GAD's Ramblings

Opposable Thumbs Required

I like my butter soft. I don’t think that’s so strange, but it has been a source of lighthearted contention in our house since we’ve had a house to share.

You see Lauren is firmly entrenched in the camp that believes butter should be refrigerated lest it go rancid over time. Being someone who won’t drink milk that’s even close to the expiration date, I can see her point of view. While I have experienced the joy of lumpy milk first-hand, I have never sampled the taste of rancid butter. Perhaps that is why my point of view differs from Lauren’s.

Aged milk aside, I like my butter to be soft, which means that it needs to be warm, which, in turn, means it shouldn’t be stored in the refrigerator. Cold butter means firm butter, and firm butter just doesn’t spread nicely. The risk of torn toast is simply too great for me to risk firm butter, let alone hard butter. I spend a great deal of time and energy toasting my bread to a perfect texture and golden-brown color. I am certainly not going to risk my handiwork with something so vulgar as firm butter.

As an aside, I would like to point out that no one uses the term “buttery” to describe something hard and cold. If my butter isn’t buttery, than what is? How can the thing I’m using to describe a texture and consistency not exhibit the fundamental principles used as the basis for identifying said principles?  Call me pedantic, but if my butter isn’t buttery, I’m not eating it. I have my standards after all.

While I like my butter to be soft, Annie has no such preference. She likes her butter in any form, so long as it’s available, though to be painfully accurate, availability is rarely a concern of hers. Annie doesn’t just like butter, it is by far, her favorite food, and she will do whatever it takes to sneak a lick or even steal an entire bar of the stuff. Annie it would seem, can not be bothered with the rantings of a butter connoisseur.

Since Lauren wanted to keep the peace, she took to storing the butter in the microwave when we were not at home. The butter stayed soft, and Annie couldn’t figure out how to open the microwave door, though I did catch her staring at it in contemplation more than once. Lauren then took to storing everything even remotely edible in the microwave. At first we used the oven, but quickly learned that we often forgot when the oven was full. Apparently bananas, butter, grapes and clementines don’t do well in an oven when it’s preheated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Who knew?

Annie altered the battlefield in the butter wars, as the ever escalating games of “hide the butter” have come to be known. You see if we left the butter out — so that it might attain the perfect consistency needed for easy spreading — it would disappear. We thought for a time that we had been visited repeatedly by the butter fairy, but we grew suspicious at the callous lack of dollars where the butter had once been. We were also concerned about the teeth marks on the butter dish. According to my measurements of the bite radius, the butter fairy would have been about 120 pounds, sporting large fangs and powerful jaws. Somehow this didn’t line up with the mental image I’d always had of fairies. To be fair though, I’m far from an expert on the subject, regardless of what my middle school gym teacher might have said to the contrary.

Early in the butter wars, Annie took an entire stick off of the counter, and when Lauren caught her in the act, Annie chewed furiously in an attempt to swallow the stick before Lauren could take it from her. Convinced that we needed better armor, Lauren bought a closing butter dish. Once we contained the butter, Annie stole not only the butter, but the butter dish as well. She then proceeded to lick and chew the butter dish in an attempt to extract the last molecules of butter essence from the plastic tray. We threw that butter dish out.

Lauren then bought a Rubbermaid butter dish with a “locking” lid. I use the term locking loosely, since the magic ferret-dog managed to take the dish, dismantle it, enjoy the contents, then summarily destroy it. Annie’s lust for butter, it would seem, knew no bounds.

She had eaten through one butter dish, and tried desperately to destroy the next. Lauren then went all out and bought a heavy-duty industrial grade mil-spec space-age locking Tupperware butter dish. This dish was a piece of engineering magnificence, guaranteed to keep the butter safe from shark attacks and two-year-olds. Surely it would keep a puppy at bay, even if she was a 120 pound ferret-puppy from the magical land of Newfoundland where butter fairies roam.

I am happy to report that thus far the beast has been unable to gain entry to the butter. The super-dish does sport marks from one night’s attack, but her efforts were for naught, and for now, our butter remains safe. Sure we eat dinner every night with a butter dish marred by bite marks. Sure we sometimes have to scoop the butter from the lid instead of the tray. Apparently she rolls the super-dish around at night in an attempt to get at the tasty butter inside. None of that matters. What matters is that, for now at least, we have outsmarted the ferret-dog.

Our butter remains soft and the integrity of my victory toast is assured. Life is good… for now.

With apologies to the master

The old man sat downstairs talking to his lovely wife. The lovely wife was saying good night as she did every night. The old man had always been a night owl and went to bed long after everyone else was asleep. As she reached in to kiss him, a noise caught his attention. She’s in the sink he thought. He pulled away from his bride and left the office to run upstairs. He had to be quick. There was no proof without catching her in the act.

The old man could still pretty spry when he wanted to be, though the years had limited the duration of his sprints. He knew his limitations. He just needed to get to the kitchen before she jumped down. As he rounded the landing that served as a midway point on the stairs, he pivoted on the railing and launched himself upstairs. As his vision cleared the top floor, he could see the beast. I have you now…

With both humans downstairs, the beast had infiltrated the kitchen and decided to feast on the bits of chicken stuck to the tray soaking in the sink. She had stood on her hind legs, and was standing at the kitchen sink like a person. The beast was as large as a man, and twice as strong. Her two front legs supported her massive frame while her head bent down into the sink in order to grab the tasty morsels from the pan.

Adrenalin fueling the chase, the old man reached the top of the stairs in an instant. He had planned to run up behind the beast so that he could surprise her. If he could scare her while she fed, perhaps she would learn not to eat from the sink. That was the plan anyway. It seemed like a good plan before it all went bad.

As the old man reached the second floor, something unexpected happened. Though he couldn’t be sure what was wrong, his aging brain had time to register one important alert. With pain imminent, the old man’s brain sounded the alarm to all bodily systems: Warning – collision imminent – brace for impact!

The human body is a marvelously complex machine. The brain serves as the command center for much of the body. Like a large sea vessel, when emergencies are encountered, alarms are initiated. In this case, the ship had lost it’s bearings due to a sudden unplanned change of course. Specifically, instead of moving forward, the ship was now diving straight for the floor. Old ships are not submarines after all, and sudden acceleration towards the sea floor is cause for alarm. So it was with the old man. He was not built for sudden acceleration towards the floor. Still, the old man’s brain was pretty active. Aware of sudden danger, his brain recorded the following actions and alerts in short order:

• Hands: pain
• Elbows: pain
• Knees: pain
• Cause: Sudden lack of ability to remain upright
• Secondary Cause: Falling
• Primary Cause: Tripped
• Root cause analysis: The Beast
• Alternate Beast Identification: Ferret Dog
• Canonical Name of Ferret Dog: Annie

• Emergency Restorative Action 1: Scream in anger and pain
• Emergency Restorative Action 2: Re-evaluate horizontal position
• Reset all systems and report
• Reset Initiated…
  

• Critical systems: nominal
• Legs: pain
• Arms: pain
• Man-parts: How YOU doin’?

• System has been reset
• Prime Directive: Kill Ferret Dog

As I flopped on the ground trying to decide which limb hurt the most, Annie jumped down from her feast while Lauren came upstairs to see what all the fuss was about. It hurt to get up. It hurt to do anything.  Somehow, someone had come in and replaced my body with that of an old man’s. As an additional insult, it would seem that the old man’s body had clown feet that had hooked the top step of the stairs. None of that mattered though. It was hard to see through the pain, impossible to think through the rage. One thought consumed me. 

Kill The Beast!

Annie enjoyed the advantage of youth. The beast, however, lacked wisdom. Though I might have been unable to run up a flight of stairs while remaining upright, I should damn well be able to outsmart a one year old dog.  Life isn’t like it is in books though. Slowly I climbed to my feet while Lauren watched, her concern masked by her strenuous attempts at curtailing her laughter.

Annie cowered in the corner. She had no fear of physical retribution, for we had never laid a hand on her in anger. She knew though — oh the beast knew what she had done. She wore her guilt as if it were a necklace of thick iron. Her head hung under the weight of it, her eyes looking up at me with a pitiful stare.

Still my fury was consuming. I gathered my bruised old body, stood towering over her and pointed a shaky finger at her. The only word I could manage through the anger and pain hung in the air as I glared at her.

“You…”

That was it. That was all the English I could conjure. My internal conflict had consumed all of my mental resources leaving me with only basic language skills. I wanted to kill the Ferret Dog, but I could never hurt her. The beast had won. I’m not entirely sure how, but she had won.

I gathered up my bruised body along with my battered dignity and limped back downstairs where I could hurt in peace. The battle had ended; I had lost. Losing wasn’t the problem though. What bothered me most was that for all my pain and humiliation, the she-beast hadn’t learned a damned thing.

Annie Staying Out of the Office

Annie is not allowed in the office. I know that, and she knows that, but only one of us cares. I’ll leave you to decide which one of us that might be. It might be the same one that mutters “stupid dog” under his breath from time to time, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you.

Annie knows that so long as part of her is outside the perimeter that defines the office, she is being “good”. Good, as with most issues of morality, is a topic open to interpretation. It is also therefore subject to the interpreter’s point of view. Someone it would seem, has informed Annie of this moral loophole.

Take for example the included picture of Annie. This picture was taken from inside the office. As you can see, the curve of her spine is on the tile – outside the office – while the majority of her body is on the carpet – inside the office. This position, while technically adhering to the letter of the law, flaunts her disdain for the spirit of the law.

Annie didn’t just walk up and lay down in that spot. She started by sitting down in the hallway outside the office with no part of her body near the door. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes though, she stretched, and rolled, and twisted like the bored child that she was. Idle paws as it were.

I imagine that during one of those contortions, her back paw must have touched the rug. Jackpot! she surely thought. With a paw on the rug, the incursion could begin. The game had begun. Next a casual roll would flip her tail onto the rug. Of course she wasn’t comfortable that way, so she rolled over to the other side. Two feet in!

If we happened to have seen her at this point, she would have looked all twisted and uncomfortable. We usually comment on how strange she is, or how she sleeps like a teenager when we see her like that. It’s all a ruse though, for she had a plan and she was determined. She was on a quest to violate a rule she found offensive – a mission of civil disobedience. Since I am the giver of rules, I am therefor “the man”. She is my very own Abbie Hoffman in a black and white fur coat. Thank God she can’t write her own book.

As she continued her machinations, more and more of her body poured into the office. She was slow and deliberate and moved in such a way that I never noticed her efforts. She was on a covert mission like a Marine sniper in the tall grass: quiet, deceptive and deadly. I never saw her move. Like the intended target of the sniper in the grass, I never figured out what was going on until it was too late.

After her dance of deceit I turned my chair and saw her curled up as you see her now. Her mission had been accomplished. She had quietly infiltrated my lair and delivered the fatal shot without making a sound. Her stealth was admirable – her mission a success. Without uttering a sound or causing a fuss, she had not only shown her contempt for my rules, she had done it in such a way that I didn’t see her do it. Therefore, according to the rules of war and the articles of the Geneva Convention, I could not tell her that she was bad. Had she just walked in and sat like that, she would have been open to my counter attacks. She was far too smart for that.

So Annie sits with 90 percent of her body in the office, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Stupid dog indeed.

2nd Draft Manuscript

Writing a book is an arduous process. Anyone who says otherwise probably hasn’t written a book, or if they have, it likely hasn’t been published. As I wrote in my blog entry
What it Takes to be a Published Author, writing is harder than most people think. Sure it is sometimes easy to sit down and put words on paper, but almost 100% of the time, those words are crap. While the mechanics of writing are different for everyone, I thought some might be interested in how I approach the task of writing a book.

Stage 1: Stream of Consciousness Writing

The first step is to get all the garbage in my head onto paper. This is the easy part for me. Like most writers, I do have battles with writer’s block, but for the most part the task of articulating complex ideas comes easy to me. During this stage I work hard not to spend time correcting and fiddling with sentence structure. The ideas need to be translated to words, and that’s the task on which I try to focus. Grammar, word order and any other editing is saved for later revisions.

Some people like to write a paragraph and then fiddle with it until it reflects the perfection of a final draft. I prefer to get the entire story out of my head and into the computer as quickly as my fingers and aging brain will allow. This gives me the added benefit of completing the first draft much sooner than if I endlessly fiddled with each paragraph. Completing a draft is a pretty big milestone in any writing endeavor, and being an endorphin addict, I go for the fix as soon as I can. Once the first draft is done I proceed to dance with the dogs. I usually write late at night, so there is little risk of anyone seeing my 2:00 A.M. dance of completion.

Stage 2: First Draft Editing

Once the dancing is done and I’ve had some recovery sleep, I print out the entire thing and give it to my wife, Lauren. She reads it, marks it up with a red pen, and gives me her opinion regardless of whether it’s good or bad. She marks up typos and acts as my first line of defense against stupid, libelous or just plain bad writing.

When I get Lauren’s notes back, I set about the first draft editing process. The primary goal of this stage is to to get rid of the crap. I feel that a primary goal for any writer should be to use as few words as possible. As William Zinsser says in his fabulous book On Writing Well, “Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

The stream of consciousness process from step one results in many unnecessary words. Entire chapters are often culled during my first draft editing since anything that doesn’t matter is unceremoniously deleted. Deciding what matters is a surprisingly easy process when it comes to chapters and paragraphs. Finding unnecessary words can be a more daunting task.

The removal of unnecessary words is, to me, the essence of writing. This stage of editing is what starts to make a great story from a good one. In the book I’m working on now, I had this clause in the first chapter: “I don’t know if that was true or not…”  The “or not” was completely superfluous. “I don’t know if that was true” by it’s very nature, includes the possibility that it was not true. the words “or not” were unnecessary. Master the skill of removing your own useless words and you’ll make a big leap towards becoming a better writer.

At the end of this stage I hope to have removed 30% of my text. There is no science in that number, but 30% makes me feel like I’ve done my job. The amount of work cut depends on how well I wrote the first draft.

Stage 3: Second Draft Editing

Sometimes I write chapters that flow like poetry written by angels. These masterpieces are invariably followed by rambling pages of nonsense written by a psychotic monkey on a Benadryl bender. Being responsible for every word, I set out to level the playing field. Since I don’t want to degrade the beauty of the great chapters, I endeavor to make the terrible work flow like poetry.

Making words flow is an art that many writers – even famous published ones – seem unable to grasp. A chapter that flows well is more enjoyable for the reader. A chapter that doesn’t flow well might be called choppy or described as all over the place. Often though, the reader will just put the book down in the store and walk away.

The goal of this stage is readability. Every sentence should flow with its own cadence, and it should lead the reader by the hand to the next sentence. The last sentence in each paragraph should entice the reader to continue to the next. Every sentence is a chance to to pull the reader deeper into my world or to lose them altogether.

A great way to test the flow of your writing is to read it aloud. As goofy as that sounds, it seems to work. I try to do this at home, since apparently some customers have a problem with me reading aloud in Starbucks.

Stage 4: Outside Editing

When all the pages have been purged of fluff and the entire work flows to my satisfaction, I start to like the book. Until I like the book, no one but Lauren gets to read it.

At this point I send copies to people who have agreed to edit my work in one way or another. I may choose someone because they have an advanced degree in English, or because they are a writer. I may choose someone who is an expert in the field of which I have written, or someone who just likes to read. The more feedback I can get from a variety of viewpoints, the better I can make the book. What is important to me here, is the quality of the feedback I get. I’m not going to give someone a copy only to get an “It was great – I really liked it” in return. That experience is reserved for paying customers.

I try not to touch the book until I get a response back, or for 30 days, whichever comes first. This lets me view the book as if it were new to me. Writing the same story every day for months means that I have become too close to the story. Taking a break lets me focus on it more as a reader would.

Stage 5: Final Editing

I may not use all of the feedback I get, but I take it all to heart. Sometimes what seems like a perfectly crafted sentence to me is confusing to someone else. If it confused one person, it will confuse others, so it is probably a good idea to tweak it a bit. If I’ve done my work in the first few stages well, this stage doesn’t take much time.

Stage 6: Submission

Off it goes into the harsh world of agents, publishers and the world at large. Edits beyond this point are as an agent or editor might request or demand. That’s a tale for another time.

Actual Status from Network Warrior

Tracking Progress

For each book, I maintain a spreadsheet. For each stage I make a list of the chapters, how many pages and words are in each, and I check if it has been edited yet. This lets me track my progress and see visually how much work remains.

Final Thoughts

As a published author, one of the most common questions I get is “How did you do it?” People seem amazed that I could organize my thoughts over 600 pages. I try to view writing one sentence at a time, then one paragraph, then one chapter. Beyond that it’s like moving colored pencils in the box until they look nice. You don’t need to worry about how the pencils are made, but the order seems obvious when you look at them from a distance. So it is with chapters in my mind.

Writing is a very personal experience, so what works for me may not work for you. What matters is this: if you want to write, then write. The steps that I use help me write large projects. I hope that my experience might help you with yours.

He really said that. Well, most of it anyway.

I am a fan of experiences that make me question reality. Imagine getting ready to lift a heavy container. You flex your muscles and lift, only to discover that the container is empty. Your brain panics for a split second as it tries to reconcile your previous perception of the container’s weight with the reality of the empty vessel in your hands. Experiences like this are a rarity, for our perceptions of the world have been reinforced through years of conditioning. Water in a river will be cold to the touch. Fire will be hot. Heavy things are heavy. We expect our world to be predictable.

Some things are never predictable though. Spill paint and try to predict where it will splatter. There is a randomness to life that is reassuring, for strict order would make living unbearable to even the most committed of control freaks.  Still, this randomness is in itself, reliable. We can rely on the fact that splattered paint will create a different pattern every time. There are certain laws to which the universe is bound. In certain cases, where order might otherwise lead us to madness, randomness is key. If every sunset were identical, then none of them would be spectacular.

Life with a puppy is a mixture of predictability and randomness; order and chaos. A puppy will grow, be silly, play and love. She will also nibble, chew, and make a mess of damn near everything while she learns the rules. While the acts themselves may seem random, they will occur with certainty assuming the puppy leads a relatively normal life. Try though to predict where the puppy’s drool will end up when she shakes her head and you will see the inherent randomness found within the universe. While you can safely assume that most of the drool will end up on the floor, this is simply the nature of gravity. Where on the floor it resides is a far more complicated matter.

Trying to determine where drool lands is not an act that calls reality into question. Big dogs drool, and the drool goes everywhere. My reality is filled with proof — I don’t need to study the matter any further. We need a different type of experience to test reality. For a truly jarring experience akin to lifting a surprisingly empty container, we need only one thing; a special kind of dog. We need a dog that that cares not for the rules of nature, nor for the equations that describe the laws of physics. Luckily, I know of such a dog.

I am a 45 year old writer and science buff who thinks he has a pretty fair grasp on reality. Sure there might be zombies outside the fence at night, but until you can prove to me that there are not zombies, their existence is, at the very least, a possibility. One fine night I opened the sliding glass door in the dining room to call the dogs. Upon opening said door I saw dog number one laying on the deck wagging like the good boy that he is. Guinness thumped to me his lazy Hi Daddy – I like you but you’re not the Mommy greeting that I so often receive. Not seeing Annie, I leaned my head out a bit and looked to the left where I should have been able to see the entire back yard. Only instead of the yard, I found myself looking eye to eye with dog number two; Annie, resident she-beast with the newfound ability to bend time and space.

For one reality bending second, I looked into the eyes of the mischievous one year old Landseer. She was smirking. So help me she was smirking! My brain clicked into high gear and tried to reconcile the perceived discrepancy that had lead me to question reality, and thus my very sanity. The logical process initiated by my brain unfolded as follows, all in the span of 1/10th of a second:

• Annie is a dog
• Annie is a big dog
• I am six feet tall
• Annie, though a big dog, is not six feet tall
• Annie is looking me in the eye
• Kate Beckinsale is hot
• Can dogs fly? No
• Am I kneeling? No
• Is Annie on her hind legs? No
• I wonder if Kate Beckinsale likes dogs
• Is Annie a werewolf? No – my tests ruled that out last week.
• If I’m six feet tall, and Annie is not, then how can she look me in the eye?
• Have I fallen? No
• What would Kate Beckinsale do?
• I bet she would tell me that Annie’s sitting on the storage box
• I wonder if… wait… what?

Annie had chosen to sit on the large plastic outdoor storage box on the deck. We have since witnessed her on the patio table as well. Why? Because she’s Annie. Apparently being Annie involves a blatant disregard for anything regarding normalcy. There seems to be no other reason that we could discern. She just likes to be different. Annie came to us from a rescue foster home where she spent the first few months of her life with not only other dogs, but cats as well. She seems to have taken the characteristics and mannerisms that appealed to her from each species. Then again I think Annie is simply ammused when I am forced to question my own sanity. I wonder what Kate Beckinsale would think.