Retelling the Odyssey

The piano is Penelope.

This week I was thinking about one of my favorite songs.  Disco Ulysses by Vulfpeck. The piece is a nice groove and I love a band of talented musicians who are with it. I’m bringing it up here because I like to think of it as a retelling of the Odyssey. I mean, it’s in the name of the song…and the music video. I don’t think I’m discovering anything here, but I do like exploring the storytelling in the song.

So, the piano is Penelope. Odysseus leaves Troy to make it back to her, but the adventure is too much fun. That’s the bass played by the amazing Joe Dart. The bass and drums lead Odysseus further and further from the piano until in the middle of the song its gone. But then in all drops out as the joy of the adventure is over, this is Calipso. This is the guitar duo part in the middle.

Then, freed from the prison by a glissando, he races home, the piano growing more powerful until at last he reaches her. The adventure returns but only in the pursuit of Penelope. The whole song bursts to life as he fights his way home.

I don’t know if you can see it when you listen to the song, but it is what I hear. I love it.

Music has an odd power in the creative space. It can build stories without words, simply by the way instruments build on each other.

I write to music all the time, as it takes up the part of the brain that needs to be entertained. When I’m listening to an instrumental song and not writing, I find my mind gets taken up by scenes built as I listen. The more I listen to a song the deeper the story goes, built up and up on every listen. Don’t get me started on Gershwin’s An American in Paris, because I can tell you where the poodles go.

Thanks for reading this odd one,

Michael

The Quest #12

Sorry I missed last week. I was out of town and was busy doing this and that. The numbers are steady.

Recently, a friend read and gave me feedback on the book I’m trying to get published. Getting back feedback is always an odd experience, because I never know if my writing is going to come across the way I want it to.

I quickly read across the edits and talked with my friend about his thoughts on the book. His edits will help to make a stronger book, and help me get published by making the first chapter stronger.

Something to remember while editing is that when someone says a piece isn’t working, they’re right. When they say how to fix it, they’re usually wrong. That comforts me because it sets parameters on what has to change and gives me the control, not my audience.

So now I will be embarking on a comprehensive edit number three to make draft 4. Some people say never edit unless a publisher tells you to, but if there are people I trust to look at my book early, then I should trust their opinion.

Thanks,

Michael

The Quest # 11

This time I met a wizard. In every quest, there comes a time for the protagonist to meet with a wise wizard who can help on the path.

First, I’ve been maintaining about ten active queries at a time. I got one rejection from a more recent send. No harm, no foul. Keep up the pace and something will get through.

Anyway, the wizard.

I’d heard from the writing group I go to that there were some people who went pro. That made me feel like I was in the right place, an incubator that someone had come out of. So I asked and reached out to them.

Earlier this week I met Sue Burke. She is an author who is traditionally published and has an agent. I asked her a lot of questions about how she broke in and her ideas on who to do so know.

The main thing is patience. She said it took her a year of querying to find someone. I’ve been querying for six months. We commiserated about how it feels to be rejected by an agent. Then she created a large list of things I can be doing now to get my name out there, and pointed me to local communities I could go to network.

I have never talked with a traditionally published author before, so it was a great experience. I can see the woods ahead now. It helps to have a wizard.

Michael

Her site is https://sueburke.site/

Check out her books and let her know I sent you.

Stories in Games

How Twilight Imperium tells stories:

We are living in the golden age of board games. Well, we were before tariffs. If you thinks that board games are Monopoly, Risk, or Sorry, take a look around now because games can do such much.

Twilight Imperium 4th edition is a game I’ve played probably about 40 times. At first look, it seems like Risk. It’s dudes on a map. It’s about using spaceships to fight battles and take territory, right?

No.

If you spend a game of TI attacking people, you will probably lose. The game gives this framework: Three thousand years ago, the galactic empire collapsed from internal rebellion, the galaxy scorched and the various peoples retreated to their corners. Now, the stewards of the old galactic throne sent out a call to try and rebuild galactic civilization. Those stewards give missions, you the player get points for completing those missions. First to ten points wins.  

Now, it is possible to win the game by eliminating the competition, but that would take so long that by the time you managed it, your opponents would win because there just isn’t enough time.

So you have to do these missions. Own four of this type of planet. Have certain number of technologies. Be near special systems. This is simple, but it creates an interesting dynamic.

In TI, war is expensive and potentially disastrous. Building a fleet and getting it somewhere useful takes a few turns in a game where you might only have eight turns. Players have to consider military action and weigh that against diplomacy. Sniping a system can be the difference between winning and losing, and better than losing everyone in an unnecessary battle. In Risk, you lose a bunch of men, oh well. There’s always more next turn. In TI, losing ships is devastating.

A standard conversation goes a little something like this:

Player 1, “I’m activating X system and sending this fleet.”

Player 2, “Really? Why are you coming at me? She has more points!”

Player 1: “Yeah but I need that victory point. Besides, you already scored it. I’ll leave it next turn, I promise.”

Most players understand such maneuvers, leading to a diplomatic ecosystem where people understand getting tapped, but that when you start swinging punches at them, they team up against you.

This is an excellent model for diplomacy between nations. And it’s pretty incredible that this is achieved despite everyone playing a psychotic alien conqueror. There are resources you need, but talking more exposes you.  Having a friend to watch your back in vital.

TI builds natural stories simply by giving players the power to seize what they need at the time, but not hold it. Players take on rolls and for relationships with the nations around them, be they friendly, adversarial, or hostile. You won’t get a chance to take over the galaxy, but you will have a deep rivalries with your neighbors over small things. Its wars are memorable and the nation states frequently teeter on the knife edge between ruin and glory.

I love this model of diplomacy, where everyone wants the same things, but are willing to lose now for gain later. So often we are taught all or nothing. I need everything I want or I will lose. But this, trading, losing a little to gain more in another location to get the points. Flexible empires survive. Rigidity dies. I have never played a game that so perfectly told the stories of whole peoples so well.

Thanks for reading,

Michael

The Quest #10

Numbers steady. I imagine my query is in a big email jumble, and by the time the agents get to them, they’ve already picked the authors they want to represent for the next cycle. Got to find a way to stand out.

On that front, I do have news. I’ve done my first piece of press. Through a high school English teacher, I was put in contact with Victoria and Wynne of the Heart of the Matter writing podcast.

They were excellent and we had an interview last April or May (I forget which). Going into I was nervous because I had never done anything like this before. I know thee blog makes it seem otherwise, but I hate talking about myself. I try to talk more about the journey than me, hopefully I do.

Anyway, the time just flew by. My hosts knew their stuff, setting up a loose scaffold of conversation to guide us along. Having that knowledge of what was going to come next helped loads, because I knew what things were going to come next, which is a weird thing in a conversation. I mean, unless I’m planning to bring something up to someone, I never know the next thing I’m going to say.

That structure greatly reduced my anxiety for what is really a strange thing. Have you ever watched a talk show and thought how odd it is to have a staged conversation. I thought it would be weird to be on one, but absent a live audience (which is great), but after the first few minutes it was just like talking to my aunts. Friendly and comfortable.

I feel so fortunate to have had a good experience the first time I did press. If I had done poorly, it would be hard to get back out there.

The interview comes out this Friday.

Thanks for reading,

Michael

On Death

My grandmother died today. Well, not from your perspective. You will be reading this months, and more likely, years after I write this. I am publishing this well after the fact, but I wrote it today. I won’t tell you the day. You will simply be left to wonder.

I am left with three feelings. Relief, shame, and wonder. I know that it’s an odd three, so I’ll unpack it.

Relief: I suspect those of you who lost someone from a long illness felt the same. My grandmother had some memory troubles a decade ago. The last time I saw her with her memory, when she still had her mind, she was forgetting simple things. She didn’t know how to get around town, though she had lived in the same city all her life. She couldn’t remember if she had put eggs into a dish. That state frightens me, but it is so much better than what comes next. Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever the disease is, infantilizes lions and burns happy memories.

The next time I saw her in person was seven years later. I know. We’ll get into it in the shame section. Anyway, as none of her children lived in the same country, when my grandfather died, her children decided it was best to put her in her childhood home, where she still had family. In the Caucasus Mountains, she gently lost her mind. Surrounded by mountains and farm animals. I suppose it would be peaceful. I think I would like that, were I in the same position. Then Putin went and invaded Ukraine, and in response Biden cut Russian out of world-wide banking. We had no way of paying for her care.

So she was moved out of that idyllic landscape and flown to live with my uncle and his family. That is when I next saw her. I was part of the team to help ease her in to her new abode. It was as though my grandmother had withered in the intervening time. She had shrunk, her hair completely white, her skin hung off her bones. Eyesight had failed her, and she spent her days looking down, confused about where she was and what she was doing. She could only say three things unprompted. “Where am I?” “Don’t hurt me.” “Where is my caretaker?”

In that state she persisted two more years. Nothing grew clearer for her. Just a long slow decay until she finally expired. Right now, as I write this, her body is on a gurney in a hospital on the other side of the world.

Her pain is over. Her disease is over. Now she can rest, finally rest. She will no longer be afraid. No longer be confused. She will no longer resemble Picaso’s Old Guitarist. Death is a terrifying thing to me, especially when I consider going through the process myself. But here, I can only feel relief for her. The long tragedy is over.

Remembrance can begin.

Shame: I feel I was a bad grandchild to my Russian grandparents. Especially as a child. I didn’t call on my own volition. We saw them every year or two. My mom called regularly, and roped us into the call when us kids were around. I would stand there, answering questions in their language, not mine.

Selfishly, I wanted them to speak my language. I wanted them to be normal American grandparents, though I already had a set of those. I think what I wanted was to understand and be understood. That was not the case. I was a pretty rotten kid in my treatment of them. I can remember a couple temper tantrums that I had in front of them that I rue today. The past is the past, and it will needle me forever.

It’s not all downers. I loved them, I just don’t think I could express it. My grandmother taught me how to make an omelet, which to this day remains my go to for any breakfast that takes more than twenty seconds to make. I can still remember so many games of chess I played with my grandfather, how he would laugh when one of us (me more often) made a bad move.

I wish I had more memories; I suppose. I feel ashamed that I didn’t seek them out. Every day that I didn’t the possibility remained that I would. Now, I never can again. That is the shame that I will carry the rest of my life I think.

Eight hours ago, she breathed. Eight hours ago, her heart was beating. Then, it hit the last note, and will be silent forever. Eight hours ago, there was a human being named Irena. Now she is gone. She will never again be seen in this life. Her time, now immortalized in the past, a land strange and distant, where I cannot walk but in memory.

Wonder: There was a moment, a brief one probably, an infinitesimal moment, when my grandmother was the most recently deceased person. When she was the last soul to leave the earth.

That thought leads me to the next one, as I thought about the 150,000 who died on the same day as her. I wonder who they were, and I know that most of them were elderly, but some weren’t. Some were sick children, some were soldiers. Some were people in accidents, some were people who made mistakes. Some were people consumed with hopelessness.

All of them, people who may never have met one another, share one thing. They all left this life on the same day. They are forever linked in that.

My sense of wonder first lands on the scale of humanity, the thought of all those people. Then it expands, and I think about everyone who grieves this day as I do. How many of us went through the same pain at the same time, scattered throughout the world, alone in our little islands of grief. My mind is on you today, as I hope your mind might stray to me today.

I know that if we knew about one another, we would comfort and console, because that is simply who we are as a species.

It’s an odd thing, this life. But I find comfort in knowing that no matter how I feel on a given day, there is someone out there in the world who is going through the same thing, in much the same circumstances. In the wide network of humanity, someone is always hurting.

Something to think about as you walk the sidewalk and see the people pass by, or drive and look at headlights coming your way. Someone in that number is having an awful day.

Something to think about.

Thanks for reading,

Michael

The Quest #9

Last two weeks, only got one boilerplate rejection. It came in today. Good reminder that I had to blog.

No new queries because I’ve been applying directly to publisher houses instead of through Manuscript Wishlist and I have to wait to be rejected by one agent before I can send to another at their agency. So the waiting game.

Spirits remain good.

Submitted a short story to a magazine and will be published a book on a writing site soon.

Short update this time, thanks for reading,

Michael

A lesson from movies.

I want to talk about two movies. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc, and Hacksaw Ridge. One of these movies is perhaps the platonic ideal of an action movie. The other was so infuriating that it has haunted me to this day.

It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out which is which.

As a writer, I want to understand storytelling, how others have done it and why certain things fail. I have no idea how Hacksaw did in the box office, and I’m not going to find out. The movie failed for me for simple reason.

Hacksaw told me it was a screenplay.

At no point in watching that movie was I unaware that this movie had a screenplay. The movie looked me in the eyes and said “This is the part of the movie when he meets the girl,” “This is the part of the movie where his convictions are tested,” “This is the part of the movie where he earns the respect of his peers,” “This is the part of the movie that his convictions are proven correct.”

It was like the movie was hitting the Save the Cat beats but wasn’t all that interested in hiding it. I could see the bones of the movie. Not that I’ve never seen a plot beat before, but I think it was the first time it had ever been telegraphed to me. It drove me bananas.

I want to compare that to Raiders, which is the best action movie ever. I think it stands on the opposite end of the spectrum from Hacksaw. Everything that happens in Raiders happens at the right time. Every plot beat, right when it’s needed.

Raiders doesn’t just have muscles, it has skin. The story moves along just at a perfect pace. Because of this momentum, it never has to pick itself up and run to hit the next plot point. Raiders pulls you along, the next moment is always the right moment. The action is never for its own sake, but to keep the audience invested while driving plot.

These two movies sit on opposite ends of a spectrum.

So what can I learn from these two movies? Smoothness, I think. I don’t ever want my readers to think “gosh, they just lost a battle, so now its time for a training montage.” Or at least not to read that in my books. I think the lesson is also about pacing, because it’s not like Raiders isn’t formulaic. It follows tropes of cinema and pulp fiction laid out before. But the formula is not the only thing it has to offer. It understands the tropes it’s playing with, and so puts them in an order where the bridges between them don’t have scaffolding. Raiders moves so well that it doesn’t have too worry about making it to the next stop, so when it reaches it, it simply goes on.

I hope that made sense. I am writing this late on a hot day. Take care,

Michael

The Quest #8

So its been a couple weeks and that will probably be the schedule for the Quest on forward. I only had one rejection in the time, and I finished a big batch of queries a couple weeks ago. I’ve sat on the queries since then. Since I’m looking at agencies, I’ve got to be careful not to send stuff to two agents at the same agency.

I think that the quiet comes from the agents working through their queries.

At this point, I’ve been querying for five months and while I have been receiving boiler plate rejections, at least I haven’t been ghosted. I think I would be excited to receive a personalized rejection, because that would mean they’re giving me the time to consider my work.

So we’re going to have a think. Still nothing coming in my area for face to face pitches. I think that’s going to have a high percent chance of working out.

Thanks for reading,

Michael