S.G. Browne

2011 speeds along toward its inevitable end, leaving Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day in its wake, the holiday season no longer on the distant horizon but rising up out of the depths like some mythological beast, ready to smash us to pieces.

As you might have figured out, I’m not prepared for the holiday season. It seems like just a few weeks ago I was dressed up like Uncle Sam, selling illegal fireworks to middle school kids.

How did this happen? Where did the rest of the year go? When did Thanksgiving follow summer?

I guess it doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving is upon us, or at least upon me, and that means it’s time to reflect upon the things in my life I’m thankful for. Which is easier than having to deal with New Year’s resolutions. That’s way too much pressure. At least with Thanksgiving, I don’t have to worry about breaking any promises.

So I’ve decided to list the things I’m thankful for in the universe of writing. No reason. I just wanted a theme. I chose 24 because that’s the date on which Thanksgiving falls this year.

So here they are, in no particular order. 24 Writing Related Things for Which I’m Thankful:

1) My agent
2) My editor
3) My readers (Thank you for the support)
4) Stephen King
5) Chuck Palahniuk
6) Ray Bradbury
7) The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
8) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
9) Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
10) The screenplays of Charlie Kaufman
11) Haiku
12) Spell check
13) Copy editors
14) Brick and mortar bookstores
15) The comedic writing of Matt Stone and Trey Parker
16) Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
17) Oscar Wilde
18) Mark Twain
19) Book reviewers (positive reviews are a bonus)
20) My writer’s group
21) My writing community (both in the real and cyber world)
22) The song writing skills of Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day
23) Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney
24) Books that aren’t electronic

That about wraps it up. Now it’s time to go make garlic mashed potatoes for the annual family gorge fest. I’m always in charge of the mashed potatoes. I think it’s because I use two sticks of butter and a cup of sour cream.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m not a big fan of long chapters.

I prefer my chapters short and manageable. Chapters that give me some dialogue, some action, some character building, some plot movement, and don’t screw around with excessive description or weighty exposition or ten-page flashbacks.

Call me a product of Hollywood movies.

Plus short chapters give me a definite place to stop. With long chapters I always feel like I’m being forced to keep reading to the end when sometimes I just want to roll over and go to sleep. At least give me a break in the middle of the chapter, a space or a line of asterisks or some fancy little symbol so I don’t have to pick up the book mid-scene and try to remember where I stopped and what was going on. It’s like stopping in the middle of a conversation while you’re at a bar and trying to remember what you were talking about before you did another shot of Jagermeister.

Writing a chapter is like giving a speech. You really only have 3-5 minutes before people lose their interest. But because I’m being generous, let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes. Tops. After that, eyes are turning glassy and people are wondering where to take their next vacation and what to have for dinner and and how to kill their boss without going to jail.

Book chapters should be governed by the same rules. 10-15 pages, max. You exceed that and I’m flipping forward, wondering how much longer it’s going to take me to finish this damn chapter so I can feel like I have a sense of closure.

Yes, I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive. But so are you. Admit it.

Right now I’m reading Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, which at 415 pages and 20 chapters averages nearly 21 pages per chapter. To make matters worse, the book is written in 10-point Times Roman so there’s more than 400 words per page. Come on! That’s a good 100 words per page more than Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island, which is written in 12-point Times Roman and, at 354 pages and 31 chapters, comes in at a much more reasonable 11.4 pages per chapter.

Bing, bang, boom.

In this age where e-mails and text messages and Facebook status updates have replaced hand-written letters and phone calls and actual conversations, where in another generation Twitter will have made it impossible for anyone to have any kind of interaction that’s longer than 140 characters, I think short chapters are definitely going to be in demand.

Fortunately I’m already ahead of the game, as Breathers, with 310 pages and 58 chapters, comes in at 5.3 pages per chapter (PPC), while Fated (352 pages and 54 chapters) has a PPC of 6.5.

Ka-ching!

After going through a random sampling on my bookshelf, I discovered that the majority of my favorite novels have short chapters, with The Great Gatsby being one exception to the rule with a PPC of 20. And nearly every novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Moore, and Kurt Vonnegut comes in with a PPC of less than 10.

True, Slaughterhouse Five has only 10 chapters and a PPC of just over 20, but each chapter is broken up into as many as 80 separate sections and some of the chapters even have pictures. Bonus! So it’s still technically in the club. And then there’s Cat’s Cradle with 191 pages and 127 chapters for a PPC of 1.5, which is by far the lowest PPC of any novel I’ve ever read and sets the bar for ADD readers and Twitter-philes.

Can I have a hallelujah?

Conversely, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has nearly 35 pages per chapter for the entire trilogy, which probably explains why I never made it past The Fellowship of the Ring. You ask me, it needed more pictures.

Here are some other notable books I own and their PPC quotient (based on the copies on my shelf):

• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (214 pages / 26 chapters / 8.2 ppc)

• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (218 pages / 31 chapters / 7.0 ppc)

• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (309 pages / 36 chapters / 8.6 ppc)

• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (231 pages / 32 chapters / 7.2 ppc)

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (288 pages / 23 chapters / 12.5 ppc)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (143 pages / 35 chapters / 4.1 ppc)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (322 pages / 43 chapters / 7.5 ppc)

• High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (323 pages / 35 chapters / 9.2 ppc)

• The Stand, Stephen King (817 pages / 66 chapters / 12.4 ppc) *The original version, not the complete and uncut version, which has a PPC of 14.8

So where do you sit? Long chapters? Short chapters? Tequila shots instead of Jagermeister? Have at it. Or not. It’s a free country.

So I decided to give myself a break from rewrites of Lucky Bastard last night and watch a movie.

I had Rachel Getting Married from Netflix all cued up in my DVD player when I caught the end of the Family Guy episode “Something, Something, Something Dark Side” on TV, which is a parody of The Empire Strikes Back, and I decided to watch Star Wars again for the first time in nearly ten years. On VHS.

Yes, I still own a VHS. And I have a cathode ray tube television that weighs a thousand pounds. I have trouble getting rid of things that still work.

But back to Star Wars.

While I still have a soft spot for what was the most awe-inspiring and memorable movie-going experience of my life (having seen the original release at the Festival Cinemas in Hayward in 1977), I discovered that the writer in me couldn’t abide several problems in the film that I used to be able to overlook.

For one thing, the Stormtroopers need some target practice. Sure, you can argue that on the Death Star they were missing on purpose to allow the good guys to escape so they could track them to the rebel base, but throughout the film they were about as accurate as a weather forecast.

Speaking of shooting, when you have a single point of entry to defend where only one stormtrooper can come through at at time (like when the stormtroopers are coming out of the elevator into the detention block), it seems like Han and Chewbacca could have picked them off one by one as they came out. Not that I have any experience fighting with plasma bolt weapons, but it seems reasonable to me. Just sayin’.

But the part that really gets me is at the end of the movie when the Death Star approaches the planet Yavin, on the other side of which sits the moon that is home to the rebel base. With all of that “ultimate power in the universe” hyperbole, couldn’t the Death Star just blow up Yavin to get to the moon and take care of wiping out the rebellion in a matter of minutes? Instead, the Death Star goes into a leisurely orbit around the planet, which takes thirty minutes and gives the rebels plenty of time to attack the Death Star and blow it up.

Lame. Not as lame as regurgitating the same plot point in Return of the Jedi, but still lame.

If there’s one thing that irks me in films, it’s contrived or inexplicable plot points that allow the story to unfold in a manner inconsistent with the existing story elements.

But then, George Lucas has a bazillion dollar movie franchise and his own special effects company and a campus in the Presidio in San Francisco with a Yoda water fountain out in front of it, so what do I know?

When I was two years old, I used to greet my father when he came home from work and convey to him the exploits of my day. He would watch me with this bemused expression and nod his head and say “That’s great” without having any idea of what I was saying, causing me to throw myself on the floor and scream and kick and cry because he didn’t understand me.

This is all according to my mom. I don’t have any recollection of these moments of communication frustration. Nor do I have any recollection of calling my pacifier a “loodela” (pronounced loo-da-lah). It was like I was speaking another language. Something Germanic, I’m guessing.

As I grew older, my speech began to resemble something closer to English, but I still had trouble with certain letters, like U’s and R’s. So words like “fork” came out sounding more like I was from South Boston. Apparently, this was a great source of amusement for my parents as their five-year-old son would say things like: “Where’s my fuhk?” or “I need a fuhk.”

Doesn’t everyone?

However, I do recall a not-so-amusing moment when I was seven years old and, frustrated with my mom about something that had just occurred, I yelled out “It’s all your fault!” and stormed up the stairs to my bedroom. Only because of my speech problem, what my mom heard instead was “It’s all your fart!”

I don’t know what that means, exactly. I guess it implies definitive ownership of the fart. But I do know it was enough to get my mom to follow me up the stairs and wash my mouth out with a bar of soap. Ivory. Dove. Palmolive. I don’t know what flavor it was. And I didn’t imagine myself going blind like Ralphie in A Christmas Story but let me tell you, it didn’t taste too good.

And what does this have to do with writing? (Scratches his head to try to remember where he was going with this.) Ah yes. It has to do with communicating your ideas to others. Using language and characters and plot to convey what it is you want to say to your readers. Getting your point across. As another author (I believe it was Nigel Hamilton) once said:

“If the reader doesn’t understand what you’re saying, then you’re just talking to yourself.”

I suppose you could say it would be the equivalent of literary masturbation.

I think that’s something writers just take for granted. Not the literary masturbation part, but the ability to communicate.The idea that the story we create in our heads makes it to the page without losing something in the process.

When my writing group read my initial drafts of Breathers, Fated, and Lucky Bastard, they brought up a number of questions about the worlds I’d created. I didn’t withhold this information on purpose, but the story made sense to me when I initially told it. After all, I’m the creator of the universe, so naturally it all makes sense to me.

It wasn’t until I got feedback from the other members of my group that I realized I needed to do a better job of getting my ideas across. I needed to convey the concepts in my head so that the reader would enjoy the story and understand what I was trying to say.

Which is why rewriting is such an integral part of my writing process. It’s where I get to fix the problems. Where I get to craft and shape the story. Where I get to clarify what it is I’m trying to say so I’m not just talking to myself. Sometimes this process can include as many as half a dozen rewrites before the manuscript reaches my agent. That’s followed by a round of edits with my editor, then another three rounds of line edits, copy edits, and proof edits before it’s finally ready to publish.

I guess you could say that if writing the novel is the equivalent of giving birth to it, then rewriting it is like raising it and teaching it everything you know before sending it out into the world.

After that, you just hope it doesn’t throw a tantrum or get its mouth washed out with soap.

Just a quick round-up of a few new things going on that I wanted to share:

New Interview
First off, I have a new interview up on ShadowCast Audio (though it’s a text interview, not audio) where I discuss laughing at inappropriate moments, the hardest thing about writing, the possibility of sequels to Breathers and Fated, and why afternoon naps should be mandatory.

New Conventions
Next up, I’ll be at the World Horror Convention at the Doubletree Hotel in Austin, TX, from April 27 – May 1. While the convention itself isn’t new, I’ve never been to Austin, so there you go. And although the convention does run through the weekend, I’ll be leaving Saturday to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC, which is new for me. On Sunday, May 1, I have a scheduled signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Books booth, #372 with Christopher Farnsworth, Debra Ginsberg, and Steve Hockensmith. I’ll post more details about Austin and Los Angeles on Monday.

New Book
And last, but certainly not least, my third novel, Lucky Bastard, has been sold to Simon & Schuster with a tentative publication date of Spring 2012. Lucky Bastard is a dark comedy and a bit of a mystery/noir about a private detective who lives in San Francisco, has an addiction to corporate coffeehouse baristas, and who was born with the ability to steal luck.

That’s all I’ve got time for today. Thanks for listening. And Happy Easter!