Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: ad-pre-2021

  • Merge and purge (writing and language)

    My first draft was 220,000 words of symbol-laden passages and over-described locales. Over years I steadily replaced sets of words with smaller stronger ones, refining the language to heighten the story and the emotional viewpoint. The never-quite-articulated goal was for the words to hold more weight relative to their size thanks to their structure.

    In four passes I got down to 120,000 words. I cut few complete scenes. Mostly I just kept redoing the language, finding slenderer shorter beams for each bit of structure, abandoning ideas that were less essential. It was like starting with an Art Deco skyscraper and renovating it into a geodesic dome, bit by bit.

    Now I hope to write less in the first place but I am not sure it is turning out that way. At least I outline more, or more frequently, nothing grand but enough to guide me. Still, once it’s prose, my process scales to it. Less is an asymptote. Even a small post like this, I write and rewrite, in layers, questioning the questioning.

    Yesterday going through the magazine pile for something to read with my soup, I stumbled upon an article discussing linguist Noam Chomsky’s controversial recent ideas about the beginning of language. Chomsky theorizes early humans created the foundations of language by developing a new ability Chomsky calls Merge, the ability to group mental objects and work with them as a unit.

    I’m no judge of linguistics theory but as an idea Merge resonates with me. Something in my process also looks to merge, or at least more densely encode, meanings – and wants a lot of meaning to encode. Just as we care about both increasing bandwidth and compressing data, maybe the drive to merge is tied in with communication in multiple ways, a circle of acquiring and optimizing we have yet to map out.

    I also confess a happy feeling about my own fiction’s truth. One of the angels to appear late in my novel is of_clumping, which I felt was a driving force in our universe, from stars to black holes. How nice to think this is an angel of meaning as well.

  • Notes on bad posture (symbol much)

    I have a bad stance. I stand, walk and sleep with my feet pointed out. It’s always bothered me, but only mentally. I suspect it’s why I’ve never been much of a runner. It never hurt, however, nor derailed my skiing and skating. I thus never got serious about stretching the tight butt muscles that cause this splaying.
    Now in my advancing years, I walk night hallways to soothe my infant son. My knees click. They click less if I point my toes straight. I can force that to happen, but for it to be natural I have a lot of stretching ahead of me, both in discrete sessions and in changing my postures of habit (goodbye cross-legged sitting).
    The other day my dad came to visit. As I sat, he corrected me sharply, as only a parent-surgeon can. “Why sit sideways like that? You’ll hyperextend your knee.” He started naming ligaments. I just tuned out and shifted in my seat.
    Later, as I forced myself along another oddly straight night walk, I considered the moment. I do often sit so one leg lies sideways across the chair, with my other leg over it. Had I ever thought about it, I might have called it my reaction to a world too short for me, like my leaning back on the rear legs of chairs. Now I see another adaptation to my bad stance — muscles so out of balance that it is more natural to sit like the Tarot’s Hanged Man.
    This is a little story but for me an instructive one. Things that seem unrelated or rooted in different causes turn out to be the same buried problem, layered over and accomodated like a tree growing around a fencepost, creating all kinds of distortions. My last few years have involved re-seeing much of my life in this way, an unpleasant and humbling process but one for the long-term good. If nothing else, my knees should make it a bit longer. Perhaps I along with them.
    Also, perhaps, another instruction: that the world is full of good advice and it comes out when one needs it, but it takes a modest attitude to hear it all.

  • Big news – and some thanks

    I am thrilled to announce I have signed a contract with WordFire Press to publish The Demon in Business Class, my first novel!
    I am so excited about this! But it’s some months away, with a lot to do between now and then. I’ll talk about it much more as the book launch approaches, and I hope you can be part of it.
    I’d like to thank Kevin J. Anderson, Vivian Trask and WordFire Press for the warm welcome and the hard work ahead.
    This novel is years in the making, and I have pages of thanks. I here want to acknowledge the people who worked on this most recent stage, with the final draft manuscript and the marketing plan. Thanks to Jackie Dobranski, Kate Yonkers, Jessica Epperson-Lusty, Laila Sultan, Joshua Essoe, Jennifer Brinn, Melissa Cox, and Adrian Bryant for their invaluable help and feedback.
    Thanks also to Wayland Smith for inspiring me to up my professional game.
    I have written a beautiful book, of its time, for times ahead. I want to share it with you and the world. I’m pleased to have an excellent publisher to help me do that.

  • The power of story (2016 Iowa Caucus)

    I have wagered with my wife that the 2016 US major-party presidential nominees will be Trump and Clinton. I don’t regret my choices after the Iowa Caucus. I understand the power of story.
    On the Democratic side, one story seems better — a dark horse, vastly more leftist than anything we’ve seen in decades, going from obscurity to near-parity despite the machinations of party bosses. But Sanders is white, old, and male, and he’s been an obscure senator since before his most ardent fans were sperm. So far the main “machinations” are the Democrats choosing crappy viewing times for debates. Sanders didn’t win on good turf for him, and certainly didn’t trounce. As a tale of a man having a long-awaited moment, he’s heartwarming; but in this race he is an Obama sequel, and at that he is weak.
    Clinton started as a sure thing, a near-coronation, just like last time. Clinton got in a fight for her life, just like last time — and narrowly won on bad turf for her. Now, a loss in New Hampshire will only keep the audience more engaged. Sanders failed to get a come-from-behind victory; Clinton is living a come-from-behind life.
    For the Republicans, the best story is not when a man works incredibly hard convincing his own most supportive base to give him a squeaker of a win. Cruz has the kind of petty early victory racked up by the loser in a romantic comedy. No one wants that guy to win.
    For Rubio, being the newest bottle of old wine is not a story at all. He’s won nothing yet, since the other establishment candidates not only haven’t dropped out, but are now turning their fire on him. So what is Rubio’s story? Alas, it’s Night of the Living Dead, where a man survives zombies inside and out, but dies anyway when he is mistaken for one. (Hey, at least he’s not Jeb Bush, the Chad Vader of 2016).
    Which leaves us with a wealthy powerful man committed to protecting his country, who survives his first comeuppance, bloodied but unbowed, keeping the faith that his put-upon supporters always had despite the mockery of the elites, until he wins the naysayers over. That’s a black hole of narrative gravity, the ultimate Frank Capra film: It’s A Wonderful Life To Be Donald Trump.
    You can’t fight the power of story. I will win that $1 and put it toward a new novel.
     
     

  • Robots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)

    Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city.
    From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry goods or a seated cross-legged person. It took a little time before I saw the plot and character possibilities of robots without hands or appendages. It meant that they had continued to evolve themselves to depend on people, both as customers and even as mechanics, like Thomas the Tank Engine.
    I also gave them a limited vocabulary of green and red lights, suitable for bargaining over fares, but akin to the radiation-wounded Christopher Pike on old Star Trek. This made for a stranger, more labored interaction, but one familiar to anyone who has set a digital device.
    It also made it easier for the taxibots credibly to be taken for granted by the people around them while they — well, you’ll read it one day. 🙂
    This is a less common take on manufactured beings. (more…)

  • NaNoWriMo recap (winner!)

    National Novel Writing Month was a huge personal success for me, and a big confidence booster. I will miss my silicone NaNoWriMo bracelet tomorrow.
    By the numbers, 50,028 words, finished in the wee hours of November 27. On the twenty-three days I wrote, I averaged 2,175 words a day, due mainly to a big push in the first two weeks that had me writing close to 2,500 a day.
    As a project, I reached the end of the draft narrative. I kept control of the pacing so I landed it roughly as I intended. It was an active effort, matching my word count to the outlines, planning scenes ahead in 500-word increments, fleshing out passages still short of their part of the total.
    However measured, when I could write, I did, at speed and with some level of consistent craft throughout. I’m not sure I believed I could do it. I am glad to no longer have to rely on belief.
    I don’t think I have universal advice, but for me it started well before November 1. (more…)

  • NaNoWriMo update at the halfway mark (yay)

    I keep meaning to blog! And it isn’t that I am SO BUSY – NaNoWriMo has become so all encompassing that all my draft blogs are navel-gazing treatises on processes which inform the start of my day but go by the wayside when it’s ten pm and I still have seven hundred words to go. Anyway.
    In short, I am well ahead, 70% done (35,286 words out of 50,000) at the halfway mark.
    I won’t be able to keep up this pace, but that was my point in pushing hard early – a strategy developed with and supported by my wife, who took point on family issues these last two weeks.
    Still, to say a marathon is unsustainable as a lifestyle is to miss the point of the extremity. The point of the extremity is something personal to each extremist. (more…)

  • No tablets for me

    NaNoWriMo 2015 Day 02 – 3775 words. I think it is the most I have written in one day ever. I had an outline but a lot of patches that I found promising ways to fill. Many more distractions today than yesterday, including house painters, so I worked very late at it, but I am pleased to have beaten the goal on this biggest single day of my schedule.
    One good thing about being a slow blogger is that you don’t have as much to undo.
    At several different points this past year I was convinced I had found a way to use a small touchscreen device – sometimes a tablet, sometimes my phone – in a way that helped my writing more than the extra work it took to use. I even wrote posts but never finished them.
    None of my tools survived so much as a week. While the hardware form-factor was pleasant, the compromises of using apps designed to take over the screen and only open one document at at a time (with no local storage) was too inconvenient for long-form writing.
    That said, I had some fun. My most noteworthy creation was to take a hinged keyboard for a tablet, and replace the tablet with plexiglass and poster-hanging putty, to make a rest for the phone.
    IMG_0130
    It worked well enough that I know in a pinch I could do remote work on it at length. Despite its appealing 1970s-tech look, I wouldn’t want to.
    The real question of course is why I do this. (more…)

  • Pandoc makes for easy document conversion

    NaNoWriMo 2015, Day 01 — by the site’s count, 1966 words, seventy more than my goal. It went smoothly, without many breaks. When I was within 300 words of the goal I was more interested in using them to flesh out what I had already written than to push forward. This kind of internal editing is what they all tell you not to do, but it helped me find places I was repeating myself and places where I hadn’t gotten the point across.
    ==
    My serial novel developed an idiosyncratic workflow for each week’s chapter:

    • I wrote plain text files using Markdown syntax which I discussed here
    • I send my editors Word docx format
    • My final version goes out in HTML

    It works for the project. I like to compose drafts in plain text, with no settings to change or distracting questions from the software. Using Markdown syntax, I tag words or lines for later formatting. It’s also easier to write on the go. Markdown-aware smartphone text editors are nimbler tools on phones and tablets than full word-processors.
    In Word docx format, my editors can use the Track Changes feature, letting me accept the edits into the final text with a click. Since the final destination is a WordPress website (and, an ebook), it “goes to press” as HTML.
    Thanks to a nimble command-line document converter called Pandoc, I can get clean trustworthy conversions between different formats. I can use each app for what it does best, and maintain a smooth process. (more…)

  • My return to writing, via NaNoWriMo

    I have long been absent from public life and social media. In July I had severe medical problems – short-lived, thankfully, but requiring rest.
    In some way, the medical problems deflated me. My mood, always a little low to begin with, got lower still. I could manage family obligations, and family joys, but I was discouraged, and lost my way in my booklife.
    I am still finishing the serial. But, in my lows, I saw that both my novel and the serial are very rigid stories, requiring a lot of facts or details from the real world. I wanted to give my imagination a free rein.
    Thus I am doubling down on my existing commitments to the serial by doing NaNoWriMo, an attempt to put down fifty thousand original words of a new novel (as much as The Great Gatsby plus a long Sunday magazine article) between November 1 and 30. (more…)