Blog

The Tragic End Of A Bird Nest

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A couple of “flycatcher” birds returned this year to nest outside my back door. (I don’t know their exact species but I think they might be Eastern phoebes.) I watched in fascination as four little baby birds grew up in the nest this Spring. I took tons of pictures of them. I setup a streaming webcam so I could watch and listen to them from my computer room. (The parents would chirp and scold me if I stood at the door to watch.) I even figured out how to stream an image from my DLSR camera fitted with a telephoto lens.

As the babies got bigger, my cat Gracie (a stray cat that arrived last year) got more and more interested in the nest. I tried to keep her indoors as much as possible, and shoo her away from lurking around the back porch while she was outside. Part of the reason I setup a webcam was so I could keep an eye on things if the cat was outside, without having to stand at the back door all the time.

Early Tuesday morning, Gracie bugged me to let her outside so I did. I counted four baby birds in the nest, quiet and settled. Gracie immediately jumped up on the porch railing so she could sit directly underneath the nest, a spot she had grown fond of over the previous few days. I shooed her away and she wandered off. I started to think about setting up the webcam for another day.

I went back inside, got some coffee, then I got distracted with my computer for about 15 minutes. I realized I had lost track of time and hurried back to the door to check up on things.

I found a horror show.

The nest was empty. The nightmare scenario happened: The babies were out of the nest and my cat was outside. I knew immediately that something was horribly wrong because the bird parents chirped madly and flew to and fro around the back porch. I ran outside and found Gracie with one of the babies on the grass nearby. I grabbed the cat and threw her back inside (in retrospect I’m lucky she didn’t scratch my arms to shreds because she hates to be picked up).

That baby on the grass did not move and remained limp. I saw the parents landing nearby and chirping at it, but it did not react. It did not react when I approached to look at it. I’m sure it was dead.

I searched around the porch for the rest of the babies; three were unaccounted for. The parents chirped and hovered, so I knew they must be nearby. I found one other baby sitting on the ground on the opposite side of the porch, apparently unharmed. I got some gloves and thought to try to pick it up and put it back in the nest. As I approached, the little guy flew away into the trees, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

I did not find the other two babies so I’m assuming they flew away as well. I had watched the babies flapping and testing their wings in the nest just the previous day.

I was sick with anger at my cat. I’ve never been more angry at a cat in my entire life. I felt like she had betrayed the trust I’d put in her. Of course I was really angry at myself for leaving her unsupervised for what turned out to be too long. Cats are predators, no matter how adorable they are.

I don’t actually know what transpired in those 15 minutes I was distracted. Part of me hopes that the babies just happened to choose that moment to try to leave the nest. But that’s probably not what happened. Gracie probably got back up on the railing, then jumped up and knocked or scared the babies out of the nest so she could get at them. It would have been an easy jump for her. I had worried about that exact scenario for days.

I’m so embarrassed and ashamed and mortified and sick that my brief negligence has probably killed four little innocent baby birds. One for sure, and three maybe because they were rushed out of the nest too soon and not prepared for the world. They might be out there struggling to survive while I’m typing this, maybe starving to death because they don’t know how to hunt for food on their own yet. (One day earlier they relied on their parents to bring them food.)

I didn’t want these flycatchers to build another nest in my back porch after this one, because they are bit messy, but now I hope they come back because I really want to redeem myself to them. I read that the same birds will come back to the same nest year after year–if they are successful in raising their babies there. They’ve had a pretty traumatic loss here so I doubt they’ll ever come back now.

I gathered up the little dead baby bird in a plastic ziplock bag and put it into the trash can. I had to pull it up from the ground because its little feet clutched at the grass. I am very sure it was dead, because it did not move or make any noise. I am embarrassed to say that I cried a lot. I haven’t cried like that in a long time. I was a lot more emotionally invested in this bird nest than I would ever admit to another person. I felt like I had let down those parents and the whole universe. That was my one and only job: To keep my cat away from that bird nest, and I failed at it utterly, because I got distracted and couldn’t stay focused on the task at hand.

A little later I noticed the parents were still hovering around the back porch. They landed on the gutter over the garage and chirped. It happened to be right over the trash can. I got it into my head that their baby hadn’t been dead but merely stunned, and the parents knew their little baby was suffocating to death inside that ziplock bag in the trash can. I ran back outside, dug out the ziplock from the trash can and opened it up. The baby was definitely dead. If it hadn’t been before, it definitely was then.

I don’t think I killed it. I’m pretty sure my cat killed it. Actually I’m not sure at all anymore. Now I’m only about 50% sure it was dead when I put it in that ziplock bag. What if I killed it? What if it had only been playing dead when I chased Gracie away? What if it could have flown away and had a chance to live but I robbed it of that chance? I can’t stop thinking about that.

I put it back in the ziplock bag and back in the trash can. There was nothing I could do about it then, whatever had happened.

A little while later I spotted the parents still hanging around the back porch, chirping and searching. Then a new thought clawed its way into my head: What if they didn’t know their little baby was dead? What if they thought it was still alive somewhere? Maybe they’d accounted for three of their babies, and couldn’t find the fourth. How would they ever know for sure what happened to their fourth baby?

So I dug out the ziplock bag again, took out the dead baby bird, and set it out where the parents could find it. At least maybe they could get some closure. It is ridiculous to think that birds have those kinds of advanced emotional responses, but it was honestly more for me than for them. I stood at the back porch for a long time hoping I would see the parents fly down and check on it, but I never did. I saw one of them land on the bell by the back porch, which is where they always landed before flying up to the nest with food. Instead of going to the nest, or down to the corpse, it flew away into the woods.

About an hour later I put the dead baby bird in the ziplock again and back in the trash can. Ants had started crawling over it by then.

Last year the flycatchers raised three babies in this nest. When they finally left, I felt empty for days. I got really attached to watching the progress of the nest every day, and saying hello to the little guys every time I walked by. I even had to help the last of the three babies leave last year. The last one’s little foot had gotten tangled in the nest, so I had to pull it free before it could fly away. I don’t know what happened to it after that.

I’d like to think of this incident as a “tragedy” but I feel like tragedies are accidental and unpredictable. This was entirely my fault and easy to predict that it would happen. All I had to do was stay at the back door and watch to make sure Gracie didn’t get into trouble, but I couldn’t even manage that simple little thing.

Last year I felt empty after the nest emptied, but this year I feel like all of my insides have been torn out and the world will never be right again. I’ll be okay tomorrow I guess, and hopefully learn something from this colossal blunder, but today, I am grief-stricken, and I need to figure out how to forgive my cat for just being a cat, and forgive myself for letting down these poor birds so much.

Books/Reviews

Besieged by Kevin Hearne (Audiobook)

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Published by Del Rey. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Random House Audio.

The ancient gods are alive and well in the modern world in this hilarious, action-packed collection of original short stories featuring Atticus O’Sullivan, the handsome, tattooed, 2,000-year-old Irishman with extraordinary magic powers from Kevin Hearne’s New York Times best-selling Iron Druid Chronicles.

Listen time: 8 hours, 46 minutes, between 1/26/2018 and sometime in February or March?

I finished listening to this a while ago, but forgot to write about it. There isn’t much to say, really. It’s another book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, and if you liked any of the previous entries, you’ll like this one, too.

This one is a bit different in that it is a series of short stories, and not really a “main” entry in the series. If I had to guess, it is material cut from the other books because they are largely stories unrelated to anything. I still enjoyed it, though I will admit at this point that the series is probably more of a guilty pleasure than anything else.

One of the things I love about these books is the sheer magnitude of lore present. Over the course of the series, we’ve heard about just about every mythological pantheon in existence, some I knew about, and some I’d never heard of. There are cultural lessons in every book.

Blog/Process

Why Self-Publishing Might Be A Mistake

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Recently I saw a tweet from someone contemplating self-publishing some of their writing. They didn’t sound confident about it. It prompted me to write this post.

I’ve thought about this for years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to self-publish Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon.

It was an informative experience, true. But the only thing I really gained from it was the first-hand knowledge and experience of formatting a book for e-publishing. At the time I thought that would be worth something, but in retrospect, it’s not. The process has probably changed entirely since 2011 anyway.

Obviously, not being a popular author, and not having the time or money to promote it 24/7, nobody actually *bought* the book. It’s been on Amazon for seven years and I haven’t made a single cent from it. I haven’t received anything even from the handful of people who actually paid money for it, because you have to cross a certain threshold before Amazon will cut you a check (it’s something like $100, which is far beyond the number of copies you can sell to friends and family).

(That’s why they always say it’s more important to write a review or spread the word about books than anything else… reviews and buzz lead to a chance for enough sales to get over that threshold, whereas, completely counter-intuitively, sales don’t lead to anything at all.)

(It’s also why Amazon is evil as a publishing company, because they get all the benefits of my content without having to pay anything for it. In fact, thanks to Kindle Unlimited, you can pay Amazon money to read my book for free. Such a deal.)

(Incidentally, I see Amazon has a direct deposit payment method now which allegedly does not have a threshold, so my complaints could be moot.)

(I should stop these parenthetical side bars and get back to the point.)

Not getting any money doesn’t seem like a drawback, right? Assuming I maintain a day job. So I didn’t really *lose* anything by publishing the book, right?

Well, unfortunately, I can count a few things I’ve lost.

Most obviously, I’ve lost the ability to ever publish Lute of the Sparrow traditionally. I can never submit it to an agent or editor without them Googling it, seeing it’s dead as a doornail on Amazon, and passing on it without even reading it. If, by some miracle, someone *did* read it and want to publish it, they would then Google it and find it had already been published. A lot of places (rightly) won’t publish a book that’s already been published elsewhere, even if self-published (it’s a concept called “first publication rights“). Even if a publisher thought the book was the most amazing writing ever seen, they are, in the end, a business, and they’ll be able to see that the book was commercially unsuccessful on Amazon, so they would have no choice but to back away slowly.

I knew that before I published it, though. So why did I go ahead with it? This is where we move beyond pure business logic and into more emotional reasons.

The main reason I self-published Lute of the Sparrow is that I simply didn’t think anyone would ever publish it traditionally. I had absolutely no confidence in it. I was 100% sure that it would be rejected by everyone I tried to submit it to, period, The End.

That may or may not be true. I still think it is true, but I’m experienced enough now to know that the author is not the best judge of whether a book is good or not. (Just as a programmer is never the best person to test their code.) I should not have made that judgment myself.

Besides, I now know that whether or not a book is published traditionally mainly boils down to luck and connections. It helps a lot if the book is good–or at least average–but without luck and connections, you’re never going to get a book in front of any eyeballs. (Persistence might be a substitute for luck and connections, if you can put up with years of rejection. But persistence, too, has a price. I have heard that the more you are rejected, the less likely you are to be published, because the publishers start to remember you as “that guy that’s been rejected a thousand times.”)

I said I still think nobody would publish Lute. That’s because I’m experienced enough now to know that the story has flaws from a craft perspective. I can now look at my writing from more of an editor’s perspective than ever before. I love that world and those characters, but I can see the flaws in the story construction as plain as day. I can’t *not* see them. I have ideas on how to fix them, but it would take extensive rewrites–throwing it out and starting over, for all intents and purposes.

I knew all of that in 2011, before I self-published it. I knew the story needed a lot of crafting before I would be fully satisfied with it. But I’ll be honest: I wanted to work on other things. New things. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life chiseling away at one book. So I gave up on Lute of the Sparrow.

They say that you never really finish a book, you simply abandon it. I agree with that. In this case, it was absolutely, undeniably true.

But that’s not a good reason to publish a book. Especially your first book. In 2011, I was basically saying, “I enjoyed writing this book but it’s got problems and I’m sure nobody will like it anyway, so I’ll just go ahead and publish it myself. What’s the harm?”

It was an admission of defeat.

Whether the book is good or not isn’t really the point. The point is that I undermined any chance for it to be evaluated independently from my own doubts and fears. I sabotaged myself. I killed it before it even had a chance of life. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was training myself to believe that I didn’t belong in the world of traditional authors. That’s not a lesson I needed. Nobody does.

One other, more subtle thing I’ve lost is the ability to use the name “Everett Renshaw” for any traditional publishing attempts. Lute of the Sparrow, from now until the end of Internet time, is going to come up under a Google search for Everett Renshaw. The stain of that book just sitting there on Amazon will haunt Everett Renshaw for the rest of his career. Maybe he can recover from it, maybe he can’t. I have ideas for that problem, too. But if he can recover from it, it will take a lot of work.

So what have I learned? What should I have done?

Well, nothing.

I’ve written a lot of novel drafts since I wrote Lute of the Sparrow. I don’t think any of them are ready to publish, or even submit, much like Lute. Some of them probably never will be, and that’s okay.

The older I get, the more I realize this: Not every piece of writing needs to be read. Sometimes writing can be just for ourselves, to explore an idea. In fact, I dare say that writing should always be for ourselves, more than anything else. As a blogger, God knows I’ve blogged countless times just for me. Sometimes I write drafts but never publish them. I do that a lot actually. On Endgame Viable, I have over a hundred draft posts that I haven’t published. Some of them are really long and elaborate posts, too–there’s one fairly recent post that’s over 5,000 words. But they aren’t “right,” so they remain unpublished, and I move on to other things.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that it never hurts to not publish something. There is no downside whatsoever to keeping my writing to myself. Certainly from a business perspective, there’s no downside. From an emotional or craft perspective, you could argue that spending too much time on one draft is counter-productive, but as long as I keep that firmly in mind, and continue to work on new material, maybe one or two drafts a year, I’m taking the steps necessary to avoid falling into that trap. (Admittedly it’s a constant struggle, one that must be re-fought weekly or monthly, if not daily.)

P. S. Why not check out Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon! It’s completely free if you have Kindle Unlimited. And why not write a review when you’re done? Or tell someone else about it? I mean, if you like it that is. Don’t write a review or tell anyone if you hate it, obviously. :)

P. P. S. A cynical person might think this post is just an advertisement for my book, but I didn’t really intend it that way. At first, that is. Then I thought, “Wow, this could be a great advertisement for my book, too!”

Blog/Process

A Very Morose Writing Update

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# Monday, March 19, 2018

I promised myself that I would write about writing twice a month. The last writing post I published was January 17, over two months ago.

Brace yourself for a shocking revelation. My writing is not going well. This could explain why I haven’t been rushing to tell you about it twice a month.

I am writing this post in Visual Studio Code, because perhaps it will inspire me. I love VSCode. I am writing in Markdown format, and watching the little preview window on the right-hand side update as I type. It’s very satisfying.

Unfortunately I don’t have much to say.

Except this: I hate my writing. I hate every sentence that comes out of my keyboard these days. They are all terrible. When I look at my sentences compared with everyone else’s sentences, mine look like some twisted, rusty, metallic monstrosity, like an abandoned gray industrial zone in a city, where the skyscrapers are falling down, it rains all the time, and homeless people fight to survive, and drug dealers shoot each other over two lost dollars. There are cracked out prostitutes staggering around the streets in my sentences. The cops don’t even try to police these sentences anymore.

Everyone else’s sentences look like sleek, clean, high-rise apartments in the nice part of town, where everyone wears nice clothes and has plenty of money. The sun there shines in a crystal blue sky, and there is not a care in the world.

It’s really, really disheartening.

I remember once reading or hearing about how some people think in words and some people think in pictures. I definitely think in pictures. When I’m writing, I’m usually trying to describe an image I see in my head. The first draft of that description sounds a lot like what I would say out loud when speaking casually.

That’s bad, because I’m not very good at speaking off the cuff. I hem and haw and um and stumble over words a lot. If you’ve seen any of my game videos you’ll already know this. I often stop in mid-sentence because I have no idea how to continue, because I have an image in my head but no words to describe it. One of the reasons I record videos at all is to a) get better at speaking and b) learn more about how my brain works. I had no idea that I stopped in mid-sentence all the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. Now I know. It’s kind of an interesting self-discovery process, recording oneself.

Admittedly playing a game at the same time I’m trying to speak is a bit of a distraction.

But I digress. I was trying to explain how thinking in pictures affects my writing, and how it seems like an incredible disadvantage.

When I write sentences and paragraphs, they are all just rough ideas of what I’m thinking about. I imagine it like sculpting. My first draft is a very rough cut piece of stone that requires a whole lot of fine detail work to get anywhere close to what I want readers to see. With something like a blog post, I usually just let it go in rough form without much editing, at least as long as it more-or-less communicates the idea I’m trying to get across.

I don’t know what it’s like to think in words, but I imagine it’s much easier to write that way. Or at least, much *faster* to write that way. I imagine such a person can sit and type perfectly-formed, non-repeating, interesting sentences on the first try for hours on end, with fascinating metaphors and diverse vocabulary.

At least, that’s how it seems.

Now for some actual writing updates.

## Cataract

I haven’t worked on my latest work-in-progress Survey in a long time. But I have an excuse!

Earlier this month, I went to the eye doctor and was told I have a cataract in my right eye. This was the surprising but inevitable culmination of several months of really irritating vision problems. Cataracts don’t just spring up overnight (or so I’m told), so this thing obviously has been developing for a long time, but it’s only been seriously *interfering* with my vision, specifically in terms of reading and writing, for a few months now.

It’s very challenging for me to read text on a computer screen these days. It’s not so much that I can’t see the text, it’s that the cataract creates a weird interference pattern that sort of blurs and obfuscates the letters. It’s a little bit like looking at the text through a tiny wire mesh, like a screen door. Except no matter how much you move your head, you can’t quite see between the wires to get a clear view.

It all clears up instantly if I simply put my hand over my right eye. I’ve tried to work like that, but I haven’t had much success. I even made a pair of reader glasses, popped out the left lens, and covered the right lens in black cloth to make a sort of eye patch. It works for a very short time, but after a few minutes I get nauseous\*, or some even stranger patterns start to develop in my right eye. I don’t think my brain can handle it.

The obstruction to my vision is much worse on sunny days. I have to wear sunglasses to do anything with a computer when the sun is out now. The eye doctor explained it very well. In bright light, the pupils dilate, so light cannot get *around* my cataract and has no choice but to go directly through it. When it’s darker, light can get around the cataract and I can see better. That’s why sunglasses help.

To make a long story short, it’s hard to write at a computer screen for any length of time now. Not only is it difficult to read the text, which leads to headaches, but it actually makes me nauseous after a certain amount of time. It’s a feeling much like vertigo or motion sickness, very much like the unpleasant feeling I get when reading in a car. I’m starting to feel it now, so I’m going to have to wrap this up.

## Summary

To summarize all that we’ve learned in this post: I hate my writing, and I have a cataract. I have made no progress on my latest work-in-progress, because it is terrible and I should feel terrible for even trying to pretend it’s not terrible. I should give up and start completely over. Or better yet, just give up on ever writing anything that anyone will ever want to read (let alone pay for). I should resign myself to an incredibly boring, meaningless job that I hate doing that sucks all the creative life out of me every day for the rest of my miserable existence. That pretty much sums up my current writing mood.

Yay these writing posts are fun!

P. S. I didn’t feel like editing this so it’s all first draft material, baby.

P. P. S. Oh hey look, apparently I don’t have Markdown enabled on this site. Sigh.

\* Nauseous is the first word I’ve typed in this post that made me wish for a spell-checker. Unfortunately, VS Code, being a programmer’s text editor, does not have one. I know that I always spell nauseous wrong on the first try, and I rely on the spell checker to tell me the correct spelling, but there was no red squiggly line to help me until I imported this text into WordPress.

Books/Reviews

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Audiobook)

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

Published by Tor Books. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Macmillon Audio. I got this a long time ago because it won the Hugo in 2015, but I only just got around to it in my January 2018 listening binge.

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

Listen time: 13.5 hours, 1/24/2018 – 1/26/2018.

This book is a masterpiece of science fiction. You should read it, or listen to it. It deserved to win the Hugo Award in 2015. That’s all I really need to say about it.

It is obvious that this is a translation, but it did not detract from the experience at all for me. In fact, I found it even more interesting because of it. Sentences were not quite the way I might have expected them to sound, which gave them a mysterious and creative appeal.

The first half of the book is a little confusing, and I didn’t quite understand how everything fit together, but there is an underlying mystery that compelled me to keep listening. (Actually, if I’d read the blurb above, the first half might have made more sense… I had no idea there were going to be aliens in this book.)

I was surprised to find Luke Daniels reading this book. I didn’t know if he could pull off reading a serious book, but he did. At first it was a little jarring to hear obvious American-sounding characters in a Chinese book about Chinese people, but after a while, the story engrossed me so much that I didn’t care.

The book stands alone, but there are more in this series. I’m not sure I want or need to listen to any more though. What if the sequels aren’t as good? Might it cheapen the experience of the first book?

As an aspiring author, this is the kind of book that it is both inspiring and thoroughly depressing. My immediate reaction is something like, “Well that’s it then, I guess there’s no point in trying to sell a book now.” There is simply no way I could come up with a plot to compete with the level of detail and imagination in this one. Only after some time has passed will I be able to return to my silly pew-pew stories again with any confidence.

See more of my book reviews here.

UPDATE

After I lamented my lack of confidence in writing, I noticed Yoast had this to say about this very post:

Books/Reviews

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Audiobook)

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Gardens of the Moon: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 1 by Steven Erikson

Published by Tor Books. Read by Ralph Lister. Produced by Brilliance Audio.

The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen’s rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins.

This is a fantasy book that is not quite grimdark but nowhere near high fantasy, either. Somewhere in the realm of low fantasy I suppose, except that there is a lot of magic. I guess there was a lot of fighting and dying so maybe it’s classified as grimdark after all. It wasn’t really “on screen,” though, and there’s magic of a distinctly high fantasy sort (teleportation), so maybe not. I don’t know what it is, to be honest. :)

Listen time: About 4 out of  the 26 hours, 1/23/2018 – 1/24/2018.

After four hours of listening I couldn’t identify a plot or any characters that I cared about. I would describe this as a fantastic book where “stuff happens.” The stuff that happens is relayed to the reader very artfully, with interesting sentences and dialog, but I wasn’t hooked by any of it. Perhaps it is a long, slow burn, which makes some sense because it’s a long audiobook, and it’s the first book of a series. I intentionally listened for a long time (four hours) because I figured it would start slow, but then I remembered that I had tons of other books in my backlog.

I will admit that my attention faded in and out while listening to the first four hours, so I’m not terribly clear on the story. There is a war, but I don’t know what they are fighting over, for, or against. I’m not even sure *who* is fighting. It’s hard to get invested in a book when you don’t know the stakes.

Ralph Lister is a very good narrator and I would definitely listen to more of his work. His narration is probably the main reason that I listened to four hours of a story that wasn’t really grabbing my attention. He reads the material as if it is the most important work of our generation, and really brought the character’s voices to life, far more than the text did, I think. I was also very interested in the way he pronounced certain words, like “swathed” (swaythed) and “migraine” (meegraine). (I always thought they were swahthed and mygraine. I will concede the first but I’m reasonably confident of the second.)

Perhaps another time I will return to this book and finish it.

Books/Reviews

Pandemic: The Extinction Files by A. G. Riddle (Audiobook)

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Pandemic: The Extinction Files, Book 1 by A. G. Riddle

Published by Riddle, Inc. Read by Edoardo Ballerini. Produced by Audible Studios.

In Africa, a mysterious outbreak spreads quickly. Teams from the CDC and WHO respond, but they soon learn that there is more to the epidemic than they believed. It may be the beginning of a global experiment–an event that will change the human race forever.

Another one where I have no idea how or why this book got into my Audible library. I don’t know if it was recommended to me or if I just randomly clicked on something on the front page of the site to try to use up my Audible credits before I cancelled my subscription. Probably that latter one, because I had a lot to use up, and I try to vary my genres now and then. (I think this is a “thriller.”)

Listen time: About 75% of the ~19 hour run time, 1/21-1/23/2018.

This was a very interesting book, but probably not for the reasons you might expect. I found it to be an incredibly mixed bag. It had *just* enough interesting material to keep me listening to the very end, though.

It might surprise you to learn that Pandemic is about a virus outbreak. It starts with a fairly typical outbreak story that you’ve probably read or seen a hundred times before (person in third world gets sick, local doctors suspects it’s Very Bad, virus spreads, CDC workers begin efforts to stop the outbreak, etc.). It was so ordinary that I thought I would stop listening after an hour or so and move on to another book.

But then a few chapters hooked me, mainly the ones involving a WHO woman named Peyton. I was intrigued by the mobilization efforts to fight the pandemic, and the descriptions of how such a fight is conducted. I am a sucker for end-of-the-world stories, and the realistic portrayals (real to me, at least, who knows absolutely nothing about fighting pandemics) fascinated me. (Personally I am pretty sure the human race will end because of something like a virus or bacteria, not a nuclear war or climate change.)

I, the reader, kept fighting with the author, though, who insisted that Peyton was not the main character, and kept returning to chapters about another guy named Desmond. Desmond is a super-spy-ish, computer-ish guy who had lost his memory, rather similar to that Jason Bourne guy. I started skipping his chapters as soon as I heard his name. He was running from police, logging into computers, hacking passwords, playing virtual reality games, trying to find out who he was. I didn’t care one whit about him, because his plot arc did not intersect with the struggle against the outbreak.

I enjoyed the book the way I was listening to it: Skipping the Desmond chapters without remorse, listening with fascination to the Peyton chapters that dealt with the outbreak in Kenya.

Unfortunately the two characters of Desmond and Peyton came together into a single plot thread, taking Peyton away from the outbreak, and the story kind of veered off a cliff for me. It happened a bit shy of the halfway point. The characters boarded a helicopter, and there followed a very long period of backstory and exposition that demolished the book’s pacing and threw the unfolding pandemic far into the background.

I might have stopped listening, but unfortunately for me, I was invested in a few other side characters that I cared about, and wanted to hear how their stories turned out. Their stories, back in Kenya and Atlanta, were more compelling to me than the main “thriller” story of the globetrotting duo of Desmond and Peyton trying to track down the people responsible for the pandemic. Sadly, the side characters only got about half a chapter in every ten, if they were lucky. I would have loved to hear more of them.

I skipped a lot of chapters. A lot of other chapters I didn’t pay much attention to, even though I technically played them. My ears only perked up when the story returned to the side characters I liked. In the end, I was satisfied with the narrative arc for the side characters, but the plot for the main characters (ie. the main plot for the book) turned out to be a disappointment.

Edoardo Ballerini, by the way, is another competent reader, but he doesn’t have a lot of personality. He is more of a TV commercial voice than a storyteller, if you know what I mean. He seems to be more concerned with perfect diction and consistency, as opposed to conveying strong emotions. Actually that’s probably not fair. He’s certainly not the worst I’ve ever heard. But he doesn’t really “bring characters to life” in the way someone like Luke Daniels or an actor would.

Would I recommend it? Not unless you’re bored. It would probably make a much better movie. But they really need to work on Peyton’s character. She started out a “strong female lead” and then deflated into little more than “the girlfriend” for the main character. I was really disappointed in that.

Despite giving this book a somewhat poor review, I still found it fascinating from an author’s perspective. This book broke *so many* of the rules that everyone tells you about. Yet for some reason, it was published, and someone made an audiobook of it! Show, don’t tell, they say. This book told like a maniac. Use active voice, they say. I don’t think this book had a single active verb from beginning to end. Almost every chapter began with a very formulaic establishing line like, “X verbed in Y, verbing.” “Jerry sat in his office, looking over the research papers.” “Betty walked the streets of Berlin, searching for the suitcase.” “Rex stood in the Atlanta hospital, staring at the whiteboard.” Every. Single. Chapter.

Weirdly … sometimes it worked. There were plenty of chapters where I was riveted by what was being “told.” It feels like the kind of book that needs to be studied to understand why some parts worked and others didn’t.

For example, I understand why it makes sense to begin every chapter with a line to quickly establish the character and setting, because almost every chapter switched to a different location. It’s just that the author made no effort to deviate from a very specific grammatical formula. But then, why would you? Formulas are formulas because … they work.

Books/Reviews

The Land: Founding by Aleron Kong (Audiobook)

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The Land: Founding: A LitRPG Saga: Chaos Seeds, Book 1 by Aleron Kong

Self-published. Read by Nick Podehl. Produced by Tamori Publications LLC.

Tricked into a world of banished gods, demons, goblins, sprites and magic, Richter must learn to meet the perils of The Land and begin to forge his own kingdom. Actions have consequences across The Land, with powerful creatures and factions now hell-bent on Richter’s destruction.

This is definitely a winner for the largest number of sub-titles within one title. I have no idea where I heard about this book or why I got it.

Listen time: ~32 minutes on 1/21/2018.

This book did not click with me at all. It is about (stop me if you’ve heard this before) a guy who accidentally gets transported to a real fantasy world after playing a game (a virtual MMORPG). It is, I think, a comedy targeted at an audience demographic who plays online games or tabletop RPGs, i.e. people who will “get” the in-jokes.

I listened to four audio chapters while I was trapped in the shower, and afterward, it was a fairly easy decision not to continue. I would describe the first four chapters as boilerplate setup chapters heavy on exposition, the kind of chapters I have written plenty of times before and been embarrassed about.

On the plus side it is competently read by Nick Podehl, who actually sounds a bit like a cut-rate Luke Daniels. I would consider listening to other books read by him. I don’t think I would consider reading any other LitRPG books, though. It’s possible it gets better, but I just don’t have time to wait for it. Maybe when I run out of other audiobooks I’ll skip ahead to the middle to see if it improves.

See more of my book reviews here.

Books/Reviews

The Authorities by Scott Meyers (Audiobook)

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Published by Rocket Hat Industries. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by … Scott Meyer? (Presumably the author paid Luke Daniels to make the audiobook.)

Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn’t respect are definitely not “finer things.” Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect—wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand—becomes an Internet sensation.

I’m pretty sure I picked up this book because it was another Scott Meyer/Luke Daniels collaboration. I found the Magic 2.0 series juvenile but also very funny.

Listen time: ~10 hours, 1/18-1/20/2018.

Very much like the Magic 2.0 books, the story and writing of The Authorities did not do much for me, but it is brilliantly read by Luke Daniels. I am very biased though because anything that Luke Daniels reads becomes 1000% better in my personal opinion. The Authorities is basically a long series of absurdly comedic situations (Scott Meyer’s trademark) loosely tied together into a police procedural format. It’s a fun listen, that’s about it.

I would recommend the audiobook solely because it has a lot of funny moments, and Luke Daniels is perfect for this kind of humor. I’m not sure I would recommend *reading* the book, though. There were long stretches where I checked out and didn’t pay much attention. For example, I didn’t care a whit about the mystery of whodunnit. The victim and the murderer just didn’t matter. But I enjoyed the hijinks that occurred along the way of solving the crime. I guess that’s another way of saying that the characters were far more interesting than the plot. It had a bit of an absurdist A-Team vibe to it.

See more of my book reviews here.

Editing/Process

Survey Revisions Continue

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I promised myself I would try to write two writing posts a month. Technically this should be the second one, but it’s actually just the first one. Oh well.

While I have not been extremely happy with my progress on editing “Survey,” my 2016 NaNoWriMo project, I have at least *made* progress on it. Last time I described how I was highlighting sections of text that needed attention, and I have more-or-less completed that.

Initially I highlighted text in blue for Backstory and Exposition (“the history behind this thing is…”), then red for Telling, Not Showing (“she felt angry about that”).

I added another category of highlighting: Worldbuilding and Continuity, in green. These are sections of text that refer to any in-world names, places, dates, or times. While I’m writing a draft, those things are very much in flux, so while I might start out the draft thinking that an event occurred a thousand years ago, by the end of the draft it could be six thousand years ago, or vice versa. If I actually took some time to plan things in advance, I might not have to change them all the time.

To be fair, I *did* spend some time worldbuilding for Survey, long before I even knew what the story or characters were. As it turned out, most of the worldbuilding of names, places, etc. did not even end up in the draft.

Now that I’ve finished with the highlighting, my goal is to start working on real edits. This is the hard part for me. The part that I dread the most, and in retrospect, the part that I was simply postponing by highlighting the first draft. That is, moving text around, and writing new text to replace shoddy work in the first draft. I am unfortunately going to need to write a lot of new text for Survey.

The draft told me that this novel has three parts. Part one involves arriving on the planet. Part two involves the events that occur on the planet. Part three involves events that occur after leaving the planet. The vast majority of the draft I wrote happens in parts one and two. Part three got very short shrift because I didn’t get to it until late in November. (That part of the draft is highlighted almost entirely in red.)

I will need to make a lot of major revisions to Part One because the story does not begin very well. There was entirely too much exposition at the beginning of the first draft, despite intentionally trying to move it along quickly. The story is supposed to begin with a ship crash-landing on a planet, but I felt like it took way too long to get to the exciting part in the draft. I tried to explain how the ship got to the planet first. :)

We may kid ourselves into thinking that readers are sophisticated enough to give an author time to develop a story, but the reality is that I’m a new author, so if the first sentence, paragraph, and page doesn’t scream action, mystery, and/or humor into the reader’s face at full volume in short, declarative sentences, I can expect 99% of the audience to go elsewhere. (Especially agents and editors.) After I’ve published a handful of successful books, then maybe I can start with more leisurely exposition.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how to approach this part of the editing. It’s *incredibly* intimidating, because it feels like I might as well just delete the entire draft and start over, and obviously that is two months of work, minimum, at the end of which I will have basically a second first draft which is no closer to publication than the first first draft is right now. Surely there must be a better way.

Maybe if I can crack the first chapter or two, it will seem easier to manage. Or perhaps I should start the revisions in the middle. I was reasonably pleased with large sections of the middle. Or maybe I should start with writing the ending that I didn’t have time to write in November. The possibilities are too numerous. :)