I had two ideas early in the morning: The character of Shaun still being hard to pin down, I ought to have him appear first of the other characters. Perhaps Hap picks him up in Wenatchee and brings him up to Chelan and they talk. This establishes his character in readers’ minds before they have a chance to focus on anyone else.

Secondly, I need to begin the book with a problem for Hap, a problem he seeks to solve throughout the narrative. He will be tempted to solve the problem by submitting to the temptations offered by the other characters.

Perhaps Shaun is one who does not offer an explicit temptation, but then we find out that the temptation he offers -- whatever it is -- is more insidious than the rest.

Popular posts from this blog

Datamining your Twitter feed

Just as I predicted in How They Scored: Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines. -- Kara Swisher, All Things D
Read more
Yesterday I wrote about 2500 words as a backstory to Shaun... this morning I wrote another 2000, and I only now have just picked up Shaun. Most of that was a story about a girlfriend they shared, Robin. I modeled her on the real Robin I slept with only once or twice back in 1980 -- a cheerful blond girl who had not lost all her babyfat, whom I met doing contact improv. There was one memorable moment in my affair with her -- the moment I came inside her. Other than that, I remember walking her to her place over on Parnassus afterward, and running into her and her mother on a Muni bus some time later after we had mostly lost touch with each other, and trying to keep up a correspondence with her when she moved back to Washington, DC. She was someone I never really knew much about -- I don't know whether that was because she was rather young and unformed, or because I was too self-centered to pay attention. Probably a little of both. Anyway, I kept the blond cheerfulness, the blandness...
Read more

Why do people report on themselves?

Image
Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...
Read more