How They Scored

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

2009-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

Reader review: 'Unexpected... a diverting read'

2009-12-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Lisa B wrote a very nice review of HOW THEY SCORED. An excerpt:

After the men gather, the plot picks up steam and their interactions increase, with Pritchard quietly portraying a shifting dance of male alliance and competition. Their picaresque sex tales start to cast a subtler light on their characters. The story of the Serbian fashion model ends poignantly. A tale of a threesome takes an unexpected turn, with the storyteller unable to perform, feeling both sentimental about an old girlfriend and ambivalent about the suddenly aggressive behavior of his current one. In short, the scorekeeping of these men becomes less about tallying up sexual conquests and more about assessing their own strengths and weaknesses -- and the elusiveness of their desires.

Wow, thanks Lisa!

More oversharing

2009-10-16T16:14:00.000-07:00

Just in case you wanted to have a standard system for bragging to the internets how often you bang, now there's Bedpost, an online sex tracking tool.

The rest of this post writes itself.

Choosing between a job and a social networking identity

2009-10-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

According to this article, some employers not only are searching the internet for discouraging information on you, but a few companies have asked interviewees for their passwords to their social networking accounts.

What in holy Christ.

For many people, I think the choice would not be whether or not to give up this information. It would be whether or not to reply calmly, "Why do you want that?" or flipping the bird and walking out.

I accept that whatever I put on the internet has to be regarded as public knowledge. If I post it, it's there for anyone to see. I might put a warning on it, or I might hide it behind an obscure or invisible link, but some search bot will find it and display it on search results. I accept that. Indeed, I'm more concerned about someone getting me mixed up with the other Mark Pritchards of the world than I am of someone finding something I did in the past. That's because I've always lived an open life. I'm bisexual, I write porn, I go to church, I've done drugs in the past, I like singing, I used to be a high school teacher. All a matter of public record.

But my life at work is separate from all that. I hope people are adult enough to understand that. I'm not surprised that some fundamentalist Christian academy is not; that a Montana city behaves the same way is only a little less unsurprising. This is another reason I live in San Francisco.

But I mean: asking for your password?? People just have no shame.

Datamining your Twitter feed

2009-10-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

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

Authentication

2009-09-28T12:47:00.001-07:00

Here's a nice discussion of authentication, an information technology concept I mention in "How They Scored," and its implications for online identity.

Now with a nicer cover

2009-09-25T23:17:00.000-07:00

I redid the cover so it's nicer, and I also fixed a page bug so that all the chapters properly start on odd pages. Man, this self-publishing thing is a lot of work.

I really like the picture of the highway, which I took from a State of Texas government website. The whole first half of my book is a road novel so I thought it captured the feeling. The trip is not to Texas but to the mountains of Washington state, but I really like this picture.

Why do people report on themselves?

2009-09-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

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 rewards programs know where you've traveled and what you've bought. The phone company knows, within a few hundred feet, where you made that cell phone call from, and if you have GPS enabled, they know within a few meters.

And so on. Any modern consumer knows all this, so there's no need to go into it at length -- though the Wired story Gone Forever: What does it take to really disappear? is somewhat of an eyeopener, in that it communicates the ease with which some modern-day gumshoes, such as private detectives working for bail bondsmen or insurance companies, can locate you through the databases compiled by airlines, Amazon, Visa and others.

You may or may not feel comfortable with all that tracking and archiving of data about you, but there's not much you can do about it. After all, you "agreed" to it when you signed up for whatever credit card, rewards program, cell phone, etc. etc. you use. Just check your "End User License Agreement."

If this makes you feel just a little bit creeped out, then I would ask you: Why do you have a Facebook page? Why are you on Twitter? Why do you post your name, address, preferences and picture online on any number of sites, from Amazon to Yelp? In my novel How They Scored, I put it this way: Why would you even need an East German-style secret police these days when people are putting so much effort into reporting on themselves, compiling their own dossiers? (We call them online "profiles.")

There's no need to be needlessly paranoid about this. No one (unless he or she is actively stalking you) has hired a private detective to compile a report on the details of your quotidian doings. But they could. Because your life's an open book.

I'm aware of all this and I still tweet what I'm doing, what I just ate, where I am. I still blog about books I read or music I listened to (facts which, if they were in the records of the public library, would require a court order for anyone to access, but I give them away for free). I still have my picture online in a dozen places, along with the neighborhood I live in, and so on.

But I still rebel in small ways. For example, I don't have a Safeway card, but I still take partial advantage of their program. How? I thought to myself, probably most people in the neighborhood of this store have Safeway cards. All I have to do is type in the local telephone exchange and four random numbers. For the Safeway on 29th and Mission, in my neighborhood of San Francisco, that's 415-824-xxxx. And it almost always works. I get my TV dinners 4 for $10 and whoever actually owns the account gets some points toward the purchase of ... whatever Safeway gives. That's my big protest.

The problem of writing erotica from the perspective of straight men

2009-09-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

When I was asked to write a book of sex stories in which the narrators were all straight men, I faced a challenge: What was interesting about straight men?

For years I'd written erotica in which the whole point was to blur the boundaries of traditional sexual identities, to take people who thought they were all one way and show how they could, given the right situation, go the other way and enjoy it. I showed straight men blowing other men, gay men getting off on women watching them masturbate, and tops opening up to being topped by somebody else for the first time. In other words, people losing their inhibitions and having new fun -- the basic currency of erotica.

But what could I do with a group of straight men sitting around talking with each other about sex? (Every time I write that sentence, I start out by saying "talking about sex with each other," then have to reorder the clauses.) Men who really are straight, who won't get all hot and bothered by the storytelling and get it on with each other. Getting it on with each other was not what the book was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about these men getting it on with hot women.

I also faced the challenge of developing several straight male characters who could be distinct from one another for the length of a novel. Shit, I don't even know that many straight people, outside my job. Most of my friends are gay; I'm bi. I dealt with this challenge by going to one of the original source tales showing a bunch of straight men sitting around with each other. No, not the Gospels. Not the Knights of the Round Table. The Seven Dwarves.

The Seven Dwarves (I'll let you name them for yourself, ready? go!) provide the key to the book's characters. Happy is Hap, the main character. Dopey is Denny, a drug addict. Sneezy is Seth, who has allergies and works in biotech. Get it?

Once that was taken care of, I still had to make it hot at book length without, again, having the Seven Dwarves get it on with each other. Of course I could have done that, but that wasn't what my publisher asked for. I found myself dredging up details of practically every opposite-sex relationship I'd had over the years, and made up several I didn't have. I reused a story I told in nonfiction form in Best Sex Writing 2006. I turned people I knew, and some I'd barely run into -- such as the annoying salesman type who sat next to me at a sushi bar in Las Vegas in 2004 -- into characters. And I did it all in six months.

So to return to the original question: What was interesting about straight men? The way they shove themselves cheerfully into situations without much thought. The way they think everything revolves around them. The fact they'll do anything to get laid.

Companies rated for privacy reputation

2009-09-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

A survey rated companies on privacy, with Google "conspicuously absent" from the top 10. I love that the US Postal Service was included. Frankly, I do trust the post office more than, say, Google. A vast bureaucracy plus a unionized workforce equals nice slow responses to court orders.

Why do people believe in highly improbably conspiracies?

2009-09-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

This article in Scientific American says:

The problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

The book is now on sale!

2009-09-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

How They Scored is now on sale from the Lulu Print on Demand website. They produce a nice product, and it's a book I'm proud of. Buy the book. It's funny, sexy, and you're probably in it.

Assuming another identity

2009-09-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

This story on wired.com, about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored.

The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days.

There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I read, music I listen to -- no. It's already creepy enough to see my house from space on Google Maps, to see on Amazon that people who live in my zip code read scads of self-help books...

And then there's the American fantasy of disappearing. ... I might merely want to start over. I love the idea that you can move to a big city or a small town and get lost. Isn't that what hundreds of people did after 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? -- claimed that all their papers were lost, whether or not it was true. Got new ID with a new name, moved to another state, faded into the woodwork.

You can still do that in America -- barely. But with Dreedle, no way. That dead guy whose ID you stole probably liked completely different music, wore completely different clothes, had totally different jobs. Once I started buying Shostakovich CDs and had them delivered to a zip code the dead guy never lived in, a red flag would go up. A complete change in shopping habits combined with a change in address equals the probability of identity theft. That's what it would be called. Not "starting over."

Microsoft's data mining idea

2008-01-23T20:52:00.000-08:00

This is just the kind of thing I wrote about in my book:

Microsoft ponders offline profiling of Web users

By John Letzing, MarketWatch

Last update: 7:02 p.m. EST Jan. 23, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Microsoft Corp. is developing a method of using personal data such as credit-card information to target Internet users with advertising once they connect to the Web, according to a patent application filed by the company.

In an application disclosed earlier this month, a Microsoft team including Chairman Bill Gates presents a method of collecting information about users' "cell phones, geolocation systems, credit-card information" and other data sources to select and display "targeted advertising."

The technology described in the patent application touches on a delicate issue for Microsoft and other online companies such as Google Inc.

Microsoft and its rivals have all sought to gather increasing amounts of personal information about Internet users to deliver advertisements more likely to draw attention. That's because the companies generally earn revenue only when a user clicks on an ad.

Microsoft director of privacy strategy Brendon Lynch said patent applications don't necessarily indicate product plans for the company. But if Microsoft does develop a product based on the new patent application, Lynch said it "will first be reviewed against our privacy standards to ensure that privacy is protected."

Google is currently facing questions in Europe about its own collection of user data.

Bill Gates is listed as an inventor on the patent application, alongside members of various Microsoft research units.

The European Parliament held a public seminar Monday to discuss the privacy implications of technology used by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

"We put great effort into building privacy protections into our products and systems," Google privacy counsel Peter Fleischer wrote in a blog post related to the seminar.

In addition, the European Commission is considering the approval of Google's acquisition of online-advertising firm DoubleClick, a move that many say would unfairly expand Google's store of user data.

In Microsoft's patent application, the company describes a technology that can first better align search results with a users' offline behavior. Then, according to the application, "an advertising component employs the user profile in connection with the delivery of an advertisement."

Offline behavior can include credit-card information such as types of purchases and "payment history," according to the application.

Data relayed by cell-phone towers can also be tapped to locate users, and "tailor search and advertising during online experiences so as to better interpret queries to search engines, to better target advertisements," the application said.

In addition to cell-phone and credit-card use, other offline behavior that can be monitored includes TV-watching habits, the patent forms say.

"If the offline behavior indicates the user was watching a college football game ... if the user goes online during or just after such activity, then an inference could be made that the user is interested in seeing more information about the game as well as being receptive to advertisements selling college-team memorabilia," according to the application.

Gates is listed as an inventor on the patent application, alongside members of various Microsoft research units.

It increasingly has become common for Gates to be listed as an inventor on Microsoft's patent applications, according to public filings. Gates, who co-founded the company in 1975, is expected to step back from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in July to focus more on philanthropy.

Let's get on board with Technorati

2008-01-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

I have a Technorati Profile.

Outsourcing users to Bangalore

2007-12-30T11:55:00.001-08:00

An American startup is paying people in India to sign up for its service so it can show it has 1000s of users.

2007-12-29T19:13:00.000-08:00

Second full day in Chicago. I didn't get much done yesterday; I was feeling kind of sleepy. I managed to go through a number of Christy's comments, but I didn't even finish them. Actually, Christy's individual comments are not what I'm concerned about; most of them deal with small issues and are easily dealt with. What I'm concerned about is the rewriting I have to do, and yesterday I didn't do any of it.

One of the scenes that needs reworking is the story about "Cara" in chapter 10. I based it entirely on C___, and I think it's too close to reality. What I have is a French immigrant who wanted to be monogamous and I have put in all the intimate details of her sexuality. I need to change the former so I can keep the latter. It doesn't matter that the character be a French immigrant, what matters are the compelling details of her body and her sexuality. Since I have a few hours free, I'll try doing that now.

7:00 -- I made it all the way through Christy's comments, and I also rewrote the Cara scene so that it's about a Porteño instead of a Parisienne. Now all I need to know is the Porteño equivalent of "Viens, viens!"

A.: If she was from Madrid I'd have no problem telling you.
Me: I know, but..
Together: I've/You've never been to Madrid.
Me: While I have been to Buenos Aires.

Another thing I need to rewrite is the opening scene. Christy said it seemed strange, that the guy would be rushing off while his hot girlfriend is begging him to do it one more time. Just shows she hasn't lived with a guy.

2007-12-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

I'm in a hotel in downtown Chicago, and will have a few days here to work on HOW THEY SCORED. It's a version of the retreats I've taken in past years -- almost always in December or right before or after New Year's -- to work on or finish books. The difference here is that I'm staying in the hotel room of A., who is in Chicago to attend a conference. ...

Since I finished the first draft 12 days ago, I haven't worked on the book at all, except for a couple of hours yesterday. Christmas intervened, and before that it was the tech manual project that refused to die, so that my initial plan of taking much of the week before Christmas to goof off and work on this book was a complete bust. It was a good thing I finished it on the 15th, because I sure didn't get a chance to even look at it between the 15th and the 26th. Well, the break was good.

It occurs to me that one of the weaknesses of the book is that the whole theme of privacy and security is not integrated with the sex stuff at all. I guess if it were, it would be a really different book -- it would be impossible to have all the sex scenes from a variety of perspectives wind up somehow being about security and privacy.

Still, I want to make the book as smart as possible. While I'm here -- and I should have a good three days to work -- one of the main things I want to do is polish and possibly enhance each sex scene, make them hotter and more pornographic, give them more of a wow factor like my previous books. Right now I think they risk seeming rather vanilla, and I don’t want to disappoint people who are familiar with my other work.

Sometimes instead of thinking about the content of the book, I think about what it means in my career. It will be my first published novel, and I'm keen to get the [erstwhile] publisher to classify it as fiction first and erotica second -- if at all. I don't want it to be pigeonholed. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if instead of fighting it, I shouldn't just be embracing the fact that my genre work has succeeded, thanks in large part to the same publisher, where my other work has not. Plenty of writers make a career out of doing genre work; I shouldn't look down on it. On the other hand, I really do want to write books of general interest.

Well, perhaps Bangalored will open that door for me, once this book is put to bed and I have a chance to give my India book another go.

Dream

2007-12-25T09:10:00.000-08:00

I had a dream that I was at a place like Holden Village, the church camp that is mentioned in passing in How They Scored. It's a Lutheran church camp but in my dream an Episcopal priest I know was there, offering armloads of peach pie to all comers -- a dream of abundance and hospitality.

I visited Holden Village in real life three times, the longest for a six week stay which I recorded in the form of an edited journal I posted on my main website. While I was up there, I was working on my first (as yet unpublished) novel Make Nice.

'He who controls the "default option" writes the rules'

2007-12-23T15:51:00.000-08:00

From a NYT column on advertising and marketing by Christopher Caldwell:

In early November, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, rolled out an advertising program called Beacon. It would track users onto the sites of Facebook's commercial partners -- Coca-Cola, the N.B.A., The New York Times and Verizon, among others -- and keep their friends posted about what they were doing and buying there.

Did it ever. A Massachusetts man bought a diamond ring for Christmas for his wife from overstock.com and saw his discounted purchase announced to 720 people in his online network. What if it hadn't been for his wife? What if he had been buying acne cream? Pornography? A toupee? You could go on. Researchers at Computer Associates, an information-technology firm, discovered that Beacon was more invasive than announced. MoveOn.org started a petition movement against Beacon that rallied 75,000 Facebook subscribers. ...

The Beacon fiasco gives a good outline of what future conflicts over the Internet will look like. Whether a system is opt-in or opt-out has an enormous influence on how people use it. He who controls the "default option" -- the way a program runs if you don't modify it -- writes the rules. Online, it can be tempting to dodge the need to get assent for things that used to require it. This temptation is particularly strong in matters of privacy. For instance, the "default option" of the pre-Internet age was that it was wrong to read others' mail. But Google now skims the letters of its Gmail subscribers, in hopes of better targeting them with ads, and the N.S.A. looks for terrorists not only in the traditional manner -- getting warrants for individual wiretaps -- but also by mining large telecommunications databases.

So it is with Facebook's Beacon. We used to live in a world where if someone secretly followed you from store to store, recording your purchases, it would be considered impolite and even weird. Today, such an option can be redefined as "default" behavior.

'Privacy meltdown' feared from Google-DoubleClick merger

2007-12-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

From an interview with a privacy expert on the Google-DoubleClick merger:

There are two key elements to a profile. Most people tend to focus on the Big Brother data collection side, and that's simply taking information about a person from different aspects of their private life: their medical records, their financial records, where they go online, what they put in e-mail, who they call -- all that kind of information that can be put together to create a detailed profile of an individual.

But the second part -- which I don't think people think about very much but in many respects is becoming more important -- is the algorithm that is put on top of that data and the decisions that are made [based on an analysis of the information]. That's actually an area that EPIC is spending a lot more time on these days, because if you look at such questions as which banner ads an Internet user sees when they visit a Web site, or whether an airline passenger is pulled aside for secondary screening, what's really happening is a type of profiling that involves not only the data collection, but also some decision-making process that treats one person very differently from another person. That's also something that turns out to be secretive. Companies will not explain their proprietary algorithms for serving banner ads, nor will the Department of Homeland Security tell us why certain people are pulled aside for secondary screening and not others.

Phone to track your 'health'

2007-12-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

This prototype phone from Nokia would be able to track your health and other "conditions." Apparently you strap on a sensor that monitors your vital signs, sends the data to the phone over a wireless signal, and then God knows what happens to the information.

RFID to track your magazine browsing in waiting rooms

2007-12-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

This is just astonishing:

The next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room, you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID. Mediamark Research & Intelligence and DJG Marketing have come together to use RFID for measuring magazine readership in public waiting rooms.

More here. RFID is the little bitty chip already used to track library books, merchandise, and in some localities, children.

I should totally finish today

2007-12-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

I should totally finish the first draft today. I'm just not really up for it. As I just wrote on my blog, as part of several hours of work-avoidance:

I meant to finish the first draft of HOW THEY SCORED last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short.
Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don’t think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week. ...

Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell which sentences are well constructed and which sound awkward -- which is why they tell you to always, always read your stuff out loud before considering it finished. It made me remember how, in my past experiences at LitCrawl (2006, 2005) I closely edited the piece I was about to read with a mind to how it would sound read out loud. I didn't have the opportunity to do that last night, and it was good to be reminded of how important it is.

So on to the last few pages of this book, which I will subsequently spend as much time as I can rewriting.

Of course, I did not then immediately start writing; I didn't even turn to this notes file. I did more internet time-wasting.

The small reading was at Christy's, at an event she and her girlfriend intend to hold monthly: they serve a soup and bread supper and invite people to read a little something. Christy had already read the first two-thirds of my book, of course, and knew the passage I read: the bit about how Greg discovered Growler's most interesting side effect. The two dykes at the party who were strangers to me seemed a little put off by the bukkake at the Glitter Gold Girls Club, and it was at that point I realized that I might have prepared people more in advance. Fortunately Christy's enthusiasm overpowered any discomfort.

All right... I really must think about this thing and just finish it.

In the ending, I mean to have a nice bit about how Meeghan's body is "home" for Hap, the narrator. However, this is a manifestly sentimental idea, and not made any less so because that feeling has been very real for me in the past with certain lovers. It has to be handled just right; otherwise it will sound stupid and shallow, not to mention fundamentally sexist and narcissistic.

I think one way to handle it is to show Meeghan is truly independent, that she has a life apart from Hap -- something there is no hint of yet. Another is to inject a little bit of darkness at the end. It is, of course, stupid to think that your feeling of being truly "home" depends on being able to fuck someone in particular, since no matter how sincere the feeling is and how much both people want to maintain it, bodies are fragile and love, not to mention one's feeling of being truly home, must ultimately depend on something more substantial.

OK, a walk to the café, then down to work.

1:09 pm -- I actually begin working on the last section.

3:45 pm -- Finished. 1600 words for the day. Grand total 85,293.

The driving force behind technology innovation

2007-12-15T09:48:00.000-08:00

I found this interview with author William Gibson, who like many science fiction writers is a futurist who uses fiction to explore his ideas rather than non-fiction, very pertinent. My favorite quote:

Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge.

One of the things I explore in How They Scored is exactly that dynamic: a software entrepreneur senses he can make a bundle -- to use Gibson's apt phrase -- on a certain idea he had about data mining and aggregation. During the book's action, he recruits both money and expertise from the other characters.

2007-12-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

Right, I handled that with no problem. I got all the way home with Hap and Meeghan about to go to bed for the final time (in the book).

When I went to bed last night I told myself to think about Chapter 10, the chapter where Hap relates his failed marriage to Cara. All along I've been thinking that the best thing I have in real life to use is , of course, my failed marriage to C___. Most of the external details will change, i.e. the whole foreigner-green card marriage aspect, but I want to keep the intimate details. I've never written about C___ before and this is an opportunity to do it in a respectful and complete way. I want especially to use the tender details I remember about her body and her reactions during sex, and also to use her emotional goodness and sweetness. The one thing I don’t have is the exact way they break up, though I might simply use what is close to the truth: instead of Je___, use the affair with S___ that broke up my relationship with S___.

It's 9:00 a.m., I'm going to the store and I'm coming right back to do this.
3:35 -- I worked until about 2 pm, writing 2500 words. I thought I wrote a great first draft of that chapter. It was a little shorter than I expected it to be, but it’s so heavy that it doesn’t have to go on for long. Lots of sex too.

I'm so close now to finishing the draft. All I have to do is write the ending. Of course, I got started on it yesterday but didn’t really get there... I got right up to it... but I think I need to back off and start fresh, at least for the part that's set back in San Francisco. I liked the last scene with Denny on the boat, where I quoted from "Masculin-Feminin."

2007-12-08T12:44:00.000-08:00

Who stays with Don: Bart, Seth (because of Bianca)

Who goes down the mountain: Seth drives; Hap, Greg, Shaun, Denny.

Q: What is the conversation with Denny on the boat home about?
A: I have no idea.
Q: Why do you even want to show it?
A: I want to give readers an idea of what happens to Denny, where he goes next.
Q: And where is that? What do you want to demonstrate by it?
A: I think I just want to remind people of the idea of "home" that Hap takes advantage of later. Maybe I'll have them bring up the grad student girl.

2007-12-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

While reading Henry Miller tonight -- I'm almost to the end of the Rosy Crucifixion, which I have inhaled, along with the Tropics, in order to give energy to my voice in "How They Scored" -- I had the idea that I can skip the entire trip down the mountain. What a bore! Instead, end the current chapter 12 with Bianca popping out of Seth's room, and then cut to the boat. There you can have one last conversation, with Denny -- because I have an intuition that Bart stays behind with Don to lay plans for Dreedle -- while Greg tries to make time with some hikers. Then the whole trip home in two pages -- no, one! The point is to get to the end.

I see it clearly. The conversation with Denny can set up, to some degree, the ending, the thing about where your home is. But not too much of that. Lightly, lightly.

2007-12-02T22:45:00.000-08:00

Man, really hard to get started today. I wore myself out a little bit yesterday, perhaps.

It's after 3:00 already, and in the three hours I’ve been here at my office at Bob's, all I've done is a little additional cleanup of the reorganization of chapters 10-12. At this point I can either:

write the long bit on Hap's marriage to Cara (I did decide to spell it with a C, other notations notwithstanding)

go on in chapter 12, which is where I am.

I really should do the latter. I think the Cara thing will have to require special circumstances, such as me taking a whole day off work and going to a motel or something.

OK, so onward in chapter 12. They've just eaten dinner and the chickens are about to come home to roost.

I had a moment today when I thought -- maybe it should be Don who gives the "Citizen Kane" speech. But no -- Denny has clearly been established as the person who makes film references.

Note on (c) from December 1 -- "Hap finds himself recruiting Bart despite his resolution not to." What I need to do is make Bart say, on announcing he's going to work for Don, that it was something that Hap said that made him finally decide. Hap is surprised. Bart explains. This leads directly to (d) -- Hap gets credit for it. In Don’s terms that means he’s going to make sure Hap is able to buy his building (though there might be a cavil that "it might be necessary" for Don to buy it actually and then lease it to Hap -- which is not the same thing at all, though Don will represent it as the same thing).

Q: What is that thing that Hap says that moves Bart?

A: Maybe just the suggestion that "it's a risk" (moving to Dreedle, that is) to which Bart replies "I like risks."

Q: So how exactly does Bart announce his decision?

A: I think it should be right after a sex story.

Q: We just had one by Hap -- the voyeurism thing. Will that suffice?

A: Hmm. Not really strong enough.

Q: And yet?

A: It brings up the whole privacy thing. Could make it work.

10 pm -- I had a fairly bad day of work in my office at Bob's. I procrastinated like crazy. I finally managed about 700 words... but I was pretty much where I left off yesterday.

When I got home, however, Cris was reading and she let me work, and I did another thousand words and wrote the climactic scenes that bring the whole software plot to a head. I still have to go back and rewrite chapter 10 for Hap's relationship with Cara. I should do some thinking about that this week so I can get right down to it the next time I can work.

2007-12-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

I'm working at home one more day. Since I have a date tonight, I don't want to be gone all day. Tomorrow I'll try to work from my office at Bob's, where I haven't worked in like three weeks.

I had this thought the other day: Once Don directly asks Hap to recruit Bart, instead of the way I have it now where Hap goes straight to Bart and does that, it should go like this: Hap should do everything he can to keep from doing what Don wants. He runs the other way because he already doesn't like the Dreedle idea. But the comedy is that Bart actually asks Hap for advice, and does it in a way that Hap finds himself talking about the advantages of joining Dreedle. Then later, even though he's tried to do nothing to encourage it, when Bart does announce he’s joining Dreedle, Hap gets credit for it. So in summary:

a. Don asks Hap to recruit Bart.

b. Hap doesn't like the idea, and does the opposite.

c. Hap finds himself doing it despite himself.

d. Hap gets credit for doing what he didn’t want to do.

e. In frustration, Hap does to Denny and says let's do the wi-fi thing.

f. That's when Denny has the climactic conversation with Hap, Citizen Kane references and all.

This works much better -- it's funnier, it makes more sense, it clarifies Hap's character more, it forces him to make a harder choice, and it leads directly to the scene 6 where Denny tells Hap the wi-fi thing isn't going to happen.

Thinking for the moment about whether I should just push on from where I am now, or go back and rewrite with this in mind, I think I'm going to go back. Even though it will stall my word count progress, it will make finishing everything easier. And the word count progress is meaningless. The good thing is, I don't have to go back too far. The sequence starts in 10b and in my last work session I only just started writing chapter 12.

The other thing I have to go back and do, I have pretty much decided, is in 10a, remove the stuff about S____ and S____ (called Cate and Suzee) and substitute a new passage in which he recalls the story of his marriage and breakup with Kara. This is something I've known I have to put in somewhere, haven't found a place to do it, and in the last several days realized this is the place for it. However, it isn't necessary to do that before I make these other changes in 10b and forward.

5:50 pm -- I ended up cutting about 4300 words, rewriting the scene with Bart and other material in chapters 10, 11 and 12. I still have the story about his marriage to Kara to write. That will take some concentration.

2007-11-25T23:20:00.000-08:00

I did manage to do 1200 words yesterday -- mostly between about 4 pm and 6:30. That was after taking S. to the airport and then distracting myself with several other things. Now it's 2:00 pm -- I've squandered the last three hours or so and it's really time to think about working. I haven't wanted to push myself too hard because I know from experience it's difficult to get things done on the fourth day working in a row. So my plan will be to make notes until I'm really clear on what I need to do.

Yesterday I covered points 1 and 2 in the list I made yesterday. (Not to be confused with the list of scenes from 10 November, which I referred to right up to the point where I made the new list.) I think my challenge today is to think through the decisions that Hap makes and break down 4 and 5.

I'm a little worried about the homecoming business too, but I'll deal with that when I get there.

So let's see. The first problem with (4) is that I'm not quite sure why Bart decides to go with Dreedle.

Q: What has Bart been thinking up to now?
A: He's interested in the idea. We also learn that he seems to have no moral objections. He can see both sides of it, but he's mainly interested in the renown and the fame that might result from participating.
Q: Why does he finally decide to do it?
A: What about this: Bart tells the story that Cris suggested -- the voyeuristic thing. No, not Bart... Shaun. Shaun tells the story and then maybe Greg one-ups him, perhaps saying he watches his neighbors' porn postings on YouTube. This leads to Bart deciding to go with Dreedle.
Q: Why exactly does he decide that?
A: He comes to the conclusion that people don't even want privacy, so why make such a big deal out of protecting it?

Late -- I did about 2000 words, covering a scene that prepares the reader for (4). Cris suggested the idea of a voyeur scene, and it fit in nicely with the theme of privacy. Not quite sure it all fit together, but I can work on it later.

However, I still have to transition into (4) and then work out all the changes leading up to (5). And this is Sunday night... so it's not likely I'll get a chance to work on this for a few more days. Maybe Thursday...

2007-11-24T17:17:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving weekend. Working Thursday and Friday, I got in 2800 words, going over the 75,000 mark. That means it's officially a novel-length manuscript. That took four months from the time I wrote the first words; almost five months from the time I began making notes. Not too bad for something I hadn't the slightest inkling of before receiving the call from Felice in April.

I finally completed the 4th point from the above list, which means I have 1-5 done. 6 and 7 are somewhat trivial, so with some additional work today and tomorrow, I absolutely should finish the first draft by next weekend.

I should say that the work this week has taken place in the context of Thanksgiving, a visit by S., who stayed overnight at our place for three nights (I just got back from taking her to the airport), and the cast on Cris's leg. So I did all this work at home in the office. For somebody with a cast on their leg, Cris was great about letting me work. Letting me sleep is another matter, but I'll leave that for my personal diary.

My plan is to make some notes and then go to bed for a few hours, due to the disruptions last night.

I think maybe my best strategy should be to bring things to a fairly quick conclusion. It's been drawn out enough.

Greg can't believe Hap is ambivalent. Might be a good place for a Greg story that highlights the notion of striking fast.
Don might check on Hap, give him more pressure.
The next morning, Bianca emerges from Seth's bedroom with him. Everyone thunderstruck. Seth story.
Bart makes it clear he's going with Don's idea.
Something makes Hap not want to go with Don -- even though he'd now get credit for it. He goes to tell Don, but Don is talking to Denny, who announces he's decided to throw his money behind Dreedle as well. Don still doesn't know Bart is coming along. Even though he could now get on board with Don, Hap impulsively decides to reject the Dreedle idea and Don's money, or promises of it. He tells Don and Denny.
Denny and Hap have the Citizen Kane conversation in which Denny tells Hap why he can't save him.
In the car on the way down the mountain. Everyone's all excited about Dreedle, except Seth, who simply wears a dreamy, satisfied expression. Finally they ask Hap if he's joining Dreedle, and he says no. When Bart says "But what about your apartment" Hap says there is more than one way to buy a house. He'll figure out a way to do it.
Coda showing his homecoming in SF.

I guess that's all right. I'll sleep on it now.

1:40 pm -- Becalmed. I went to bed for a couple hours but didn't sleep much. I did think idly about this book but not much came to mind except stuff I'd already written.

It's always harder the third day in a row that I work on something. I think the best pattern for me is to make notes on Friday night, sleep on it and then start fresh right away on Saturday, get a lot done, then come back Sunday and polish it off with another 2000 words or so. That's the way to do a consistent 5000 words a weekend instead of the closer to 4300 I've been averaging.

2007-11-21T15:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, continuing with that brainstorming about Denny. I'm going to copy it over here so I can continue.

Q: What is the important thing to think about w.r.t. Denny, in addition to the main plot points?
A: His subplot.
Q: Which is?
A: His wife Marianne has just left him, he's started using junk again, and he has to decide what to do next. Because he is indomitably wealthy, it's not a matter of how to survive financially, only emotionally and physically.
Q: How will going back on heroin affect him?
A: It won't, in the short run -- i.e. for the purposes of the book.
Q: So do we have to talk about it?
A: Only in passing, perhaps as we take leave of Denny for the last time.
Q: So the main thing to think about is what?
A: His emotional state with his wife leaving him.
Q: But that's affected by...?
A: His emotional state is affected, i.e. muted, by going back on junk. So we'll have to acknowledge that.
Q: Then what's the main thing?
A: As I've said before: he's searching for meaning in his life -- more so now, since he's lost two relationships -- and for some sort of redemption.
Q: How does he express this search for meaning and redemption?
A: He already expressed it partly by getting involved with Marianne and trying to kick for her. By trying to do that relationship better, he was in some way trying to atone for his relationship with Marinka.
Q: Note the similarity in names.
A: True. I never quite noticed before how similar the names are.
Q: Anyway, sum up.
A: He tries redemption with Marianne. Doesn't work out. Now searching again for meaning and redemption.
Q: Is the wi-fi thing really a strong enough impulse?
A: No, not at all. Needs something else.
Q: What will that something else be like?
A: Has to be something he can do with his existing resources. Could be a relationship. Could be something he's doing with his money.
Q: Contrast with Bart.
A: Bart is already on the boards of non-profits and stuff.
Q: Why isn't Denny?
A: He probably is -- I can include that. But it should be something a little more daft and impractical and not as community-oriented as what Bart does. Like the Long Now Foundation.
Q: Perfect.
A: It does something "for the future" that's totally impractical. And in addition let's invent some artistic thing that's similar. He's on the board of a foundation that supports a single middle-aged artist whose project is an earthwork artist whose project is deep underground in a remote desert location -- the height (or nadir) of inaccessibility.
Q: Beautiful.
A: I could link this in "Knock Yourself Out" too -- that artist could be a character in that book!
Q: OK, OK. Focus. This is presumably stuff that Denny has been doing for the last while. What's he doing in addition, now?
A: Well, the wi-fi thing. That's his new thing.
Q: How does Dreedle reflect or match that?
A: It's the dark side of his redemption-through-investing-in-the-right-things strategy. In fact, I can have him considering various applications from "green technology" firms too.
Q: What does this say that you haven't mentioned?
A: That people are always coming to him for money.
Q: Should put that in now.
A: Right... OK, I put that in.
Q: Why are we thinking about Denny right now anyway?
A: Because he's one of the most interesting characters and his subplot is the most substantial, we're trying to figure out what plot points in that subplot need to be developed, and how they fit into the themes of the book. And because his ultimate decision about whether or not to give money to Don, or to support the wi-fi thing, has directly to do with Hap. That decision has to be well prepared for.
Q: OK, so what's next?
A: I did have done idea, to launch directly into another story by Greg. I think it would recharge the book's energy. I think it sort of needs it at the moment.
Q: What about another idea -- develop this thing that Denny's into in the desert.
A: Hmm, have Denny tell a story about being in the desert in support of this artist character? Some kind of erotic encounter down there?
Q: Reminds me of what?
A: The unfinished story set in the desert with all the converging story lines.
Q: Does that really help?
A: Probably not... I might mention one or two of the settings. I can mention the crater and the Marine Base maybe... Just the setting. Not characters.
Q: What do you want to show about Denny at this point?
A: There's this point -- 4. Denny again speaks to Hap, holding out the possibility of an alternative that isn't so morally objectionable. It doesn't involve the possibility of riches, but it does involve Denny buying Hap's building and letting him stay there. -- and I need to link this to an emotional place that Denny is in.
Q: So you should do what?
A: Have Denny come to Hap instead of the other way around.
Q: What happens?
A: Denny talks to Hap on the porch again. For some reason the porch is Denny's territory.
Q: But...?
A: But I can't have Denny straightforwardly offer the whole arrangement to Hap, because then it's too simple for Hap to just take it. Denny has to approach things obscurely. (In fact -- work that more into his character.) And hap has to be somewhat confused about what Denny is really offering. Don't draw this out too much, though. We already had Don draw out the whole Dreedle thing somewhat. (Of necessity, however, because of its complexity, and to create a sense of mystery.)

2007-11-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

Last working session I arrived at one of the turning points in the book. Don has revealed his idea for the business, and now he reveals to Hap why he's up there and what Don wants from him: to use his influence to recruit Bart for Don's business, Dreedle. In return, Don will promise to solve Hap's problem with the apartment.

As I see it, there are only a few important plot points that remain:

When this doesn't work, Shaun attempts to sabotage the business somehow. But he ends up getting turned around by Don, who convinces him to invest all of his nest egg, about $4 million, in the company.
Seth is telling Hap to go for it. But Seth is also disgruntled that he wasn't thought to be as important as Bart to the new enterprise.
Denny again speaks to Hap, holding out the possibility of an alternative that isn't so morally objectionable. It doesn't involve the possibility of riches, but it does involve Denny buying Hap's building and letting him stay there.
Hap tries speaking to Bart about it, but Bart is slippery. This might be the occasion for Bart to tell his big sexy story about working at chain.com.
Don asks Hap about his progress.
Greg can't believe Hap is even hesitating.
Hap decides he's not going to try to use his influence with Bart anymore, in fact decides to take Denny's offer.
Denny informs Hap that he's decided not to pursue the wi-fi thing, to go with Don instead. This is where I bring in the "Citizen Kane" reference.

After that I'm not quite sure what the resolution is. Man, that's a lot of scenes... I'm going to have to write more than one a day if I'm going to finish this in another 5 writing sessions.

Better get to it. I've wasted two hours and I have to stop by 5:00.

2007-11-19T12:43:00.000-08:00

A bit at a loss, my attention fragmented. I've squandered the morning time when Cris is still asleep, and now she's up. I'm working at home all week, but there's not much virtue in that, as most of my attention is taken by Cris, the house, the cats, etc. -- which is why I have an office. But as I'm here, I really ought to try to pay attention.

Q: What is the important thing to think about w.r.t. Denny, in addition to the main plot points?
A: His subplot.
Q: Which is?
A: His wife Marianne has just left him, he's started using junk again, and he has to decide what to do next. Because he is indomitably wealthy, it's not a matter of how to survive financially, only emotionally and physically.
Q: How will going back on heroin affect him?
A: It won't, in the short run -- i.e. for the purposes of the book.
Q: So do we have to talk about it?
A: Only in passing, perhaps as we take leave of Denny for the last time.
Q: So the main thing to think about is what?
A: His emotional state with his wife leaving him.
Q: But that's affected by...?
A: His emotional state is affected, i.e. muted, by going back on junk. So we'll have to acknowledge that.
Q: Then what's the main thing?
A: As I've said before: he's searching for meaning in his life -- more so now, since he's lost two relationships -- and for some sort of redemption.

2007-11-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

Since writing the above list of scenes, I've felt both constrained and energized by it, to the point that I do little thinking about how to go forward except to work out how to get those scenes on paper. By now, at the beginning of chapter 11, I've covered 1 through 3 and also 5. I guess I need to do 4 next. Of course, I also have to work in the sex...

This is also a period when I'm stuck at home. Cris got ankle surgery two days ago and I'm home taking care of her. It's just as well, in a way, since B. has family at his house; he warned me last weekend that it would be noisy and difficult to work there.

Yesterday was Saturday and I only did a few hundred words. I told myself that it was all right, that things would work out so I would be able to get things done. Even more important than sheer progress is not to get too anxious at this point.

I wrote, basically, one scene all weekend: 11a, in which I covered point 3 above. The next thing I have to do is point 4, or maybe I'll write something intermediate to set up point 7. None of these have to go in exactly the order listed above, as long as point 9 is the last one.

The only other thing I accomplished was to go through the whole manuscript and change two-thirds of the occurrences of the word "just" to alternatives including "simply," "only," "exactly" and so on; or to simply cut out the word as needless. I left it in dialogue more than I left it in narration. When I was done I felt better about having cleaned up something that is one of my weak habits.

But I need to think about the main thing, which is to get the scene with Denny off the ground, and to think about another sex scene. Maybe tomorrow.

2007-11-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

Went to bed early! Woke up early! -- it's 7:24 a.m. and I'm getting at least a three hour head start. Of course I'll probably have to stop three hours early too, but at least I'll get something done.

I went to C_____ last night for a reception for F¹, who is relocating to London while continuing to work for the press. I chatted with F²about the book, and I was relieved to find her still very enthusiastic about it. In fact, she gave me leave to include at least one bdsm scene, and when I told her that one of the characters was a network nerd at chain.com, she said that sounded perfect. So that gives me an opportunity to open things up a little.

I also talked to the women who is doing promotions for them about promoting the book when it is released. I got a chance to tell her I wanted to be very involved, share costs, and generally do everything I could to promote it, and she was receptive. Now if I can only remember her name.

I need to look at my outline to see where I am... Oh, right, Denny is telling about Marianne. Let's see, I need to sex up that story a lot. I need to think of an erotic detail about her personality that will help...

2007-10-26T21:10:00.000-07:00

I got an idea for the resolution of the book. My idea up to now has been to have Denny hold out an alternative job idea to Hap and then yank it away at the last minute. Tonight I had an idea of how that could happen. Denny, the former film student, starts talking about the scene in Citizen Kane where Joseph Cotton passes out drunk at the typewriter and Kane finishes his brutal review of Susan's opera debut. When Cotton wakes up, he's told "Mr. Kane is finishing your piece the way you started it.... I guess that'll show you." And then Kane fires him. And Denny goes on to say something that compares him yanking the job away from Hap to that -- something about loyalty to him and not to the friendship... or vice versa.

2007-10-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

Sunday. Yesterday I did 2500 words -- though that figure is cheating slightly, since I had done 300 of those during the week but did not count it as a working session -- and by the end of the day I still had a whole social evening to go to (of course I had to stop early because of it). And by the end of that I was completely exhausted. I decided to skip church this morning and sleep in, and I was glad I did, since I slept til 9:00.

I'm in the middle of chapter 9 and I'm about to do the first sex story told by Don. There might be only this one from him. I'm over 55,000 words.

2007-10-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

Whew -- well, I managed to squeeze out 2000 words yesterday -- exactly 2000. That leaves only 4000 for today. Since I'm doing a Greg story, it might not be that hard. The most inspired day I've had so far is when I wrote the chapter about Greg and Growler. However, I have to differentiate it from my own experience as far as possible, and I have to make it typically Greg -- suspicious, aggressive, insistent on getting what he paid for. I think it would be interesting to make it representative of the business approach of a certain type of person, and in fact the original impulse I had for Greg's character fits into this perfectly -- the obnoxious business type I encountered in Las Vegas whom I overhead saying: "I'm gonna make about $2000 on the deal. Hey, I figure, he charges me for his labor, so I'm gonna charge him for my money. If he worked for free then I could do him a favor." Implicit in this view of the world is the notion that everyone else is bound by the values you yourself subscribe to. But there's a particularly delicious irony I could bring out: On the one hand, Greg feels he pays prostitutes to do whatever he tells them to do. On the other hand, he says to himself that the prostitutes are independent contractors who will, as he does, strive as hard as they can to get the most out of the transaction. If I'm good, I can make his approach representative of a certain kind of sexual ethos in addition to the business ethos; I can make the business ethos stand in for the sexual ethos even in a sex scene.

I also want to think about what happens after this scene. As a rule I think I need to alternate three types of scenes:

Sex stories
Scenes that relate to the business-y plot
Internal/narrative passages without dialogue.

Ever since "Make Nice" I have been wary of writing dialogue scenes that go on and on. And I generally need more lyrical passages. The last bullet allows me to avoid dialogue -- I think it gives the reader a break and a change of pace -- and include descriptions and ideas.

2007-10-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

I had a good weekend last weekend, with just over 6000 words, and I start this weekend at 47,000-plus. Yet I'm increasingly worried about my deadline. If I average 5000 words per weekend from now til Thanksgiving, That will only bring me to 78,000. What I really need to do is average 7000 per week -- nearly impossible without working a four-day week at my job. So perhaps what I'll have to do is "work at home" one day a week.

And it would be a good idea to start that on Monday, since Cris has delayed her return from vacation by a day and will not be returning until late Monday night.

All right, what am I going to do today? The book is completely out of my mind. I should have prepared by catching up on it yesterday, but I spent the whole evening doing laundry and listening to the ball game. I'll have to catch up now. This is an example of how I still am inefficient when it comes to use of my time.

It occurs to me that I still don't have an outline, and that it would be good at this point to put one together to allow me to see where I am.

Still sort of at a loss -- and yet I have the feeling I need to move the plot, such as it is, along much more. The part in bold dark red in 7e is where the main arena for conflict of the book is mentioned for the first time. -- aside from the source of Hap's anxiety, i.e. whether or not he gets to keep his apartment. In addition to sex, I have to keep in mind to have lots of scenes with the whole business plot moving forward.

1:18 pm-- Man, I'm not focusing. I'll take a tiny walk and then come back and read a little.

3:36 pm-- I went and did an errand, coming back an hour later. Now I've spent more than an hour reading. No closer to knowing anything about what it is I have to write today; I only know that I'd better get revved up and do it. I would have done better to go to a film early today than to do what I have done, which is worse than nothing.

All right, I'll concentrate. It's quite simple, really. I must explicate the plot machinations between the characters while doling out generous amounts of smut. The plot machinations themselves I have not really planned out, because they don't matter much. Nevertheless, I'll have to have some idea where they're going.

I seem to remember I had mapped something out several weeks ago. Let me see if I can find it...

Don explains idea for company. Hap considers the attractiveness of going to work for Don -- the pluses and minuses.
Don wants Denny's money. Denny considers investing in Don's company versus doing the something else.
Denny indirectly encourages Hap to think there's an alternative to going to work for Don. (Problems here -- why shouldn't he go to work for Don anyway? What's stopping him? Must make it some kind of moral objection.)
Hap has to decide, and he finally decides to go with Denny.
But then Denny decides to go ahead and invest his money with Don anyway.

And:

Make it clearer that the apartment represents freedom for Hap. Keep that word in mind. Contrast it to the period when he owned a house with his wife Kara. He rents now but is freer.

And finally, I have never addressed this:

Perhaps the subplot does have to do with Denny's own internal struggle -- his motivations for competing with Don, for coming up with an alternative, for inveigling Hap. Something to do with the way his yearning for redemption competes with his weaknesses.

My sense is that the other subplot has to have something to do with Seth, who has not come to the fore at all yet.

Oh... Hmm, I said last weekend that the subplot had to have something to do with Bart and the wi-fi for all thing, and should be comic.

Okay, I have an idea. I'll open the action on the day following 8a with a scene between Don and Bart that Hap overhears. After a few moments he becomes uneasy and manages to get away without them knowing he has overheard them. Then he finds Bianca and exchanges a few more words with her. Finally, he joins Greg in replacing the outhouse on its foundation; this gives us an opportunity to hear another sex story from him.

2007-10-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

Early Sunday evening. I did a good 3000 words yesterday, and 900 today to finish that scene, which I interrupted in order to go out with A. Now I want to write the next sex scene, because there hasn't been one in a while, and for that reason it also has to be a good one to reward the reader for sticking with it.

It's either Shaun's, Denny's, or Don's turn -- Don hasn't had a sex story yet. I'm inclined to let him go next after this one, which is at the beginning of chapter 8. (I'm over 45,000 words.) I think it should be Shaun. Let's see... something in keeping with his character... Suppose he met a girl at some anarchist conference. (Earlier I had made a note about him telling a story that takes place at Burning Man, but I think I'll leave that to Seth, the over-achiever.) Hmm, I'm finding that the only person who could tell the Orna-cum-Amnesia story is Shaun. Bart is also the type, but I'm establishing him as someone who (against type) likes really straight women. And Greg would never wind up in bed with two women he hasn't paid. So it has to be Shaun.

Of course, it could be Hap... hmm. No, Hap has to tell the story of his marriage eventually, and that'll take up a lot of space. OK, so it's Shaun.

2007-10-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

So, that day on the train was a bust in terms of writing my book -- aside from getting to read as much of "Sexus" as I wanted to. I got most of the way through it.

Now I'm staying at home today, Saturday, instead of going to Bob's house, because Cris isn't here and it's less hassle than getting over there, given that I have to stop early AGAIN. This time because I have symphony tickets and I have to get dressed and meet Anna for dinner beforehand.

OK, THINK ABOUT THE BOOK.

2007-10-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

board the Coast Starlight en route to Oakland.

I was hoping to get some work done on the train, but all around me people are talking, the motion of the train is unpleasant -- unlike the local train which I took from Ventura to Santa Barbara which apparently used new equipment -- and there's no power for my laptop. The noise of people talking is the worst; I can't think well enough to compose. But maybe I can make some notes.

Hap has gone out onto the deck to talk to Denny. I have to find some use for this conversation.

Q: What are some of the things they can talk about?
A: Small talk -- what are they both doing lately -- use this to show moods and attitudes. Of more use -- Hap can ask Denny to buy his building, and Denny can reply with news about what he's doing lately, his wealth, and might hold out some hope that he can fulfill Hap's needs by either buying his building or possibly doing something else even more glorious but vague.

Arrgh, can't think at all.

2007-09-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

We spent six hours putting together one of the three bookshelves yesterday. We finished at 10:30, both exhausted and sore from squatting, kneeling, bending, and standing up.

Today I would up with only about four hours in which to work; I went home so we could start another bookshelf, perhaps both of the remaining two, at 4:00. But Cris found a damaged piece on one, which meant we could only complete the other. Still, it only took us two and a half hours instead of six.

So because of the bookshelves project, I wound up with only 3350 words for the weekend. I did, however, get over the hump of finally having all the characters present in Don's lodge. It only took me 39,000 words to get there.

Today I wrote a farcical scene in which Greg wrecks a cabin and gets seemingly penalized for it. I introduced Don as a sort of Donald Trump character who likes ordering everyone else to do ridiculous things which, at least at first, they do without question.

By the end I had set up a scene with Denny. Hap's going to ask him to help with the apartment problem. Then maybe we'll get Denny's perspective on one of the other characters.

I'm having fun. I just need more time to work. Fortunately Cris is about to go away for two weekends, from the 4th to the 14th. I'll drive down to Southern California with her and then ride back on the train. That reminds me, I have to buy my train ticket, don't I.

2007-09-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

10:10 -- getting a bit of an early start, for once. Just read a little from the middle of "Sexus." It makes me aware I'm not doing much with these characters at the moment. I have to think more about their inner lives -- or, rather, I should say I have to allow them space to lead their inner lives.

In general, I have to spend a great deal of time on characterization. The sex stories matter only if you know the person telling them.

Anyway. I'll finish the chapter I was working on last Sunday when I had to stop, and then I'll try to get right into the next chapter, introducing the Bianca character.

2:30pm -- I did about 2100 words and I'm going home. Cris hasn't called me yet but I'll just go home anyway. Bob is having some kind of "debauchery" here and I'm at a good stopping place.

2007-09-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote about 2800 words yesterday, a not-too-bad start to what is, essentially, the second part of the book -- the part where they will all be in one setting. I say not too bad because it reads all right the way it is, and yet I'm conscious that the second part of the book is that which must build to a climax and since I don't really have a sense of the shape of the narrative arc -- though I have mapped out some conflicts -- I can't say I have done well to start that arc at the beginning of chapter 6. All I did was introduce Seth a little more and have a sex story set against the background of an abortive prank where they're gathering fallen wood to make a sort of sculpture. Silly idea but... It's hard to judge. It seems more important to keep tearing onward.

And today, Sunday, I have a shortened day. Cris expects me back at the house in less than four hours to work on some bookshelves. I just became aware I haven't had enough coffee so I'll make a few notes, go get the coffee, and attempt to begin. Though I have no idea what to write next.

I suppose I ought to introduce Bianca, though I don't feel quite ready to. The thing is, it's late in the evening and I want to have one more scene before the morning comes and I introduce her. Perhaps what I'll do is make it not quite so late. I'll have a few of them sitting up having a nightcap and then have a story.

The question then is which story. I just used up one of those I thought of including: the story Stacy told me of how one night she switched beds with her housemate and they fucked each other's dates. That story still tickles me; I could have done more justice to it.

I also realized this morning that I must do more to make each female character somewhat memorable. They can't just be a parade of cunts, they have to be really alive. Doing so will not only be more honorable, but it will make the book more interesting once the reader gets used to the idea that the book consists of sex story after sex story.

So again, which story should I tell -- instead of asking who should tell it. Bart hasn't had much screen time lately so maybe it should be him. And what do I have for Bart to tell? I thought of having him tell about something from Burning Man. Also, he can tell about an event that took place in Bangalore... I thought of having him tell his version of the story about fucking Jennifer the HR lady. Actually I think that would be more fun.

One thing that's interesting -- I thought it might be hard for me to maintain interest writing mostly about straight vanilla sex, but so far it's been pretty easy, and at times inspired. There's enough variation, like the business about the women switching beds -- so far.

4:25 pm -- must knock off. Made good progress though, got well into the scene between Bart and Jennifer. Hee hee.

2007-09-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning -- once again, 11:15, though I have to say I managed to get to my desk before 11:00 at least. I spent the last 25 minutes nostalgically reviewing photos and news stories in my "Dear Prudence" -- I mean "Bangalored" -- folder. Having met with Elise a few days ago to talk about what the book needed before she felt comfortable putting it out there, it's been on my mind.

But last night while I was falling asleep I got a halfway good idea for how to do the next chapter, which is chapter 6.

After this weekend, there are 8 weekends before Thanksgiving. If I keep up a pace of 5000 words per week, that's another 40,000 words, which would bring me close to 75,000. But if I can average closer to 6000 words per week, that's a lot closer to 90,000 for a first draft -- and that would be much better. But since my current average per week for the first 7 weeks is 4738, I will need to push myself and also take as much time off work as I can. Since my next project at work is supposed to GA in late November, maybe I can take off the whole last week of the month. Then no one is likely to be around in the 11 days between Saturday, Dec. 22 and Wednesday, Jan. 2...

None of that matters. What's important is to do as much as possible, as soon as possible. And I'm finally at the beginning of the group scenes at the lodge. I'll have to write six or seven 6000 word chapters set up there.

Even before really getting into this section -- which is the meat of the book -- I'm wondering how I can shake it up. I mentioned "The Thing" before, a movie that impressed me with the way it kept three steps ahead of the audience by constantly shifting the source of the main conflict. I need to see it again to refresh my memory, since I haven't seen it since it came out in like 1982, but as I remember it, it starts out with these polar researchers vs. the elements and a government or corporate bureaucracy, and then they're fighting what seems like an epidemic, and then it turns out to be some kind of space alien that assumes the shape of whatever it kills, so that at the end there are only two guys left, and neither can prove that he's not the alien and the other is, so they're just sitting in the snow with guns drawn, and that's how the movie ends. I've always admired how the movie keeps the audience guessing, even before you get to the stalemate at the end. So I've been wondering how to shake up the middle of my book.

The bones of the premise are not dissimilar: a group of men marooned in a remote location. Perhaps I could have sort of a set of subplot conflicts running beneath the surface:

Seth vs. the wilderness
Shaun tries to subvert the dominant paradigm, but Denny is more of a natural trickster; he can't compete with Denny if Denny decides to do something subversive
Greg constantly competing with Bart. So is Seth, in different ways.
Hap feels that Bart is somehow too soulless, focusing only on technical problems -- that Bart's main motivation is to seek an outlet for his expertise and skills, regardless of the social or political implications which Hap would like him to consider
Don wants Denny's and Greg's money. Greg has little resistance, but Denny the trickster initially sets up a competing venture.

That's all good, but I think I need Hap to have a dominant conflict throughout the book. Somehow it seems his fear of losing his apartment isn't quite strong enough. He has to be in conflict with whatever is happening at the retreat, in some way.

Let's see. He's happy -- that's his dominant personality trait. He should be known by the others for this. And it should go beyond the simple fact that he's getting laid by a great girlfriend; he should be happy with everything in his life. It's not that his life is more perfect than anyone else's; it's just the way he feels about things.

The others envy him somewhat. And yet it's also important to them that he be a happy character, the way some long term relationships are important to a group of friends of the couple, friends that would be crushed if the couple broke up.

I dunno, there doesn't seem to be that much there.

I want to go back to the idea that something about the whole gathering bothers him. I can't think what, though.

He didn't really want to come to this thing. Why?

2007-09-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

Today, to start with, I want to do a couple of things. First, I'm going to go through all my notes and make lists of all the possible sex scenes I have thought of so far. And second, I'm going to put in a few things about Hap's anxiety about his apartment. That always has to be uppermost in his mind -- that anxiety should drive the book, like Yossarian's anxiety about going on more bombing missions.

List of characters along with stories for them to tell:

Hap:

This is the one most likely to be in a suburban setting, and why not. A little reminiscent of John Updike, complete with the anal sex.
Also should have something about his wife, Kara -- or probably three stories with her.
Meeting her, honeymoon
Peak of sexual relationship
Scene which carries the seeds of the destruction of their relationship

Don:

Sex with a co-ed at the conservative film festival on campus (!)
He might talk about something that's happened there at the cabin. Maybe in the past he brought up strippers. As a smart scientist type, he wants to break loose, but observes -- has trouble joining in, maybe.

Denny:

Must have at least one extended monologue about Marianne
Let's say it starts out suggesting a dark, urban mood, but actually takes place in a bucolic setting, against type.

Greg: This guy's story has to be about a prostitute, someone he hired. Perhaps he has a customer service issue with her. Or maybe something to do with the mob in Vegas.

Seth:

Possibly the thing about Stacy and her roommate, whose name I totally forget -- the time when they switched beds and fucked each other's dates. Show: Seth's sexual superiority to Shaun; second, the way Shaun fucks things up by being passive and uncertain and, above all, by dealing with fantasies rather than the reality. Something about the girl who was Seth's date that brings out Shaun's nascent political romanticism -- like the girl is Spanish and Shaun wants to talk to her about the Spanish Civil War.
Must have at least one extended monologue about Marianne
The O.-cum-Amnesia -- about how the second resembles the first, etc.

Shaun:

Something hippyish here. Or no -- burning man! Two sisters maybe?
What about putting N. in here -- maybe N. and Sy., just for contrast. But actually I could use any six-foot tall skinny girl with big tits in a cowboy hat.

Bart:

Something from the Chain Tattoo world
As shown by his attraction to Jennifer, he seems to like women who are very straight -- or maybe that's just one of the types he finds attractive. I should think about why he was attracted to Jennifer, the annoying super-straight HR manager, and not Stella, the kooky San Francisco girl. Perhaps Stella is too similar to all the girls who are naturally attracted to him, whereas Jennifer, strangely enough, represents -- not a challenge, but something different. Similarly, he has also had an affair with the bored wife of a Chinese-American dry cleaner. In fact, taken together, all these represent a quirky, eclectic bunch, even if alone set against American culture they are anonymous and straight. Hmm, interesting -- explore.

4:15 pm -- I rewrote the opening of the book, cutting 300 words and writing 1500. I expanded the opening sex scene and then made the whole thing about the building being sold much clearer. I also changed it somewhat -- now it's that the building is being put on the market, with the implication that Hap himself might be able to buy it -- if he can come up with an insanely large chunk of money. The larger the cost of the building, the better.

5:05pm -- I wrote a few hundred more words, smoothing out the scene at the end of chapter 5 and finishing the chapter. Now I have to start the next chapter with a proper group dialogue scene. Here's where the book gets difficult -- scenes between large groups of people. I think I'll try reading Catch-22 tonight to see if I can find how Heller handled it.

I wish I could work more for the day; I've only done 3300 words for the weekend. If only tomorrow were a holiday, or I could take off work. No chance -- I have, like, three meetings about the release notes, and by the time the day ends I'll be pooped. Fucking job!

2007-09-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

A little after noon; I have been here reading for almost an hour. I am at the point of the book where all the men have arrived at Don's mountain lodge.

In my last session I had such a good time writing about Greg that it's made me think I should go back and make the rest of the book, or at least parts of it, more antic and absurdist. But I don't think I'm going to try to do that now; I want to keep forging ahead.

So I'm at a point where normally I would get very bogged down in a sort of slow-motion scene: They go upstairs to meet Don... They have drinks and talk and then have dinner... They have the first wide-ranging conversation.

Instead of doing that, I ought to do something that confounds the reader's expectations. What if Don is somehow missing, and they have to kind of deal with that? He shows up the next morning and it's all meant to keep them off-balance and demonstrate that he's at the top of the pecking order.

I still need to introduce a subplot or two and I have no ideas that I can remember... Time to look back on my notes.

Perhaps the subplot does have to do with Denny's own internal struggle -- his motivations for competing with Don, for coming up with an alternative, for inveigling Hap. Something to do with the way his yearning for redemption competes with his weaknesses.

My sense is that the other subplot has to have something to do with Seth, who has not come to the fore at all yet.

Oh... Hmm, I said last weekend that the subplot had to have something to do with Bart and the wi-fi for all thing, and should be comic.

Okay... I'm going to get started. I have some scene-setting and exposition to do anyway.

6:10 pm -- I managed to work most of the afternoon, except for taking a break halfway through for a sandwich, getting in 1500 words, but I don't feel very happy about them. Basically I got the guys into the house and did a little bit of exposition. Dull.

At home tonight I hope I can do some real thinking about what to do next.

11:30 pm -- I only just now looked a little through notes again. I happily note that I already have loads of ideas for sex stories from most of the characters. I ought to calm down and just have them start telling them.

Hmm, I wonder if I can work Bart's chain.com job in somehow. Or does there have to be a justification for all the sex stories?

2007-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

That whole thing with Hap having to chose between Denny and Don -- I was thinking about the Denny part as a subplot. It's actually part of the main conflict. I need more subplots.

I ought to have a subplot centering on Bart, who has a comic aspect. Let's see... I think I could take the "wi-fi for all" concept and give it to Bart instead of Denny... It's too optimistic for Denny. It also fits into Bart's community-oriented work: in addition to serving on the board of the non-profit arts center in Seattle, he's also doing this wi-fi for all thing. It's like what Meraki is trying to do, only in a non-profit community oriented way.

6:15 pm -- I wrote what might be all of chapter 5 -- all about Greg. I took the idea I'd had before about how he is starting an energy drink business and totally ran with it. Even though I didn't get a start until after 12, I had a great day -- 4350 words.

2007-09-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

The subplot (or maybe it's the main plot) about Denny trying to get Hap to join his initiative rather than Don's company -- the important thing about it is that this alternate initiative has to represent something important for Denny. It has to represent a true alternative for him personally, a different road than he's taken before. And when he decides not to do it, it's not just him fucking with Hap and moving his money to Don, it's a huge personal defeat and turning point for Denny.

I wrote above:

What's Denny doing? Could he be doing some kind of nonprofit thing? I can steal the "wi-fi for all" idea -- it's not that unique an idea. Maybe Denny surprises the others by having an idea that competes with Don's for attention.

However, don't forget Denny is a drug addict. He's probably not doing anything. Maybe the wi-fi people have him on their board or something. And ... Denny is half-heartedly trying to recruit Bart, but basically he doesn't give a shit.

Another thing I have to do: go back and make it clearer that the apartment represents freedom for Hap. Keep that word in mind. Contrast it to the period when he owned a house with his wife Kara. He rents now but is freer. I need to evoke that whole Henry Miller type feeling of freedom and then create a feeling where it is threatened.

Well, why not: Have a scene where we actually see him preparing to leave. Meeghan is going to leave the apartment a few minutes before him. The mail arrives and he opens a letter from the landlord saying the house has been sold. Meeghan asks what it is and Hap says "Nothing," but then goes on to explain to the reader, as he leaves town, the import of the letter.

2007-09-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I developed another pink eye infection. It meant I couldn't work at all. How frustrating it was to have a three-day holiday weekend and not be able to use one of the days. Today, the holiday, was not shaping up to be great either, because I was going to have to spend much of it at home due to the fact an electrician was coming to work at the house. But strangely, with all the disruptions, I actually did about 2500 words, writing the end (or almost to the end) of chapter 4 with Denny's story about Marinka. It felt good and weighty and very interesting without being too dirty; I only hinted at the outré stuff without actually going into it. I'm at almost 25,500 words.

Tomorrow morning the guy is coming back, so I went tonight to work and got my computer so I can work at home tomorrow. The release is slipping a week so it shouldn't be a big deal.

2007-09-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Saturday -- again, as long as I allow myself to sleep as late as I need to (since it's the only day of the week I can do so) and perform a minimum of errands before getting to my office, I wind up sitting down to work between 11:00 and 11:30. Perhaps part of the issue is that the neighborhood is so pleasant early in the morning, and my office is do dreary. It's very dark during the morning and gets increasingly brighter, due to reflected light, during the day. An hour before sunset the room is brilliantly lit by sun reflecting off the walls of the airshaft, even though it never shines directly into the room. Then the sun goes behind a row of trees across the street and suddenly the room becomes twilit again.

So when I begin work in the morning I'm bound to turn on lights. I imagine that during the winter the problem will be much worse, since the sun will not climb high enough even to reach into the airshaft and will set behind the buildings across the street earlier. Plus, it will be cold, probably very cold. I'll have to take steps such as get a heater and perhaps even a heated cushion for the chair.

Anyway. All that is neither here nor there. To the book.

Q: What does Denny offer? It has to be related to his character, "desiring release and redemption."

A: Perhaps it's not something as quotidian as a job to rival Don's putative offer. Perhaps it's something that actually does not give Hap a way to keep his apartment and his lover, but something that Hap still wants because all middle-aged men want it: a chance for complete escape and starting over again. Perhaps Denny even holds out the possibility of Hap bringing his lover along.

Q: What is important here about the remote setting?

A: Hap can't phone Meeghan and talk excitedly about it. In fact, that's the main reason Don brought them all up there: because there's no communication.

Q: Shouldn't you make that very clear?

A: Yes, I can bring it up shortly. Perhaps Hap can have a conversation with the ghostly hippie he glimpsed boarding the ferry, and the man can tell him a little about life in Shattermine -- specifically the remoteness.

Q: Why is it important that Hap (and the others) can't discuss what's going on up there with others?

A: Don doesn't want them to until he settles who's working for him. (I should have him get them all to sign NDAs when they arrive, though -- humor.) But in terms of the narrative, I want the environment to be more like a pressure cooker, so that the only resources the characters have are each other. This is important not only for atmospheric reasons but so the characters are deprived of information and support from outside; this plays into the hands of the characters who are willing to be more manipulative, which is almost everyone except Hap.

Q: What else do you need to establish that you haven't?

A: Bart and Hap are good friends. This is necessary for the plot, as I explained above: Don intends to reach Bart through Hap.

Q: One more thing to think about?

A: I have to take care in revealing Denny's story -- which parts to reveal when, for what advantage.

3:00 pm. I've written about 1400 words, covering several small issues. I went back and introduced Greg very briefly so I could bring him up in the middle of ch. 4 where I find myself right now. And I wrote more about the remoteness of Shattermine and of Don's lodge. Chapter 4 is now 3100 words so there's time for a nice long passage at the end. I'm of a mind to write a long story about Denny. There are some main parts of his backstory I need to cover.

2007-08-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Friday of a long holiday weekend. I should have come straight here to the office after leaving work, but I felt some resistance. In fact, I spoke of it last night to A.: I said "I actually don't want tomorrow to be Friday because I don't feel like working on my book already." After I left work I went home, took a shower, tried and failed to nap, and left the house; but even then I drove around unwilling to go straight to my writing office. Nevertheless, I drove up the block, and there was no parking place, and I felt vaguely hungry, so I finally drove to Noe Valley and had something to eat at Pomodoro, a chain Italian restaurant on the corner of 24th and Noe. It's cheap but good, and neighborhoody enough that I don't feel bad about going in there wearing only a t-shirt (while I would never wear just a t-shirt to Bar Bambino).

After eating I felt more like working, so I came to my office at Bob's house. I have a couple of hours to make a few notes, and then I have to take S. to the airport.

So let's see. I was thinking in the car that I can just skip the rest of the ferry trip, elide it, and get right to the mountain retreat. I could do that. But the important thing is to decide what I'm showing in this chapter. Surely I'm not just staging this chapter so I can show the ferry ride. It has to have a purpose, like:

Demonstrating the relationship between characters
Telling us parts of the characters' backstories that are essential to understanding parts of the book
Introducing and/or forwarding plot elements

Hmm, perhaps I should be doing more plot. I was just thinking of the Peter Plate novel I read, how it had cryptic plot and character elements suitable for a mystery -- basically it was all atmosphere, with these plot elements to drive it forward.

Brainstorming:

Don's main motivation is to recruit Bart for his new company. He's willing to take others if it means he gets Bart, but only Bart is essential.
Thus others are motivated to make alliances with Bart.
Greg, of course, would do anything to be part of it. His natural niche is sales, but strangely he finds himself competing with Shaun, who actually has done sales for one of Don's companies in the past.
Shaun doesn't really care about getting hired by Don except to the extent it fits into his own trip, which is, pretty much, self-aggrandizement and making himself a celebrity but doing it through the unlikely vehicle of being a leftist revolutionary. It makes sense to him: leftist revolutionaries are his only heroes, therefore he wants to be like them. Of course, the main things he wants to emulate is the fame and hero status. He's not really down for the years of solitary confinement in prison and such.
Denny is searching for some kind of forgiveness for the death of his girlfriend... does she have a name? Marinka -- and also for a release from his other demons. Plus, Marianne has just left him. He is a sort of negative seeker -- he really seeks only a release. How could this fit into any decision to join Don's company? It wouldn't. Probably Don only wants his money.
The prospect of investing money may also be a draw for Shaun, for the typical reasons of a middle-aged man with what he feels is a sizeable stake -- it's only a few million but the temptation is to pull it out of the politically correct investment fund and give it to Don.
Of course, Hap wants to keep his apartment (or get another one), but his price is low. All he wants is a job that pays a lot more than what he makes now.
Seth wants to be recruited because he wants approval. He might even secretly feel he's still in competition with Bart.
Greg feels he can possibly use Seth, so he flatters him.

That's a good collection of motivations and relationships vis-à-vis the new company. But I feel there has to be another subplot. For this, I suspect the most interesting character is Denny. He seeks a release, I wrote above. What does that mean? I don't know, but it occurs to me that Denny has to offer an alternate temptation to Don's. Hap will have to choose at the end. Of course it has to be that the job, or whatever it is, that Denny offers will be less financially secure than what Don is offering.

But remember that Don wants Denny's money. So let's say there's a competition for that too. Could be like this:

Don explains idea for company. Hap considers the attractiveness of going to work for Don -- the pluses and minuses.
Don wants Denny's money. Denny considers investing in Don's company versus doing the something else.
Denny indirectly encourages Hap to think there's an alternative to going to work for Don. (Problems here -- why shouldn't he go to work for Don anyway? What's stopping him? Must make it some kind of moral objection.)
Hap has to decide, and he finally decides to go with Denny.
But then Denny decides to go ahead and invest his money with Don anyway.

Seems kind of like a classic dilemma: A is attractive but morally repugnant, B is less attractive but more morally acceptable, you make the "moral" choice and decide to go with B but then B is taken away. But instead of going with A as the "only" choice, you say fuck it and choose C -- whatever that is.

A little like Catch-22. But I'm sure no one will notice the similarity.

In order to make this work, I would need only to make the various choices clear. It must be that A is less in keeping with Hap's character than B, so that accepting A would be a sort of betrayal of himself. In order to make that clear, I have to make Hap's character clear, and I have to do this from the stories he tells.

Similarly, I have to make Denny's character really clear too: his moral ambiguity.

The only problem... hmm... Who is the more morally interesting character -- Denny or Bart? I've always said that "Bart is fundamentally amoral." And yet I also feel Bart has more potential for corruptibility, while Denny does not. Denny feels more like the lost soul. Perhaps Bart isn't really amoral, but he's never actually been forced to make a truly moral choice.

That means the stakes have to be really high for Don's venture. The moral and political stakes, that is.

I can show Shaun to be interested only in himself. Don will appeal to Shaun's vanity.

To sum up:

Don wants Bart
Goes through Hap to get Bart (therefore I must make Bart and Hap close friends)
Hap is tempted by $$ but finds Don's venture morally objectionable
Denny, seeking redemption, has an alternative.
It's more in Hap's nature to take the morally good alternative and to refuse the $$ advantage.

So I need a complication.

2007-08-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

Underway no sooner than 11:20, despite best efforts. I have as much time as I need; still, I find myself wishing I could take Monday off.

Today I'm supposed to write about Denny, but I have the feeling it will take me a little bit of time to work up any momentum. I'll try reading a little.

4:15 pm. I wrote 1600 words and got a good start on the chapter, but now I'm stuck. Somehow I feel I've backed myself into a corner... Maybe I should have Shaun take up the part of Denny's backstory that comes after college. I have: They meet in a bar, both are underachievers of a sort; they do drugs together.

4:40 pm. Okay, I did another 325 words, but I'm really dried up for the day. I'll knock off. Almost 1900 words for the day -- above average, the way I'm going.

2007-08-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

I didn't get right back to it. My head of steam, such as it was, wore off and instead of getting right back to it, I did something else -- exercised and watched baseball on television, or did not exercise and still watched television.

Then during the week I found myself feeling a little bit creatively tired and even depressed. I brought my laptop to work most days but I found myself resistant to thinking about the book or even opening the notes file. Friday came, and I found myself busy at work and with things to do during the evening, so I did not fuck off and come over to my office to write.

So while I worked for four different days last week, this week will have only two. And I'm getting a late start today, a muggy Saturday where the fog never quite burns off but forms a glary haze. I woke up reasonably early but because I was determined not to spend time sleeping during the day -- because I have to knock off in late afternoon and go see A. -- I stayed in bed and slept until after 9:00. Then I got up and did errands and now when I finally sit down it's almost noon. And even as I sit down, it's none too eagerly. I have to make myself concentrate.

I think I'll try to close my eyes for a few minutes and then do some thinking.

3:30 -- I wrote about 1160 words and found a way to end chapter 3 on a slightly foreboding note. I finally have four of the characters roaring up the lake on the ferry. In the next chapter, rather than simply continuing the forward narrative, I think I'll begin with a flashback featuring Hap's sex life. I can bring in another character at some point... For some reason, I'm reluctant to talk a great deal about Seth at this point. I introduced him in this chapter without doing what I did for Shaun and Bart, which is to give a lot of their backstory.

I think instead what I'll do is talk about Hap's marriage to Kara, how it started and ended. He would have known Greg, Bart, Shaun and Seth during this period...

Another note is that I'm neglecting Denny, and Denny is really a more interesting character than Shaun, on whom I've already spent a lot of ink. Perhaps instead of writing about Bart's marriage, I'll write Denny's whole backstory, and then he comes onstage in the middle of the chapter when the ferry arrives at the top of the lake.

It's 3:45 today so I think I'll knock off and try to have a big day tomorrow, when I don't have any obligations.

2007-08-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

I got a very late start today, and was very slow to warm up. But once I read some Miller I found myself in a much better mood. Finally I did about 850 words in about three hours. If I was sure where things were going, I'd do even more. And I might get right back at it, in fact.

2007-08-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

Early start -- 10:50, anyway. A sunny, warm day with a cool breeze -- perfect summer weather. Me in my little green cave (the office is painted green; when I finish this book, I want to repaint it so it's not quite as underwater-feeling).

I feel like starting something fresh. Instead of doing the scene about Bart's first time, told at the party -- which I am having trouble getting a feel for -- I want to attack from a different angle, write a dialogue scene between the travelers. Above all, change the tone.

The idea will be to show some character traits through dialogue, with a little exposition along the way. It's also important to introduce a constant sexual tone, not just from the narrator, but from the others.

I'll read a little Henry Miller to prepare.

2007-08-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Late Friday afternoon -- I came to my office at Bob's a little before 4:00. I want to think just a little about this section, then lie down.

Random thoughts about Bart:

He is a GEEK, he must be strange, but he is also a SUCCESS. He is not immature.
As shown by his attraction to Jennifer, he seems to like women who are very straight -- or maybe that's just one of the types he finds attractive. I should think about why he was attracted to Jennifer, the annoying super-straight HR manager, and not Stella, the kooky San Francisco girl. Perhaps Stella is too similar to all the girls who are naturally attracted to him, whereas Jennifer, strangely enough, represents -- not a challenge, but something different. Similarly, he has also had an affair with the bored wife of a Chinese-American dry cleaner. In fact, taken together, all these represent a quirky, eclectic bunch, even if alone set against American culture they are anonymous and straight.

Hmm, that's kind of an interesting idea.
He doesn't need Don's money or job. He will have his own reasons for taking it or not taking it. I should show this independence right away. He is really independent and his own person.
He can talk in a sort of shorthand.
Don't make him too young. He may be a couple years younger than the others but that shouldn't translate to much difference. In fact, he is more mature than Shaun and Greg and probably Seth, at least.
He has no interest in telling others what to do.

Later. Wrote 934 words, introducing the party scene at M.'s (now Olive's). Almost got off the ground; not quite. Re-attack tomorrow.

2007-08-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that I should try doing something a little different for Bart's story of how he got laid the first time. I can have a little more dialogue and give-and-take between Hap and Bart, and I can also stage it in an interesting place -- M.'s parties, I'm thinking. That will allow me to relate backstory as well as create this Bay Area atmosphere.

Keep in mind that M.'s parties were a pre-dotcom phenomenon. They were more related to the RDBMS- and aerospace-heavy high tech industry of the early and mid-90s than they are to the dotcom era. Make that clear.

So let's see... Who should I use (from my own history) for Bart's first? Has to be somebody young and impressionable... J., or that noisy little Berkeley girl with the jewfro. Yeah, that's it. Bart can tell this story to Hap at the party and they can have a big laugh over it. Then I can immediately transition to them standing at the dock the next morning ready to board the ferry.

This means there will be no scene in chapter 2 (or 3) at the hotel at the foot of the lake in which we meet both Bart and Seth at the same time, but that scene never came close to materializing in my mind, so the hell with it. This in itself is an important thing to learn. In the past I would have conceived of a scene when outlining ahead (cf. the entry for 7 Aug 07) and tried really really hard to write through it, even when it was resolutely failing to come. Now I know I should just jettison such scenes and go around them by presenting whatever I had originally intended for them elsewhere. And in fact I never had even a remotely good idea for this scene, had no idea what purpose it was supposed to serve -- it sounded dull as soon as I conceived it. And it devoted pages to sitting around in Lausanne when that's not even the setting of the book. The heck with it.

So: start ch. 3 the way I have it, with the long paragraph introducing Bart. Then cut to the scene at the dock where they're waiting to board the ferry. We can have a short bit of dialogue, some short exchange that tells something about Bart. (I'm always better at assigning myself such moments to write than I am actually writing them.) Then talk about how they met, and explain M.'s parties, and segue into the story Bart told of his first time. By the time we get back to the "present" the ferry should be well on its way.

I wonder if I should work in a few facts about the geography at this point, by way of setting the scene more. I can have the boat captain explain them and Hap quote them indirectly.

All this is a wee bit dull, though... I find myself asking "What are we trying to show with this whole novel anyway?" Keep that in mind, then: the way men talk, the way they behave. That's the point.

2007-08-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the sports radio program this morning and I thought, I should have a character -- either Greg or Don -- just talk like Gary Radnich, where everything is a sort of catch phrase or sports cliché offered in an ironic tone. It's a good template for an aggressive man who needs to be in control. Somehow I feel it's better for Greg than for Don because I feel Don doesn't exert power that way.

I put a few words to the end of chapter 2 and this afternoon wrote a paragraph about Bart to begin chapter 3. I thought he would be a stronger character to continue with than Seth. And I quickly decided that I could begin with a sex story about the first time he got laid. But I need to figure out a little about that. When I wrote the sentence "he real reason he stuck around long after the faculty had run out of things to teach him was that it took him that long to get laid" I drew a slight blank and I realized I had to do some thinking about it. However, the bit I wrote last night on going to bed, and this bit today, pushed me over 13,000 words.

2007-08-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

5:15 pm -- I got though the part about picking up Shaun and I found myself basically giving his whole backstory. The chapter is up to 6000 words and I feel it needs another sex scene; I think what I need to do is get them to Chelan -- which I am changing the name to Lausanne for some reason I haven't really thought out. However the next thing that has to happen is that they have to meet Bart and Seth. Since that would feel like too many new characters I think I'll remember what happened in Catch-22 and just let this be the Shaun chapter. I can bring in Seth and Bart at the end, maybe, but I don't need to talk extensively about them and fully introduce them as characters.

So I guess the next thing to do is to wrap up this chapter with some action or dialogue that helps illuminate Shaun. And ideally it should foreshadow or indicate some crucial character trait of his that will become important later. To do that will take some thinking.

Up to 12,271 words. About 2800 today, 6000 for Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Not bad.

2007-08-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

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, the strong body and the orgasm. Since I don't even remember her last name, nor do I make up one in the book, there is no danger in using her real first name. I ought to do that more often, I think.

Well, so far I have not had much difficulty writing sex scenes. I think that's four or five of them in the first 10,000 words of the book. At that rate there will be four dozen, and all it has to do is hold together as a novel. I won't know for a while how successful that will be, but I suspect that if I pay more attention to tone and less to plot, I will do well.

Having written a good 2000 words already before 1:00, I feel a little inclined to take a break -- as long as I actually do get back to the book this time and not abandon the work session like I did yesterday when, at about 4:00, I knocked off intending to get back to it and never did. Instead I went to Writers with Drinks and the Market Street Cinema, where I had a têecirc;te-à-têecirc;te with (again) a fleshy little blond not unlike Robin. I remember Robin as being distinctly a little taller than I was, and this girl seemed only an inch or so taller at the most. She definitely still had the baby fat; in fact, only a little over a year ago, she was still in high school, she said. I will try using my impression of her body for the stripper Marcie in the first chapter of my book.

2007-08-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

I keep making notes on this chapter but I'm clearly having trouble with it. The main problems are that it's an interstitial chapter -- it's between the road trip and the arrival at the cabin -- and that it has to bear a lot of burden of exposition.

In the past I would have simply tried to write through it, painstakingly leading the reader through moment after moment more as a way to discover for myself what happens than to actually say anything interesting. But I don't have time to do that, nor would it be interesting. Get to the point! -- except that I'm not sure what the point is.

Q: What are the points?
A: First, introduce three characters. Second, Shaun's antipathy toward Seth. Third, the setting. Fourth, Hap's dilemma.
Q: What else?
A: Each time a new character is introduced, must reveal -- through language -- Hap's attitude toward him.
Q: But what is important about that?
A: Because of the male readership this book is supposed to have, I can't take the general mocking attitude toward the male characters that I normally would. Maybe should read a Raymond Chandler book or something.

90 minutes later -- After all that angst I simply started in, and wrote 775 words to begin the chapter. I tied up the scene with Marcie, doing a "next morning" thing, then did these points from above:
1. Road.
2. Hap on Meeghan and how she has to carry on affair at his place.

Just about ready to pick up Shaun.

2007-08-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

Another thing to remember: oblique dialogue. I'm not actually sure how to go about writing oblique dialogue, since I almost always write standard, natural dialogue, but I'll have to figure it out. Not only will it lend the writing more style, it will help me be more interested in the sound of the language. And the interpersonal relations between the characters might be suited for oblique dialogue because it will show how they can only approach each other indirectly.

I haven't read any Don DeLillo in preparation. Perhaps I should, but I'm already doing enough reading. I'm feeling antsy about the project already. This is a good sign; it means I have some pent-up energy and will make progress the next time I sit down. I've been trying to write just a few notes every day, to keep the project in the front of my mind, and the anxiety shows it is working.

The first chapter was a piece of cake, but it's actually not like the succeeding chapters. I think that once I discover a way to combine the energetic, forward-pushing energy, the Mamet-like aggressive business environment, and the DeLillo-like dialogue, I should be able to polish off a few more chapters before I start to go more slowly as plot threads needing development pile up. On the other hand, I shouldn't pay too much attention to the plot threads; they should be incidental, like the secondary and tertiary plot threads on a TV cop show: no matter what they're about, they have little or nothing to do with the main climax, the shoot-out or near shoot-out at the end of the show. (Come to think of it -- TV episodes of cop shows seldom end in a shootout, fistfight or other violence, while movies about cops almost always do.)
OK, what kind of things do we need to know from Shaun? He should talk about where he's been, perhaps his train trip. But first I think he goes through a spasm of politeness in which he asks Hap about his trip, what he's doing, and so on; this gives Hap an opportunity to talk about both his job and his predicament -- to make the whole thing about losing his apartment clearer.

I wonder if I can start off the chapter by talking about his girlfriend again... what's her name? Meeghan. Hap can say he wasn't thinking about the stripper... Marcie -- but about Meeghan again. We learn a piece of crucial information about her, namely that as far as she's concerned she has to carry on the affair at Hap's, because she lives with a housemate who used to be her lover and it just wouldn't do to do anything under his nose. And besides, she lives in a dump in the lower Haight, she doesn't want to bring Hap there. So it's either at Hap's place or nothing. At this point he picks up Shaun, and in response to Shaun's question makes clear the whole connection between keeping his apartment and keeping Meeghan.

Obviously there has to be some connection to the temptation of business. Don wants Hap to join his evil firm, promises a decent salary and, of course, stock options.
So let's recap.

Road.
Hap on Meeghan and how she has to carry on affair at his place.
Wenatchee. Stops to pick up Shaun. Shaun bums money from him first thing.
Shaun in the car, asks Hap what he's been up to.
Hap mentions his job and then Meeghan, makes clear the connection between losing his apartment and possibly losing her.
In response, Shaun begins discussing his latest affair, but much of it is through the filter of Hap. In the middle of the story Hap gives background and exposition about Shaun. **Note that this doesn't come sooner. It has to be dropped into the narration of his monologue.**
Then I suppose it's time to arrive at Chelan. A very little bit about the town, predict that Seth and Bart are there.
I feel Shaun should say something derogatory about Seth, his old college roommate. But even now we get the tag about Seth -- "good with the ladies."
The whole chapter feels like it's getting really long already so to keep things moving I should go right to the next scene.
After dinner with Seth and Bart -- sitting overlooking the lake. A little exposition here -- why aren't they having the whole gathering down here in a nice hotel rather than go all the way up the lake to Don's cabin? Because Don wants to show off, and also he's paranoid, and so on. So we understand they're going to a remote place, and Bart describes the place a little.
I feel we should get something about Seth's history with Shaun. There's some resentment here that I should bring out.

See below for notes on Shaun's resentment of Seth.

Q: Why does Shaun resent Seth? What’s their history?
A: Has to have some element of sexual competitiveness, something that Seth came out on top of.
Q: What story could we use here?
A: Possibly the thing about Stacy and her roommate, whose name I totally forget -- the time when they switched beds and fucked each other's dates.
Q: Did this happen in college?
A: Certainly not in a dorm -- would have to be in an apartment house.
Q: What do you want to show through this story?
A: First, Seth’s sexual superiority to Shaun; second, the way Shaun fucks things up by being passive and uncertain and, above all, by dealing with fantasies rather than the reality.
Q: Is there something about the girl who was Seth’s date that brings out Shaun's nascent political romanticism?
A: Yeah, maybe something really dumb -- like the girl is Spanish and Shaun wants to talk to her about the Spanish Civil War.
Q: That’s good, keep that. And what else?

2007-08-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

This morning I thought: Remember your idea to approach some of these chapters the way Heller approached the chapters in Catch-22: each chapter highlights a different character. This was emphasized, to a misleading degree, by naming chapters after the character.

I don't have to name the chapter after the character. But I can privately think of it as Shaun's chapter, Denny's chapter, etc.

2007-08-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I wrote the entire first chapter's first draft, about 6100 words. Lots of sex and not a huge amount of exposition. Some of the writing struck me as a little flat but I should be able to fix that.

Now it's Wednesday, and I'm spending the day at home on a sick day. I have little energy but I think I can still make notes on the second chapter.

The second chapter has to accomplish a few things. First, I have to get Hap and at least some of the others a lot closer to arriving at the cabin. Originally I had everyone arrive at the same time, but when Cris suggested that it would be interesting to suggest remoteness by setting the cabin way out on Lake Chelan, so that you'd have to take the ferry to get there, I decided Hap would meet a subset of the other characters in Chelan. And a little after that, I decided it might be good for me to have him pick up Shaun in Wenatchee on the way to Chelan. (Why Shaun? Because he doesn't have a car, and has to take the train. Must have some explanation of why he didn't ride all the way with Hap in the first place.)

So the idea would be to introduce Shaun first, then two more characters whom they meet up with at the hotel in Chelan: Bart and Seth. Don, Greg and Denny are already up at the cabin, so they're introduced when the first four get there. This has the obvious benefit of allowing me to introduce characters one by one, and especially to be clear about Shaun, since he's one of the characters I have a hard time getting my mind around and, indeed, not mix up with Denny.

... took a nap. When I got up, I had a sudden clear idea what Denny looks like. When A. and I went to the Sigur Ros concert there was a couple sitting in front of us in the front row. They were clearly some kind of royalty in that context -- I imagined the guy was a programming executive for a rock radio station, but for all I know he could have been the lead singer for some famous band. I say they looked like royalty because they were both around 30, chicly and expensively dressed, and very attractive. The woman was dark and gorgeous but in a slightly puffy and damaged way, as if she had been drop-dead gorgeous three or four years earlier before all the drugs. The guy was similarly ragged-looking and slightly puffy, with the requisite stubble on his pale, clammy skin and some kind of shaggy haircut that wouldn't have looked out of place on Neil Young in 1969 or 1989. He was very tall, and he wore a red satin shirt under a black or charcoal grey blazer, and he had a somewhat hulking walk that his height and weight gain contributed to. He looked extremely self-centered, and like someone who would sit in a nightclub for hours with a sullen expression doing nothing while his girlfriend chatted with everyone. So this will be my model for Denny. This is good, since earlier I had in mind my old housemate Larry but he didn't have the gravitas that Denny needs.

Okay, back to thinking about the action of the chapter.
a. road
b. Wenatchee station
c. Shaun -- the first thing he does is ask for money so he can go in and pay at cafe
d. Exposition about Shaun told by narrator
e. Dialogue -- very brief and indirect -- about where they're going
f. Chelan hotel -- check in with Bart and Seth -- all have dinner

The difficult thing will be working sex into this chapter. I should have some kind of sex story told by Shaun in the car.

2007-07-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

1:30pm on Sunday afternoon. I've been wasting time, avoiding starting. I better try to focus.

Q: What is the next thing to write?

A: The scene in the strip club, followed by a scene in the hotel.

Q: What is the name of the woman Hap goes to bed with?

A: Becky.

Q: Tell about her.

A: She is of college age, with straight blond hair, 5'5" and slender, though not athletic -- more of a teenager's body. Think Becky Becker only with straight hair. Tanned and smooth. She goes to Eastern Oregon State and is in town for the summer, making money at the strip club, because there are no strip clubs in Ashland. She is a biology major and was supposed to be pre-med only she has decided she doesn't want to be a doctor, though she hasn't told her parents yet.

That may be enough to get going.

2007-07-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

I began actually writing the book today, with a 2,048 word session. I mixed what I had intended to write about the road trip with something I invented on the spot -- a girlfriend for Hap, named Meeghan. I modeled her on the girl I ran into last weekend, K., but K. is such a strange name that I made it a little more common. I also made her enamored of "the angle" of fucking Hap energetically on top. I got all the way to the opening of the section set in the strip club in Bend.

I think the writing's a little flat but on the other hand I didn't really get bogged down. I'll have to do a little more reading every day; I'm taking the Miller with me.

2007-07-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

OK, first two chapters... What do I have to cover?

Chapter 1:

The main premise, i.e. he and several others are invited up for week at cabin by Don
Who Don is and who, in general, the others are
Hap's main problem -- losing his apartment
Geographical setting: the drive north, cutting off I-5, the strange grassland, Klamath Falls, Bend
Action in Bend

Chapter 2:

Driving through forest, then fields, then over the Columbia River, then Washington.
Wenatchee: picking up Denny. Driving with Denny to Chelan
Meeting Seth and Shaun in Chelan. (That leaves Greg and Bart already up there with Don.)
Mischief in the small town.

Seems all right. I wonder how much I need to expand most of those before actually writing them. Perhaps I should consider what gets revealed when. That always seems like one of the keys to a book.

2007-07-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a late lunch and a coffee. There's a cafe called Little Spot a block away. They have free wireless and that's about all you can say for it; it's extremely sleepy, run by a lanky, long-faced Arab guy in the afternoons. I go over there with my laptop when I need to get on the internet, since I usually can't get a connection at my office.

I was over there just now and a fetching lass in her mid-20s came in and politely asked if there was wi-fi there. I said yes, and it's free. I worked for another 15 minutes while she pulled out her own laptop and had coffee. When I was finished, as I was standing up and closing my laptop, I turned and asked the girl if she was visiting the area. No, she smiled, she had just signed a lease nearby. I introduced myself and she said her name was K. I only mention it because it's been about 5 years since I last met a stranger in a cafe, and a lovely young lady at that. She had a dancer's ponytail and was working some Capri-cut jeans.

I emailed V. and asked her if she would introduce me to the kink.com people. Of course there's nothing stopping me from simply contacting them myself; they're a public business, not a movie star.

OK, back to work. Let's think about Hap, my protagonist -- he's the only character I don't have much of a clear idea of. I don't even know what his job is -- and that's very important to my conception of a main character.

Again, some brainstorming mixed with what I have already established about him:

He was on the creative writing magazine in college. This suggests he has, at least, some notion of being a writer or creative person.
He "has enough" and "is a happy man." He's satisfied in life.
Therefore, he must have a problem that threatens him and his happy life. It must relate to a temptation that challenges who he really is.
At some point, perhaps during college, "Don wasn't very aware of Hap until he wanted something from Hap. Then he cynically tried to flatter and manipulate his way, and the extent to which he succeeded makes Hap ashamed even today, though Don doesn't even remember it."
Denny dated the same girls, often stealing them from Hap. So they knew each other well.
After college, Hap does a little freelance writing for the same alt.weekly that Shaun sells ads for.
Right after college, Shaun dated someone whom Hap had also dated.
The freelance writing thing doesn't go so well, so Hap gets a job working for a large tech company similar to Sybase or Sun (we'll call it BlueSky). He sort of works in product marketing on white papers and collateral.
At some point he falls in with a hippie-nerd like crowd, and they take him to M.'s parties.
The M. parties period takes place 1996-1999. Seth is also there, and Denny a little bit.
Hap meets Bart at one of these parties. Later, Hap approached Bart for a job at Moment (even though he already knows Don).
Denny betrays his friendship in the usual addict ways.
Hap manages to miss both the highs and the lows of the dotcom bubble. He works for BlueSky all the way from 1995 to 2003 and then is laid off.
Meanwhile, he runs into a woman he had been flirting with at a party, and she has someone else with her. This someone else, Kara, he marries in 1999.
He buys a house in the Mission District, thereby becoming a symbol of what Shaun soon begins fomenting against.
Hap's marriage to Kara is marked by his infidelities. He is not a fantastic womanizer but this is the Bay Area and women are more available. Eventually Kara can't take it any more and leaves him after four years, in 2003. So he gets divorced and laid off in 2003.
He sells his half of the house to Kara and now lives in J.C.'s little flat in Bernal Heights.
Things are kind of tight in 2003 and 2004, but toward the end of 2004 he gets another job very similar to his last one.
His contentment comes from being single and having the freedom to bring girls home and not get tied down again. He isn't ambitious, he makes a good salary, he has a good apartment; he doesn't want to buy a house or have kids, he doesn't want to work 70 hours a week at a startup.
However, just before the book opens, he finds out that the house where his apartment is has been sold. There's no way he will be able to afford another place in San Francisco without a large down payment and twice as much rent as he was paying. Therefore, the temptation to take a job with Dreedle is strong.
Remember: he doesn't like threats to his autonomy.

Well, that's all very good. Evidently it's easier than I thought for me to construct backstories for characters. With previous books I had generally had difficulty, but not so much here.

There might, however, be a whole level of emotional characterization I'm missing which I won't discover until later.

I have created a huge chart on the wall with a timeline -- a row for each year from 1992 to 2007, and columns for each character. It done with colorful post-its that tell what characters were doing, how they interacted, and so on.

Things I'm still missing:

I describe an interaction between Don and Hap during or right after college, during which "Don cynically tried to manipulate Hap," but I don't really have a handle on it. I don't know what happened. I need to come up with that.
I need to come up with more temptations other than those offered by Don's business. That is merely the most obvious.
I need to know more about what Denny is doing as the book opens.

2007-07-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

A whole day, a real whole day, of working on HOW THEY SCORED. Not that I got a particularly early start. I began the day with the usual errands, parked the car at home and walked over to my office, and tried to figure out where to put the chaise, which is supposed to be delivered today. Then I spent at least 45 minutes cutting out the relationship chart pieces and sticking them onto a big giant post-it poster -- I had to print the pieces (i.e. the cells of a table) on plain paper, and gluing them on post-its then sticking the post-its up was easier than dealing with labels.

I still lack a couple of pieces for Bart, but I was thinking earlier today when I was driving around that perhaps I ought to change the characters a little. Instead of "Seth" the Jewish nerd, why not make him an Indian nerd? I could make him Rajiv, the Indian guy Bart hired in Bangalore (since it's the same Bart I wrote about in my novel set in Bangalore).

On the other hand, no -- That would mean telling at least one sexual story in the voice of an Indian dude, and I can't pull that off. Still, "Seth" -- does it have to be such a Jewish name?

So back to Bart. I'll hew closely to the character from Dear Prudence, not that he was very developed. Let's combine a little brainstorming on him with things I know.

Bart and Don were in the CS department together in college -- they met there, and later went on to found Moment.
Bart and Seth had a class together in sophomore year and they were a little in competition with each other to see who was the smartest. This is a competition that Bart easily won, which made Seth decide to work harder. Bart has forgotten about this incident, which was life-changing for Seth.
Bart knew Shaun a little because Shaun was Seth's roommate, but Shaun didn't hang out with the Creative Writing magazine crowd.
Bart and Denny were college roommates.
Bart is "bashful," a real heads-down geek. He's not above enjoying the money he has made, but he's more interested in technology -- a little bit the way Scott W. was.
After college Bart gets a computer science MS but long before he gets his degree he's working for Don at Moment.
Bart leaves Moment after it is bought by Oracle, not immediately, but after Don starts throwing his weight around. They had already been disagreeing about the direction of the company and even whom to get acquired by.
Around this time, he meets Hap at one of M.'s parties.
Bart has another idea for a company, and he approaches Denny as an angel investor. Denny comes through with some money but the company fails -- this is part of the dot-com crash.
After this, Bart gets the job with CaliMort.
I'm thinking that around this time he encounters Greg -- probably at a social occasion held by Don.
After he leaves CaliMort, Bart gets the job he has now -- a low-profile job as IT director at a medium-sized (70 person) startup -- he's not the CTO, but he has options and sweat equity and is more or less paying bills while trying to think of his next company. OR, alternate idea: let's say ? he's the network nerd at kink.com (or equivalent). I kind of like that better, especially because it provides some perspective on the other, more mainstream sexual lives of the other characters. (Nevertheless, Bart's tales are little more extreme than anyone else's. Perhaps we get the impression that these are the tales he merely chooses to tell for his audience.)
I wrote: Sloth--He's secretly lazy; one of the reasons he became a coder was to save work. Dislikes physical labor or any labor not involving a keyboard or a whiteboard.
I had an intuitive idea about Bart: He tends to take physical risks. Perhaps likes playing on the edge of what he can or can't control.
Bart is a valued asset. Don wants him for his new company.
I wonder if I can also make a subplot around Denny -- Denny wants Bart also?

What's Denny doing? Could he be doing some kind of nonprofit thing? I can steal the "wi-fi for all" idea -- it's not that unique an idea. Maybe Denny surprises the others by having an idea that competes with Don's for attention.

However, don't forget Denny is a drug addict. He's probably not doing anything. Maybe the M. people have him on their board or something. And ? Denny is half-heartedly trying to recruit Bart, but basically he doesn't give a shit.

Think more about Denny:

Denny is modeled on my former roommate L..
He is from a slightly wealthy family, went to Reed, did a little bit of filmmaking. At Reed he became an alcoholic and also smoked way too much dope. Eventually he dropped out.
When he cleaned up he went back to school, this time to the college where everyone else went.
He worked on the creative writing magazine with Hap and where he pranked Seth.
Denny "often stole girls away from Hap" He "attracts women who like the bad boys," which means he has successfully turned himself into someone more disreputable
Denny is brooding. He doesn't have much of a purpose. He may have a talent for making films, but he isn't ambitious. He considers producing but it's no business for someone who isn't ambitious. He considers himself born at the wrong time -- he thinks it might have been better if he had been alive 80 years earlier and could have just been a rich patron of the arts.
Also, then there was space of a sort to be a rich opium or morphine addict.
He meets Shaun in a bar in SF. They are both underachievers, so they understand each other to a point. They do some drugs together during a period before Shaun finds his métier as an "activist."
He has a relationship with a model. She is too unstable for him, and he has no talent for being nurturing or a savior.
He's very passive.
When the model dies of a drug overdose in some godforsaken place -- Bratislava, say -- Denny has nothing to do with it, he's in the US. But he feels very guilty for not being able to have helped her.
During the period of the dotcom boom, Denny heads way downhill. His life alternates between attendance at fabulous events which end up in sodden drugs orgies (without much sex -- think the book "Veronica") and completely bumming in skid rows -- he is always able to go home and get cleaned up whenever he wants to, since he's truly wealthy -- he can't lose it all. He will always have the wealth as an escape hatch.
Finally, in 2000, after meeting a woman (Marianne) at one of his many attempts at rehab, he decides to clean up for her once and for all. She is different because she is interested neither in his wealth nor in his supposed bad boy qualities but in the intelligence and creativity within him which he takes for granted.
Their relationship lasts for a few years but then Marianne simply falls in love with someone else discovers he's using again and leaves him -- this happens not too long before the action of the book.

I am also missing some pieces for Hap.

2007-07-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-07-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

It sounds hokey, but I wonder if I could somehow tie the sex stories that people tell into the whole business development scheme. Could the sex-talk spree possibly be a competition, with the winner being somehow rewarded with the business deal?

No, it's too too corny. Sex is too subversive. What I should do is have the sex talk somehow go against the grain of the whole business atmosphere.

2007-07-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

In order to have a business idea for Don, I could cannibalize the bit from the cut section of Bangalored when they were joking around about spy software that would report back what songs people were listening to on their iPods during which activities.

In that book, it's raised as a joke and then Jed starts going with it, to Stella's disgust. What I could do is, instead of spyware, have it work on the Twitter model where you opt in. In fact, let's say it's a plugin that works with Twitter. When you send a message on Twitter saying what you're doing, it pings your iPod to find out what you're listening to at that moment, and matches them.

Almost too realistic!

2007-07-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

I had an insight on Saturday when I was working on HOW THEY SCORED that the name of Hap's character and his strong sexual nature suggests a link to Henry Miller, whose motto was "Always happy and gay" (back when gay meant merely ebullient). This is potentially very helpful. It not only gives me a handle on his character but on the narrative voice I can use in the book -- a copious realism that is just as likely to veer into a philosophical issue as into a description of direct and enthusiastic screwing. And there's so much in the Miller oeuvre that I can read him for hours on end, if I want to, and never get to the end of it, while soaking up the Millerite voice for use in my own book. This also has the advantage of imbuing my usually inert first-person voice with more energy.

One of the best writing experiences I remember was the evening I went to see Stanley Kubrick's "Killer's Kiss" at the Castro, and came home so full of energy that I wrote the first several pages of what turned out to be the title story of "Too Beautiful." The interesting thing about it was that watching that movie -- proto-film noir -- did not make me start writing in hard-boiled prose. Or rather it was a very up to date late 90s version of hard-boiled prose. The real gift it gave was that it filled me with artistic energy, the way a good sermon fills me with spiritual and intellectual energy. That narrative first-person voice was full of energy, it was toppy and pushy and it knew itself. It was a little show-offy but that was all to the good. And I distinctly remember the act of writing and how much it felt like playing music. How often I have wished to recapture that energetic voice!

This means changing my approach from third person to first person, but again Miller has shown the way. Long monologues by another character are often rendered in the third person, with intermittent direct quotes. At the moment, it seems like a good way to go.

I really ought to go out and get some more Miller books and just read them all the time.

I wonder how far away this project is already from the conception of F.N. She may have imagined a simple series of stories enlivened only by my tasteful voice, with sex being the primary content -- at least 50 percent of the text. But I fully intend to make this a substantial novel. The sex stories may wind up being less than 15 percent of the text, but rather than having people skip the intermediate parts my goal is to have the sex stories so integrated with the characters that people won't want to skip.

Memorable characters -- that's the ticket. Large personalities. I somewhat belatedly remembered, the other day, the part of the discussion I had with F & F about the degree to which the characters might represent American archetypes: an astronaut, a firefighter, a cowboy and so on. Of course, one doesn't want to wind up with the Village People. I think I can fulfill this requirement by concentrating on basic archetypal personalities -- the aggressive businessman, the attractive loser, the manipulative addict, the introverted but watchful computer nerd. Of course, I have to avoid stereotypes in that direction as well. I think I can do this by giving each character a twist. The computer nerd can be quiet, but he can also have a greedy streak. The slacker can be a Zonker type, but he can also be over-concerned with people getting along.

2007-07-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Setting up office. Thinking about characters, what their stories are.

Theme emerging: temptation. Each character either/both is tempted or tempts others (sometimes other of the characters, sometimes only those in his story, sometimes those in his job).

Nascent outline:

Friday. Drive up to Bend. Introduce main premise, the weekend with college buddies hosted by one of them who’s rich. Meets a girl in Bend and has an erotic encounter.
Saturday. Arrive in Chelan, meets three of the other men: Seth, Dusty and Bart. After the two others go to bed, Dusty tells a story.
Sunday. Ferry ride up the lake: Hap witnesses a conversation between Dusty and Bart. Seth inside looking a little green.
Arrival at dock. Doc and Greg there in an SUV.
Arrival at cabin. Shaun is alone there.
Dinner. General ribald atmosphere, no long story, but a lot of dirty talk.
Monday.
Hap glimpses Bianca early morning, no interaction.
Golf. Continuation of ribald atmosphere. After match, mixed talk of business and sex. Perhaps a sort of power game here where choosing to talk about one means you can avoid the other.
Evening: after dinner, Bart tells a story involving his online business.
Tuesday.
Another glimpse of Bianca, no interaction, but we get some explanation.
Bart's additional details.
Because he is competing for Don’s attention, Greg tells a story.
Wednesday.
This time, an actual short conversation with Bianca. Hap invites himself on a shopping trip with her, then discovers Seth has been taking her already (earlier in the week).
Tension between Bart and Greg, and also between Shaun and Greg, between Dusty and Greg. No lone seems to like Greg much. But they all have to be nice to him for a reason.
Hap tells a story tonight. Then in contrast to him, Shaun does as well.

In order to extend that, I'll need to know more about the conflicts and all.

2006-07-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

Note: This entry shows my technique of asking myself questions to stimulate my thinking about a plot or character point. It's a brainstorming technique, and thus a lot of this didn't end up in the final book.

Before beginning, another piece of backstory I'm still lacking is how Hap met Don in college. I have the feeling this is too important not to figure out in advance, because it will color Hap's whole attitude about attending the week at Don's cabin.

Q: What kind of person was Don in college?

A: He was a dual business and computer science major. As a computer science major he was a geek who preferred to stay in the data center (don't forget this was in the 1980s before there was a computer on everyone's desk). But as a business major he developed a feel for contacts and politics and did a certain amount of schmoozing at fraternity parties. I might make some of his sex stories about the sorority girls and so on.

Q: Maybe it would be better to ask what kind of person Hap was in college. All I have at the moment is that he was on the Creative Writing magazine and that he knew Seth and Denny; Don is the only other character he knew. And all I have about that is:

Don wasn't very aware of Hap until he wanted something from Hap. Then he cynically tried to flatter and manipulate his way, and the extent to which he succeeded makes Hap ashamed even today, though Don doesn't even remember it.

A: Okay.

Q: So what does that imply?

A: That Don was aware of Hap for some reason, and thought Hap could be useful to him, and tried to manipulate him, etc.

Q: What is Hap doing during college?

A: Working on the magazine, and also perforce the student newspaper. So perhaps Don wants him to write about something.

Q: What about Shaun on the radio station? Does Don approach him too?

A: I'm thinking he approaches someone on the radio station but not Shaun, because there are others better known and more effective there.

Q: OK, back to Hap. Don wants Hap to publicize something. What is it?

A: Let's see... Don is involved in CS and a little bit in Business Administration, which simply means he's in a fraternity... I'm trying to cast my mind back to the early 1980s to remember what people were even focusing on then... It can't be an internet thing because there was hardly any such thing; at least, no one outside university science departments used it, and no one owned a computer except scientists and hobbyists. Maybe it's something as simple as an event or series of events that Don puts on as sort of a project.... I'm thinking a film series. Something that would fit with his self image as a technocrat but also with being a frat boy of sorts... Didn't the movie Red Dawn, about a Soviet invasion of Colorado, come out right about then? And Reagan had just been elected. So maybe a patriotic film series of sorts. Not that Don cares anything about film or even about politics -- The film series is just an excuse for him to be important and to boss people around.

Q: That's all really good, but it's missing a CS component.

A: Maybe it doesn't have to be that monumental for Don as long as it's something Hap remembers. Suppose Don is doing this thing, and tries to get Hap to publicize it in the student paper. He flatters and manipulates Hap until he gets the article, then when Hap wants to talk to him about something later, is aloof and unavailable.

Q: What is that other thing?

A: Let's say there's been an unfortunate incident of some kind at the frat house, a rape case or something. And because of this contact around the film series (which Don didn't even go to beyond the first one, once he'd gotten everything he could out of it), Hap thinks of Don as a contact and tries to use him as a source.

Q: Is Hap also reporting news?

A: Yes, because he's a journalism major.

Q: OK, so Don manipulates Hap into publicizing the film series -- which isn't much of a stretch, because that's part of Hap's job on the paper anyway, but Young Don thinks it's a masterful stroke of political media manipulation -- and afterward Hap comes to him for a return of the favor. What does he want?

A: There has been some kind of scandal at the frat house involving a wild party and an alleged rape -- of course rape happens all the time at the frat parties more or less, only this time it was the daughter of a Congressman and all kinds of shit is hitting the fan. Hap goes to Don for some information, he even proposes it as a way for the fraternity to tell its own story. At first Don seems to agree and invites Hap down to the frat house so he can meet the kindly members and learn what swell fellows they are. But when Hap shows up, Don is nowhere to be seen and Hap is brought roughly through the door and used as a scapegoat for all the press which is hounding them; the more he explains why he's there, the angrier they get, becoming more and more threatening, until they take away his notebook and tear it up in front of him, and take away his wallet and write down his address, and then for good measure they haul him out to a car and like little gangsters take him to his house and inform them they now know where he lives and if he wants to survive the semester he had better shut up about the whole thing. Intimidated, Hap can only weakly raise the issue with Don the next (and last) time he sees him, and Don doesn't even listen, pretends nothing happened, and in general gives Hap short shrift, so that Hap has to simply swallow the whole experience and go on as if nothing really had happened.

2006-07-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Tropic of Cancer in order to imbue myself with the Henry Miller voice for my book. I'm not sure it will work in the long run but I'm hoping it can enliven things. No doubt it's something that people have tried and failed at before.

2006-04-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

More thinking about characters.

Name	Characteristic	Comments
Doc / Don	The smart scientist type; possible father figure; PhD, software millionaire, owns the cabin	He might talk about something that’s happened there at the cabin. Maybe in the past he brought up strippers. As a smart scientist type, he wants to break loose, but observes -- has trouble joining in, maybe.
Happy / Harry	A happy man; he has enough in life, but during the events here, he is tempted!	This is the one most likely to be in a suburban setting, and why not. A little reminiscent of John Updike, complete with the anal sex.
Grumpy / Greg	Type-A personality; that guy at the sushi bar in Las Vegas.	This guy’s story has to be about a prostitute, someone he hired. Perhaps he has a customer service issue with her. Or maybe something to do with the mob in Vegas.
Sleepy / Shaun	Under-achiever, slacker; in a way, also a hedonist; in the morning he meditates, but as the day wears on he becomes more hedonistic. Each night he experiences a desire to shed all the attachments he gathered during the day.	Something hippyish here. Or no -- burning man! Two sisters maybe? What about putting N. in here -- maybe N. and S., just for contrast. But actually I could use any six-foot tall skinny girl with big tits in a cowboy hat.
Dopey / Dusty	Neurotic; drug addict; also in business, but often self-sabotages.	Very urban. This could be the darkest, but let’s say it only starts out suggesting that, but actually takes place in a bucolic setting, against type.
Sneezy / Seth	Allergic to things, he’s bookish; tries to over-achieve; Schlemiel. He is allergic to being in the woods. but he Understands The Ladies.	This might be the guy who tells the story about O. - cum - A. Thus this one is the most urban setting. Make this the story about the guy who has a lap dancer as a girlfriend, to the surprise of the other men.
Bashful / Bart	The quiet nerdy guy; He is a software coder, has worked for Don in the past, but they had a falling out (subplot here!)	Work in an online/internet aspect to this one. Also maybe at a sex party. Maybe I make the main girl here a sort of Badger proxy. The Silicon Valley setting is actually kind of suburban.

2006-04-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

Thinking about characters.

Greg doesn’t like Shawn and Dusty because they are his opposites, but Shawn and Dusty are distinguishable. Shawn is the slacker, easy-going type; Dusty is neurotic, possibly a little obsessive-compulsive.

Seth and Dusty are both neurotic, but Dusty is more anxious and obsessive-compulsive, while Seth is more of an introvert.

However, Seth is not as introverted as Bart. Bart is a network nerd. He, also, is wealthy, because he worked for Netscape and then for Google. But he does not have an ostentatiously wealthy lifestyle like Don.

Don is more a scientist than a business success -- he is a Silicon Valley millionaire, not the (acquantance 1) type but the sort-of smooth type. He's a CTO but has managed to smooth himself out -- a little like Ford or that guy who was the head of inet.

Greg is more the classic type-A business type, but he’s not as successful as Don or even as wealthy as Bart. He is a very minor real estate developer -- he redevelops strip malls and old shopping centers. Keep in mind that guy you sat next to at the sushi bar in Las Vegas as the prototype for Greg.

2006-04-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to need to start thinking about distinctive characters. Suppose each character embodied a particular characteristic, based on a standard set -- for example, the seven deadly sins. I wouldn't have to go so far as to name the characters or the chapters after these -- although, on second thought, it might be kind of funny to play with the characters’ names like that.

Another idea: What if there was one woman on the scene? She should be: not associated with any of the men particularly. What if, for example, she was the cook, someone who works locally -- a local woman, perhaps -- since she lives out in the boonies there -- one of those appealing young earth mother hippie types, the kind you would see at Holden? Hmm... that type has her advantages and disadvantages. Another alternative would be to make her have another language as her first language, so that the men feel more comfortable talking with each other when she’s in the room... No, I don't like that idea so much.

Back to the idea in the first graf. Let's see, there are the seven deadly sins, the seven circles of hell, the seven dwarves -- that would make an interesting thing to play with, especially since they have their Snow White -- and the twelve attributes of a Boy Scout. (What are they called? Not attributes -- the list that ends with "brave, clean, and reverent." It's called something like the Boy Scout Code, but it simply starts with "A scout is..." and then all the attributes. Can't remember; doesn't matter. There are too many attributes anyway; seven is a much better number, and besides, F. said something about 8 chapters.) There are also ten commandments, the Eightfold Path, and any number of other standard sets...

Back to the second idea. Could I possibly make the woman the main narrator? That has immediate appeal, since she could speak to the reader from the position of judge of the events and the stories; it would also allow a counter-perspective.

But if I kept to my main idea, in which the main narrator is one of the men, I could do something different with her. I could make her an object of desire, of course, but if I were to raise the narrative to a somewhat mythic level I could do something like have her sleep with each of the men in turn. It could be done in one of two ways:
Each man takes his turn, one per evening, to tell whatever his erotic story is. Snow White listens to the tale and then goes to bed with the guy at the end of the night, sleeping with each man in turn.

But to give her more power and personality, I could make her choose which guy she sleeps with each night, and then the next day that guy tells his story. It could start like this -- the guys know she has slept with someone the first or (better) the second night, and they want to make him talk about it, but he offers a story of his own instead. Then that night she sleeps with another guy, and so they want to make him talk about it the next day too, but instead, he tells a different story. As it develops, each guy has the choice to talk either about his night with Snow White (could I get away with naming her Bianca?) or a story of his own. Since most of the guys prefer to be discrete, they wind up telling their own stories. Perhaps the series could end with Bianca telling a story -- that would provide a satisfactory dramatic climax. I suppose the expected thing to do would then be for her to have sex with all the guys at once. I’m not so sure about that.

Second idea is obviously much better.

All right, what are the seven dwarves anyway? Sleepy, grumpy, doc, happy, uh.... dopey... Donder and Blitzen. No, Sneezy and Bashful.

So we have:

Dwarf	Characteristic	Character name	Comments
Doc	The smart scientist type; possible father figure	Don	A PhD, software millionaire, owns the cabin
Happy	A happy man	Harry	This is the narrator. He has enough in life, that’s why he’s happy. But during the events here, he is tempted!
Grumpy	Type-A personality	Greg	Business tycoon, aggressive. That guy at the sushi bar in Las Vegas.
Sleepy	Under-achiever, slacker; in a way, also a hedonist	Shaun	Natural conflict with businessman. In the morning he meditates, but as the day wears on he becomes more hedonistic. Each night he experiences a desire to shed all the attachments he gathered during the day.
Dopey	Neurotic	Dusty	Drug addict; also in business, but often self-sabotages.
Sneezy	Allergic to things, he’s bookish; tries to over-achieve	Seth	Schlemiel. He is allergic to being in the woods. The others scorn his weakness. But he Understands The Ladies.
Bashful	The quiet nerdy guy	Bart	He is a software coder, has worked for Don in the past, but they had a falling out (subplot here!)

How this book began

2006-04-05T13:46:00.000-07:00

F.N. from ____ Press called with a brainstorm. She said she had received a manuscript from an agent that was of really low quality -- a scenario in which two housewives got together to exchange erotic stories -- and that, while rejecting it, she came up with an idea of her own for an erotic novel she thought I would be perfect to write. She adapted the idea to a group of men. They’re together for some reason -- golf match or something -- and share tales, probably inflated, of their sexual exploits. It would have an episodic structure with each of the men getting his own chapter.

She asked me if I were interested, and I sort of am. I immediately started thinking of ways it might work, and I said I would write something up and submit it to her in a sort of proposal format -- a few pages long -- and then discuss it with her when I returned to town after the 22nd.

Some of the ideas I had: the main setting has to be a situation in which a group of men are together for some believable reason: maybe a camping trip or a business conference. Or, I thought, perhaps something more sinister, like they're quarantined during a plague -- but she said she didn't want it to be too dark. Not quite mainstream, but not as dark and edgy as some of my stuff.

One version might be like this: The main narrator is driving up to meet his buddies for a week of fishing and camping at the cabin of one of them -- in Washington state, say. The first chapter is about his trip up there, in which he has the first sexual encounter of the book. During this chapter we also get some backstory on the guy which is important at the end of the book -- because he returns to his backstory, which I’m not sure of yet. At the beginning of the second chapter, he arrives at the cabin and we meet the other characters, and they take turns telling these stories. But the whole book is from the point of view of this one character, so we get his perspective on all the other characters; this allows him to comment on them, etc.

Another version might be that the men are on some kind of working trip as opposed to a vacation. For example, they could be the crew of a fishing boat. Unfortunately I know nothing about fishing. Or they could be a baseball team on the road. I sort of like that idea, but the problem with that is believably differentiating among all the baseball players. On the other hand, if Philip Roth could do it…

I also thought of it taking place on a cruise ship, but I have never been on a cruise ship.

It seems that isolating them works best -- in a vacation cabin -- or if not in a vacation cabin, where else are groups of men isolated?

In military service, About Which I Know Little Or Nothing (AWIKLON)
On a work crew that is working in an isolated location -- could be anywhere from Antarctica to some remote rural place, but again, I don’t know much about any of these jobs, so realism might be a problem.
In prison, or better, in some unexpected and temporary imprisonment, such as the recent incident in which the crew of a small British ship was seized by Iran and held for a couple of weeks. However, it seems to me that the stress of a situation like this would preclude the light-hearted atmosphere I want to capture.

It should be a somewhat light-hearted atmosphere but in a situation that the attendees have to deal with -- such as being stuck in a blizzard but with plenty of supplies, or simply in an area so remote that to choose to leave rather than stay would be a major decision.

I’m also reminded of the Chuck Palahniuk book in which people who were marooned in a disused resort told each other scary stories. That book was compared to the Decameron! So it could be a bit like that.

The useful thing about the group of men on vacation is that they might have been from similar backgrounds but now have taken a variety of paths in life, and I could use these to provide contrasting and distinctive settings for each of the tales.

But once I've decided this, I immediately start wondering how I can subvert the premise -- such as making the “men” really FTMs, but not revealing this til the end. Hilarious!

Or maybe the setting is actually a reality TV show. All these guys are stuck in the house together and are forced to play all these games... Hmm, the problem with that is that the period during which there are eight people still in the game, the players are being eliminated rather slowly, not quickly enough for my book. I guess it would be better that the characters merely joke about this.

But it would be good if there were some kind of overarching narrative line. A competition would be one way to do it. Clearly they are competing in their storytelling, but I feel it should be something else. Men are always competing, aren’t they?

Idea: one of the ways the stories should start is by a typical masculine challenge: one character says, for example, that in his opinion there really is no such thing as a nymphomaniac, and another says Oh yes there is, and proceeds to tell his tale.

Structure idea: Remember what I liked so much about John Carpenter's "The Thing" is that the premise kept changing so that the narrative was always one step ahead of the audience. I’ve always wanted to adapt that concept. Not sure how.