Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Top Men Working on It – Part 2

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Well, I enjoyed yesterday’s outing so much I thought I’d have another go at solving the world’s problems on Uncle Sam’s dime.  Here are some more projects to keep me off the streets and make the world a better place:

  • Stamp Out the Metric System. – That’s right. I want to outlaw it and insist that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees and the boiling point is 212 degrees.  And I’m talking Fahrenheit.  I want halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths and thirty seconds of an inch as the way we measure lumber.  I want everyone to know that a pint’s a pound the world around.  I want horsepower, tons of cooling, foot-pounds, cubic yards, pounds per square inch and inches of mercury everywhere you look.  I want the speed of light to be 186,000 miles per second.  I want pounds and ounces and BTU’s and I don’t want any kilometers or kilograms or ergs or any of that European or Canadian jazz, thank you very much!  And I will back up my hatred with the force of Trumpian law.  Anyone found using a metric tape measure, scale, thermometer, pedometer or any other metric device will be subject to public dunking followed by banishment to Bogeyland.  And no one will be immune.  If I find out that Elon Musk is using metric tools and hardware on his cars, they will be forced off the roads.  And if his rockets are instrumented using metric units, the Air and Space forces will be authorized to shoot them out of the sky.  This may sound harsh but order must be maintained.  Some of you may claim that decimal units simplify and make calculations easier.  I say, calculations are supposed to be difficult.  So, suck it up!
  • Defund PBS and NPR and Subject the Personnel to the Inquisition – My hatred for these institutions knows no bounds.  Every time I heard some bow tie wearing doofus on NPR whispering softly about some pathetic cause he wanted me to espouse I had to change the channel.  Now it’s time for payback.  And closing down their operations and returning that money to the American people is a wonderful accomplishment.  But shutting them down is not enough.  I propose that a sort of Artificial Torquemada (AT) be programmed to subject these awful people to whatever punishments will make them suffer the most.  First off, their diet will be Big Macs and fries, morning, noon and night.  Secondly, a public address system will play a loop of Donald Trump’s greatest hits from his campaign rallies, played twenty-four hours of the day.  Each inmate will be provided with a mockup of the Sunday New York Times newspaper featuring a facsimile of the Times crossword puzzle but unfortunately, none of the possible answers will fit the spaces.  The gulag will have mandatory television viewing of reruns of Hee-Haw, The Dukes of Hazzard, Benny Hill, Home Improvement and Baywatch.  The prison library will consist of the collected works of Mickey Spillane.  And finally, every month there will be a special session where the inmates will be strapped into chairs and forced to watch a ten-hour compilation of the 2016 and 2024 election coverage including the rants and crying jags caused by the epic failures of the Clinton and Harris campaigns.  None of the inmates will be available for parole until under surveillance of a lie detector they can state honestly that “The 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump through voter fraud.”

Okay so that’s enough for now.

Top Men Working on It

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My recent thought experiment to determine whether the geometry of our universe is Euclidean or not has inspired me to get involved in the upcoming Trump Administration.  Just as Trump has farmed out budget cutting to DOGE, I would like to volunteer (well not for free though) my services to perform research that is woefully needed by the United States government.  I haven’t come up with a snappy acronym for my team but I’m working on it.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the projects I’d like to tackle for Uncle Sam.

  • Global Warming – Now, this is a no-brainer. Up until now research on this subject has been performed by commies.  And no matter what information they get they “analyze” it until they can work it into a hockey stick graph that warns that the end of the world is imminent.  What is needed is an objective, scientific approach.  And that’s me all over.  I will analyze the hell out of that data and something tells me that my result will be a call for more fossil fuel and nuclear energy to stave off the next ice age which is already rearing its ugly head.  Also, I’ll perform a mass and energy balance and a cost analysis around such technologies as wind generators and solar energy panels.  Something tells me that the cost of each kilowatt hour taken over the usable life of the equipment and including the replacement cost of the equipment (not neglecting the cost of environmental remediation for mining and processing of heavy metals and other toxic materials) will be an order of magnitude higher than either fossil fuels or fission reactors.  Is it too much to ask to have the “climate scientists” hauled into court for fraud?
  • The Definition of a Woman – In a country where this

Is called a woman, things are not going to go well.  What I propose to do is convene a panel of experts.  I will use the most credentialed individuals available.  I will include married men, wedding planners, hairdressers, script writers from the Hallmark Channel, employees at grocery and clothing stores and shoe salesmen.  In addition, I’ll recruit a fair cross-section of guys found habitually at strip joints from across this great land.  Between them all we will work long and hard to come up with a consensus definition and if necessary, a list of qualifying and disqualifying “conditions.”  I’m sure the team will have a contentious and spirited discussion about everything from terminology to visual aids but we’ll make sure that the exhibit shown above or anything like it is never mistaken for a woman again.

  • My team will devote a full year to trying to figure out exactly which mental conditions Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suffering from. After making an exhaustive study we will try to translate their last four years of speeches into rational English sentences.  Where no meaning can be found we will overlay those sections of the transcripts with pictures of kittens and puppy dogs.

So that will be a start.  Eventually we’ll expand out and solve all the problems of the multiverse.  But I will charge time and a half on weekends.  After all I’m only human.

I Can’t Wait to Get Started!

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I was reading a chapter in a mathematical survey that I bought a long time ago (Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev).  It was a section in the non-Euclidean Geometry chapter called something like “Real Space.”

The author was trying to make the point that since gravity bends light and light rays were the closest thing to perfect straight lines that you could claim that parallel lines can intersect and triangles can have more or less than 180 degrees in real space.  And to get away from the idea of straight lines in empty space (no matter present) he said that the concept of space only exists in the context of it containing matter.

And I stopped to think whether that seemed to follow.  I never usually question the meaning of empty.  My basic visualization of reality is that the universe is the void of the Bible augmented by really small golf balls bouncing around in it.  Empty space to me is wherever there aren’t any golf balls at that moment.  Now granted, I’ve heard that particles are always appearing into and disappearing out of existence in the “quantum vacuum.”  And I know that many physicists characterize the universe as just a bunch of “fields” of the various elementary particles; the electron field and the Higgs field, etc.  But I don’t understand why we can’t imagine empty space.  I mean I know that at any time a quark or a gluon or some other ephemeral exotic particle can show up anywhere but why is it so hard to say. “Right now, right here is empty space because nothing is there.”

I guess I’ll have to read more deeply.  After all, if the empty space between galaxies (and everything else) is always and ever more rapidly expanding as the universe itself inflates at an accelerating rate, it seems logical to me that there’s more and more “empty space” everywhere.

And so, I propose the following thought experiment:

I posit that using the James Webb Space Telescope, we find a spot in the sky where there aren’t even any really, really old galaxies hanging out.  There’s nothing along that line of sight.  I then take two flashlights (or “lasers” if anyone insists) and using a protractor and some really straight two by fours I line them up parallel to each other in the direction of that cosmic empty spot and turn them on.  Why wouldn’t those two beams continue on to the end of the universe exactly the same distance apart?  Now, sure, a few photons here and there might be deflected by a some randomly situated gas molecules or by the odd quantum vacuum quark that appeared for a femtosecond along the line of sight but for the most part the laser beams should continue on forever and ever, amen.

So, if that is the case.  What’s the problem with imagining empty space (mostly) with my two flashlight (or laser) beams going out and out and out forever?  And forever parallel.  After all there’s nothing close enough to really bend those light beams.  Now to prove this result there will need to be someone on the other end of the universe to do the measurement.  This presents something of a problem.  However, there may be a solution (well, a thought solution anyway).  It’s a well-known part of the Big Bang Theory that there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe.  But here we are with basically none to be found.  I theorize that at the end of the universe is the anti-matter we’ve been looking for (just like those ‘droids).  Granting this, then there should be an anti-matter me at the end of the universe.  Let’s call him anti-photog.  Now assuming he’s extremely long-lived (which anti-matter life forms always are) and that he thinks precisely as I do, he’ll be waiting for those two beams of light and he will measure the angle between the beams and find them to be parallel and thereby prove the Euclidean (or in his case anti-Euclidean nature of empty space.  Then he can send a return beam back in our direction (somehow) and we will have the answer.  Of course, the sun and probably the Milky Way Galaxy will have long ago been absorbed by the local super massive black hole and cosmic lichens will possibly be the only form of life remaining but that’s how science works sometimes.  You have to take the good with the bad.

So, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Riemann and all you other “non-Euclidean” geometricians (I’m looking at you A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov and M. A. Lavrent’ev!) shouldn’t put too much stock in all this curved space hand-waving.  Until the results of this wonderful research of mine are available, they should sit tight.  Estimates for the return trip signal are still being calculated but I’m sure it won’t be too bad.  I’ll be starting my crowdfunding page to buy the lasers and the two by fours very soon.  I’ve still got my third-grade protractor somewhere around here so I don’t need that.  I can’t wait to get started!

Update:

I asked an AI image generator to reproduce my thought experiment rig

It came up with this!

This may take a while.

The Mass of Men

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Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”

Well, I don’t know.  I’m not sure I’m the quietest (or the loudest) of individuals.  And as for desperation and resignation that seems a bit much.  For most people work can be a rat race but, is what we do just resignation?  I hope not.  Now, sure, we all have to reach that endpoint and when that gets a lot closer, desperation and resignation start to sound more fitting, more apt.  But Thoreau said the mass of men.  Well, most men aren’t about to face death.  We get a decent shot at a pretty decent span; “three score and ten” the Bible says.

And even when the end is in sight isn’t there any consolation in reflecting on the fact that you spent your life doing what you thought was best?  Maybe it’s a matter of temperament.  I guess Thoreau was a product of Yankee New England upbringing.  And those people have always seemed a little cold and humorless for my taste.  Maybe it’s a combination of puritanism and bad weather but they always seemed like they just bit into something that tasted bad (or maybe it was their reaction at seeing me).  Maybe I’m just naturally cheerful.  Call it my Mediterranean predisposition but I just think that every story has a happy ending.  And this even though I look around me in every direction and I see wrack and ruin out to the horizon.  And sure, when it’s time to start hauling away the wreckage I’ll swear and grumble and complain.  But I’ll still look forward to a lunch break and quitting time.  And then there has to be some human joy somewhere in that mess.

I know some people who live the other way.  And they are quite a bit better off than I am.  That grim determination has its advantages.  You can stuff a 401k plan with quite a lot of money if you’re grimly determined.  And maybe they will have an easier time of it at that last stand knowing that everything is paid for.  I guess it’s kind of the Cheops or Ozymandias option.  But it still feels kind of grim to me.

So, I like to think that most of us try to live lives of quiet or not so quiet inspiration mixed with perspiration.  I think the guy who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope” had it right.  While there’s still blood pumping through your veins and air being sucked into your lungs there’s hope and more than hope.  There’s at least a little excitement.  Even if you’re a hundred there’s still the challenge of trying to get on your feet and remembering what it is you have to do to keep breathing that day.  And until that gets to be too much for your spirit you have a reason to greet the day.

And if you still have anyone in your life who cares whether you live or die you’ve got a world outside yourself to think about.  Maybe people call that quiet desperation.  Or maybe I’m the exception.  Maybe I’ve just been blessed with much more than the mass of men have.  But I kind of doubt it.  I’m just an average guy with the average life.  Well, except for Camera Girl.  She’s pretty great.  But don’t tell her.  She might demand a better contract.

That’s Entertainment

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Over the course of three thousand years of western civilization, storytelling has transformed from an oral tradition of poet/rhapsodes reciting mythological epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey at religious festivals to information age books read on an electronic page or listened to from an audio-file.  I find it interesting that the Greek epic poems are approximately the same length as a typical modern novel, something between one and two hundred thousand words.  Reciting the whole poem at a festival would take up week’s-worth of listening.  That’s comparable to the time it takes to read a book.

Now for shorter subjects, the Greeks had the drama.  A play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides was just an hour or two of the viewer’s time.  Pretty similar to a Shakespearean play and interestingly enough, the amount of time that a motion picture usually takes to watch.

Does this mean that human beings inherently absorb story telling in these lengths of time?  I can’t prove that assertion but you know, a three-hour movie starts to get to be a bit much for one viewing.  And a four-hundred-page book better be damn interesting or it also begins to wear out its welcome.

So maybe our entertainment has been standardized to suit our mental, emotional and physiological parameters.  Humans have a limited attention span.  We also tire after a certain amount of time sitting or standing watching something.  Also, hunger, thirst and the realities of hydraulic pressure eventually force us to interrupt even the most fascinating entertainment.  To ameliorate these considerations, movie theaters are equipped with a snack bar and restrooms.  But dramatic interest will begin to flag by the third hour.

So, I’d say we’re programmed for these lengths of entertainment products.  Whether it’s Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or The Lord of the Rings at some point you either come up for air or you fall asleep.  And similarly with a book.  There have to be chapters or groups of chapters that allow for the reader to put the book down and come back to it later.  It needs a punctuated progression.  The action must go through a series of starts and stops.  It needs a rhythm to the action, a flow.  And if the rhythm isn’t right, the story doesn’t work because the reader is jarred out of the spell of the story.

You may be wondering what this post is about.  It’s a transcription of an internal dialog I’m having with myself.  I’ve been rereading my story and some sections seem choppy to me.  Some of the transitions from one chapter to another just don’t flow.  So, to make myself feel better I’m imagining Homer sitting in his office in downtown Mycenae and wrestling with the transition between the story of the cyclops Polyphemus and the Island of Aiolos.  He’s plucking the strings of his lyre and thinking, “This Aiolos story is really boring compared to all the excitement of the cyclops.  It needs something to punch it up a little.  Maybe I can include some more man-eating giants again.  No, wait, that’s stupid.  There can’t be man-eating giants on every island.  That’s just lazy.”  I totally feel for him.  The epic poetry-listening public is easily jaded.  They demand good writing (or singing).  Ah, the vicissitudes of the epic Muse Calliope.  Like all females, she is fickle.  Well back to the grindstone.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

Stop the World and Let Me Off

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Okay, it’s enough.  I’ve watched my last screaming progressive video.  It’s not fun anymore.  And I’m good with the Trump cabinet picks and his agenda.  Honestly, that’s his problem.  He’s responsible for avoiding weasels and psychopaths.  That’s what we hired him to do.  Every once in a while it will be interesting to note how that’s all going.

I will admit I’m watching very intently the madness in Ukraine.  Apparently, the neo-cons running the war have decided to start WW III before they are physically dragged out of office.  And, I assume this is also the case for the Pentagon.  So, I can’t say I’m done with Ukraine because it’s not done with us yet.  But I restrict my attention to a few daily checks on some YouTube channels that cover the war.  So, until the mushroom clouds blossom over Dunwich I’ll take a watch and wait approach.  Which is about as much as I can logically hope to do.

So, what does that leave for me?  Well, as I’ve been reminded, I’m supposed to finish up that book.  And, lo and behold, I have been doing some work.  I put together a list of changes and additions to round it up and I’m rereading it to find any weaknesses or mistakes in the story.  And I’ve recognized a few.  Connors’ role in Iraq needs to be clarified and justified.  After all mega-billionaires aren’t usually strolling around forward operating bases of a war zone as if it were Silicon Valley.

And I have to inject more personality into my main characters.  This means I have to invent scenarios where they interact beyond strategizing how to pick off evil intelligence officers and their goons.  And, heaven help me, I might even have a relationship break out between Connors and Grace.  It would tie up some loose ends and add to the emotional interest in the story.  And so, I’m looking at those things.  But what I’ve noticed is that when you start a story by the braille method (that is, without a somewhat detailed outline) it’s hard to tack an outline onto it once it’s gotten beyond a certain point.  It’s like an off-the-rack suit that doesn’t quite fit in a bunch of places.  Trying to make it fit requires a lot of alterations.  And some of these alterations feel awkward or rub the author the wrong way because they seem antithetical to the way you originally saw a character or an event.  It’s a very uncomfortable activity.

What it’s made me aware of is that starting a story with a good road map ahead of time is an invaluable asset to finishing the story.  So, the lazy lout in me says, “Well, put this story aside and start another one from scratch with a good outline.  But I know myself too well.  That’s terrible advice.  What needs to be done is to bite the bullet and put in the work and wrestle with the problems until they’re resolved in a creatively satisfying way.  So that’s what I’m going to try to do.

What it will require me to do is put a few hours in every morning to get it done.  And that’s few hours every morning that won’t be devoted to reading the news and political stuff.  Well, I guess the world will survive with me at half strength.  You folks may notice a certain slackness on the site but I guess it can’t be helped.

Anyway, let’s give it a try.

2024 Election Follies – The Recap

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Today was the first weekly zoom call I had with my work buddies since the election.  It goes without saying that high spirits and hilarity were the order of the day.  We compared the high we were getting from watching the compilation videos of despairing Kamala voters to the 2016 Hillary scream fests.  I think we agreed that the 2016 psychos were probably funnier but since we are more grateful in 2024 it was basically a wash.

We talked about some of the Trump cabinet picks and agreed that the panic and despair we had heard about inside the Deep State was a very good sign.  There was much schadenfreude expressed.

We compared notes on how things were going in our lives outside of politics and everyone seems excited about Thanksgiving this year.  Then we traded stories on “the Company” and how awful and woke it had become and how the stock price had dipped.  But even that hadn’t dampened our enthusiasm for the future.

I regaled them with stories about the elections here in Dunwich and they told me about the follies in their communities.  All very familiar.  One of the guys is an Indian American who used to be a Democrat.  So, we gave him a bunch of grief about how his relatives will now consider him a traitor for voting for Trump.  He told us the rationale that he uses to justify himself to his parents and other relatives and we hooted at how lame it all sounded.  We told him that as our official token POC and Indian American he must take all the blame for Trump winning and he must apologize to Kamala face to face.  He proceeded to say some very rude things in his best subcontinent English and that was that.

I had hoped this week would be a calm after the storm.  But commitments piled up and my first real breather doesn’t come until Thursday afternoon (I hope).  But from that point it should be clear sailing.  The last two years have been a kind of great experiment getting involved in elections and politics.  I’ve learned how it all works and now I know what is likely and what is unlikely with respect to election fraud.  What seems clearest is that mailing out absentee ballots and allowing “voters” to access ballot drop boxes is the weak link in election integrity.

There are well-documented cases of individuals stuffing drop boxes with dozens and even hundreds of ballots.  This is completely illegal and also extremely hard to prevent.  Other irregularities weren’t part of my experience.  I suppose if the ballot tabulators in some jurisdictions do not use paper ballots and are connected directly to the internet that any kind of skullduggery is possible.  I have to assume that any reasonably intelligent person would know that.  What happens going forward will depend completely on the state government in power.  Places like California and New England will allow whatever irregularities they deem helpful to the Democrats.  Hopefully, the red states will protect themselves from voter fraud and election fraud.  But many of the cities are run by Democrats and the state government will have to provide oversight to protect against it.  So, my great experiment has been somewhat successful.  Now how do I separate myself from this quite onerous responsibility?  Well, we’ll see.  The First Selectman doesn’t like to be disappointed.  To be continued.

All That Jazz

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So, it turns out I should be a plotter.  Looking at my story from the point of view of character arcs it became obvious that I haven’t even decided on several characters’ outcomes that are pivotal to a satisfying resolution to the plot.  Put succinctly, somebody’s got to die.  And maybe that’s part of the reason why I haven’t moved those character arcs along.  I’ve grown fond of all my main characters and deciding which of them has to die and then writing that outcome is disturbing.  But I do see it has to be done and I’ve begun working out the scenario.

So now I understand why just drifting along on plot can be very problematic for anything more complicated than a short story.  If you have six or eight main characters and another dozen secondary characters, not mapping out what ends up happening to them risks all kinds of conflicts or worse; wasted opportunities for adding interesting content to the story.

I said that writing a death scene was disturbing.  And it is but at the same time it’s interesting to plan how this event will impact each of the adjacent characters.  For instance, it’s not too challenging to have associates and even friends react to a death.  But one of the most likely “victims” has a parent/child relationship with one of the other characters.  That will have to be a developed carefully to produce a satisfactory effect.  So now all of a sudden, my simple dystopian sci-fi book has emotional states like bereavement and anguish.  Who knew?

And a much bigger consideration for being a plotter versus a pantser is how much more important it is if your story is part of a larger series of stories.  If the story doesn’t end with the end of a stand-alone book, then things like killing off characters, even killing off antagonists is much more serious.  If you invest an enormous amount of effort into building up a really wonderful villain then you’d be crazy to kill him off in book one.  Sure, kill off his henchmen; Helmuth and the Tyrant of Thrale by all means.  But Gharlane of Eddore has to last through six or seven books.

And that’s just one aspect of what needs to be coordinated between a series of stories.  Doing that without a map would be very difficult.  And I see that now.  So, I’ll be heading down the path of plotting an outline for the whole story first and then a detailed outline for the first book.  It’ll take a little longer but in the long run it’ll save me a lot of time and it’ll make for better stories.

And on a completely unrelated topic, today I reduced the number of videos I watched of Kamala voters barking at the moon to three.  Well, everything’s relative and I think that’s pretty good progress in kicking the habit.  I remember in 2016 I watched the Hilary shriekers all the way through December and still couldn’t get enough of it.  Now it’s starting to get boring.  Maybe with Trump in the White House we’re all ready to move on from all of this jazz.

Plotter and Pantsers

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Here on the other side of the bright line of demarcation that is the post-2024 election decision I selected outlining the plot of my poor neglected novel “Sniper” as this morning’s project.  Last night was a long planned and greatly enjoyed family party celebrating Princess Sack of Potatoes’ sixth birthday.  It was a good-sized gathering of about thirty people and featured the Princess’s food of choice; multiple versions of pizza.  Now I personally do not believe that something called “mac and cheese” pizza could actually be considered pizza.  It is an abomination in the same league as anything called pizza that contains pineapple.  But I am a tolerant man.  If the children demand mac and cheese pizza then so be it.  I found a giant box that contained something that was garnished with sausage and pepperoni on it and so I was content.  And I even managed to introduce the grandchildren to a small snippet of the classic W.C. Fields movie “It’s a Gift” before it was drowned out by the torrent of talking that erupted when their parents followed us upstairs after the majority of the guests left.  Well, I’ll just have to wait for an opportunity during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to screen that cinematic gem for their viewing pleasure.

And because that gathering ended late, I had no time to look around for a theme for last night’s post.  And honestly, I was exhausted.  And if I had tried to post something in that state it would have been stale and derivative and a waste of everybody’s time.  And in this new regimen of mine that is anathema.  I’ll write when I have something I want to say.  And when I don’t, I’ll work on my projects.

And getting back to the theme of this post, my project for today is to review “The Sniper” holistically and identify plot line and character development and quality issues that need to be worked on.  And come up with an outline for the whole story and an outline for the series of stories in this “universe” and then a plan for completing this novel this winter. And then scheduling this work to be finished by some reasonable date.

And this is exciting for me.  It’s an intellectually interesting process that I’ve never tried before.  Up until now I’ve been what’s called a discovery writer or more colloquially a “seat of the pantser” or just a pantser.   This is the opposite of an “outliner” or a plotter.  A discovery writer just sits down and starts writing based on some idea or even just a gestalt of a story and keeps writing and let’s the story write itself without any direction from the author’s conscious mind.  I’ve always done this.  The positive side of this process is that the author’s natural creative instincts are in control and many exciting characters and plot events bubble up.  It is the natural method for producing realistic dialog and emotional insight into the characters.  The negative side is that the story direction is kind of random and you very easily can paint your story into a corner that can only be fixed by a massive re-write which is lethal for story-telling and for the morale of the writer.

And as someone who has run up against this dead-end scenario several times, I have decided to make the effort to do a formal outline and learn the skills it takes to plan my story in a disciplined way so that it won’t fly off the rails at the end and cause me massive mental anguish and confusion.  If I find that working on this outline is interesting, I’ll probably write more about and might even consult some of the sci-fi fans in the audience for their opinions on some of my story choices.

So here I go.