JUST A LITTLE BREAK

Due to health challenges, we will be putting this blog on hold for a short while. 

As you may know, JJ was diagnosed with Stage 4 GIST cancer in 2011.  Karen had a massive heart attack just prior to Halloween 2013 and is recuperating.

Thanks for your understanding and patience.

WRITER’S BLOCK

You’re writing, really cruising along.  Words are flowing.  Characters are doing all the right things, and the plot is twisting perfectly.

Day wanes and it gets late; you’ve been writing for hours, and it’s finally time to go to bed.  You heave a sigh of satisfaction, turn off the computer and crawl under the covers.

Ahhhhh.

After several hours of pleasant dreams, you open your eyes and it’s morning.  You fire up the computer and amble off to grab a cup of coffee.

You sit down, re-read the last chapter, take a sip of coffee, and…

Oh, no!  Your fingers are on the right keys, but you’re not typing.  Last night you were cruising down Inspiration Highway with no traffic or red lights as far as the eye could see, and this morning you see something up ahead that sends chills down your spine.  You’ve seen it before; you know what it is.

It’s the Mount Everest of Writer’s Blocks!

Gasp!

All writers smack into the dreaded block from time to time.  We sit at the computer and stare at a blank screen.  An idea pops up and we type a few words, then realize what we’ve written is crap.  Ctrl A – Delete. 

Get up and get a fresh cup of coffee, thinking maybe more caffeine will help.

An hour later the screen is still white.

Surf the net.  Watch an episode of Mythbusters, hoping for inspiration.  Check to see if the mail was delivered yet.

Sigh!

Play a game of Spider Solitaire and answer emails.  Listen to music and watch a video or two. 

It’s still sitting there.  Time for alternative thinking.

In his blog, Richard Castle (the mystery writer played by Nathan Fillion on TV’s Castle) calls it “writer’s embarrassment”, and maybe he’s got a point.  We want to write The Perfect Book.  No mistakes, no typos, no quibbles from readers/reviewers.  When we feel we’re not at our best, we’re embarrassed.  We’re writing crap and we know it, but for some reason we can’t seem to get back on track. 

Is there a remedy?

Castle offers an excellent suggestion:  write crap until you get over the dry spell.  Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but it works. 

One rainy day I found myself staring at a blank screen and thinking, “Gah!  I haven’t got one good idea!"  I decided to try Castle’s Remedy (which should be bottled and sold at the local internet café).  I wrote the most godawful drivel, knowing it would die a sad and unhappy death when I hit Ctrl A – Delete.

I spent an hour or two at the keyboard before I noticed something about two paragraphs back.  It looked like the first crocus of spring poking the tip of a leaf tentatively out of the muck.  Eureka!  I thought, “Maybe if I nurture it; maybe if I watch it for a little while..." 

Suddenly ideas began to grow and blossom.  Hmmm, what if I have Character A...  Pretty soon the fingers were flying over the keys and characters had direction.  Yay!

So, the next time you find a block in your path, don’t think of it as a massive Writer’s Block.  Look at it as a challenge.  Put on your climbing gear and explore. 

Never know what you might find.

EASTER EGGS

According to Wikipedia, an “Easter egg is an intentional inside joke (or)  hidden message…The name has been said to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt.”

Did we put Easter eggs in Swagger Vasa Chronicles?  You bet!  But no hints.

As we wrote, we found ourselves interjecting references to our favorite movies, TV shows, books, etc. as an homage to all that inspired us.  Sometimes it was intentional, other times not so much; it just happened. 

Swagger Vasa started out on twenty-first century Earth, so he’s going to have references from his own time. 

Enough said about this.  Read the books and find the Easter eggs for yourself.  J



WHERE DO WE GET OUR IDEAS?

Legend says that Keith Richards, lead guitarist and co-founder of the Rolling Stones, woke in the early hours of May 7, 1965, turned on a tape recorder and laid down a riff.  He dozed off and when he woke some time later, he hit playback and heard about 30 seconds of music followed by 45 minutes of snoring.  He’d played the riff while half asleep, on an acoustic guitar, at a slow speed.  Mick Jagger said it sounded like country music and not something the Stones would play.  Keith refused to give up and continued playing with the riff.  By May 10, 1965, that half-minute riff was on its way to becoming the Stones’ greatest hit:  (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. 

Did Keith dream the riff?  Did some rock and roll angel (or alien) implant it in his brain while he slept?  Who knows.

That’s how it happens with writers, too.  We'll be driving to the grocery store and one of us will say, “Hey, I just had an idea.  What if Swagger..."  And then ideas start bouncing all over the place. 

When back-to-school supplies go on sale, we stock up on spiral notebooks.  We’ve got notebooks all over the house with parts of scenes, lists of ideas, names for characters...  I keep a small notebook in my purse so I can jot down ideas that come to me when I’m driving around doing errands.  Sometimes I spend more time sitting in the parking lot writing ideas than I do shopping. 

A piece of music can inspire a scene—like a cut from the Mass Effect 3 soundtrack that inspired the scene where Foster...  Oops, no spoilers!  JJ types with her headphones on, listening to music on You Tube.  The group Two Steps from Hell (particularly Archangel) has been a major inspiration for both of us lately.  Song lyrics can inspire a scene or a character’s motivation.

TV shows or movies can inspire.  Some shows are incredibly formulaic and predictable.  You know exactly what’s going to happen, and hope the writers took the story in another direction.  They didn’t.  So you begin to think, “What would have happened if..."  Another great idea for a story.

One of my grade school teachers used to post a picture on the wall or play a piece of classical music, and we were to write whatever it inspired.  We were graded on spelling, grammar and punctuation rather than the subject, and it was fun.  A black and white photo in our living room inspired a scene of a foggy night with pools of light at the base of street lamps and an old fashioned car on the road.  A Michael Parkes print in my bedroom inspired the beginning of a story about gargoyles.   

So to tell you where we get our ideas, I have a simple answer:  I don’t know.

Sometimes we do get some satisfaction.

WRITING A SERIES

Writing a single book is one thing; writing a series is a whole ’nother ballgame.

When we started writing A Sirius Condition, we were thinking one book would be quite enough, thank you.  As we worked our way through the storyline, we realized we had more than enough ideas for one book and decided on a trilogy.  That seemed to work for Tolkien (not counting The Hobbit or Silmarillian) and Lucas (until he decided on prequels and now plans Star Wars 7).  I joked that we’d end up with eight books, to which JJ shrieked, “Nooooo!”

Writing a series of books is like writing a series of articles for a magazine (or ezine).  I edit Psychic-Magic, a quarterly ezine on “weird, wonderful, paranormal and New Age topics”, and receive inquiries about article submission.  Our guidelines include:  "articles may be serialized and must be received in their entirety."  The reason for that was the disappearance of a contributor after the first two installments of a multi-part series were received and published.  I don’t know whether he headed to another planet, disappeared into an alternate dimension, or simply lost interest.  We certainly didn’t want to do the same with our series.

Another reason was that, as a series progresses, things change.  A character starting as a villain might end up a hero.  A good guy might take a definite turn to the Dark Side.  Foreshadowing is important.  An event in book three might require a bit of foreshadowing in books one and two; but if they’ve already been published, it’s impossible to go back and make changes.  Therefore, we felt having at least the first draft of three books would give us a good basis and we could build from there. 

We began book one in early 2009, and by December 2010 had the first drafts of books one through three done.  Then the real work started—making sure we foreshadowed, filling in description, keeping characters straight, etc. 

Each of the books was titled:  A Sirius Condition, A Sirius Misunderstanding and Sirius Repercussions.  What would link them?  The perfect name for the series:  Swagger Vasa Chronicles.

We are now editing books four and five, which is quite a task!  But worthwhile...

HOW CAN TWO WRITERS WORK ON ONE PROJECT?

It isn’t as difficult as you might think.  We do a lot of talking and batting ideas around, making sure to take notes so nothing is forgotten.

JJ started book one with a dynamite chapter that left me wondering, “How can I match that?!” It seemed daunting, but I woke about 3:30 one morning and turned on the computer, wrote a chapter and went back to bed.  Pretty easy. 

One thing that helps—both when you’re working alone and with a collaborator—is casting your characters.  We choose actors for each role.  It helps with description as well as keeping characters “in character”.

Here’s an example.  I was working on a vampire story (not published) with a character named Graham who had psychotic moments now and then.  My inspiration was a scene from the first Lethal Weapon.  It was just after Riggs (played by Mel Gibson) “rescued” a potential suicide by handcuffing himself to the man and jumping off a roof.  Danny Glover’s character confronts Riggs, and the wild look in Riggs’ eyes and his totally insane behavior inspired Graham.  If I felt I “lost” Graham at any point, I could watch that one scene and get him back.

Do JJ and I disagree?  You bet!  But we’ve learned to compromise.  And while I was editing book three, JJ was busy starting book four.  Once book three was published, I began on book four, doing the editing, adding some description, making sure timelines worked, etc. 

Once a book is finished, we each do a final read-through.  Yes, the computer sometimes decides it knows better than we do when it comes to spelling, grammar, punctuation or spacing...  Like today, JJ typed “brunette” and the computer instantly changed it to “brown haired person”, and changed hormone to...  Well, we won’t go there.

Suffice it to say, we’ve managed to catch most of the glitches.   



Sample from A SIRIUS CONDITION

Here's a sample from the first book in Swagger Vasa Chronicles...

The process began when they removed his gloves and he was manacled to a steel wall.  The freezing metal bit his flesh.  His skin temperature dropped.

Within a few seconds, the palms of his hands were a chilly, painful 60°.  Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on his hands constricted, sending blood coursing away from his skin and deeper into his torso.  His body was allowing his fingers to chill in order to keep his vital organs warm.  His fingers numbed slightly.

Human adaptations to cold are mysterious.  They brought in a treadmill and he was handcuffed to the bar and the setting was pushed to a high level.  His body temperature rose as he jogged on the treadmill.  Blood started seeping back into his fingers.  Sweat trickled down his sternum and spine.  He felt the bite of the minus 30° air on his face.  The monitors showed his core temperature was 100.8°.  And then they came in with their enviro-suits and their helmets on and took him off the treadmill and chained him to the wall again.  The frigid air pressed against his tired body and sweat-soaked clothing.  The exertion they had put him through was now working against him.  His dilated capillaries carried the excess heat of his core to his skin and his wet clothing dispelled it rapidly into the glacial wall behind him.

The lack of insulating fat over his toned muscles allowed the cold to steal that much closer to his warm blood.  Within a few minutes his temperature plummeted to the normal 98.6° and then slipped lower.  At 97° his neck and shoulders tightened into the pre-shiver muscle tone.  Sensors within the brain signaled the temperature control center.  The entire web of surface capillaries constricted.  His hands and feet ached with cold and he tried to ignore the pain.

Forty-five minutes passed—at 95° he was entering the zone of mild hypothermia.  His body trembled violently as his muscles contracted rapidly to generate additional body heat.

They returned and doused him with a fire hose until he was soaked.  He screamed obscenities at them, but they did not acknowledge him other than to glance briefly at the monitors on the wall.  He sank back against the wall, his heat draining away at an alarming rate.

Why were they doing this?  Who were they?  But his mind could not concentrate.  The cold rendered the enzymes in his brain less efficient.  With every one-degree drop below 95, his cerebral metabolic rate was falling.  A stray thought told him he should start being scared, but fear was a concept that floated beyond his immediate grasp.  Apathy at 91°; stupor at 90°.

He had now crossed the barrier into profound hypothermia.  His core temperature was 88° and his blood was thickening like oil in a cold engine.  His oxygen consumption was down by a quarter.  At 87°, if a familiar face had suddenly appeared in front of him, he would not have recognized it.

At 86° his heart was pumping less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood.  The lack of oxygen and the slowed metabolism of his brain triggered visual and auditory hallucinations.

He saw a room with a fireplace and heard the crackling sound of the flames.  The chains fell from his wrists as he struggled to put one foot in front of the other.  Hours later, or maybe just minutes, he had still not reached the warmth he craved.  Exhausted, he stopped moving, deciding to rest for a moment.  When he lifted his head, he was there, lying on the floor in front of the fireplace.  The fire threw off a red glow.  First it was warm, then it was hot, and then it was searing his flesh.  His clothing was on fire!

With a body temperature of 85°, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, people freezing to death will often rip off their clothes.  This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault.  Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness the constricted blood vessels near the body's surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All he knew was that he was burning, and he clawed off his hoody and T-shirt and flung them away.

But then, in a final moment of clarity, he realized there was no fireplace, no room, nothing.  He was still manacled and alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up.  His discarded clothing had not come all the way off because of the chains.  He tried, but could not find the strength to pull them back on.

At 0600 the next day, the men in the suits found him huddled in a fetal position on the floor, his gloveless hands shoved into his armpits.  The flesh of his limbs was waxy and stiff as old putty, his pulse nonexistent, his pupils unresponsive to light.  Dead.

But those who understand cold and know that, even as it deadens, it offers perverse salvation.  Heat is a presence:  the rapid vibrating of molecules.  Cold is an absence:  the damping of the vibrations.  At absolute zero—minus 459.67° Fahrenheit—molecular motion ceases altogether.  It is this slowing that converts gases to liquids, liquids to solids, and renders solids harder.  It slows bacterial growth and chemical reactions.  In the human body, cold shuts down metabolism.  The lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood.  Under normal temperatures, this would produce brain damage.  But the chilled brain, having slowed its own metabolism, needs far less oxygen-rich blood and can, under the right circumstances, survive intact.

Setting her ear to his chest, one of his rescuers listened intently.  Seconds passed.  Then, faintly, she heard a tiny sound—a single thump—so slight that it might have been the sound of her own blood.  She pressed her ear harder to the cold flesh.  Another faint thump, then another.

They carried him into the adjoining room.  With a “one, two, three”, the doctor and nurses slid the man’s stiff, curled form onto a table fitted with a mattress filled with warm water.  They knew they had a profound hypothermia case.  Usually such victims could be straightened from their tortured fetal positions.  This one could not.

Technicians scissored the man’s clothes off with stainless steel shears.  They attached heart monitor electrodes to his chest and inserted a rectal thermometer that flashed digital readings:  24 beats per minute and a core temperature of 79.2°.

The doctor shook his head.  “I can’t remember seeing numbers so low.  They kept him in there too long.  I’m not sure how to revive this man without killing him.”  He was aware many hypothermia victims died in “rewarming shock.”  The doctor looked down at the man, compassion in his eyes.  “Strap him down.  The slightest movement can send his heart into ventricular fibrillation.”

“Why is that, Doctor?”  The voice was young, female.  She was new to his team.

The doctor had worked at a teaching hospital and obliged her with a little more knowledge.  “The constricted capillaries reopen almost at once and cause a sudden drop in blood pressure.”

“78.9,” a technician called out.  “That’s three-tenths down.”

The doctor rapidly issued orders to his staff.  “Intravenous warm saline.  Heat the bag in the microwave to 110°.  Just to raise his temperature one degree means we need 60 kilocalories of heat.”  Before she could ask, he supplied the new nurse with the answer, “A KC is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water one degree Celsius.”

“Even with the warm saline, that’ll only raise it 30°, Doctor,” one of the technicians said.

“I know.”  The doctor fought down a surge of irritation.  “That’s why we have the cardio-pulmonary bypass machine.  We’ll pump out his blood, rewarm and oxygenate it, and pump it back in.  That’ll raise his core temperature by one degree every three minutes.”

Moments later the patient’s stiff limbs began to relax and his pulse edged up, but the doctor watched the jagged pattern of his heartbeat on the EKG machine and shook his head.

“He’s got a J line.  Be ready to defibrillate.”

Over the next hour nurses and EMTs hovered around the edges of the table where the patient lay, centered in a warm pool of light, as if offered up to the sun god.  They checked his heart.  They checked the heat of the mattress beneath him.  They whispered to one another about things they were never supposed to discuss.  They were being monitored and they would be reprimanded severely by the facility head of operations if they were overheard.

Slowly, the patient began to respond.  Another liter of saline was added to the IV.  The man's blood pressure remained far too low, brought down by the blood flowing out to the fast-opening capillaries of his limbs.  Fluid lost through perspiration and urination had reduced his blood volume, but every 15 or 20 minutes, his temperature rose another degree.  The immediate danger of cardiac fibrillation lessened as the heart and thinning blood warmed.  Frostbite could still cost him fingers, toes or an earlobe, but he appeared to have beaten back the worst of the frigidity.

For the next half hour, an EMT quietly called the readouts of the thermometer, a mantra that marked the progress of this cold-blooded proto-organism toward a state of warmer, higher consciousness.

“90.4...  92.2...”