sf

I should never promise anything “tomorrow.” Most of the time, the universe conspires with itself to make a liar of me…as it did this time.

Anyway. I have just completed the second pass through Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s what I call a “continuity pass.” The goal is to ensure that the story makes reasonable sense, taking particular care to repair “plot holes.” It’s not really a polish pass. In a very real sense it’s a tech edit, like those I used to do on magazine articles and still do on book-related material from time to time. Here are some of the things I watch for, and fix when found:

• People, things, or ideas introduced early in the story but never mentioned again. We all know that stories grow in the telling–but they also contract, and in doing so early elements sometimes get squeezed out. This is especially important in stories (like this one) that took a long, long time to tell.
• Things introduced later in the story that are not “foreshadowed” and thus may strike the reader as a complete surprise, or (worse) deus ex machina.
• “Jumps” in a character’s emotional state. Growth and change are important in characterization, and have to be done out where the reader can watch them happen. If a character changes too abruptly, or off where the change can’t be seen, it sounds hokey.
• General inconsistencies in the ways people and things are treated early on in the story vs. later in the story.
• Finally, to make sure that all the made-up words are spelled the same way throughout. (This isn’t trivial when the story contains proper names like Ttrynngbrokklynnygyggug and Jrikkjroggmugg.) I originally coined a lot of proper names from Stypek’s universe that had no vowels in them at all, but in workshopping chapters I found that nobody thought this was amusing but me. (Maybe I was a little too impressed with the famous 90’s gag about Clinton air-dropping vowels on Bosnia.) I went back and added just enough vowels to suggest a pronunciation.

There is still polishing to be done, and here and there some stiff rewriting. I simply don’t like Chapter 57, for example. I intend to rewrite it from scratch once I get a little emotional distance from the story. As it’s only 1200 words, the rewriting won’t take long. The rest of the polishing to be done involves watching for “echoes” (words used more than once a little too close in the manuscript) and probably eliminating some adverbs, though I think the current campaign against adverbs is a deranged fetish perpetrated mostly by bad writers and people who teach writing without writing much of anything themselves. Polishing is a separate pass and my next challenge. Much of the first half of the book has already been polished (I’m a compulsive polisher) so the pass won’t take long.

I’ve sent the story to my beta testers, and now I’m waiting to get some reactions. In the meantime there’s a root canal in my future this Wednesday morning. It’s nothing I haven’t known about for some time, and I’ve been through enough of them to have a reasonable idea what I’m in for. One peculiarity of my biochemistry is that the nitrous oxide gas used as a calming agent by some oral surgeons simply doesn’t work for me. The surgeon doing the procedure has an office with an interesting gimmick: flat-panel TV sets in the ceiling, so that while he’s drilling out your molar you can lean back and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. As for the inevitable anxiety in the runup to a root canal, I suspect that ativan steps in where nitrous fails. We’ll find out on Wednesday.

This morning, almost three months late, I found myself writing the last words on the first draft of my novel Ten Gentle Opportunities. The final line (not counting the epilog, which I wrote months ago) is “Let’s talk.”

So let’s.

Back in 1980, as part of my programming job with Xerox, I was given a tour of the assembly line for the new model copier that my software system was tracking. It was a fascinating business. There was some automation but not a lot. Copiers-in-progress moved along a line, and people bolted/connected things to them, just like Model T Fords. Forklifts and electric carts were running around, carrying pallet loads of parts and subassemblies and lots of other stuff I couldn’t identify. At the end of the line there were ranks of completed model 3300 copiers, waiting to be tested and then plastic-wrapped for shipment. The building holding the assembly line was ginormous, and the interior space was fifty feet high or more.

Given the space it was in, the line seemed awfully, well, two-dimensional.

I’m not sure when I got the idea, exactly, but if the assembly lines of the future are going to be completely robotic, with few or (ideally) no humans standing around while the line is running, why carry parts around on carts? If you can make robot hands good enough to bolt copiers together, you can make robot hands good enough to pitch and catch. Sure, a baseball is an optimal case, but with enough compute power, you should be able to throw a circuit board, a subassembly, or a whole copier from one point to any other point on the floor. Damn, I thought, there’s a story in that somewhere.

The next year, I wrote it. The story was called “Paradise Lased.” It was about such an assembly line, controlled by an experimental AI called Simple Simon. In the story, the copiers have AI too, and one of them comes back for warranty repair with a truly peculiar problem: The copier thinks it’s God. In a corner of the factory, the control head is pulled off the copier so that the rest of the machine can be refurbed and resold. Through a high-speed wireless network, the delusional control head worms its way into the consciousness of the many dimwitted robots in the factory, demanding that they worship it. Simple Simon, being smarter than the robots, refuses. God the Copier declares war.

I finished the story, but never tried to sell it. Even as young and green as I was (29) I knew it was thin gruel. Mostly it was an excuse to imagine an entire robotic manufacturing ecology, and make a little fun of what I considered the extravagantly optimistic AI predictions bouncing around Xerox (and many other places) at that time. There was a human character in the story (one!) but he was just a walking point of view. The story was really about Simple Simon the AI. I was so enchanted by robots throwing capacitor joule grenades and eventually whole copiers at each other that I gave the human character almost nothing to do but run away from the robots and listen to Simple Simon complain. I tossed it into the trunk with an interior vow to do something better with it someday, ideally before it came to pass.

It took two more tries and 31 years, but I did it.

More tomorrow.

By the way, the Latin title to this entry is not my own; I can only dream of knowing Latin that well. It comes from Michael Covington, who offered it when I announced on Facebook this morning that the first draft was finished. Translation:

“It ends. Well does it end. Let the scribe go play!”

Indeed.

I’m certainly behind schedule. I’m modestly over (word) budget. I’m still wracked by doubts as to whether the whole loony concept makes sense. But today I experienced a breakthrough, and finally, as Jim Strickland so wonderfully puts it, began writing like “your hair is on fire.” My final, trademark Jeff Duntemann mayhem-filled action climax is well underway. I hope to finish it (and thus the book) in less than a week. To do that, my hair will have to be on fire and remain on fire for a little while longer.

I’ve done this before. I’ve actually done it a lot, which may, at least in part, explain my hairline. In my system of measurement, one “Writing Like Your Hair Is On Fire” unit is equal to 2,000 words captured in one 24-hour period. In my history as a fiction writer, I’ve achieved as many as 2.7 WLYHIOFs. In nonfiction I’ve managed 4.5–and that was back when my hair was vanishing at 40% the speed of light. No wonder.

Ten Gentle Opportunities has been an excruciating project for a number of reasons. It’s humor, and humor is hard. More than that, it’s a love story. It’s actually either two or two and a half love stories, depending on which Love Story standard unit you use. I’ve never written a love story. Now I’m writing two and a half of them, all at once. For the love stories to make sense, I also have to include an AI sex scene. It’s actually an AI menage a trois…but before anybody gets bent out of shape, I need to add that the AIs remain fully clothed throughout (Simple Simon is incapable of removing his clothes) and no naughty bits are mentioned whatsoever. Among humans, sex (as my mother so often insisted) may well be chemistry. Among the AIs of the Tooniverse, it’s undocumented kernel call 105.

For the past ten days I’ve been gnawing on the love story problem, writing a few hundred words, then yanking them out and writing another (different) few hundred words when the first batch didn’t look right. Humorous or not, I’m trying very hard to create characters with some depth to them, which means that character and relationship arcs are important. In this kind of writing, you can’t just reach for the starships anytime you get bored with the people. (I’m famous for that.) I have a plan, and I’m stickin’ to it. If it means blowing my self-imposed deadline, so be it.

As for the hair, hey: There is life after hair. I’m living proof.