Blog of Jeff

I’m still struggling to find blogging time with the new job. It’s fun, but I’m having to learn a lot quick. I found out today that I have about 36 hours to do a project that nobody there has ever done before. It’s probably a minor project that can be done easily enough, but it is still a jumping through hoops on short notice. Good chance to look good in the first weeks, though.

I am also having a hard time keeping up with the news, but I did see another headline about Gonzo back in front of Congress. Won’t they ever learn? There is nothing they can ask or he can say that will change the three major rules of GonzoLand.

1. He is an incompetent idiot.
2. We all already know he is an incompetent idiot.
3. Bush isn’t getting rid of him.

There really isn’t much more Congress can do to drive home those three points any more clearly. They are set in stone at this point.

My day job is changing, because I received an unexpected opportunity to go back into IT for a large organization. A very exciting opportunity, but it means I will need to pull back from the freelance writing. I’ll keep blogging a bit to stay in practice, though.

It seems like the Democrats are stymied on every front. They can’t get us out of Iraq as quickly as they would like, they can’t do anything productive about the Libby commutation, and they can’t force Gonzales out. Their last try on Gonzales went backwards as the witness claimed executive privelege on anything and everything that could be damaging, but gave full and complete testimony on everything that painted the administration in a positive light. She got great positive soundbites and the Democrats got nothing that they could use. They would have been better off just accepting her claim of executive privelege and not questioning her.

Well, I was able to complete and submit a short story for the WritersWeekly Spring contest. It looks like it had around 400 registrants, but my guess is that not everybody submitted a story. I had a lot of things come up that wrenched up my plans and it would have been easy to forget about it. I was just desperate to get something written.

The topic was strange, which makes sense since they to prevent people from coming into the contest with a planned story. Creativity and originality count for as much as writing in this particular venue. The topic had to somehow include a woman in darkness, near the ocean, with a Nor’easter storm approaching and her somehow having one last chance involving the throwing of a bottle. It would be pretty hard to walk into the contest with a planned story and adjust it to fit that specific of a topic.

I will probably put my entry on the website tomorrow. It will be a month before I find out how I did. I am pretty realistic about my odds of coming in 1st, 2nd or 3rd. However, there are 20 honorable mentions and I will be pretty disappointed if I don’t at least get one of those.

I’m reading “3 Cups of Tea” now and it is a good book. It is the true story of a man who has been building schools in rural areas of Pakistan. The book was written by a reporter who spent nearly 3 years researching and interviewing the subject of the book. While the book is good and I recommend it, this post is really more about the writing style.

When I read now, I try to pay more attention to how things are written. In this particular book, one thing that bothers me is that it seems over-descriptive. Every noun seems to have a string of adjectives with it. It is still a good read, but I think the writer is so focused on describing everything that it takes away some from the key points. If everything is described completely, how do I easily know which parts deserve more or less of my attention?

My writing tends to the sparse side, not because I have trouble finding adjectives, but because I think they need to be important. If a character is only going to be in a story for a short period of time and is primarily a device to advance the plot, I don’t want to spend a lot of time and words building that character up. An important character should be described frequently and fully, with consistency through-out the work. I find the over-description of the unimportant to be just as annoying as the under-description of the important.

I also think that style of writing misses the power of the reader. If it does not matter whether a character is fat or thin, then let the reader’s mind fill in the character any way that seems appropriate to the reader. For any story, there is a balance between what the writer tells the reader and what the reader’s imagination brings to the story.

To me, that balance is one of the biggest things that separates the artistry of great writing from mere technical skill. A person with excellent grammar and a strong vocabulary can write effectively and descriptively, but artistic writing gives room for reader inferences, detours and interpretations.

Here’s a truly classic example. In the King James version of the Bible, God prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. It doesn’t get more sparse than that description. (Book of Jonah, Chapter 1, verse 17)

How big? We don’t know. Did it have teeth? We don’t know. Could it have been a whale? Might have been. Could it have been a robot fish made by God just for the sole purpose of swallowing Jonah? Sure, why not? Could it have just been a naturally occuring sea bubble released from a volcanic eruption that happened to have 3 days of air in it? No, that’s the kind of scientific mumbo-jumbo that will get you banned from textbooks in Kansas.

The beauty of this example is that it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that God was powerful enough to get Jonah inside a sea phenomenon and keep him alive for 3 days. A few details might have made the story more interesting, but they also would have taken the focus off the guy who made the fish. And since some of us think whales, some think sharks and some think giant robots, the story lets us pick our individual favorite. The focus stays on the story and main characters, not on describing a fish that peeks our curiousity, but ultimately is irrelevant.

My business plan still has some holes, one of which is my mission statement. I researched this a bit, pulled out some old MBA books and looked at some that are considered “best practices” style mission statements. I also looked at the Dilbert mission creator (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi) just to make sure I wasn’t heading into that category.

At the end of my careful analysis, I basically discovered that there is little consensus on what a good mission statement should be. Some companies advocate hard and fast goals, even possibly including sales or profit targets. Others preach broad encompassing principles that can guide a range of decisions by the staff. The one thing that they all agree upon is that it should be memorable and honest.

I also studied the websites of several authors and other artists and found that they seem to be lacking in mission statements. For that matter, there also seems to be a lack of sample business plans for artists/authors despite a gazillion samples in other industries. I know there are a lot of authors that are extremely marketing/business savy, so it may just be they don’t publicize their plans.

But back to the problem at hand. I need a mission statement that doesn’t make me vomit, something succint that clearly articulates what I do and how I do it. I am not going to choose a mission statement that ties me to specific sales or revenues targets, because I think the business plan addresses those in plenty of detail. Plus, those are boring and ostentatious to most readers. (OK, ostentatious was my bonus writer’s word of the day. I’m not really sure what it means, but I think it means boastful or self-important. (Alright, I decided to be professional and look it up. http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/ostentatious. My definition was close enough …))

Enough of these ramblings. What will my mission statement be? How shall I fill this gaping hole in my business plan? I am thinking that my mission might be ”creating quality writings for audiences to read.” Now, here is where my journalism experience comes into the picture. I instantly want to chop off the prepositional phrases, leaving the first three words. And the MBA side of me thinks quality is meaningless unless it has a clear definition.

My mission is to create writings that captivate readers. I think this is the winner. I can measure how many writings I create. I can measure the captivation of readers through a variety of measures, such as sales and numbers of clients.

I put more work into my “short” story today and as I mapped out what I want to add in terms of story and descriptions, I found it growing into a blasted novel. The whole point was to write something short and sweet, something that I could finish in a month. But now I am seeing themes, character development, allegories and other silly English literature concepts. It was just supposed to be a fun little story without any ambitions of growing up.

I may need to come up with something else to do as a true short story. Science fiction may not work for me as a setting, because I automatically start explaining everything. It is hard for me to just write a concept for the reader to accept without at least an attempt to make up a reason for that concept to be in the story.

At the very least, I will soon have my story from the writing contest, so that will be a true short story. Maybe I will convert this story into a novel. I have to write some more to see if the story really justifies that kind of depth or if I should just hack my ambitions back down to size.

For the record, I will lay out the general synopsis. Maybe a blog reader will have an opinion. (if I ever really get a blog reader, but that’s a challenge for a different day …)

Anyway, the story is set in a futuristic setting where corporations use mercenary forces to hold and acquire resources from newly discovered worlds. The legal system can’t keep up, especially since the corporations stall intentionally while they harvest resources. That leaves corporations free to finance mercenary security forces in the most profitable way they can. In this environment, limited wars are fought with very strict budgets. Since the entire point is to maximize return on investment, it is the cost of combat that keeps battles from expanding or raging out of control. Most mercenary commanders have accounting or finance backgrounds and their tactical decisions frequently flow from cost-benefit analysis.

The main character is a mercenary pilot who is willing to allow other priorities to trump profit margins, such as personal loyalty. His true love is simply flying his ship. But mercenary work is the only avenue he has to give him the freedom to spend his days in flight. One of the things that sets the main character apart is that he has over 100 seconds of air-to-air combat experience and very few pilots survive that much time due to the power and accuracy of their weapons. It makes him the futuristic equivalent of an “ace” fighter pilot with some associated fame. It also marks him as someone who has cheated death, because the odds of surviving that much time in air-to-air combat are so very low in this setting.

As the story develops, he is ordered not to engage an enemy craft due to the technical superiority of the other craft and his employer now wanting to take the risk of losing his craft. The climax of the story is the main character making a decision about whether or not to engage and the results of that decision.

Anyway, I’m now imaging the story with a great deal more depth than I originally had, so that puts me at a bit of a crossroads with this one.

Another day of feeling that only an idiot would think about walking away from a perfectly good day job to become a struggling writer. In fact, my business plan practically screams “idiot” from it. I have little to no start-up capital, no confirmed clients, no proof that anybody will every buy enough of my writing to scratch out a living and no good fall back plan. But, my heroes have always been eccentric writers who make stupid career decisions. Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe and Benjamin Franklin all lost or quit numerous good jobs during their careers. And only one of them died drunk and penniless in a ditch. (And another fought hard for the turkey to be national bird, but discovering electricity ought to balance that out …)

Speaking of writing, I did put some good work in this weekend on a short story that I hope to publish by the end of April. I will probably sell it for $5 through one of the online publishing companies to see how it works. I will probably put an excerpt and synopsis on the fiction part of my site, but I don’t intend to make any copies freely available. My business plan is pretty clear that I should stick to my guns on trying to sell my work. I think my business plan also says something about selling 1,000 units, but I’m pretty sure that was PUI. (Planning Under the Influence)

I just finished another page on the website. Hopefully, it will be complete in about two weeks and I can really start focusing on the writing and marketing side of the business. I also have a writing contest coming up in about 3 weeks. Aside from the obvious publicity and solid portfolio entry that a winning story would generate, it really is a fun concept and I am looking forward to it.

The contest is formatted so that 500 writers get an e-mail announcing the start of the contest, the topic and the allowable word limit. Then everyone has 24-hours to write their story and submit it. I like that concept and it is particularly helpful to people like me who can consistently start stories but fade on the finishing side. Knowing that is a one day event with a shot at winning something adds a little competitive juice.