I’ve been working two jobs and searching for another. And I’m working on two writing projects: The Afflicted, which I hoped to finish by now but which I have not; and a short story that is doing its best to turn into a novella, for my writer’s group. This does not leave all that much time for blogging. Or sleeping, actually. I’m amazed at my ability to go without sleep lately. I had thought I’d lost it. But apparently what I’ve lost is the ability to stay up late. I have not lost the ability to go to bed at a reasonable time, sleep for a few hours, and then get up long before dawn.

I did manage to watch all of the original Tales of the City miniseries over the past two weeks. I know, I’m about thirteen years behind the rest of the world on this one. I can say in my defense that, while my family did have a TV in 1994 (we’d had a TV for two years by that point, I think), said TV only got one channel: CBS. While others were being thrilled and shocked by depictions of sex and drugs, my family was stuck with Walker, Texas Ranger.

Well, okay, CBS in the mid-’90s did have some good shows. I rarely missed an episode of Northern Exposure. My whole family would gather in the living room to watch Murphy Brown, Picket Fences, Due South, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Lucky for us, reality shows hadn’t spread beyond MTV yet.

But we did not get PBS, and I had never heard of Tales of the City until I was out of college. I hadn’t read the book until last month, when I was shopping for a book for my stepfather and came across a $3 used copy and bought it on impulse. It was fun, with interesting characters and the kind of absurd plot that I’m learning to loosen up and enjoy. But while the characters were interesting, I found it hard to root for any of them. Then I Netflixed the miniseries, and went from being mildly interested but not really liking any of the characters to liking all of them. Every single one.

What changed? The dialogue didn’t; the miniseries writers practically used the book, unedited, as a script. It works. The short, choppy chapters translate into scenes very well. But the characters — maybe it was just putting faces on them that did it. Maybe I had been reading the dialogue wrong, not picking up on the sarcasm when I should have, or reading sarcasm in where it wasn’t supposed to be.

But I’m sure that for many people the miniseries re-created the book perfectly. They read the book as the author had intended, so they already felt about the characters the way I felt about them after seeing the miniseries. It’s making me think about how, sometimes, a writer’s work just won’t be interpreted the way the writer intends. That’s something to look out for. It’s something to minimize, to try to prevent as far as possible. But it’s going to happen; a reader is going to think your likeable jerk character is just a plain old jerk. Or when you’ve spent an entire novel carefully building up hints as to the sinister nature of a character who appears charming and sweet on the surface, someone’s going to miss the hints and be completely confused when the character’s secret is revealed at the end.

I have problems with this all the time; I tend to be too subtle about characters’ motives and interior conflicts. When I get rejection letters with handwritten notes, those handwritten notes often mention that my endings don’t feel like real endings. To me, they are real endings, and they do resolve something; but the something they resolve is still in my head and hasn’t made its way onto the page. Or, if it has, it’s buried too deep beneath the surface happenings, barely hinted at in dialogue, or inadequately dramatized. Never, you know, actually stated. Which is just bizarre, because when I read, I take stories very much at face value. I don’t analyze. I assume the writer meant exactly what they said. But when I write, I expect readers to do more work than I do when I’m the reader. Kind of unfair of me, isn’t it?

So, that’s something I’ll be working on when I finally finish the rough draft of The Afflicted and start editing. I’ll try to be less subtle. I’m gonna bring out the two-by-four.

Yesterday was cold and gray in a way that, if I were a thousand miles north of here, I’d say meant snow. It made me wish for a wood stove. The hunters came in in droves in the morning but half of them had left by noon because of the cold.

I was thinking about how it felt up north when it’s about to snow when a couple came in and asked how to find Magnolia Lake Park and I told them that it doesn’t exist anymore, but that Magnolia Lake was open for fishing today, and they asked if they could just go up and see it because all the lakes at the park where they were camping were dried up. They had binoculars and a yellowed old Petersen bird guide, and something in their voices reminded me of my grandparents. As they pulled away with the tag that said they could be here, I saw their license plate and realized why. Pennsylvania.

People from western Pennsylvania have an accent. It’s hard to define. It’s kind of Great-Lakes Midwestern, but subtler. I never noticed it before, really. It’s a nice accent. Pleasant-sounding. There’s something educational about it. Like a school library. Okay, that part’s probably because my grandmother is a retired librarian.

When they stopped on the way out to return the tag, the woman saw some tall yellow flowers growing by the fence and asked what they were. I said, “I’m not sure. They’re some kind of legume, but I don’t know what they’re called.” And she said, “Really? They remind me of… oh, the name is right on the tip of my tongue…” and I said “Mullein.” She said, “Yes! The ones like…” and she made a gesture like swinging a sword, and I laughed and said, yes, exactly, and with the rabbit-ear leaves, and she asked where I was from. I told her West Virginia, but my dad’s family is from around Erie and my mom’s family is from around Pittsburgh. She told me they were from near Pittsburgh too, and I said, my grandparents still live in Mars, and the man said, “Oh, I know Mars! It’s right near us.”

Anyway, I felt kind of bad that they had come all the way down to Florida into this Pennsylvania-like weather, and they were talking to a person whose family came from their home county, shivering on the porch in a fleece jacket. I mean, you come to Florida to escape the flat gray sky and the brown grass and the stiff fingers. But we get those days, sometimes, too. More this year than usual, I think.

Except, you know, we do have yellow flowers here in late December. So maybe it didn’t seem that way to them.

I’m in the check station today, with nothing much to do. There’ve only been five hunters checking in so far, and it’s getting light so most of them are already in. Outside, the fog is so thick and heavy it’s almost rain. I’m doing my job: being here and awake. It’s not a complicated job.

I’ve been reading the obituaries the past few days. I’m not like my brother Paul, who at 25 already checks the obits and the police blotter for names of friends and sometimes finds them. I’m looking for the name of the man who killed himself at San Felasco Hammock when I was there. It’s morbid curiosity more than anything. I didn’t see him kill himself. I parked in the parking lot and was off on the trails on the north side of the road with the dog, and when I came back the medical examiners were pulling the guy out of his car. It struck me how carefully they were handling him, as if he were still alive.

Anyway, I wonder about the guy and feel bad that something in his life was so bad that he decided that was the only thing he could do. I think suicide is up to the individual; there are certainly situations where life really is hopeless enough to justify it. But it’s a terrible thing and all other options should be exhausted first. Of course it’s terrible for the person’s family and friends; I’ve seen my own family go through that and I don’t want to minimize the pain. Of course it’s awful for everyone involved. But it seems to me worse if they don’t have family or friends. Without anyone to remember you, you are erasing yourself from the world, and that is horribly sad.

That’s why I want to know the man’s name: In case there’s nobody to miss him. At least someone will know that there was a man named —— who died of hopelessness at San Felasco Hammock on November 28, 2007.

This is a procrastination tool writing exercise I use a lot in November, and I thought I’d post it here just for fun. So, here we go — letters to two of my many, many characters.

Dear William:

Are you sure you don’t want to get DS from the, you know, infected blood you just got all over your hands? Because I could rearrange events and make that work. No, of course you don’t. Because that would be easy. And save me from having to write the ridiculous end to your subplot.

Also, thank you for finally developing a personality, although it will be a very hard personality to convey in writing since you, uh, don’t talk. And your sudden loss of all sense of self-preservation when your friend got hurt? It was kind of surprising, but sweet. And, now that I think about it, totally supported in the Mr. Smith story! Friends bleeding to death seems to be a theme for you. Also, it’s just supporting that stupid plot resolution. I’m not going to get out of writing it, am I?

And your obscene-but-funny speculations about Renaldo Garcia and Dog Boy? Awesome bit of irony there.

- Your author

P.S.: Yes, I’m going to change your name to something less normal. I just haven’t found one that sticks, yet. Any ideas?

Dear Christmas Joe:

Sorry about the gator. I wasn’t expecting it either. It just kind of appeared.

You’re causing me a little worry here, as a character. You’re a little too nice. You only have one less-than-stellar quality: a mild contempt for people stupider than you. Which, admittedly, I can get some mileage out of: most people are stupider than you. I’m still working on a way for that to come back and bite you on the ass. No, not literally. Don’t worry. I have a limit of one bite per character per story. Unless there are zombies or werewolves. Which, so far, this story lacks.

And if you and William could stop trying to take over the story, I’d appreciate it. Yes, you’re an interesting and likeable character. I know. But you’re a secondary character, okay? You’re just hanging around in everyone else’s plots, helping or interfering or providing comic relief. You’re really good at that, but you’re still not getting your own subplot.

Be grateful. You’re the only person in this story who gets a romance with a happy ending.

- Your author

So my brilliant and cool and way-more-organized-than-me co-ML, Christy, is doing something different for NaNo this year. She’s writing an improv novel. She’s writing it entirely online, in front of an audience, and she’s taking suggestions from the audience as she writes. It’s completely insane, and very cool, and she’s quite good at it. And there’s something satisfying about making a suggestion, and a few minutes later seeing her work it into the story.

Watching and commenting on Christy’s project, called Threepenny Novel, is one of the more entertaing ways to procrastinate working on your own novel. She’s posted the times she’ll be working, and you can read her story and add your two cents while she’s online, or, if you want to know what the story is actually about before offering suggestions, you can catch up with her daily archives.

I never expected plumbing to be an important plot point in this novel. It was a random throwaway line to give my characters something to talk about; one of them is working on a salvage crew and mentions that she’s found a lot of copper piping in the buildings she’s helped tear down. The other is a farmer, and they’re in the midst of a major drought, so she suggests that they use the pipe to irrigate the fields. This was not really supposed to lead anywhere, I just wanted to have them talk about something to draw out the sexual tension that was really the focus of the scene.¹

But then the characters insisted on actually following through with their irrigation plans, and at first this annoyed me because it was a weird tangent and I wanted to get on with the story, and plumbing is not that exciting to read about. I should know; reading about plumbing was a big part of my old job. But it turned out to be a good way to fix something I’ve been worried about; how someone finds a notebook that reveals another character’s past and kicks off an important subplot.

The solution was already there. Because I had already, without planning it, had established that:

• The hospital building does not have a concrete-slab foundation, or at least the porch doesn’t, so there’s a crawlspace under the porch.
• The protagonist hid the notebook under the porch in an earlier chapter.
• There’s a limited amount of salvaged pipe.
• The characters want to run a pipeline from a spring a good distance away to the garden.

I had not explicitly put the hospital between the spring and the garden, but I hadn’t said it wasn’t, so now it is. And rather than go around the hospital and waste pipe, they’re going to run it through the crawl space. And, voila, they are now in position to find the notebook.

I love when the solution to a problem comes together from little elements that were already in the story! When this happens, it’s one of the moments that make writing worth doing.

How about you? What are the moments that make you glad to be a writer?