The Game Of Thrones Effect

I  experienced the “Game of Thrones” phenomenon, much like the earlier “Harry Potter” fad, by sticking my toes in tentatively rather than immersing myself in the lengthy narrative. I read the first book in the series, A Song of Ice and Fire, watched the first season videos, and dipped in occasionally thereafter, to get an idea of what the excitement was about. As with Harry and his cohorts, I definitely got it, and I was curious about how it would end, but that was all I needed. To experience it in its entirety would take years.

I find that “Games of Thrones” can influence my writing without my fully comprehending it. George R. R. Martin has created an alternate universe, one that is medieval, brutal, and warlike. It’s a place where you don’t reason with your enemies. You behead them, throw them off a cliff, or poison them. If for some reason you prefer to keep them alive to prolong their suffering, dismemberment is the method of choice. There are no real consequences for violent behavior, other than the certainty of making more enemies. Warriors fight to advance their respective kingdoms, with one overriding throne in contention. There are no nations, and no seasons as we know them on earth. It has been summer for ages, but everyone can sense the approach of winter, which will seem never-ending and make for an even harsher world.

This sort of reality-altering creation has somehow freed up my own imagination. I feel just a tad better about what my critique group sometimes calls my “plausibility issues.” I suspect many of us genteel fiction writers might get a boost from tales like GoT. It seems to make honesty and rawness more possible for every writer. For example, I’ve always been squeamish about sex scenes, but I recently attempted one that is downright kinky. It involves a powerful woman taking advantage of a vulnerable man. I gave it a fairy tale sheen, comparing it to a popular story in which an evil witch kidnaps a handsome prince.

Now I can admit that my 2010 novel Let’s Play Ball, and its intended sequel with the working title Let’s Play Two, really do inhabit an alternate world. I invented a new Cuba, an island south of Florida that is more brazen and more of a player on the world stage than the real Cuba ever was or probably will be. Council meetings at the presidential palace resemble the mad hatter’s tea party. This country keeps acting up and committing outrages against the United States, mostly by making use of its baseball connections. American leaders not only tolerate these shenanigans, but sometimes subtly encourage them for their own purposes. One of my critique group members complained, “I don’t believe all this presidential stuff!” I didn’t totally believe it myself, but I couldn’t help liking the “presidential stuff.” In fact, I’m beginning to think “Games of Thrones” may have inspired aspects of Trump World, or maybe vice versa. The one adviser to the original King Robert who was a true friend of his, and had enough courage and integrity to tell him the truth, was beheaded for his efforts. The beheadings in Trump World may be symbolic, but truth and integrity lose out just the same.

Similarly, this is a world totally devoid of political correctness. The dwarf Tyrion Lannister, despite being high-born, witty, and suave, is referred to as the “imp” or “half-man.” He is defined by his most obvious physical attribute, until he manages to push himself onto the field of battle, the only way a man can earn respect in this world. Jon Snow is forever “the bastard,” as if the circumstances of his birth were his own fault. Luckily for him, he’s a born fighter. The story’s treatment of women is also dicey. They are roughly divided into prostitutes, wenches, and high-born women, with very little in the way of normal housewives. Cersei, Robert’s unfaithful wife, is pure evil, producing prospective heirs not only by adultery but by incest. “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” she pronounces, and she should know. The wives of powerful men are mostly heir-producers, and no matter how grand and beautiful, can be silenced at any time by their husbands with a sharp “Enough, woman!” This is true until Daenerys Targaryen comes into her own with an inherited title and dragons to help her conquer all … and unfortunately, a perpetual target on her back.

My favorite characters in the first season were the two battling sisters, Sansa and Arya Stark, daughters of the beheaded adviser and therefore always in mortal trouble themselves. They remind me of my close but competitive fraternal twins in Let’s Play Ball.  One of the twins is having an affair with a ballplayer whom the other twin suspects of participating in a kidnapping plot against a teammate of his, who happens to be her own fiancé. That makes for an awkward family dynamic, but they have nothing on the Stark sisters. Sansa, the oldest, is expected to marry the creepy heir to the throne who oversaw her father’s execution without a shimmer of remorse. Arya, refreshingly, saw through the loathsome fiancé long before her sister did. She trains to fight back as a warrior, although there is the drawback of being mistaken constantly for a boy.

“Game of Thrones” can be taken as a delightful vacation from reality, one that encourages us all to take similar flights. The only trouble with this formula is that the real world keeps getting weirder. Somehow, the wildest fantasies don’t seem so implausible anymore.

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Boneheaded Bureaucrats

Let me start by saying I spent many years behind bureaucratic desks myself. Like all of us paper-pushers, I was fairly insulated from the public I was supposed to be serving. I worked in a high-security building that became increasingly difficult, year by year, to enter without credentials. Phone systems were a maze for anyone on the outside to negotiate. Apart from this kind of insulation, there are rules and regulations, unique to each agency, that limit the bureaucrat’s ability to act on the public’s behalf, at least with any speed. Mountains of red tape are required to accomplish anything in government.

Now that I’m retired and on the other side of the wall, I have to say I’ve never been more frustrated with bureaucrats who have stood in the way of my accomplishing what have always been routine but necessary tasks. Maybe I took on too large a challenge by trying to renew my driver’s license and get a passport in the same year. I’ve come up against something new, the federal REAL ID Act, which puts upon the citizen the entire burden of proving he or she isn’t a hostile alien. I never dreamed it would be so difficult for a native-born American like myself, who has only been outside the United States twice in my life, to prove this. I worked for the Federal government for over 35 years, and had a top secret security clearance for the jobs that required it. I’m now an an annuitant, and on Medicare, for heaven’s sake. I’ve renewed my driver’s license countless times before, and the passport I had years ago was easily obtained with just a hospital record of my birth. But now, it seems, everything has to be super-official and sealed.

It has been like pulling teeth to obtain a certified copy of my birth certificate from the office of vital statistics where I was born, Washington DC. The main obstacle is having been born in 1952, apparently a year in which birth certificates were not routinely issued with all the necessary formalities. Certificate of this age tend to be in fragile shape, or don’t have a raised seal, or are lacking some information. Abstracts have to be made, a process which I was told would take two weeks. Try two months.

While I was struggling with this, my older brother, born at the exact same hospital and to the exact same parents, received his passport with no problem at all. His birth certificate, issued in 1947, apparently had been endowed with the requisite raised seal. In a nice Catch-22 situation, it turned out that having the passport in hand would have eased my license renewal process.

In order to prove my legitimacy, I’ve had to come up with documents that literally didn’t exist when the new requirements went into effect. They had to be recreated in a way that I can only hope will satisfy bureaucrats of various stripes. I got periodic updates from a well-recommended third party I enlisted to handle the matter. These ran along the lines of  “Sorry, but this process takes time.” Their refusal to give exact timetables is aggravating when you’re up against your own deadlines. Meanwhile, in a desperate do-it-yourself attempt, I searched three different databases that supposedly have millions of vital records. They enticed me to apply for access by claiming, during a test run, that my maiden name turned up several matches. Once in the systems, the same name came up zero. What’s with that? To be unable to find written acknowledgement of your existence is downright chilling.

I’ve tried to use what writer’s eloquence I possess, through emails and phone calls, to try to get the relevant bureaucrats to listen to reason. It’s not like appealing to a business, which depends on a customer’s good will and future patronage. I was able to break through some barriers when I made those non-refundable hotel reservations by mistake, or when I had to talk my way back onto social media sites that locked me out for no apparent reason, or when I finally got an appliance store to deliver a hard-to-obtain dishwasher after three cancelled deliveries. But now I’m dealing with bureaucracies, not businesses. The law makes them utterly inflexible, and they don’t need my good will. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s not my fault I was born in 1952. Lately, a dark suspicion has occurred to me: that these processes are less about security and more about harassing and inconveniencing certain classes of people who don’t tend to support the dominant political party.

How much more of a US citizen could I be? My paternal ancestors helped to found New Amsterdam in the 1600s. A great-grandfather on my mother’s side was friends with and worked for Theodore Roosevelt. I have a photograph to prove it … but how would I convince a bureaucrat that the handsome man sitting beside TR is really my great-grandfather? At times I get irrationally angry at my parents for not making me as “official” as my older brother. I know having two children is twice as hard, but you still have to properly register all your kids, not just the first.

Postscript: After further effort, I was finally able to get past the irritating rotary phone systems and communicate with real humans, which has made me feel immensely better. Flesh-and-blood people, as a rule, really do want to help you. I talked to one on the phone who assured me that she would put the necessary copies of my birth certificate in the mail without further delay. They have arrived, and have actual signatures and seals that make them look official. A few days later, an in-person visit to the local department of motor vehicles went off fairly smoothly, despite time wasted standing in the wrong line and in front of a lady whose driving privileges were in jeopardy because she had misplaced her social security card. So as of now, I haven’t given up on ever driving or traveling again. As I’ve had to learn as a writer, you can’t be a quitter. If I hit further snags, I’ll persevere, even if it means suing somebody or starting my own movement.

Are Your Characters Despicable?

I requested reviews for my novel Sycophants, published late last year on Amazon, so it’s time to take some flak. Overall, the reviews aren’t bad, and much of the criticism is couched in compliments. Almost everyone thinks the writing is solid, the dialogue is snappy, and the story flows reasonably well. It’s the characters that seem to give critics heartburn. I meant to make them reasonably flawed, like real people. So how did some of them, even ones I don’t think are so bad myself, turn out downright despicable to more than a few readers?

The novel poses some questions about the nature of friendship. Can a relationship possibly be healthy if one of the participants possesses most of the charisma and power, possibly encouraging something that borders on hero worship? In Sycophants, there is a basic imbalance between the co-heroines, Imogene and Sara. They are former college roommates (as depicted in my 2007 novel, The Rock Star’s Homecoming) who team up years later for a movie-making venture. They pick up where they left off at school, with Sara the leader and Imogene the follower.

In their new situation, Sara is the boss of a production company with headquarters in New York City. Imogene has been hired not for any particular qualifications, but because they are old friends. Imogene jumps at the opportunity, having become disenchanted with the mostly clerical jobs she has held in the publishing industry. Her marriage to a young lawyer, also an unequal partnership,  is on the rocks. Somewhat naive and unprepared,  Imogene finds herself scrambling to gain a foothold in the high-powered company. She does manage to benefit from her business association with Sara, as she earns a decent salary, plays at being a publicist, and works toward acquiring some credits as a screenwriter. But there’s no way she can catch up to her friend.

It isn’t that Sara is the worst boss in the world. In fact, she is fairly generous in putting up with Imogene’s early miscues, for which another supervisor advocates firing her on the spot. Still, the super-busy Sara blows hot and cold. One moment she might chide Imogene for overstepping her authority; in the next breath, she might exhort her to develop more of a backbone. There are limits to how much Sara can prod Imogene toward success; the neophyte will have to do that herself.

I never intended Sara to be “despicable,” although she does tend to collect “sycophants” through the force of her personality. Her older brother Jake, a fading rock star, is the one who uses that word to describe his sister’s  relationships. He’s offended when Sara proposes to salvage his career by putting him in a movie, although his grumbling doesn’t prevent him from accepting her help.

Not every reader finds this friendship weird or the characters totally unlikable. Some comments fell along the lines of “flawed, not perfect, just as in real life.” Some thought the chemistry between Sara and Imogene had potential. Others felt the need to refer to the “friends” in quotes. To paraphrase one reader, “These people might be realistic, but I’m glad I don’t know them!” They are pegged as users, especially Sara. “Friendship to her is a one-way street,” another reader says, adding that Imogene is too much of a wimp to avoid being her prime victim. Why, these critics demand, can’t Imogene learn to stand up for herself, benefit from experience, and take responsibility? (I had hoped the story demonstrated her doing more of those things as time passed).

The most extreme reaction came from a reader who professed to like the writing, but not the book. She admitted to being predisposed against the “coming of age” genre (although that’s something of a stretch, as my characters start off in their late twenties, having left college about eight years before). For this reader, sycophantic behavior equates to being obsequious and brown-nosing. She concludes, “I’m not sure I’ve ever despised characters so thoroughly.” I’m kind of flattered that I evoked such a strong reaction, even if I didn’t exactly mean to!

I can understand why readers take Imogene to task for bad choices. One observes wisely, “Working for a good friend isn’t always a good idea; neither is blaming your husband for your career failures.” It’s always incumbent on authors to get readers to care what happens to their characters; not caring enough, as one critic says, tends to slow down the reading. Sara’s company is stacked with ambitious people besides herself, and blind ambition tends to make them all unlikable from the start, even before they get to be out-and-out sycophants. Imogene is also taken to task for assuming that her husband is cheating on her and acting accordingly, without real proof (although her suspicions turn out to be true).

To sum up, they are “all shallow, money-driven users with no redeeming qualities. No true villains but no heroes either.” It was suggested that if I had put in a few “true villains,” it might have made the “minor villains” seem less bad. I did introduce an armed kidnapper, but he might have come off as more deluded than evil. And maybe the perpetually drunk minor musicians, who are prone to settling their artistic differences with their fists, served more as comic relief.

Once in a while you get a criticism that you actually like! One reader thought I was emotionally distant from my characters, more in the vein of 19th century literature than modern writing. As a former English major who often prefers the old style myself, I really can’t get too upset about that. If it means my book is somewhat “literary,” I’m all for it.

I’d be interested to know how many of my fellow authors have taken a similar trip with their characters. Have you set out to make them realistically flawed, but perhaps gone too far and accidentally made them despicable?

Sylvia Plath’s Final Act

I’m finding Sylvia Plath’s second volume of letters, covering the years 1956 to 1963, even more fascinating than the first. These are the letters that take her from happy newlywed to deserted, suicidal housewife. Through it all, almost until the very end, Sylvia’s writing kept coming―poems, stories, essays, book reviews, one novel published and another partly drafted, broadcasts for the BBC. She enjoyed a fair amount of success and recognition, although her true fame was posthumous. In the letters she mostly conveyed happiness and contentment in her domestic life and creative excitement about her writing. Most of her correspondents, even those who knew details of her breakdown during her college years, must have assumed that she was fully recovered and doing well.

Both she and her husband, Ted Hughes, decided to forego stable jobs as college teachers for riskier but more satisfying careers as writers. Sylvia devoted herself to family life, giving birth to two children whom she adored, and supported Ted unstintingly in his writing. His fame was greater than hers, which she believed was proper and justified. Her love for him, by some accounts, could be smothering. She came to realize herself that the loss of her father at an early age had most likely triggered this possessiveness. There were times when she couldn’t bear to let Ted out of her sight, for fear he would disappear forever. Eventually, the pressure became overwhelming. and led to an explosion. After six turbulent but mostly happy years, Ted threw it all over, shockingly and suddenly, by taking up with another woman, and probably more than one. Sylvia’s rage was unrelenting, and strongly influenced her writing from then on.

The most intriguing and ominous of these letters are the ones she wrote from her home in England to the psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, who had treated her at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard, during her first breakdown in 1953. These were the letters that Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, highlighted in her introduction to the volume. Frieda had only recently encountered these letters herself. Reading them must have been an excruciating experience, but she insisted that they be included in the volume. Frieda opines that not everything her mother wrote can be taken at face value. There are alternate accounts from other sources of some incidents described in the letters, many of which cast doubt on her interpretations. At the very least, it seems Sylvia was prone to exaggeration. Frieda herself wrestled with some of the worst allegations against her beloved father.

Sylvia’s letters to Dr. Beuscher began well before there seemed to be anything seriously wrong with the Hughes marriage. Perhaps they were mostly intended for reassurance. By the time she wrote the last one, Sylvia was aware that history was repeating itself. She had been reading reviews of her recently published novel, The Bell Jar, and pronounced them mostly “raves,” but she seemed to take no pleasure in that. On the contrary, she described the novel as the story of her “first breakdown.” She seemed to acknowledge that a second breakdown, much like the first, was in progress.

Before the book was published, Sylvia wrote a detailed letter to her British publisher in response to his inquiries about libel concerns. She reassured him that the book was fiction and wouldn’t be subject to lawsuits. Many of her claims that certain characters were entirely fictional seem disingenuous. Anyone who has studied her life would recognize the genesis of those characters … the clueless boyfriend, the perpetually put-upon mother, the romance-writer benefactor, the fellow mental hospital inmate (who eventually did sue the estate), and many others.  Far from making up these characters, Sylvia totally nailed them. She knew she got too close to the truth, which prompted her decision to publish the novel under a pseudonym. In the end, her brutality toward some of the people who helped her through that crisis seemed to give her pangs of conscience, and probably contributed to her distress after the book appeared.

The Bell Jar was not her first attempt at a long work. She tried for years to write a “positive novel,” a happily-ever-after story about her courtship at Cambridge University and marriage to Ted. The novel proved to be difficult because, as she wrote to a friend, she couldn’t get beyond “what really happened.” She had also planned a sequel to The Bell Jar, to demonstrate that everything turned out fine for her heroine, “Esther,” who would find love and professional success. But Ted’s desertion blasted that, and she reportedly burned the only copy of that book in a sacrificial fire. Somehow, she could never refashion her narrative to make it come out better.

During her downward spiral in the summer of 1953, she had written desperate journal entries, begging herself to escape from the quicksand that was her mental state. She knew objectively that she was loved and admired by many, as a nearly straight-A scholarship student at prestigious Smith College, with more publications to her credit than almost anyone else her age. But several discouraging events hit her all at once that summer: an unsettling experience as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, a rejection for a writing course she’d hoped to take in summer school, and difficulty getting started on her senior thesis about James Joyce, a notoriously impenetrable subject. Eventually, she became convinced that she couldn’t write anymore, or even read. Her sleeping and eating were affected. Her mind was a quagmire that she couldn’t dig herself out of, no matter how sternly she ordered herself to snap out of it. That led her to a desperate act from which she was fortunate to be saved.

A similar paralysis overcame her in 1963, as can be seen via her increasingly desperate letters to Dr. Beuscher. Outwardly, she had refashioned her life after Ted’s desertion, leaving the country home where she felt buried and establishing herself and the children in a London flat. She knew she had the makings of a renewed life. She had her babies to live for, and her writing was flourishing in a new way since she’d thrown off her own bonds of domesticity. She cherished some hope that once she had released Ted from the smothering marriage, and established herself as an independent woman, he would be less of a bastard. Perhaps they could even renew the literary partnership that had been so fruitful.

She tried gallantly, but her final letter to Dr. Beuscher signaled that she was losing the battle. Once again, her depression was a quicksand:  “I am scared to death that I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up … I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up .. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking, yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it.” She begged Dr. Beuscher for the reassurances that would pull her out of this “damned, self-induced freeze … this ghastly, defeatist cycle.”

Sylvia’s desperation was heartbreaking, and makes me want to cry for her. I wish that she had found the right tools to master herself. It has been speculated that modern psychiatry could have done more for her. Back then the profession was just beginning to explore the possible physical components to mental illness. She’d been referred to a specialist who intended to analyze her menstrual cycle and its possible effect on her moods. That referral, although promising, came too late. One morning, after taking care to protect her children, she turned on the gas. She ensured their safety for the moment, but there was no protecting them from that horrible legacy.

Riverdale Runs Wild

In a fit of nostalgia, I recently watched the two seasons of “Riverdale” that are currently available on Netflix. I thought it might be fun to re-experience my childhood enjoyment of the Archie Comics, which captured teenage life in a small town.  I wasn’t yet a teenager when I started reading the comics in the early 1960s, so they mostly gave me a sense of what I had to look forward to, assuming  my own teenage years turned out fairly normal.  There were characters that represented all possible stereotypes … nice and well-behaved Betty, vampy and privileged Veronica, all-American Archie, lazy Jughead, cool-cat Reggie, dumb jock Moose, and so on. In later years, more characters were added to increase the diversity of the cast.

I identified most with Betty, who had a blond ponytail and  a sweet, innocent-looking face. Although she was friends with raven-haired Veronica, she was uncomfortably aware that “Ronnie” was sexier and richer than she. To complicate matters, they both liked Archie and took turns dating him, although Ronnie was also known to flirt with the more suave Reggie. Would typical teenage dramas like these be enough to carry a modern-type streaming series?

Apparently, Netflix doesn’t think so. (Spoiler alert for anybody planning to watch this). The series begins with a literal bang … the murder of a popular student during summer vacation. His family immediately comes under suspicion, since his parents are a little creepy and his twin sister isn’t known to be a good girl. In fact, it comes to light that she was helping her brother run away from home with Betty’s older sister, who was pregnant with his child, when the gunshot rang out. That’s the mystery that sets all of the intrigue in motion, and then it keeps piling on. During the subsequent school year, more murders and attempted murders pop up. Someone who calls himself the Black Hood is wreaking havoc and sending cryptic messages to the newspaper … and also calling Betty’s cell phone, although she has no idea why she’s the target of his weird rambling. And as if this weren’t enough, copycats terrorists get in the act and strike at various times, such as during a mayoral debate and a school musical.

I found myself wondering if I could possibly identify with this wildly enhanced version of Betty, who still has the ponytail but not the innocence. I guess I could, if I suspected my dad was a serial killer, and especially if I had managed to develop sufficient journalistic skills while working on the school newspaper to enable me to uncover some horrifying clues. And maybe if I came to realize that I, too, harbored a certain “darkness” within that could compel me to commit murder for the greater good … even if my intended victim were someone I had thought for a short time was my long-lost brother.

Some comic relief is provided by the irate principal of Riverdale High. He has ample justification for his daily temper tantrums and habit of summoning kids into his office to hear his diatribes. His school is hardly a well-oiled machine; it’s barely a school at all. Most of the kids (except maybe Moose and Reggie and a few gang members) are obviously smart enough to solve complex mysteries that baffle even the chief of police. They’re at an age when they should be thinking about college and taking demanding AP classes in preparation. Even the formerly lazy Jughead has been reconstituted as anything but that, although he sports the same trademark wool cap in every season and situation. He’s probably the most complex of the revised characters, an aspiring writer and crusader for good who is also a gang member. He’s dating nice-on-the-surface Betty in this scenario, but since his dad used to be the leader of the pack, that side of his nature  is never far from the surface.

Schoolwork at Riverdale High is an afterthought, if that. I never saw any of the kids do a lick of homework, although they sometimes tell their parents they have a lot of it. That’s just a handy dodge, it seems, to avoid supervision at home. Once left alone in their rooms, they’re free to get on their computers and phones, not to write themes or work out math problems, but to exchange the latest scandalous news and clues. Nor do the kids adhere to any curfews, as they always seem to be roaming the streets in the dead of night. Once in a while they do sit in a classroom, but the lesson at hand never grabs their attention. How could mere schoolwork compete with their real dramas?

To put it mildly, this is quite a new take on an old classic. There is barely enough time for all of the red herrings introduced in every episode to be chased down. Did the producers go too far in turning what used to be innocent entertainment totally on its head? Or are they just having some fun by pulling our legs?

Corralling A Hot Mess

I’ve reached a milestone of sorts in my semi-illustrious self-publishing career. I have finally disposed of a story that has been cooking inside my brain forever, that has kept on haunting me even as I set it aside and went forward with other unrelated novels because they seemed to come easier. I’ve somehow corralled the scraps of this tale that have lurked ever since I first began to entertain an imaginary friend in childhood. That “friendship” has persisted well into middle age. She still hangs around, advising me and leading by example, since she possesses all the aggressiveness that I lack. She’s the leader of the story, a composite of strong women I have known and admired, while the character based on me is the follower. The story has always been called “Sycophants,” even as it went through revisions too numerous to count. I fear it’s a somewhat self-deprecating title that pegs my heroine, Imogene, as less than heroic, although she does manage to conquer a few demons here and there.

The outlines of Sycophants came to me during my college years in the early 1970s. I was an introvert who tended to gravitate toward the take-charge personalities in my dorm. My college was in rural Maryland, a very pretty spot, but I often longed to escape to New York City, over 200 miles away. A previous novel, The Rock Star’s Homecoming, published in 2007, dealt with college roommates Sara and Imogene as they embarked on a road trip to the big city. Their mission was to bring back the homegrown band fronted by Sara’s brother Jake, now a famous rock star, to perform at the annual Homecoming concert. Sycophants is a sequel to that novel, in which the original characters have grown up and are now laying the groundwork for their fondest dream, a movie production company. My blurb describes Imogene as a country girl by birth who determines to leave the farm where she grew up and join her former roommate in this exciting venture.

I’ve “finished” the manuscript for this story a few times before, only to abandon it as awkward, uncontrollable, and illogical. In short, it was a hot mess that wouldn’t seem to cool down. For starters, I didn’t know enough about the movie business, and what would be plausible in a do-it-yourself situation in the late 1980s. So I began to read numerous books about all aspects of film-making. I presented the first chapter to a critique group that gave it a real beat-down, leaving me incredulous as to how I could have made so many missteps in just twenty pages. Since traditional publishing was the only real option then, I queried a few places. A few literary agents admitted to liking the concept, but that was as far as it got.

The various manuscripts for Sycophants have a storied history, grinding through all kinds of primitive technology. I typed it on my first computer, purchased around 1987, a Kaypro which had no hard drive and could only store ten pages at a time on floppy disks. Over the years, as the available technology evolved, I transferred it to each new computer. There were times when the ideas flowed smoothly, and other times when they got tangled. I started from scratch more than once.

Now I’m done with it … at least for the moment. I had what I thought was a semi-decent rough draft by May 2018. I reread the whole thing to make sure it was minimally coherent, at least to my own eyes. My current critique group, a much more helpful bunch than the previous one, had beta-read it a few pages at a time, making many useful suggestions. However, that system didn’t allow for an overall assessment. I found that the story hung together, but that the language needed either tightening up or fleshing out in numerous places. I went through the rewriting process at least five times between May and October.

Finally, after farming out the cover design and line editing, I decided to publish directly to Amazon for the first time. My previous four novels were published by iUniverse, and received the Editor’s Choice designation. The last two of those novels, Let’s Play Ball and Handmaidens of Rock, went through the full developmental edit process, which I found thorough and professional. This time I went with only a line edit, not the full process, simply because I had rewritten it so many times myself that I just couldn’t face doing it again. I was something of an editor myself in my Federal government career, and I critique other writers’ work on occasion, so I’m not totally helpless in that area. Still, this feels something like walking a tightrope without a net. But having decided that perfection is the enemy of progress, I determined to let  my “life’s work” fly. At least I’m confident that the professionally designed cover reflects what the book is about … amateurs and semi-amateurs trying to worm or pay their way into the movie business.

But in Amazon’s system, is anything really finished? The files are always available to be unloaded, revised, and reloaded. To my disgust and chagrin, there were a few errors that I didn’t catch until I had the published paperback in my hands. Formatting errors, as long as they’re few and far between, don’t trouble me much. That seems unavoidable, with all the format changes that a manuscript has to go through to be readable on various devices, as well as ready to print. At least the story seems to flow and cohere as well as I could make it. The one thing that made me break out into a cold sweat was discovering that I twice used the wrong name for a minor character. I cursed myself, while wondering if anybody else would notice or care.

I’m sure many of my fellow authors have stories churning in their heads that they can’t seem to finish, but that won’t let them go either. These days it’s fairly easy to go “live” with your books, whether they’re perfect or not. Do you ever get to the point where your work is absolutely finished, and never to be touched or altered again?

A novel about film-making can’t exist without a video, so here’s the link:

If Roseanne Were A Novelist

I was a longtime viewer of Roseanne Barr’s original television show, which ran from 1988 to 1997 on ABC.  The early years of the Conner family, with Dan and Roseanne struggling to make a living and raise three kids, were by far the best, in my opinion. The stories were funny and true to life. The parents, besides working various blue-collar jobs, were brave and foolhardy enough to start their own businesses. The two daughters, beginning as an early teenager and a pre-teen, and the younger son, went through all the normal growing pains: dating, social awkwardness, peer pressure, the beginning of menstruation, birth control, and even masturbation. All of it was believable and sensitively done.

In its later years the series began to lose its attraction for me … slowly at first, and then totally. Changes are inevitable in a series as long-running as this one, as the kids grow up, acquire partners, and face more adult issues. Still, I’ve heard speculation that some of the more startling changes corresponded with Roseanne herself acquiring more control over the story lines. She has been very honest over the years about her struggles with mental illness. Reportedly, she spent ten years working with a therapist to integrate her multiple personalities. That was no doubt a courageous battle. But since she was, by her own admission, not always in touch with reality, she might have been smarter to allow the network authorities veto power over some of her more bizarre creative decisions.

The last two years of the series, in particular, could be a case study in how not to wrap up a long-running television show. It was apparently Roseanne’s idea to have the Connors win the lottery and become instantaneously, fabulously wealthy. That’s the development that lost me as a regular viewer. It simply wasn’t realistic, and not something any ordinary person can relate to. Later, the famously weird final episode of the series finished the job of blowing up everything that had been relatable about the early show, and pulling the rug out from under its loyal viewers. That was when the Roseanne character revealed herself as her own creator, and declared that she had taken the liberty of rewriting her life story to make it turn out “right.” She enumerated various “true” facts that she had altered: that Dan Conner had died of the heart attack he had supposedly survived; that the two daughters were actually married to each other’s husbands; and that Roseanne’s mother, who had discovered she was gay in the course of the series, wasn’t the family member who evolved in that way. Instead, it was her sister Jackie, practically a heterosexual nymphomaniac throughout most of the series. All of these were excruciatingly clever twists that made absolutely no sense.

I watched the recent reboot of the series out of curiosity, despite my discomfort with Roseanne’s tendency toward political ranting. Having been an extreme leftist not all that long ago, she took a violent swing in the other direction. Apparently, at some point during the Obama administration, when she was thinking of running for president on the green party ticket, she’d become convinced that the incumbent president was out to get her personally. That outburst of paranoia should have been a clear indication that her mental illness was not entirely under control.

Yet before her latest full plunge into racism, her eccentricities were bearable. Although extreme right-wing views are tough for us progressives to swallow, most of us are willing to listen to them as long as they can be related to real-world events and struggles. Certainly the Conner family continues to have more than its share of such hardships, but is that enough of an explanation? It would have been helpful if Roseanne’s character had explained her views, instead of spouting wild conspiracy theories and insulting those who disagreed, in imitation of a certain president we know all too well. Maybe that more nuanced view would have come to the surface in time, if she had been allowed to survive on the show. Instead, she was fired, and her character was killed off.

My real problem with Roseanne is bad writing. She may have acquired more creative control over her original show, but she never developed the mentality of a novelist. That requires a writer to envision the big picture, and to discard any plot twists, however clever, that don’t serve that purpose. That’s what we have developmental editors for. In order to revive the series (renamed “The Conners” after her departure), she had to blow up much of her original vision, backtracking on many of her questionable creative decisions. For example, Dan didn’t really die, the Conners didn’t really win the lottery, the daughters kept their original husbands, and her sister was not gay.

It’s too bad the imaginary Roseanne had to die. Even at her ornery worst, she was the central character, the one vivid  point around which all the plot craziness swirled. The real Roseanne might have saved her alter ego by apologizing sincerely for her blatant racism, and preferably closing the twitter account that got her in trouble. But her many explanations for her hate-filled diatribes were contradictory, and her attitude finally became defiant instead of apologetic. Hence, the overdose of painkillers that killed off her character.

Those left behind have their interesting points. The two daughters are continuing the combative relationship they had as kids, while repeating many of their parents’ experiences with under-employment, parenthood, addictive behavior, etc. It seems sister Jackie was brought back mostly to serve as Roseanne’s liberal counterpoint, since her backstory from the original series has been ignored so far. DJ, the son, has an inter-racial marriage to a military spouse, which seems to have dramatic potential. Dan’s dry-wall business is still going, barely; his use of immigrant labor has come up as a topical issue. But none of this is as interesting as Roseanne herself. I wanted to learn what became of her in the long run. Would she evolve back to someone more sane, believable, and admirable? Given her volatility in the past, anything would have been possible.