I love The Hunger Games.  It was original and amazing and gave us just enough information to accept the idea of some bizarre future world where the divide between the super rich and the super poor has reached a point where each group views the other as belonging to separate species.  The people of the Capitol are not portrayed as evil, but as clueless as to what goes on outside the bounds of The City.  The people in District 12 are portrayed as currant era poor people, they are doing the best they can with what they have and feel justified in blaming others for their lot in life.

You did too good a job in making me think the people of the Capitol are just people.  Selfish, silly, and vain people-not intentionally evil people, with the exception of President Snow.  And even President Snow is doing nothing more than protecting his government.  At least President Snow has a job, along with everyone we see working in The Hunger Games.  What does the average citizen of the Capitol do anyway?

Ok, I feel about Catching Fire and Mockingjay the way I feel about Matrix Revolutions and Matrix Reloaded-I just want to forget that they ever happened.  So I have a solution.

Katniss wakes up to find her arms and legs strapped down.  She feels a damp cloth on her forehead.  She opens her eyes and sees Prim looking down at her with a concerned look on her face.  Katniss sees that she is in her bedroom at the Victor’s Village in District 12.  Prim runs out of the room to call Peeta, Gale, and Haymitch.  Katniss’s mother comes in and tells her that things will be better now.

She is told that she was out hunting with Gale when they found a bee hive and decided to steal some of the honey.  Katniss was stung by a bee and fell into venom relapse.  For several days she has suffered from Tracker Jacker venom induced nightmares where everyone she loves is tortured and killed by her addled mind.  In her nightmare she is even forced to compete in another Hunger Game and District 13 was not destroyed.

“Forget about all that.” Gale says. “It was just a bad dream.”

The story can then be picked up right after the 74th Hunger Games and the story can follow a slightly less scorched earth plot-line.  You can still bring in the other Victors, still bring about the fall of the Capitol, still have that whole French Revolution thing where you kill all the rich people, if that really turns you on. But maybe you could make Katniss a bit smarter, Gale a bit less blood thirsty, Peeta a bit less destroyed, and twenty or so great characters a bit less dead.

I know, there will never be a sequel to The Matrix that makes sense and there will never be a squeal to the Hunger Games where you toss out two books of your trilogy.   But hope springs eternal.

I have the better part of a rough draft, which is the easy part for me.  I need to add a snappy opening, slap in a few transitions here and there, and viola! it will be ready for that dread 2nd Draft.  Then I go back and make sure everything makes sense and start to re-write a bit of the dull parts and try to pour some life into them.

Editing has always been my weakness-as the one or two regular readers of my blogs can attest.  But I like the writing part-that’s just swell.  But what do I like even more than the writing?  Why, not writing, of course.

Te help me with my not writing, and hopefully help with my editing, I have gone to the Library.   I found a number of books on writing.  Reading about writing is so much more satisfying than the usually writing avoidance tactics of:getting another cup of coffee or finding a recipe for that meal I need to prepare or cleaning up around the house.  This way I can do both nothing like real writing and nothing like real work around the house!

Books I checked out:

Janet Evanovich’s How I Write.  I don’t read her novels but she seems to bang one out about every three months and they are all bestsellers.  This is a great book with tons of advice-but it seriously needs an index.  The advice would be a lot more useful if I could just look up the info I want without having to flip through the whole damned thing-and still not find what I was looking for.

Bill Walsh’s Lasping Into A Comma.  One of countless books that sets out to help you figure out when to use words like Frig or Fridge and Gender or Sex.  It’s a fun book to flip through and find the random errors that I have making my writing whole life.  On the whole I prefer the Grammar Checker on Word for most things-though do often ignore it’s advice.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife.  One of those nifty little books with hundreds of pages and dozens of bullet points.  He is a man who knows how to use an Outline, and then turn it into a table of contents.  He talks about setting goals near the start-and that I as far as I waded into the tiny type of this one.

Gail Pool’s Faint Praise.  This is about Book Reviews and how most people don’t do them properly and most good books are never reviewed as everyone is too busy reviewing the latest Mega Bestseller that everyone is going to buy anyway.  This is a very serious book with a nice index, a solid bibliography,  and a lot of footnotes.

Jack Hart’s A Writer’s Coach.  How to write book written by a newspaper Editor filled with solid real world advice-for people who want to write for newspapers.  I like his writing tips, but found his many newspaper references leading off in directions that didn’t really interest me that much.

Lee Gutkind’s Keep It Real.  A fairly dry and legal treatment on writing Creative Nonfiction.  It covers topics like Composit Characters, Facts, Guiding The Reader, and Truth.  All of the 41 topics covered are worth reading, but they are given chapters with lengths that are only a few pages long at best.

I have been reading these books, and a few others I have lying around the house, in hopes of getting some insight on how I should structure my book.  So far I have not been overly inspired, and I had not so much as banged out an open statement to warn the reader what to expect.

I have a few ideas now of where to start.

But it is getting a bit late, so maybe tomorrow. . .

There are times while reading Blood, Bone, & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton that I find myself smiling from the simple pleasure of her prose.  A good writer can tell you how she makes pasta.  A great writer makes you want to dust the flour off your hands once she has finished telling you how she makes pasta.  Gabrielle Hamilton is a great writer.

The opening pages of Blood, Bone, & Butter paint an achingly beautiful portrait of an ideal life lived with the perfect family that you know it will go terribly wrong in short order.  And when it does go pear shaped, there is a great sense of loss.  I wanted, really wanted, that perfect vision of living the good life to carry on for a little while longer.  But that is not what this book is about, that is just the fantasy of what was, like Bambi before his Mom dies.  The end of innocence is the beginning of the story.

And there are a lot of stumbles and rambles and pointless meanderings in this 291 page story of one of the best female chefs in NYC. (She is waiting for the day when she is one of the best chefs.) But like the odd and off topic chapters in Moby Dick, I didn’t really mind most of it, as I find the author’s company charming and her word choices and descriptions always visceral and engaging.

One of the interesting discussion is the fact that women chefs are still something of an oddity in the rarefied world of cooking.  This strikes me as odd, since I grew up watching the flamboyant Julie Child and the flaming Graham Kerr.  The idea that being a chef is one of the last strongholds of Real Men in America was something of shock when I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential-I guess somethings never change.  This is kind of like hearing that being a Hair Dresser is the last job for Real Men in America.

Hey, didn’t the 19th Amendment pass in like 1919 or something?  Just wondering.

More than anything else it brings out my latent desires to cook-to do more than whip up the occasional familiar meal, to make something grand and unusual like the great meals that Gabrielle plans and prepares with those rare and wonderful ingredients that don’t seem to exist outside the small world where she lives and moves.

It is funny to read her loving descriptions of unusual and exotic foods, and then have her immediately berate the whole food movement as nothing more than a bunch of morons on both sides of the transaction ruining fresh produce markets with their self righteous views of food.

Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef/author/mother/wife/lesbian/nutso/feminist and she puts her years of college writing classes to good use.  She has honed her sentences to brilliance, but like many other great technicians of the English language, she tends to focus of the trees at the expense of the forest.  The overall story is a mishmash of random recollections that are loosely tied together in chronological order with food as a central theme.  The most jarring bit is when we jump from Gabriellia being a poor schmuck working as a catering cook to being a guest on the Martha Stewart Show and sitting on a panel at The Culinary Institute of America.  The transition from her looking at an unrented restaurant to being a celebrity chef appears instantaneous.  Her move from lesbian to married with children also seems to happen in the blink of an eye.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chefends without any real resolutions to the many issues brought up in the last third of the book.  We are left feeling that Gabrielle’s greatest accomplishment in life is not being a great chef, but in having the courage to trim a few tree branches.  It was still a great read, I just wish it had a bit more structure.

As a portrait photographer I found the author’s photo to be a bit odd.  Gabrielle Hamilton is standing barefooted behind a house holding an industrial tray of tomatoes.  It’s an awkward pose and it makes my shoulders and back hurt to look at it.  It’s one those author’s photos I look at and think-you know, I could have taken a better portrait.

I wrote a couple of short stories, but they are not all that good.  It’s been so long since I finished anything I am not even sure how I am supposed to feel any more.  I can still write.  Sitting down and closing my mind to the outside world and letting my fingers dance over the keyboard.  Time disappears and a few pages of words pop out of the nowhere and into the here.

It’s too easy to do other stuff.  To read that new Thomas Covenant book I have been wanting to read.  To surf the web and drift around the random nonsense I tend to like so much.  To look at Twitter and my blog stats and check on my Blog Buddies to see if they have written anything new recently.

I had one of those First Things First day planner at one time.  I really loved First Things First when I read it.  Yes!  I can do that!  Only, well, I couldn’t.  Several years before that I read Wishcraft, a brilliant book on how to get anything done with the help of your friends.  It also talked about doable steps and all the other standards of setting goals.  Before that I read Think and Grow Rich, which talked about things like getting twenty people to help you become rich.  I was never sure how that would work out.

I read a lot of books.  It’s pretty standard to see This Page Intentionally Left Blank, but I always have to wonder why they bother saying that.  I guess people would call them up and say, Hey Dummy, you didn’t print anything on this page!  But I have to wonder how big a problem that would be.

I like the idea of intentional blankness though.  There is a kind of Zen quality to it.  Or maybe even a Zazen quality to it.  And it’s the kind of page any writer can sink their teeth into.  Hey, who can’t write nothing?

I was watching Blazing Saddles not too long ago and the word ‘nigger’ was bleeped each time it came up.  Since this is one of the running gags in Blazing Saddles, there was a lot of bleeping.  Is this kind of thing really necessary?  After all, the whole point of Blazing Saddles is to be funny, and that often means being offensive.  See Eddie Murphy’s Raw or give a listen to Red Fox or George Carlin’s comedy.

I’d like to think that Star Trek was right about race and that in the fullness of time none of this silliness will matter.  But we aren’t quite there yet.  I was working in Arizona a few years back, in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  I asked one of the old guys what they did for fun and he said, Oh we keep busy, we have a pretty active unit of the Klan here.  His generation will be dead none too soon, but there are always more morons waiting in the wings.

Will getting rid of ‘bad’ words in books and movies make us better people?  How about getting rid of all the murders and violence on TV and in the Movies?  And where do we stop with this kind of stuff?  And who gets to decide what is offensive?  America has a profound fondness for offense, everyone seems to be offended these days by just about everything.

How many words would we need to rewrite to make everyone feel hunky dory?

Back in the day, I collected a lot of rejection slips.  As always, those first few rejects were standard issue preprinted ones saying nice things like Not What We Are Looking For At This Time.  I soon moved up to Good Luck Placing This Elsewhere and finally hit the big time of rejects with hand written notes offering suggestions for improvements and telling me they were looking forward to my next story.

That, of course, is when I stopped writing and submitting short stories-or anything else.  It was that whole life got in the way kind of thing.  Or so I like to tell myself.  I really didn’t know that the handwritten notes were a good sign, to me they were just one more rejection.  I wrote a lot of stories back then, all sci-fi and horror.  Most of them were not too good, but one or two were solid bits of writing-that might have been published if I had just polished them a bit more.

So flash forward a couple of decades or so and here I am, flipping through the pages of Writer’s Market and once more having dreams of being published.  The good old days of making a living from writing short stories are pretty much gone, but it is still possible to make a bit of money.  Writing is a hard way to make a living, unless you happen to be one of those rare few with a Bestseller.  Or maybe a Screenwriter-even optioning a script and never having it made into a film can be a pretty good payday.

The listings are fun to read and the often very, very serious business of entertaining and informing people is just daunting as it ever was.  Just because I can bang out a few hundred words without breaking too much of a sweat doesn’t mean I can crank out publishable content that someone will want to buy.  I’d like to think that I can.

The Writer’s Market has thousands of listings for every kind of writing and it also has several articles in the front that tell you such things as how to format a manuscript and how to write a query letter that might actually get a positive response.  It tells you things like a screenplay sells for $50,000 to $100,000 and that book reviews pay $25 to $900.

Hmm, movie novelisation pays $3,000 to $15,000-how hard can that be?

You start with one Main Character who has either lost everyone and everything they care about, or who soon will lose everyone and everything they have ever cared about.  This person needs a few skills that will make it logical for them to have survived while everyone else died.  They are immune to the Virus, are an Ex-Seal or Special Opts, have a bunker with years worth of water and food-just in case, lives out in the middle of nowhere and don’t even know the world has ended-yet, or has great leadership skills that will allow them to Take Charge.

You then focus on Your Main Character and follow them around as they fight off evil hordes-search for food, water, and shelter-met the occasional Good Person-protect the handful of people that they have chosen to protect-and maybe try to rebuild the world.

As a general rule be vague about what caused the end of the world.  A classic modern example is found in The Road:

“I knew this was going to happen.”  Old Man

“You knew this was going to happen?” the Man

“Well, this or something like it it.”  Old Man

How the world ends doesn’t really matter, just that the world as we know it ends.  Since most of us are pretty fond of the world as we know it, putting an end to it is a very emotional experience.  Even bad post apocalyptic stories usually get this part right.  Our hero wanders around, starving and wearing rags.  He walks into a grocery store, only to find it empty or filled with rotting food.  He walks into a clothing store, only to find the clothes ruined by time and weather.  He looks at empty farm land, only to see the fields have gone feral and he doesn’t know how to farm, or how to defend the farm from Them.

Our hero will almost always be on some kind of Quest.  Whether this is an actual quest given to him by God as in The Book of Eli or a pointless waste of time Quest like The Man and The Boy heading for the coast in The Road.  Give them something to do besides sit around and wait for the end.

There are two main choices here, go in search of something-food, other people, Sanctuary-or create your own stronghold and kill the evil things left roaming the world like The Last Man On Earth.

My favorite post apocalyptic stories end on a slightly upbeat note.  Eli finds a small community of normal people who are printing books.  BBC’s Survivors find colonies here and there as they wander around the UK.  Both the Postman and The Road Warrior end with the fact that these are stories of the Bad Old Days and life is better now.

Of course, I also love a number of post apocalyptic stories that end with no hope at all.  Planet of The Apes ends with Bright Eyes discovering he was on Earth all along.  Logan’s Run, the book, ends with out heroes heading out to space, since the computer running Earth has gone a bit mad over time.  12 Monkeys leaves us with a world in ruins as our hero can’t change the past after all.  Various zombie movies leave the world to the zombies.  And Cat’s Cradle left a handful of people alive on an island surrounded by ice.

What matters in these stories is that our heroes face a new world unlike the old world.  We share the end of their world with them.  We mourn the loss of family, fast food, cars, warmth in winter, clean water, new clothes, and so on so forth.  We face the prospect that our hero might have to kill someone to survive and we can ponder what all this means and what we would do in a similar circumstance.

One of my favorite scenes in Children of Man is when our hero meets with a Government agent who has moved into The Tate Modern and surrounded himself with works of art.  My own idea was always to raid a military base and then move into the bunker that is the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.  This would need to be a world where most everyone is dead and I can just walk in a pick up guns and ammo-but then why would need guns?  To fight for the things that are still out there.

For a good list of post apocalyptic stories check out 60 Years of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is about her favorite stories and writers. Like many college educated writers, she is a huge fan of the Long Dead Writer, and a particular fan of Anton Chekhov. Her advice at one point boils down to-Read Chekhov. Or more precisely, read Chekhov slowly. To me the unpronounceable names tend to force that slowness upon me.

Reading Like a Writer is broken down into segments which cover the basic building blocks of writing; close reading, words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue, detail, and gestures. She quotes from the likes of Issac Babel, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound. There is the occasional mention of a modern writer, such as Elmore Leonard and Gabriel García Márquez, but even the works quoted by these authors are often thirty years old themselves. It seems that, having found Chekhov, the author decides she need never read anything else.

Reading Like a Writer is an interesting book and it is fun to hear someone so enraptured by an author that is not as widely read as he could be. Francine Prose rejoices in the fact that Chekhov’s stories are not like other stories, they detail the mundane and the ordinary and they often have no great ending, they just end. Much as in real life, there is more before the events told and more after, but those events are not Chekhov’s concern.

We are told that the writers she quotes from are geniuses and that we would do well to model our own writing upon their works, if such a thing were possible. I have had that common writer’s experience of reading a bit of great writing and then have that style of writing affect my own work for a short period afterward, so that it is possible to go back days or weeks later and marvel at the quality of what was written. This kind of channeling never lasts long with me, and I’m sure I could not be the clone of some great writer anyway.

And Reading Like a Writer is not suggesting that emerging yourself in Chekhov will make you an obsessive observer of life and a chronicler of it’s many mundane and shared experiences. It does suggest that your writing might be better if you tried.

I have never been a huge fan of Chekhov, but I am now going to read a few of his short stories and see if the sky opens up for me. And to be fair to Francine Prose, all of my favorite short story writers are long dead now as well, though they were all very much alive when I first stared reading them.

Should it matter if a favorite author is dead or alive? It shouldn’t, but for some reason it does. I am also a bigger fan of Sci Fi, and the genius of Science Fiction which would fit in well with this group of austere writers is Stanislaw Lem. Lem’s work is great and baffling and filled with the mundane details of worlds that never existed. Lem is Polish and Chekhov is Russian, maybe it has something to do with the weather.

Reading Like a Writer is a good book, but I would have liked a few examples of great writing form contemporary authors. I have never been a great stylist myself, as any casual reader can tell, and books like this always make me want to up my game a bit. I seldom do, but it is nice to think that I could if I just read enough Babel, Chekhov, and Fitzgerlad.

As a blogger I like this kind of silliness when I am on a desperate search for something to blog about. This year the list seems a bit weak, with a couple of terms that I haven’t yet heard enough to want banished. Maybe the good folks at Lake Superior State University should take a staycation and relax a little bit more. Let’s face it, these phrases are not going to be game changers. But then, they are green words that be used over and over and thus have a small carbon footprint. Ok, not so much.

I guess I need to get out more as I don’t recall seeing First Dude or <3. It seems easy enough to submit a word for banishment, but I can’t think of anything at the moment.

This year’s list of banished words-

• “GREEN”

• CARBON FOOTPRINT

• CARBON OFFSETTING

• MAVERICK

• FIRST DUDE

• BAILOUT

• WALL STREET/MAIN STREET

• MONKEY

• <3

• ICON or ICONIC

• GAME CHANGER

• STAYCATION

• DESPERATE SEARCH

• NOT SO MUCH

• WINNER OF FIVE NOMINATIONS

• IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

The Wife has been a big fan of Sci Fi for a long time and used to read the wonderfully odd Omni Magazine, where Gahan Wilson also contributed the occasional bit of work. According to the Gahan Wilson website the Plot Generator was written for National Lampoon, but I feel pretty sure that The Wife was not a reader of National Lampoon. But then, you never really know about people, do you?

You have to love the simple elegance of Gahan Wilson’s Sci Fi Movie Plot Generator-They Eat Us-The End. They Leave-The End. They Live Happily Ever After-The End. It’s the kind of thing every writer should have a good look at-either to follow it’s advice, or avoid it. The Plot Generator flow charts is good for a giggle, but you can also watch modern movies and see that the basic formula hasn’t really changed all that much.

Jocelyn Paine has taken Gahan Wilson’s SF Story Generator into the modern age and all you have to do is reload the page to get a new SF Plot. It’s pretty silly stuff, but I like it.

Click on image to see larger-