http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1080256/Cannibal-cult-mother-skinned-son-eat-flesh-gets-9-years-jail.html?ITO=1490

I am utterly shocked and disgusted.

A look at the Grail Movement’s website and a reference in wikipedia are also very suggestive that, yes, there is cannibalism and torture condoned by some Christian cults. 

To do this to children….  To abuse the elderly.  Like I said, disgusting.

This was all done with stills, some 3000 of them. Cool!

End Rant

I was invited and went to an author’s party. This was a kind of a combination wine-tasting/book-reading/book-signing/talk-a-lot kind of thing put on for the author’s benefit. I drank too much wine; I dutifully purchased a book, had the author sign it, and pretty much spent the evening suppressing yawns. …So did everybody else, listening to the conversations in the washroom. We all put on a good face, though…for the author’s benefit.

My, my. We authors are a boring lot. Just check out any writer’s forum if you doubt me on this.  Anyway, my reaction to this author’s party wasn’t much different than my reaction to most of them. There are few of these socials that I find stimulating unless the author has a knack for engaging his or her audience.

Let’s face it. Nobody I know, especially me, is much interested in how much work it was for the author to write the book, get it into publishable form, la-da-da-da-da. Likewise, the quips and the cutes don’t go very far.

My favorite author events are those where the author might read a passage of the book, then stop, look up, and say something like: “You know, the morning I wrote this particular section was right after I spent a night shoveling water.”  [[Author looks around.]] “That’s right–water. My basement flooded…waterline broke…plumber wouldn’t be there for two hours.

“Did you know? Shoveling water has its tricks. You have to sort of sneak the shovel into it, slow and gentle… .”

Or maybe: “This scene in the book where Tess gets woken by a mouse falling into her tea cup really happened.  At my aunt’s house.  Except we weren’t asleep. I was sitting in her parlor while she read to me and my cousin from her favorite book–the Bible–when this mouse surprised us by sliding off a pile of her letters right into her tea cup. The rest is in the book, and, yes, said mouse got away!”

Those are the sorts of things that will make an enjoyable author’s event for me. Unfortunately, most of the time there’s just a lot of questions from other writers in the audience about “how it feels to be published, how difficult was it to get an agent,” and so on. Then there are the “personal interest” questions from some quarters. Questions like: “Is the main protagonist someone you know?” (No.) “How about the bad guy?”(No.)  ”Do you have kids of your own?” (No questions that could compromise the lives of loved ones, please.)  or “How can you write about something so appalling/sad/intimate?” (Because it’s part of the story.)

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t care a whit’s damn about most of the stuff that gets asked or answered at the majority of these get-togethers. Let me in on the inside scoops behind the scenes–the horrors and humors that sparked incidents in the book. Or tell me about the time you were supposed to meet an agent and overslept the alarm by two hours…about tripping all over yourself getting ready, breaking a shoelace and having to use one of your kid’s, only to barge into the agent’s office and have her look startled, then nod and say, “You didn’t get my message?”

“What message?”

“I had to postpone our meeting till next week.”

*chagrin*

Show me life in action, please.  Just like you do in your book.  Don’t bore me with your angst or your travails…unless they’re intriguing, action-filled, and lip or eyebrow twitchers.

So I sit in my writing den, oblivious to the world, listening to tunes, watching the fish in my display tank when I get stumped (or lazy-brained).  I’m all alone, without anyone else around, not even a cat…because those ladies and gentleman are more content lounging on plush carpets and chittering out windows at feathered flutters.  And, all alone, lost in “writer’s trance,” there comes a jolt!

It’s like a knock on the wall, but a quick peek out the window in the door that’s but three strides east shows no one is there…not that they could get through the side gate without the my watch-birds sounding Hell’s alarm.  Frowning, I return to my desk.  Again, I become lost in my work…only for two knocks to jolt me out of reverie just about the time I lose track of reality.

I look under the desk for some surreptitious presence of cat, mouse…something.  But nothing’s there.  There’s nothing outside, no one around, at all.  So I sit there dwelling in wonder.  And again it knocks, one sharp rap!

Bounding out of my chair, I launch myself out the door, intent on catching my mischievous other half up to no-good.  But, yet, there’s no one there.  

My frown is deeper now.  

The knocking stops…for the rest of the week.

Next week it isn’t knocking.  It’s squeaking…like an old desk chair, only it is IN the wall.  It keeps up even when I explore outside to find no cause.  It keeps up when I pull manuscript boxes out from their storage cubby under the desk.  It keeps up. For an hour. And there’s no one, nothing, there.

I call the telephone company.  They send someone out.  There’s nothing wrong with the wiring.

I call the gas and electric companies.  Same result.

I get the plumber.  I call a contractor.  They dig into the wall.  Nope. Nothing there.  No plumping in that wall.  No mice nested in there.  Nothing in the wall that could knock or squeak.

Am I going nuts? They certainly think so by the looks they give me (humoring).

And this week?  It’s a moan.  It’s making me grumble under my breath now.  I’ve actually video recorded it, loud, live audio, with the clock on, because I’m calling all of them back, scheduling them all–telephone man, gas man and electrician, plumber and contractor–to come at the same time of day it happened–around 2pm.  It has to be something to do with temperature changes or something.  There used to be a hot tub out and down the path a ways.  Gotta be pipes or something. …Right?

…And, yes, this is just the sort of thing that winds up tucked into one of my novels.  But not until I’ve chased down the cause.  Can’t write about something I don’t know the answer’s end to, now can I?

…Same flaws.  Not so much as a misplaced comma adjusted.

Worse, the author was the same, too — snide, argumentative, whiny, obstreperous. (OBSTREPEROUS: noisily, stubbornly, aggressively defiant.)  No matter how many times this author receives feedback — the same feedback, variably worded depending on the source — it is ignored.  The advice is ignored, but not the poor saps who give it.  For them, the blade-sharp edge of the author’s tongue, including public calls for tar and feathering.  

Luckily, each time I’ve come across this manuscript, I’ve sat back in my chair with idle fingers.  Not so for a close friend who is a legitimate editor.  He barrelled in and the author fled, tail between legs.  We all gave a huge sigh of relief. 

So here the same manuscript and its author surfaces again.  And my friend, having retired, isn’t a part of this venue, damn it.  Me? I’m still idling.  Won’t go near it, thanks.  If the author so believes in this book, why isn’t it being shopped?  Why does it appear repeatedly in critique venues around the Net year after year?  What’s the point of offering opinion on something when everything that could possibly be said concerning it has already been typed?

In this particular critique venue, it has been making its rounds since 2006 and still isn’t getting the much desired standing ovations.  Does the author so believe the book to be noteworthy?  Good.  It’s good for authors to believe in themselves.  So why seek the opinions of those, many of them published, whom one obviously feels stand far below one’s own literary expertise?

I will say one thing.  The author is certainly loyal to this manuscript’s each and every word. That’s self-confidence.  That’s dedication.   A lot of us could take some lessons here.

First person point-of-view is, however, limiting. It makes the writer stick very closely inside the protagonist’s perspective, unless one resorts to omniscient or employs a less conventional method of mixing first and either second or third points-of-view. Omniscient, however, is a tool only for the most adroit; the use of second and third POV’s requires a book with a large scope and unconventional plot. Unfortunately, my first person book’s scope does not permit this latter method of irregular construction.

Creating a work in first person, however, runs the danger of main character self-indulgence, which renders the read B-O-R-I-N-G. And that’s the huge pitfall of ‘first’.

Happily, every one of my other books is nicely set in third person, whether a single or a multiple point-of-view is employed by, respectively, a single main character, or several main and secondary characters. So I am content to allow one novel to deviate from my own self-imposed traditions, traditions which I feel best serve putting story above everything else, and especially above author intrusion and, worst, self-indulgence.

By its very nature, the ‘I’ perspective, first person point-of-view, is laden with hazards of self-emoting and self-indulgence. It is too easy for an author to begin to wallow in a character’s inner narratives and flounder in that character’s angst, especially since the character springs from the author’s subconscious. And self-indulgence and emotive wallowing is where ‘boring’ starts for a reader — at least this reader. It is where ‘tedium’ lives when I run my eye down any book shop’s shelf containing a majority of works written in first person. Sadly, that majority starts and ends in ‘I’, not with plot. Predictably, these ‘I’s’ (so favored, I understand, by angsty tween and teen crowd readers) are self-saturated with cloyingly emotive crud. Sadly, these stories, were they done from third, might have some glimmer and gleam of worthiness. Instead, they reek of self-infatuated flatulence.

In short, except in the hands of an author in complete control of his or her creation, the I’s don’t have it.

So what’s happening? First, the sad news.

1. I still haven’t snagged an agent, though one partial is still out.
2. Norman Riffe died, an honorable, ethical, delightful gentleman. I’ll miss him.

And the good news is:

1. We’re moving into a beautiful new house that’s three times the size of the one we presently occupy. The flip side of the joy is, the whole garden has to be dug up, potted, and transported, then reset into its new home.
2. I was invited into an absolutely wonderful writer’s critique circle. Not only can I just concentrate on writing and critiquing in an interface and application that is nicely intuitive and responsive to the needs of the activity, but my three critique partners are phenomenal writers with a no-holds barred, refreshing honesty.
3. And, last, my next novel is hot on the trail toward completion.

That’s the news. Now I have to catch up on my reading around here.

Have a good one.