Monthly Archives: August 2012

In traffic

people,

Yesterday while I was waiting for my bus to go to work, I watched a woman dressed oddly step off the curb across the street. The street in question is a six-lane major arterial that is nicknamed, among regional transportation professionals, “the little freeway.” It isn’t an actual highway, but it is very busy, and drivers routinely zoom along over the speed limit.

She stepped off right in front of a car. My heart jumped a beat. The driver swerved and missed her (luckily the next lane had an opening for him to swerve into). The driver tapped his horn. Just a quick tap, not a long, angry lean on the button thing. The woman flipped off the car and started shouting.

She did not retreat to the curb. She ambled further, crossing lanes, as cars stopped for the crazy person. She kept yelling angrily, occassionally flipping the bird in random directions as she craned her neck and tried to look over all the cars now stopped for her, as if she were trying to see if a bus was coming (there’s a big bus stop going the other way right across from the one I catch my work bus to).

Still yelling angrily, she ambled back to the curb and started walking toward the corner.

Traffic began moving again.

She got to the corner, and without waiting for the light or even looking, she stepped off in the crosswalk. Again, miraculalously, cars stopped. She crossed, getting honked at only one more time. Once she reached our side, she was still angrily yelling, apparently at some invisible person right in front of her.

I had a brief moment of worry that the crazy lady was going to try to get on our bus (which was one of the vehicles that had had to stop to let her cross). She didn’t; she stalked right through the crowd waiting for the bus, yelling all the way, without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Later, during lunch, I was reading my usual news sites. At about the same time this lady was playing chicken with traffic, in another part of town, a man was seen sitting in the middle of a road. His legs were crossed, elbows on hos knees, and his face buried in his hands as if he were crying. A couple pedestrian passers-by called to him to get out of the road. One stepped off the curb and approached him.

A car came careening down the road. The bypasser who had stepped off the curb jumped back. The car did not stop. It struck the man, killing him, and kept going as if nothing had happened. Police apprehended him a short distance away. The 23-year-old has been booked into jail for driving under the influence and vehicular homicide.

Reading that made my heart skip a beat again, and I marvelled, briefly, that the woman I watched had avoided a similar fate.

In the evening, shortly after I got home, my husband came into the house and told me about his day. The second thing he told me was that he had been run over on his way into work. He rides his bike to and from work. He said he was riding along in the bike lane, when a woman chatting on her cell phone suddenly turned right.

“I was banging on the front of the car after she stopped, trying to get her to back up, because my leg was pinned under my bike, which was pinned under her car.”

He insisted he was uninjured, and I couldn’t prove otherwise. Amazingly, all he had to do for the bike was replace his front tire. There’s a bicycle repair shop right next to his place of work.

He rode the bike home from work.

Three times, yesterday, traffic incidents made my heart skip a beat.

Of the stories, the one that still amazes me most is the crazy lady who was never struck. Not because she did anything to protect herself. It was entirely because a large number of drivers were alert enough to see her and stop.

The saddest is the guy killed by the drunk driver. Why was he sitting in the rode? Was he mentally ill or severely impaired and just didn’t realize where he was? Was there some sort of medical issue playing out? Was he hoping to get killed? We’ll never know.

The one that most frightens me, of course, is my husband’s accident. Unlike the others, he was right where he was supposed to be: obeying the laws, wearing his helmet, flashing lights on his bicycle, the whole thing. He came only inches from injury or far worse because a driver was paying more attention to something other than her driving.

I don’t tell him I love him often enough.

Sometimes you just need to scrap it

writing

Despite feeling sicker than I have in a long time, and it being the two hottest days of the year here, so far, I got a decent amount of writing done over the weekend. Much of it at odd hours, because I napped a lot. I would be awake for a few hours, then sleep of a few. It became a little confusing.

Months ago, I wrote the opening paragraph for a scene which I expected to use a few chapters later in the novel than I was, at that time. I’ve had this very strong image in my head for all that time of one of my protagonists sitting at a table in a tavern he used to hang out at during his mispent youth (note: the character is a professional thief of some notoriety-so it could be argued he’s in his misspent adulthood and approaching his misspent middle age) and slowly coming to the realization that much more has changed than meets the eye.

I hadn’t written more than the one paragraph because I knew some of the intervening scenes would determine what information I needed him to obtain during this scene.

So I wrote the scene yesterday. It was funny and closely matched my original vision. There was a big problem: by the time I’d finished, the character hadn’t learned anything important to the actual plot. Nor could the scene be said to reveal anything new and significant about the character.

I read it through again, and I had absolutely no idea what the character logically should do next to move the plot along.

Or rather, I had ideas for what he should do next, but this scene didn’t point to any of them. It made sense that he would go to this place to try to find something he needed. And it made sense, based on other events, that he’d experience some bewilderment that this former hub of underworld activity was now a sad used-to-be. But it wasn’t worth making the reader go through that for a few chuckles. Not when there are kidnapped children to rescue, a princess in peril, a possible war simmering, et cetera.

It would be like spending a thousand words describing the public restroom your hero has to visit in between action scenes. Yeah, everyone has to go sometime, but usually it isn’t interesting.

For a few seconds I thought about my usual rule: don’t go back to revise a scene until I’ve written the next one. But if there’s a time to break your own rule, this was it.

I didn’t delete the scene. I just cut it and pasted it into the Research section of my Scrivener project.

Then I re-wrote the scene. I kept a few lines. And the humorous discovery that things have changed in ways he hadn’t expect is still there, but it’s much less the focus of the scene. Once I stopped trying to think of more clever ways to surprise the character that something has changed, the scene flowed forward, and led him to his next step.

Sometimes you have to write a bad scene before you can write it right.

A round-up of mundania

life

Or what passes for mundania in my life.

The last few weekends our friend, Sky, came down to use my poster printer. After wasting several hours trying to figure out why the print quality was so bad, our friend Anthony, who was hanging out with us, showed Sky a dialog box on him computer to select print quality. A real Derpy moment for us all. Still, the posters are gorgeous.

Starting some time before that, Michael (my husband) had been asking what happened to the button maker. He wanted to use it for a project for an upcoming convention. I had vaguely remembered it being in the bedroom, but hadn’t been able to find it. Continue reading A round-up of mundania →

What’s next-ish?

writing

Sometimes a story flows along in order. I have the beginning situation, I think I know the ending, and as I finish each scene, the next scene is quite obvious. The ending I reach isn’t always exactly where or how I first imagined. And during re-writes I may cut out a few scenes entirely and/or add new scenes. But, generally, there is a feeling in some stories almost as if you, the author, are merely a witness to a story that played out for itself. Your decisions amount more to deciding which events to include, which to skip over, and how to frame things.

Then there are stories that are much more a struggle. I know the problems confronting my protagonists. I have an idea how it will end (but sometimes it’s no more than whether the protagonist triumphs or fails). Scenes are written, but sometimes with no idea as to where in the sequence of events they happen. Rather than witnessing a tale, the author is more like a detective or an archeologist digging around a messy place, collecting and cataloging pieces until there is finally enough to get an idea of the broad outline of the tale. Your decisions are more complicated. Is this thing you unearthed even part of the story? Is it even a “thing,” or have you mistakenly glued several unrelated fragments together into what appears to be a clay pot?

A lot of my stories fall somewhere between those. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of scenes that clearly have a sequence, but I’m not sure they all belong. And sometimes I’m a bit worried that I’m digging in the wrong spot entirely.

There’s no way to tell until I reach an ending. And that will just begin a different kind of digging, assembling, and evaluating.

Sometimes I wonder how any stories ever come together.