (This is basically what they did for the recent film Mysterious Skin, but it was a very small independent film that I suspect got booked into under 100 theaters.) If I won the MegaMillions Lotto, of course there'd be no problem! :roll:
  22. Hey, thanks for the accolades! As I revealed at my afterword, I was inspired to write this story after reading Roman Genesis' novel Earth, as It Is in Heaven. This was the story of a psychologically-disturbed younger teen who falls in love with an slightly-older high school athlete, with tragic results. The story had a lot of bizarre twists and flaws -- chief among them when you find out halfway through that the younger kid has an evil twin (gag!), and the kid winds up killing himself after he finds out that the evil twin has seduced his boyfriend, the football player. The story was ultimately depressing, and nobody is redeemed, everybody suffers. After reading it, I wrote the author and told him, "you know, the core of your idea was good, but you totally threw me with the evil twin thing and the horrendously-downbeat ending." I asked him for permission to write a completely different story -- one that was totally about the football player and not the disturbed kid, which I found was a much more intriguing point of view -- and came up with a vastly different story. It's a mystery, but it's also a coming-out story with some fairly startling (I hope) twists, and redemption for at least the main character. And no evil twin. More importantly, I wanted to show how a kid like Dylan could start as one kind of character -- a whiney, obnoxious, spoiled wimpy kid who winds up as a well-built (albeit insecure), popular athlete, and then at the end of the story, finally becomes a well-rounded guy who finally accepts what he is. Only at the end does he become a real person that we actually can admire. I struggled with the problem of writing a character who was essentially unlikeable for the first half of the book, and you only really start to feel sorry for him when his life starts going down the drain. I particularly enjoyed writing the jail sections of the novel, which required weeks of research. In fact, the whole story was a challenge for me, since it was about people I've never known (rich teenagers in contemporary LA), living in a world I know nothing about (high school athletics). Virtually all of the hundreds and hundreds of teenage readers who sent in comments told me I nailed high school life pretty well, and a few were shocked that I was in my late 40s. A handful of readers told me that they felt that they were very well-accepted in their own schools, but agreed that they knew of very few (if any) high school athletes who'd been able to come out without incident. Because I've worked in Hollywood for so long, on about 40 different (mostly bad) sitcoms and a dozen episodic dramas, I can't help but write in a way that sorta/kinda feels like a movie. I could see a lot of the events of Angel unfolding as a feature film, and apparently, so could other people. A producer/friend of mine on the East coast did option Angel as an independent film, so I've technically made some (very small) money on it. But I still strongly doubt it can ever be produced. It's very ironic to me that, after working in TV and film for so long, the two novels I've written (Groovy and Angel) are prime examples of stories that could probably never be made into films! The subject matter would send studio execs running out of the room, and there's no way we could even get away with an R rating. Still, I understand that there are ideas and concepts that work well as movies and as novels, but some only fit one category.
  23. Hey, sincere congrats, Blue! Trust me, you'll feel better for it. Nobody can come out until they're ready. I know a married guy who finally divorced his wife and came out in his FIFTIES! (He's a major executive VP at Paramount Pictures, believe it or not, and his longtime companion is his assistant.) Hope things work out for you. You might want to look into local support groups, clubs, and other stuff, just to find ways of meeting people -- assuming you want to avoid the usual bar scene and so on. I like to think there's a soulmate for everybody in the world (maybe more than one!), and I hope you can eventually find somebody that you're compatible with. More importantly, maybe you can also find some solid gay friends to hang around with. I've got maybe a dozen gay friends in our inner circle, and our bonds go a lot deeper than just sex. Hell, it's all about the "everything else" -- nothing about the sex at all. But just having guys (and a couple of gay ladies) to hang out with and talk to is nice. If nothing else, we can rant and rave against our California governator out here...
  24. Well, everybody's kinda ignoring the main part of my critique, which was I don't buy the conflict that Dewey is throwing into the story. I think parts of the story are entertaining and well-written, which makes this problem all the more frustrating. It's like watching an otherwise good movie, and then it suddenly veers off into something silly or unbelievable, and you wind up throwing your popcorn cup at the screen. What I'll say about teenage emotion is this: I believe that in a lot of ways, the first time you fall in love is, for many people, the most intense experience of your life. And I'd also agree that there's nothing more pure and more heartfelt than love at that age. I know it was for me, and I think some of that is reflected in my writing. That having been said, you gotta read the Brian & Pete story to really see the problems the author as set up. To me, the story has taken some bizarre twists, and I also think the story ran outta steam a long time ago -- like a TV show that's gone about two seasons too long. So I guess my main point was: I find it hard to believe that two 13 year-old kids could go through the emotional malestrom shown in the story. It's just too much. I'm all for suspending my disbelief, but it only goes so far.
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