Monthly Archives: February 2014

Excerpts from an unfinished novel #5

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Back in November 2011 I started working on a novel tentatively titled Ghost Hand. The story is about Marine sniper who returns to Los Angeles to recover from severe injuries only to find that the war for him has just started, and there’s more to the world than he knew.

Part of his story is dealing with his PTSD. As he starts to work out his issues he discovers a whole class of people worse off than he is: The homeless.

After several starts at the novel I had to set it aside. I just was not happy with the story. I needed to sit on it more. But in the process I did write a whole of lot fun pieces in the voice of the protagonist. Several of them were designed to be chapter headers, to show up at the beginning of every third chapter or so. These ones are all about mental illness, and are presented from the point of view of someone who has gone through it, and made it out the other side.

I’m going to put them up once a week, for five weeks. This is number five of five.

 

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On the Fragility of the Human Mind

You can get the same symptoms of a mental illness from just about anything. Fall off a ladder and hit your head, have a bomb go off nearby, witness a bank robbery, or just live though a natural disaster. All of these things can cause PTSD and have. So if I can startle someone, or just whack them upside the head, and it gives them a mental illness then it begs the question; how stable is this thing called sanity? It turns out, not very much.

Everyone in their life will experience some (if not all) of the same symptoms of a crazy person. The only difference will be for how long, and the severity. Sanity is a delicate balance, like a soap bubble, and is easily disrupted. Most people, when knocked out of balance, are able to inflate their bubble again. Some of us can’t, at least right away. Some of us never had one to begin with. But all of us can have their bubble burst.

 

From on old poem

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I want to cry at weddings and funerals.
I want to laugh at the sky,
and call down the stars.
Speak to the moon as a friend,
and the stars as close family.

I want to reach, grasp, and obtain,
my life.
With my own two hands.

 

From Late Night Coffee (Manipulate III)
-ERK 8/3/95

Excerpts from an unfinished novel #4

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Back in November 2011 I started working on a novel tentatively titled Ghost Hand. The story is about Marine sniper who returns to Los Angeles to recover from severe injuries only to find that the war for him has just started, and there’s more to the world than he knew.

Part of his story is dealing with his PTSD. As he starts to work out his issues he discovers a whole class of people worse off than he is: The homeless.

After several starts at the novel I had to set it aside. I just was not happy with the story. I needed to sit on it more. But in the process I did write a whole of lot fun pieces in the voice of the protagonist. Several of them were designed to be chapter headers, to show up at the beginning of every third chapter or so. These ones are all about mental illness, and are presented from the point of view of someone who has gone through it, and made it out the other side.

I’m going to put them up once a week, for five weeks. This is number four of five.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The brain is the first victim

It should be obvious that the term mental illness means an illness to the head. Most people have an understanding of this. They know someone with mental illness is “crazy” to some degree or another, but they don’t understand why. They say things like, “Why would someone stay in bed all day?”, or “I don’t understand why would anyone wash their hands so hard that their skin bleeds?”, or even, “Why does my husband act so cold?”

These questions are asked because the normal person doesn’t understand what mental illness means to the one who is sick.

In simple terms, the first victim of mental illness is the brain. When one is mentally ill, the very first sign, indeed the only reason most mental illness are categorized together, is that the person who is sick does not know it. Their normal thinking has been blocked by the disease. One could even go so far as to say the brain has been co-opted, taken over, by the disease.

And they cannot tell.

This is why people do crazy things when they are mentally ill. Why they stay in bed all day under the crushing weight of Depression, why they repeatedly wash their hands until they bleed under the feverish anxiety of Obsessive-compulsive Disorder, or why they withhold all affection towards their loved ones under the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In each case the person with the mental illness is a victim of their own thoughts because, like a terrorist their mental illness has taken over their brain and is holding it captive.

This is why mental illness is such an insidious disease, and so difficult to cure.   When you’re ill, it is almost impossible to tell from the inside of your head. From the inside it all looks normal. Even worse, a lot of mental illnesses carry with them a distrust of outsiders. Not only can you not know the truth (because your brain has been taken over), but you will be inclined to not trust the very people who are telling you the truth.

 

On Expository

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Expository, for those that don’t know, is the explaining part of a story; the non-fiction grain of truth baked into your fictional sandwich. Its easiest to pick out in sci-fi stories because 1) you need to explain things more in a sci-fi story (what exactly is a Golding-Fargold Laser, Doctor?) and 2) you have some pretty classic characters to explain things to you. As a rule of thumb, if a guy or gal shows up in a sci-fi story wearing a lab-coat, you know you’re in for some expository (paging Commander Spock). If someone needs to explain to you the reader why the Golding-Fargold Laser is important to the plot line, than Dr. Lab-coat is just the gal to do it.

The problem is, expository is usually boring. Boring. Boring but necessary. Its the wikipedia entry you need to read in the middle of a car chase, the bad-tasting medicine you need to take to feel better, or the non-alcholoic beer served at a friend’s wedding. Sometimes a story really does need to explain things to you or it won’t work, and you just have to struggle though a couple of paragraphs to get back to the plot.

I bring all this up because I’ve been struggling with a story for the past fews weeks, and the process has been excruciating. See its a sci-fi story, and it takes place deep underwater. Because of this, almost everything about the world the story sits in is absolutely new to the reader. Had I set the story in space, I wouldn’t have to explain hardly anything. Everyone knows what a spaceship is, most people know that space is largely a vacuum (meaning there’s not many molecules laying around), and everybody knows what a light-saber or a blaster is. So, “he jumped into his spaceship, and secured his blaster before taking off.” is largely self-explanatory. But if I write, “he swam into his sub-reefer and checked the sonar for sea mounts,” there’s a lot of things missing. What is a “sub-reefer”? What are sea mounts? Sonar, for what?

So in the process of trying to figure out how this underwater world works that I invented in my head I have been constantly explaining things to myself as I write. Each and every new technology or slight change in the plot and suddenly I need a paragraph or two explaining why it is important. After a while, the story starts to sound like a travelog. Like this:

Quiency Pressure sits on the edge of an underwater peninsula called the Chatham Rise that sticks out from the Island nation of New Zealand, some 500 meters below the surface. Near the end of this peninsula sits a submerged mountain range only visible by the Chatham Islands on it tips. South and east of these islands the sea floor drops away rapidly, going from 500 meters to 4000 meters deep in just a few short kilometers. If such a rise were located on the North American continent, rather than deep beneath the Pacific ocean, it would create the tallest mountain in the United States. Though by the geological standards of the Pacific, this rise is small potatoes. This feature, called the South Wall, sits right on the edge of a region rich in valuable gold bearing ores and minerals. Its getting to these valuable ores that’s the tricky part.

See? That’s a nice descriptive. You now have a good picture in your head of where you are, but there is no story there. Its all expository.

I’ve now started this story five different times, and all together I have put down well over 10,000 words. Alas, with the exception of a few places, almost all of those 10k words are expository. There’s no story, just a lot of explanation. I’ve pitted my protagonist against sea monsters and corporate greed. Given him girlfriends, and killed off his partners. I’ve described the dangers of living deep in the ocean in a dozen different ways, and populated his world with a dozen different characters. And all of it is boring. And the frustrating thing was, I couldn’t figure out why.

Then finally, in the shower today I had this insight. There was too much explaining, and not enough storying. So I started on version six, and across the top I put these words:

Short and simple. Story of man, octopus, and ocean.
NO FUCKING EXPOSITORY!!!!

Then I started a new outline, keeping it clean, simple. My rule is now if it takes more then an adjective or a few words to explain something, then it goes without explanation. A sentence at the most. Nothing more.

 

Art Cinéma at the Thai Restaurant

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Last night, in a pique of laziness, and after eating bland food at home so often because we’ve been sick, I rebelled and went out to the local Thai restaurant. We’ve been there often enough, even though its new, that the girl who works behind the counter recognized me on sight and greeted me with a warm smile. We talked for a bit, I paid, left a tip, grabbed my food, and left.

Now the parking for the place in accessed through a alley between the restaurant and a pharmacy next door. So I walked out the door, made a u-turn to the south, and started down the alley. It was a dark out, 8:30 or so, in the winter, and the sky had that curious quality to it I’ve only seen in LA. It looks like it is night, but that everyone had left their night-lights on. That’s the best way I can describe it. If you’ve ever been in a house with lots of night-lights stuck in the outlets all over (something we did when Trevor was a baby) there’s this curious thing about the lighting. It is both night, and yet you can see quite well, especially if you get up in the middle of the night and your eyes are adjusted. Both night, and not night, dark and not dark, if that makes any sense.

The alley I walked down is paved with dark asphalt, but the walls on both sides are either white or a light shade of off-white. Straight ahead of me was a massive sycamore tree, blocking out my view of the 2-story apparent right behind it, and most of the LA skyline. In fact, my entire view of the night sky was proscribed by either wall or tree.

Now you have to understand, around here, in the San Fernando Valley, the horizon line is a dominant feature. It really is a lovely bowl of a valley with mountains all around. Almost no matter where you go you at night see the bright stars of houses twinkling upon the jagged edge of the mountains. After the flatness of the San Joaquin Valley, where I grew up in the subtile shadow of the distant though much larger High Sierras, the more constant and visible relief of the San Gabriels and the Santa Monicas against the sky are a joy.

So when I walked down that alley, it was suddenly like being transported to a different town. Gone was the skyline which the eye longs for with every outside walk. The walls around me practically glowed in that “night-light” effect. The tree ahead was dark, with a few apartment light peaking through its bare branches. And it was at that moment I looked up into the sky.

Have you ever seen the milky way? I mean really seen it? Gone to someplace so remote, and clear that it stands out in the night sky like a river or stars? Its a lovely sight; worth every effort to go and see. Alas one of the flaws of LA is that the milky way is not accessible in a place that looks like everyone has left their night-lights on. Its way too bright down here. But when you cut off all the light around, say by a wall on either side, a curious thing happens, the night sky appears darker. Not quite dark enough to see the milky way, but darker still.

So when I left the restaurant, and looked up into the night sky, I got a real treat. The sky was dark, darker than it normally looks. I don’t know if it was the absence of the bright horizon line, or what. Even thought the walls on either side of me were light colored, and relatively bright, they were still dark enough to not leave my eyes night-blind. There were  a few faint clouds in the sky, not enough to brighten it, but just enough to add a slight texture to the dark. Almost like seeing the milky way but faintly. Orion, that constant winter companion, was up and bold, as were a few stars and a planet or two. They twinkled above in their lovely way, made more crisp by the relative darkness of the sky.

And it was at that moment that I stopped, literally in my tracks, and looked around. My ordinary trip to a restaurant, a rather perfectly mundane errand, was transformed by a bit of natural theater, and happy accident of lighting, into a piece of Art Cinéma. As if I had stepped out of my ordinary life and was suddenly standing in a Jean-Luc Godard film.

And it was breath-taking.

Excerpts from an unfinished novel #3

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Back in November 2011 I started working on a novel tentatively titled Ghost Hand. The story is about Marine sniper who returns to Los Angeles to recover from severe injuries only to find that the war for him has just started, and there’s more to the world than he knew.

Part of his story is dealing with his PTSD. As he starts to work out his issues he discovers a whole class of people worse off than he is: The homeless.

After several starts at the novel I had to set it aside. I just was not happy with the story. I needed to sit on it more. But in the process I did write a whole of lot fun pieces in the voice of the protagonist. Several of them were designed to be chapter headers, to show up at the beginning of every third chapter or so. These ones are all about mental illness, and are presented from the point of view of someone who has gone through it, and made it out the other side.

I’m going to put them up once a week, for five weeks. This is number three of five.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Different types of mental illness

If you have PTSD someone might say to you something like, “You have the some of the same symptoms of a crazy person, but that doesn’t mean you’re stone cold crazy. See, you can get better. A crazy person cannot.”

Well, that’s not quite true either. A crazy person can get better to, but it’s a different kind of better.

See having PTSD is like being obese. Sure you’re overweight, but you have this certain knowledge that if you just put some effort into changing your diet and exercising more, you can be thin again. Most crazy people have never been thin. They don’t have that certain knowledge. They don’t have that hope. Healing for them is like learning to walk by crossing a tightrope high above a stage. Not only they do not know of a single person who has successfully crossed before, they don’t really know how to walk. They understand the concept of putting one foot in front of another, but its just a concept to them, they’ve never really done it before. And their sense of balance is crap. The one thing they do know, the one thing they have any certainly about, is how to fall. They been falling all of their lives.

So if you ever meet a person recovering from mental illness, salute them. I’ve been in a lot of hairy situations with bullets flying and friends falling right and left, but the bravest people I have ever met were those few who were attempting to recover from their own insanity.

*&@%#$ Lawyers

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The other day I got a letter in the mail. It appeared to be from my health insurance company, but in fact, upon closer inspection, was from a third party. On the top it says “On behalf of Anthem Blue Cross”. The words on behalf of was my first clue.

Below the fold the letter states:

Dear Member. We need your help. On behalf of our client listed above, you are being asked to complete this questionnaire. Meridian Resource Company is reviewing your claims to determine if the services you received were a result of an accident in which another party may be responsible for payment. Examples include, but are not limited to…

So its a money hustle. Turns out, I’m not the only one to get such a letter. JohnMac from the Daily Kos got one as well. His response is much more polite than mine.

It turns out that there’s a name for this kind of thing. Its called Subrogation. Apparently, when I signed up for my health insurance, I signed up for subrogation as well. I guess I missed that clause in the sea of lawyerese. Still this kind of crap irks me.

Last summer my right shoulder started bothering me more than the normal amount. Way back in college I injured it playing flag-football, and ever since then its needed to be warmed up well to function. Add a few decades, a kid, a pool, and a busy father with no time to think about warming up first, and eventually you get a problem. In my case, Frozen Shoulder.

At the time I didn’t know what it was, I only knew I couldn’t move my shoulder, and whenever I did it hurt enough to knock my knees out from underneath me. Even worse, it got to the point where the pain was keeping me from sleeping. No sleepy, no worky. In the course of seeing my doctor about this I got asked a bunch of times if this injury was the result of a car accident of work related injury. I always answered no, because it wasn’t.

Apparently that NO was sufficient. Now a company I have no direct relationship with is asking me for information so they can fleece down somebody else and raise corporate profits. And to think I have friends who call taxes theft.

Does this kind of sleazy money hustle piss off anyone else like it does me?

Excerpts from an unfinished novel #2

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Back in November 2011 I started working on a novel tentatively titled Ghost Hand. The story is about Marine sniper who returns to Los Angeles to recover from severe injuries only to find that the war for him has just started, and there’s more to the world than he knew.

Part of his story is dealing with his PTSD. As he starts to work out his issues he discovers a whole class of people worse off than he is: The homeless.

After several starts at the novel I had to set it aside. I just was not happy with the story. I needed to sit on it more. But in the process I did write a whole of lot fun pieces in the voice of the protagonist. Several of them were designed to be chapter headers, to show up at the beginning of every third chapter or so. These ones are all about mental illness, and are presented from the point of view of someone who has gone through it, and made it out the other side.

I’m going to put them up once a week, for five weeks. This is number two of five.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

You can’t tell when you’re crazy

Here’s the thing about being crazy. The thing no one will tell you unless they’ve been there. When you are crazy you cannot tell. You cannot know it. Your brain can be so scrambled that the idea of emptying your weapon into a room full of strangers sounds perfectly reasonable. Yet from the inside your thinking feels perfectly normal, logical, even rational. Exactly as if there is nothing wrong.

How fucked up is that?

You see, from the inside, being insane feels exactly like being sane. And that’s the trouble. When you are crazy it feels just like being normal. The only difference is a sane person doesn’t believe the proper response to waiting too long in line for a bank teller is to rip the bank apart, or when they get startled by a car horn while crossing the street, they don’t pull the driver out of their car and bounce their head off the hood.

See, when you’re sane you get that. You understand that one doesn’t just go and hit every asshole in the world. You can look at some jerk, and say to yourself, “Oh, he’s just being an ass,” and then go about your day. I can’t. I don’t have that ability. I used to, but now its gone. Burned out of me like a lot of other things.

Worst still, when you are crazy you cannot hear to the good advice of others. Its like a part of your brain has been turned off. So when your best friend tries to tell you that you’re acting crazy, you won’t believe them. Why? Because on the inside it doesn’t feel crazy to you. It feels perfectly sane. So you start to think, “What’s wrong with him? Is he loosing it?” when in fact you are the one who is loosing it. Which makes for some pretty messed up relationships, let me tell you.

And remember, no one plans on being crazy. It’s not something you set out to do. You don’t wake up one day and say to yourself, “I think I’ll go nuts today.” No, it’s something you become.

Take me for instance. I was perfectly sane for years, killing people I didn’t know. Now I know what you’re thinking, “How can a man be sane when he goes around killing people?” But its true. You see, it was my job. I was a sniper, a Marine sniper. And a damn good one too. I killed a lot of people, yet I slept perfectly fine at night. That’s because they were my enemy, and I can tell you that each and every one of them would have happily killed me first, if he had half the chance. More than a few have tried, let me tell you, which is why I have so many scars. But none of them succeeded. So far. Not to sound harsh or anything, but that’s how war goes. You try to kill the guy before he kills you. At least that’s the idea. It doesn’t always work that way, but if you train hard, and travel with the baddest sons-of-bitches who ever walked the earth, you have a pretty good chance. That’s what I did.

But then one day something happened. I went crazy. Not just a little bit crazy either. Whole hog crazy. As my Sargent back in boot camp used to say, “You don’t do anything in half measures, do you Santiago?”

Anyway, now I’m trying to find my way back. Trying to be sane again. And its hard. Harder than you would think. Hell, even Marine Sniper school seems easy by comparison, and that was the hardest thing I ever accomplished.

Until now.

Anyway, this is my story.

I’ve got some splainin’ to do

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I’ve been working on a story lately, thanks to the intervention of my buddy Derek Brantley, and its been hard slogging. The story idea is fairly simple. Its based up Jack London’s famous To Build A Fire which is so wonderfully stripped down (2 actors and the protagonist isn’t even named) its practically a morality tale. Call it a long-winded fable, if you will.

When Derek first approached me with the idea we had a nice conversation, and talked about doing the story from many angles, including humor. I let the concept stew for a few days, and one day woke up (actually I think it was while in the shower) with the idea of men prospecting for gold, like the Yukon of London’s tale, but doing so deep under the ocean.

From that point the ideas started to flow, and I knew I was onto something. This is probably the best part of writing a story. Its that “first love” experience, not unlike the first time you meet a potential mate. If you’ve ever fallen in love, or even lust, then you know exactly what I mean. You get that powerful first attraction, and then no matter what that person does, to you they fart rainbows.

But, as with all great love affairs, you get to that point–with some sooner than with others–where  the honeymoon wears off, and you start to smell the stink coming from your lover’s ass. The time you realize that your friend’s were right, yes their farts do stink.

So that is where I’m at with the story, I’m starting to smell the stink of its farts. Now this is not a bad thing, I’m not writing this to complain. After all, who would care? Its not like anyone is putting a gun to my head and making me write this. I put my own head into the vise with this one. I’m pointing this problem out because its endemic to every story. All stories stink at one point. This one differs only in the type of smell.

In this particular case its because its a sci-fi story. Now I’ve written quite a few sci-fi stories, so its not like this is a new genre for me. The problem with writing sci-fi is that one has to describe a world that at times is only tangentially familiar to the reader. The more technology that a writer adds to the story, the more he or she has to explain it to the reader. Now some writers get around this problem by keeping the technology “near future” (like using a watch-phones and air cars), by using “tried and true tech” from other common stories (blasters anyone? light-sabres?), or by not mentioning the technology at all.

If you think about it for a second, you’ll see what I mean. You, as a reader, can imagine looking at your phone and having a conversation with your parents on the other side of the country. Heck you can even do this today. So this bit of tech not a stretch for the reader to understand. But if I write a story that requires a technology which is drastically unrelated to today’s tech, its a much harder proposition. How would you explain your watch-phone to someone who has never seen a phone, a movie, or even a watch? How do you explain a light saber to someone who’s never seen Star Wars? That’s the rub.

And that’s where I’m at with this story. This particular story, unlike the other sci-fi stories I’ve written, suffers from being in a place that almost no one writes about. There’s no quick fixes, no common tech like blasters or light-sabres, that I can point to and the reader will automatically understand what I mean. Practically everything is this story requires an explanation, which is pretty fucking boring to read, and just as boring to write, so I try to avoid explanations whenever possible. Not only that, but there are lots of technological ramifications that I have to tie together for it all to work. Sometimes I’ll invent a new technology only to realize later that it contradicts other tech that shows up in the story. Then I have to sit down and rewrite that first tech so it works with all the other stuff. Which causes a problem with another piece of tech, and so on and so forth.

Now add to this another layer of complication. People, in natural conversation, do not talk about technology in ways that are ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY SIMILAR to how the tech actually works. The internet is not in fact a “net”, the world wide web does not have any actual “webs”, and e-mail is not  anything like snail mail in the way it is delivered. But we use these words, inaccurate descriptors though they are, and know exactly what they mean. And, of course, people also have this nasty habit of immediately adopting slang terms to describe their experience using tech. So when I “blog” (whatever the hell that word actually means) you the reader know what blogging means, even though it would be more accurate to say I journal, or I am journalling. See what I mean?

So when an author like me comes up with a new technology, he/she has to use words that seem “natural” but also make sense to people in the here and now. And that part is a PITA compared to writing the actual story; you know the whole frame all this stupid tech is hanging on, getting the protagonist from point A to point B. Since I am very much a story teller, all this tech stuff makes me grumble, mostly because its hard work. But it also makes me think (which is nice), and on occasion it leads to some really fun ideas (like houses covered in computer screens so switching wallpaper in your living room wall is as easy as doing it on your desktop). And I have to admit, that part is fun.

So, dear reader, know that I am toiling on a story, sweating bullets over technology that will mostly never make the story, and you will likely never hear of, but are absolutely crucial to the process of writing the story. But, oh, if it all pans out, its going to be sooo good, and sooo scary.

Be prepared to be cold, cramped, crushed, and scared. Be prepared to suffer both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, at the same time. And, if I hit the my mark right, be prepared to be scared of the dark.