Oh, You And Your Peeves

Okay, don't let this go beyond us.  I don't want to upset anybody.  And I'm very happy that the world population of readers is large enough to encompass so many thriving genres of novel.  But you folks working in fantasy -- please stop with the twee titles.  I'm not talking about the books themselves -- I'm sure they're all brilliant.  It's the titles that gall.

For a while fantasy novels had curious names that sounded important and classical, like The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.  The best thing about The Silmarillion is the title.

Then Ursula K. Le Guin came along with The Wizard of Earthsea.  I'm sure it seemed harmless enough at the time.  But for years afterwards, your fantasy novel wasn't shit if it didn't have a preposterous compound word in the title.  Let's see if you can guess which of these I made up, and which ones are real book titles?

The Farseer Trilogy
Chainfire
Heir to Sevenwaters 
The Bonehunters
The Deadhouse Gates
DragonCrown War Cycle
Shadowmarch
The Dragonbone Chair
Silverthorn
The Runelords
The Serpentwar Saga

It was a trick!  I didn't make up any of those.  Add to this peeve the Robert Ludlum school of titling: The Eftling's Lament, The Croftesblayde Covenant, and so forth.  I did make those up. But there are dozens of these sorts of titles.  And don't get me started with those possessive titles, cuz damn.  The Saga of Grymlyng, A Rising of Shadows, The Unbeliever of Icefire, An Iota of Tombs.  I made those up, too.  But get thee to a bookstore and witness the real ones.

I think the motivation is pretty clear: you want to give your book a name that has that "ye olde" quality.  It should sound important, yet witty, and convey a suggestion of literature, too.  Like in five thousand years someone will excavate a mass-market paperback copy of A Ravening of Silverhawke and think it must be some famous story cycle because it's got a fancy name.

Right.  Feeling much better.  If you'll excuse me, I have to get back to writing my fantasy trilogy.  The ThornWitch of Yggrasil's Heir was the first book.  I'm on The Assassin of Melgard's Throne now.

I'm thinking the third book will be entitled The Dragonscale of Darkmage, but that might already be taken.

Copy Edits On The Way Home

Today I finished the copy editing and sent the manuscript to New York.  Nothing will happen until Tuesday, it being a holiday weekend, but meanwhile my editor sent me the copy for front and back covers of the book.

I didn't know the author was invited to collaborate on that.  It makes me wonder how so many awful book synopses make it onto back covers.  But I could be a special case, seeing as I am willing to make threats of physical violence when it comes to these things.

Anyway, next step, except for a few phone calls when they can't figure out what my corrections mean, is galleys.

This Sure Is A Long Book

Copy editing is a great opportunity to read your own stuff that one last time.  If you're writing for yourself -- that is, if there isn't a publisher involved -- this step is omitted.  I've never done it before.

Besides the swarms of purely technical notes (italics indicated in margins, text breaks, and so on) there are spelling corrections and grammatical adjustments.  I'd say 90% of the latter consist of replacing the word "that" with the word "who," because I have a lifelong tendency to ignore whether a phrase is about a person or a non-person.  This probably comes from being forced to study Latin at prep school.  IE:

                                 who
There were people that/\ could help them.

What is most interesting is that there is no comment at all on the story or the quality of the narrative.  We're past all that.  I've got this guy in New York carefully making dry little notations concerning the use of 'leapt' versus 'leaped;' meanwhile the text itself involves pus, maggots, zombies, and vomiting.

So this leaves me seeing the book about as much like a normal reader as I'll ever be.  The writer never reads his own stuff with the same eyes as a reader, of course.  Somehow, reading the text with an eye to the marginalia has allowed me to experience it differently that I usually would -- if not like a reader new to the text, at least not quite as much with the author's scorn goggles in place.

I think there are parts of this book that make the other parts worth getting through.  For me responding to my own work, that's high praise.  Or it could just be that I'm getting soft from all the red ink fumes.

          

Putting The Dead Back In Deadline

I confess: my work schedule, moving house, and a wealth of other crises left me lagging on the copy edits for Rise Again.  Now I've blown the schedule by a week, and that will have to be reflected in production -- so the book release date is delayed by a week.  I'm cringing with shame.

I'm also taking the next two days off work so I can get 'er done.  The trouble with being late is it puts the past in charge of the future.

Voice

I'm thinking about voice.  It's a strange thing: voice, as applied to writing, is what amounts to manner of speech when talking.  Certain actors, to cite a related art, have a very distinct voice.  I don't mean gravelly or lilting, but rather the way they inflect their lines with a certain attitude.  Roddy MacDowell, for example, had an odd sort of mid-Atlantic accent, but that's not what is so distinctly him.  Rather, it's the diffident, slightly startled way he speaks his parts.  He sounds like a librarian trying to explain to a very large man that he can't talk loudly in the library.  Lauren Bacall, on the other hand, always sounds like somebody just told her a really dirty joke.  That's voice, too.


A writer's voice is a tricky thing.  I don't know what my voice is.  I think in that way, in the same terms, so it doesn't sound like voice to me.  It just sounds like writing.  But I am very conscious of how others sound in this regard.  I love certain writer's voices, love them like I love certain kinds of music.  Kurt Vonnegut: what a distinctive way of writing he had!  Nobody else could come close to it.  Or Hemingway, or Susan Sontag, or whatsername who wrote The Shipping News.  Raymond Chandler.  Jane Austen.  Arundhati Roy.  These people have absolutely distinctive voices.

A lot of writers actually err on the side of too much voice.  Cormac McCarthy, for example, writes with such insistent peculiarity, his sentences like hickory branches, that I have difficulty getting past his technique and into the story.  Hemingway sometimes slides into self-parody, as well, until he's all but grunting.  E. Annie Proulx.  I knew I'd remember.  Oh lord, she sets my teeth on edge.  She's got way too much voice.  She is gripped with the sort of earnest intensity I associate with amphetamines.  Her writing doesn't so much flow as spill, and half the time I come away from her books feeling like I'm stupid, because clearly anybody clever would have the wits to hack through her poetry to the meaning beneath.  This is, I think, deliberate.  I think she's flapping her elaborately tangled language in our faces to distract us from the rather thin, precocious little stories underneath. 

The road ran along a railroad track. He thought the bend of the rails unutterably sad, those cold and gleaming strips of metal turning away into the distance made him think of the morning he was left on Uncle Tam's doorstep listening for the inside clatter of coffee pot and cups although there had been no train nor tracks there. He did not know how the rails had gotten into his head as symbols of sadness.

--from That Old Ace In The Hole

I mean, what?  That sounds to me like a first draft: somebody reached for a pithy-mythical image, changed her mind halfway through, tried to go back to the first idea, and finally blamed the whole thing on the protagonist!  Jesus Christ, edit that stuff.  Every sparkly notion that pops into your head is not a diamond.  My first drafts are full of things like this, passages that start out well and end badly.  I cut them. 

Proulx wins Pulitzers with them.

But you want a voice, how about Virginia Woolf, whom I suspect Proulx desperately wishes to outwrite?

And now, let Bernard begin.  Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent.  Let us describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence.  Bernard says there is always a story.  I am a story.  Louis is a story.  There is the story of the boot boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells winkles.  Let him burble on with his story, while I lie back and regard the stiff legged figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses.

--from The Waves

Look at all those lush echoes of phrase, the ss-ss-ss rhythm of 'S' words like a tongue-twister, and the way the 'B' words like burble, Bernard, boot boy and batsmen bubble up in the text.  This was written not just for the music of it, but for the way it lies upon the eye.  Yet despite its rigorous composition, it feels completely natural -- not like an exercise of technique.  What a voice! 

What's interesting about voice is that it is literally heard in the mind.  When we read, we don't see the words without speaking them, internally.  In fact, when children read aloud, they're probably reading better than us adults, with our squinting silence.  I will often read passages I like aloud, but softly, even if I'm alone.  Reading aloud is childish!  Yet we write to be recited.  Authors haven't altogether lost what Homer had when he spoke his stories aloud to an audience. 

Through the use of punctuation, italics, dialogue, and various techniques of composition, we are able to simulate the speed at which the text is supposed to be consumed, much as a reader can change the pace at which she speaks.  We can cause the words to sound a particular way, even though the words are consistently spelled.  That's because, in our minds, we hear what we read. 

Example, using only italics: This is the last straw.  This is the last straw.  This is the last straw.

It's the same voice that expresses our thoughts.  Which is probably why reading is so hypnotic.  It's like having someone else fill our minds with what they are thinking.

That's where voice becomes important.  I don't want to spend the hours it takes to read a book with some objectionable voice in my head.  Jim Thompson's masterpiece The Killer Inside Me is an appalling, gruesome first-person narrative, told by a homicidal psychopath as he entraps and slaughters the people closest to him.  Yet it's fantastic to read -- a revelation, for me.  Because Thompson's voice is just so damn good.  He can tell any kind of a story in that voice and it's worth reading, and he does, and it is. 

There's much more to voice, but these are the things that strike me first about it.  Too little voice and the story will merely be a recitation of events, like something from a high school history textbook.  Too much voice and it turns into a mass of plumage, obscuring the bird.  And finally, the voice must be sympathetic to the material.  Raymond Chandler couldn't have written Sense and Sensibility; it just wouldn't work.  His voice is simply too unique, and too distinctly of his time.

Jane Austen:

Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education: she was ignorant and illiterate; and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage.

If Chandler Wrote that:

Lucy could hold Elinor's ear for half an hour before it fell off, but what she didn't know would fill an encyclopedia.  Her brains were virgin, if little else.  Dashwood saw right through the glib patter.  The shine was just brass.

 Of course, trying on somebody else's voice for a few minutes is a hell of a lot of fun.  I just wish I could try on my own.

Thought Of The Day

Adults are just children made complicated by decay.

Snow Globes

Every story takes place on a limited stage.  There is no need to fill in the world around the story, except insofar as is necessary to provide a sense of the place and time in which it occurs.  Some genres, such as fantasy and science fiction, allow for a certain amount of wandering afield -- the reader expects a little exploration beyond the boundaries of the narrative, because the world itself is of great interest.  But for a typical story told in the usual world, of its universe much is assumed and little shown.

Then there are what I call "snow globe" stories.  These are the tales in which the world is obviously invented for the purpose of the events within it, beyond which there is only a great void.  This is generally, but not always, a bad thing.  However, the bad examples are the ones that stick with you.

For those of you in the torrid regions, a snow globe is a small, clear dome containing a figurine or diorama and a quantity of tiny plastic flakes suspended in a liquid medium such as water.  The base of the scene inside the globe acts as a watertight lid, sealing the liquid inside.  When shaken, it appears that the flakes are "snowing" inside the globe.  This is, for reasons anthropologists have not yet studied, supposed to be interesting.

A snow globe story, however, is always interesting.  Instructive, anyway.  Snow globe stories take place in a tiny, often claustrophobic world containing only the minimum furniture required for the narrative.  Movies are the most common source of snow globe stories.  1950s B-movie gems such as The Horror of Party Beach (easily one of the three worst movies ever made) and I was a Teenage Frankenstein  are excellent examples of the form. 

In such yarns the landscape itself is driven by events: "town" may contain a thousand-foot cliff, an army base, an abandoned mine, and six houses.  It contains nothing else.  There are no jobs or activities that fall outside the narrative, but anything may be included as required.  If the story requires a scientist, there is a scientist in town.  He will not only be a scientist, but precisely the kind of scientist needed. All teenagers hang out in a single location and pursue a single hobby, such as dancing.

It's not just bad movies.  Dr. Strangelove is this kind of tale.  Nothing in that film is seen that is not directly associated with events in the story, and the larger world is scarcely mentioned, except as required for destruction.  Are people panicking in the streets while bombers course the skies?  Is the news media packed into the White House?  Is there martial law?  It doesn't matter.  (By contrast, the sprawling, tragic On The Beach is essentially the sequel to Strangelove, although it predates Kubrick's comedy by 5 years.)  Eraserhead, Batman, and Interiors are all snow globe stories.

Books and short stories fall into the category, as well: think of Lord of the Flies or The Amityville Horror.  Why the hell do the Lutzes continue living in the haunted house?  Because in their world, there is no other house, no other struggle.  They cannot exist in any other situation.  Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is an example in the short story realm.  There is no world beyond the town limits.  You takes your chances, you get stoned to death or not, but there's no fleeing to the next county.  Town is the world.

Some stories use this form with explicit purpose -- consider the Twilight Zone episode It's a Good Life in which the world beyond the borders of town is a literal void, or Stephen King's The Mist, in which the world is lost in a death-stalked fog, reduced to a couple of businesses and a parking lot.

Snow Globe stories have a few rules that distinguish them from tales that are merely narrow in scope.  The future of the larger world can be at stake, but it is never shown, and can have no influence on events in the story.  If the characters should be ignorant of some vast realm of common knowledge, so be it -- whether it's general physics or popular culture (IE ignorance of all zombie lore, when they're under attack from zombies).  In general, everybody knows everybody.  Nothing happens unless it is directly related to the narrative.  When something is needed, it will be immediately available.  When things go wrong, they'll go precisely wrong in exactly the right way (see any Michael Crichton novel). 

Why am I rambling on about this rather well-trodden aspect of storytelling?  Just to give it a cute name?  Nay, I say.  It's a way of seeing all stories through the lens of a particular branch of storytelling.  I find this kind of stuff instructive.  My own stories exist in a sort of halfway realm between the snow globe and the wide world.  In my zombie epic Rise Again, the characters are aware of zombie entertainment.  They have cell phones and the internet.  But these things (except one) do not materially influence what happens, because they would put the story outside the realm of action -- I didn't want everyone yakking on the phone while the world collapses, or finding deus ex machina answers with a five-minute session on the computer.

There's a balance to be found: it can be jarring to introduce the outside world just for the sake of verisimilitude, breaking open the fourth wall.  I mention a couple of celebrities in Rise Again, for example; I'm correcting the proofs now, so this is my last chance to change their names.  I'm considering it, because readers of the novel will be aware of anything that happens to those celebrities after my book is published.  They might stop at the name and say, "ha!  That person died in rehab last year, so this story is dated!"  On the other hand, a world without celebrities would be unrecognizable to us. 

I guess what I really meant to say is this: every story takes place on a limited stage.  Furnish that stage with what's required for narrative purposes, and add in what's required to reflect the extent of the world in which the story takes place.  Or, if you want to experiment with a hermetically sealed world in which only this story could occur, go ahead.  But be aware, snow globes can be tacky.  And you're no longer allowed to carry them onto commercial aircraft.

Comedy & Tragedy

From my notes:

Comedy = yes no yes

Tragedy = no yes no

This sounds pretty facile, but it's true.  Some years back I got interested in story structure in its simplest form, and that's what the two main kinds of story boil down to.  You could say comedy is the "happy ending," while tragedy is the "sad ending," but it's more about success versus failure.  We tend to think of comedy as "funny," tragedy as "unhappy."  That's fine for an audience, but writers shouldn't stop there.  There are fun, upbeat tragedies.  On the opposite end of the spectrum there are Adam Sandler comedies.

In a comedy (I'll stick with movies here, because they're more one-note than books) you start with a happy meeting, in general.  Hey, there's chemistry!  Then the characters are divided.  In the end, after a series of insurmountable setbacks, they are united, and we all go home.  Yes, no, yes.

Tragedy involves starting with an insurmountable problem the characters must overcome.  They have to succeed, at least for a while.  Caper flicks and war movies rely on this format.  Then things go to hell, and in the end, the venture does not succeed.  But there's almost always one character to carry the lessons of the endeavor into the future (cf. Saving Private Ryan, et al). 

So there you have it: yes no yes, no yes no.  The rest is up to the author.

Copy Edits

I've spent the last several hours engaged in the latest effort in the book-publishing process, that of checking the copy editor's marked-up manuscript.  This is done by hand, on a paper copy of the document.  It's slow going, because this is also my last opportunity to make any big textual changes, and I want to catch any errors the copy editor might have missed, because then I'm cleverer.  Also because nobody wants persistent errors to slip through into the finished book.

When I was screenwriting, I used my own variation on the standard editing marks.  I have a tendency to slip back into using those, if I'm not diligent.  These marks are meaningless to the editors, of course.  I regret not just using the conventional format back when I was forming these habits, but the marks I used were easy to read from a distance.  I used to tack my scripts up on the wall, see, and...

Anyway, the point is it's fascinating to see, alongside the textual revisions, the deeper level of copy editing marks -- specialized indications for indents, dashes, spacing, kerning, and so forth -- that are aimed at the typesetter, not the author.  With novels, one creates the story first, and then the book.  I'm now in the zone between those two processes -- at once polishing the text and formatting it for print. 

It's also interesting to see how colloquial my writing "voice" is.  There's a note from the editor to the copy editor explaining "author makes frequent use of sentence fragments," for example.  And once more, I'll have to explain my two pet words, fucken and em.  Someday people will look back on my oeuvre and say, "he pioneered the use of the word fucken.  We owe him a debt of gratitude for freeing the English language."

While all this authory stuff is going on, my wife is out in the garage, packing boxes.

Progress Apace

I have once again been torn from the new project by the first project: Rise Again has come back from the copy editors, aswarm with penciled notes in a tiny hand.  I find I transpose "that" for "who" quite often, according to the notes.  The people that who do this stuff must write the most impeccable emails.

My contribution to this process, which mostly consists of agreeing with the copy editors and writing "stet" everywhere I meant to say what I said, has to be complete by the 28th of this month.  Today is the 12th.  We learn within the next 48 hours if the seller of the house we're trying to purchase intends to sell it to us.*  Escrow ends on the 24th.  I have a five-alarm deadline at work on the 21st.  There are more opportune times in which to write, but we don't get to choose our times.

Today I took a few minutes to write the acknowledgments for the novel.  It's a very strange process, because of course one must exclude almost everybody, noting only those few people or entities without which the project simply could not have happened, or to whom one owes a big fat debt of gratitude that no amount of effusiveness can repay.

It's dangerous, writing acknowledgments.  I found myself thinking strange new thoughts that still had the sprues attached to them.  Would a lot of acknowledgments make it look like I needed too much help?  Should I thank the internet?  The people that inspired me: do they go in there?  Most of them had nothing to do with the project itself.  Is it acceptable to throw in shout-outs to people I just happen to like?  And how self-indulgent are acknowledgments, anyway?  Writing a book isn't like climbing Mount Everest, where everyone on a big team is working towards getting the climber to the top.  It's more like having classmates in some bizarre college course with no professor: some of them you get to know; others remain strangers, but inadvertently help reveal the subject.

In the end I'm grateful for the opportunity.  The reason I haven't written acknowledgments before is because I've never had a novel published before.  It's a nice problem to have.

One small group of people I didn't include in the acknowledgments is the readers of this blog, many of whom are people I know and love -- fellow writers.  We've had some interesting conversations not reflected here.  I hope eventually to record some of those.  Meanwhile, keep writing.

* As mentioned in a previous whining aside, we were not getting the house, couldn't get a loan, and so forth.  My previous post was all about reversals.  In a shocking reversal, the mortgage broker figured out a way that we could afford the house, our financial planner lady agreed, and the sale was back on.  The difference between a reversal and a setback is one of outcomes: in due time we'll see which one this is.

Reversals

There are two basic elements to all tension-building in fiction: suspense and reversal.

These are often conflated with suspense and surprise, but those are different -- and this distinction has been lost, especially with movie writers, to an unhappy degree.  What's the difference?

I put it this way: surprise is when the hand grenade explodes with the pin still in it.  Suspense is when somebody pulls the pin and it doesn't explode.  A reversal is when somebody pulls the pin and at that moment their only child is revealed to be the enemy at whom they were going to throw the grenade.

Surprise often accompanies a reversal, but it's not the same thing. 

If my character sets out to get a divorce during an already difficult time in her life, and everything goes smoothly, the divorce happens without a hitch, and the difficulties all get sorted out, that's not much of a tale.

If the character may or may not lose custody of the kid, and that's the potential bad outcome of the story, at least there's suspense.

But reversals are where the action is: what if the character falls back in love with her husband a week before the divorce is finalized?  What if the kid dies of pneumonia?  What if she's arrested for a crime, or loses her lucrative job, thus jeopardizing her custodial status?

There's the difference between a surprise and a reversal -- a surprise can change the direction of the story, but isn't necessarily fundamental to it.  A reversal changes the whole game.  It requires a "reveal," as us writers like to call it.  New information.  The story was headed towards divorce, and then we learn something new and unexpected, and now it's headed towards a funeral.  This allows us to see previous events from a fresh perspective.

The cold-hearted husband breaks down, takes it harder than anybody; the protagonist is revealed to be a thrill-seeker, shoplifting for the excitement, and wonders if the divorce wasn't just her crazy way of spicing up the relationship.  Clearly these are just random ideas, but you get the picture.  Not all reversals are surprises, either.  The audience might know more than the characters do, which is also the fundamental requirement for suspense.

You know where reversals thrive?  Sitcoms.  Watch a few episodes of the show of your choice and note the major story point is almost always a reversal: Chrissy wasn't pregnant after all!  It was gas!  The guy they thought was a priest was really the drummer for Styx!  The new kid isn't gay, he's British!  It was a surprise party after all!  Sitcom reversals are almost always of the "mistaken identity" type -- somebody with an incomplete set of facts leaps to a conclusion, then acts on it, in direct opposition to the reality of the situation.

A few famous reversals: the line "It's a cookbook!" from The Twilight Zone.  The several switches from love to hatred in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  When the hunters become the hunted in Jaws.  When Mrs. Kramer returns for the kid in Kramer Vs. Kramer.

Finally here's a quick exercise for concocting reversals.

Take any story you know and reverse the outcome: Noah's boat sinks.  Hitler wins the war.  Grandma dies in childbirth.  Do this often enough, and it becomes automatic during the outlining process.
One of your infinite monkeys will send in a story suggestion based on reversing what you think you're writing, and it might just work: the protagonist wants a divorce, and then -- well, how to reverse that?  She gets a serious illness, and needs her estranged husband's health insurance?  By God, she'd have to pretend she changed her mind, even though she actually still despises him!  Or stick to her principles and risk death, rather than stay with the guy!

Not bad, for a monkey.

Time Flies Like A Narrow

It's been six days since last I posted -- six days during which I've very nearly bought a house: escrow, inspections, more inspections, estimates, offers, mortgage brokering and document-gathering, then counteroffers and counter-counteroffers; in the end it's all for nowt, as a substantial chunk of the funds we would otherwise use for the down payment is in instruments laden with penalties and tax implications that would put us rather extensively on the wrong side of the deal.  So barring an assortment of miracles of the type that come in a small gold-foil box with a red velvet bow tacked to the lid, we're now looking for a rental instead.

In this time, I have written -- and I did count them -- fifty-three words of the novel.  One paragraph.  But that slender thread of words was sufficient to keep the thing alive in my mind.  That -- that, kiddies -- is why, when you start a thing, you'll want to go like a raped ape* until the inevitable crisis comes along to stop you dead in your tracks.  They TRIED to kill it, but the THING LIVES!!!

So enough of that.  Here are a few observations on people in general that I find useful when concocting characters.  They're not important things; I picked them randomly from a mighty hat full of similar observations.  But they are very telling.

• Most people would literally rather die than speak in public before a crowd.  That's the tree of the thing; imagine the roots.  Where does such an essentially trivial fear get its power?  My vote is the first grade classroom, but then again, I'd much rather speak in public than die.†

• We will go to any lengths to avoid humiliation.  The grandfather of the above example.  That's why we satisfy ourselves with smaller lives than we might otherwise have, why we avoid opportunities that might be richly rewarding.  Like public speaking.  The greater the prize, the bigger the risk and the longer the odds, right?  Failure = humiliation.  Cf. all reality television shows: better those idiots than ourselves.

• Almost everybody subscribes to the sunk-cost fallacy.  That's why men famously will not stop to ask for directions, I suspect -- better to press onwards, to double down, than to inquire and learn you've been going the wrong way for thirty miles.


• We make everything personal.  Car accident on the same day you lose your job?  It must mean something.  You're a loser, God hates you.  It's nonsense, but it sure feels real at the time.  We fill everything that happens with meanings that apply especially to us.

• The placebo effect works.  If somebody says, "you look ill," you'll feel ill.  Millions of "Airborne" fizzy vitamin tablets have been sold, preventing countless common colds.  They have no proven medical value whatsoever, but they work.  If people think you're a winner, you'll win.  If you think you're unusually lucky, you will be.

• Nobody knows the measure of anything.  How much does fifty pounds weigh?  It depends on whether I'm weak or strong, rested or tired.  Fifty pounds weighs a hell of a lot more uphill than down.  How far is a mile?  It depends whether I'm walking to the gallows or an Irish pub.  Is a novel hard to write?  Yes, if I don't think I can do it.  It's easy, if I know what I'm doing.

And if I'm not suddenly trying to buy a frigging house.

*This is an expression I have not seen outside of New Hampshire, probably with good reason.  Now you have also seen it.  All part of the service.

†For one thing, I know what to wear for a speaking engagement.  Death seems like a white tie occasion -- I own the tails -- but it's probably better to wear something loose.