Monthly Archives: May 2014

A Tale of Three Stories

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Randomness

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CBCA measures the truth of a story using 18 criteria, but for writing purposes, not all the criteria are equally useful. For example, #15 is lack of memory. People telling true stories are more likely to admit that they don’t remember everything, that parts of the experience are fuzzy. But that’s only useful in writing if you’re using a first-person narrator, which I never do. Some of the other criteria are specific to law enforcement, so I’m going to focus on the criteria that are most useful to writers.

I’ll start by telling you three stories.

Here’s the first:

I was burglarized once. The thief cleaned us out.

Here’s the second:

I was once living in a house that was burglarized. I was asleep at the time of the robbery. The thief cut a hole in a window, unlocked it, came in through the window, went through the house and took everything portable—cameras, laptop computers, cash, camcorders. Then he left through the front door. He must have had to make two trips, he took so much stuff.

Two stories. One of them, according to Criteria-Based Content Analysis, should sound more believable to you. Obviously, I can’t read your mind. I can’t know what you think. But if you were a police officer listening to my stories using CBCA, you’d conclude that #2 was more likely to be true than #1.

The more details a story has, the more likely it is to be true. Details, as a criteria, measured by quantity, has a 98% success record in the tests of the viability of CBCA as a law enforcement technique. 98%. The more details a witness provides, the more likely it is that their story is true.

But it doesn’t stop there. Time for story number three.

Back when I was living in Oakland, my house was burglarized. I was living with my brother, his wife, her sister, their two dogs, and my five-month old son and in the middle of the night, someone broke in and cleaned us out. The worst part for me was that he or she stole the camcorder that I’d been recording my son with. I’d actually caught his first laugh on tape, and the thief stole it. Other stuff, too, but it’s the laugh that hurts.

Story #2 and Story #3 have roughly the same number of details. If the only thing that mattered was the number of details, they would be equivalently believable. According to CBCA, they’re not.

Story #3 should seem more believable, because not all details are created equal. Factual details matter. The thief came in through the window, etc. But factual details don’t resonate. People don’t respond to them. And they don’t make people feel the truth of your story. So what does?

Tomorrow: contextual embedding

Shaming Your Heroine

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Rant, Writing

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NSFW: Bad language ahead.

I want to rant about a book. I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the book that I want to read, that I’m probably never going to write, but that I wish someone would write.

In that book, someone tries to shame a girl. Let’s say her ex-boyfriend posts pictures of her giving him a blowjob on the internet. Revenge porn, that’s what it’s called.

But this girl, unlike Jessica Logan and Audrie Pott and Hope Witsell (Note: just the top three found after searching “teenage girl suicide naked photos” on google, without even leaving the first page)… this girl says, “Oh, hell, no.”

This girl goes straight to the ex-boyfriend and says, “Dude, you get those photos down or you are never having sex in this town again.” Turns out it’s too late–it’s always too late–so she does what she says she’s going to do.

She gets her sisters–not literal sisters, but women who are sympathetic, which is what, all of us, except the very few evil ones?–to plaster the campus in posters. Maybe even her pictures, with the most x-rated bits blacked out, his parts circled and the heading, “John Smith. The kind of guy who takes photos and puts them on the internet without permission.” Or “John Smith. He’s the kind of p***ck who posts photos of his girlfriends on the internet. It’s ’cause he doesn’t know how to use his.”

She buys the domain names for his name, all of them, and posts his image, with a detailed listing of what he did, including the number of times she’s had to hear about her photo from friends and acquaintances and how she feels it may affect her future. She ends the post, on all the domain names, with “Warning: Sleeping with this man may lead to future humiliation and pain. (And won’t get you off. He’s a lousy fuck.)” She looks into SEO optimization and learns how to make her pages the top hits on every google search for his name. Every future employer, every future girlfriend, will find her pages first.

And then she gets nasty. Every time she sees him, she makes the circled finger blowjob motion with one hand and a hard slashing knife motion with the other. She gets her girlfriends to do the same. They get their girlfriends to do the same. Pretty soon, every woman on campus, at the sight of John Smith, the crappy smug ex-boyfriend who thought it would be funny to post her picture online, threatens to castrate him. But not with words, just with a gesture. He complains, of course. People get called into the president’s office. But the women go with wide-eyed innocence and start making their moves more subtly.

He gets nasty, too, of course. That would be inevitable. But she’s been waiting for it and the moment he threatens her, she slaps a restraining order on him. Clever girl, she was carrying a recording device in her pocket and caught the threat on audio recording. (Digital, I’m sure–probably just her iphone, ready to go at the click of a button.) She never goes anywhere alone and she lets him know that if he violates the restraining order, she’ll be perfectly happy to kneecap him with the gun she carries with her.

Meanwhile, when her English teacher gives her the look–you know the one–she looks back at him steadily. Should he even hint at something, she says, acid in her voice, “Been looking at porn, Mr. Jones? I wonder how the administration would feel about that. I hope you haven’t been doing it on your work computer.” He’ll think twice before he tries again.

Books that slut-shame girls by making them think they should be humiliated by photos of themselves engaged in sexual behavior are supporting the culture that tells girls to kill themselves over those photos. I want someone to write the book that tells them to get angry instead. Tells them to be furious at the betrayal of their right to privacy, of their ability to trust. Tells them that there is nothing, nothing, NOTHING wrong with the sight of their naked bodies and that what is very, very, VERY wrong is the behavior of a guy who would share a private moment with the world without permission.

I want someone to write this book. It would be so much more useful to the New Age readers than the books that encourage them to think that their lives are over if people they know see pictures of them engaged in sexual activity.

Rant over.

Criteria-Based Content Analysis Or How To Tell Good Lies

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Randomness

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At some point along my writing journey, I realized that I didn’t care all that much about being a “good” writer. There are so many good writers whose work is tedious to me. I was an English major. Many good, even great, writers bore me silly. James Joyce, yes, I am looking at you. Melville, ditto. Charles Dickens–could you possibly take longer to get to the point? (I excuse him, though, he was paid by the word.)

I decided that what I wanted to be was a good storyteller. And I realized that good storytellers were basically just good liars. Lots of stuff goes into a good lie in person–body language, eye movements, voice stress. But in writing, what makes a good lie?

Criteria-based Content Analysis is a technique used by law enforcement worldwide to determine whether an interview subject is telling the truth. It was developed in the 1950’s by a psychologist named Udo Undeutsch who hypothesized that “an account derived from memory of a self-experienced event will differ in content and quality from an account based on fabrication or imagination.”

The technique takes a statement from an interview subject and analyses it, looking for specific markers (aka criteria) that indicate whether the statement is true or false. No single marker is sufficient to determine truth (although there’s one that’s better than all the rest) but the more of the markers or criteria that a story includes the more likely it is to be true.

You know how polygraphs aren’t acceptable evidence in a court of law, because they’re really not very accurate? Criteria-Based Content Analysis has been accepted as evidence in the German court system (which is where it was developed) since 1954. Worldwide, CBCA is reported to be the most widely used “veracity assessment instrument.” So what better way to learn how to tell a good lie than to look at the markers that indicate whether someone is telling the truth? Once we know what those markers are, we can incorporate them into our work and tada, more believable stories.

Tomorrow, the first marker.

The Ghosts of Belize

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Randomness

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Back in January, before I got swept up into ALM, I was working on a story called “The Ghosts of Belize.” I’d spent several days working on an outline for it, mapping the whole thing out, trying a new technique of outlining, but it didn’t work for me. Today I opened that story up. I already have the cover, so thought I’d go back to it while I wait for ALM to get back from the editor.

It’s the first time I’ve let a story sit for a really long time without working on it but with the expectation of continuing it and it was a great experience. Re-reading it, I could see exactly where I was going wrong. I was trying to write it like a Nora Roberts book. For good reasons–she’s an entertaining author who sells a ton of books, and I’d decided to take writing more seriously and pay more attention to the market and all that.

But I can’t write that way. Or at least when I do, it feels stiff and unnatural to me. I had lots of description, lots of scenery, room descriptions, etc. For one of the first times, my sense of the setting was very clear–because I’d worked on it a lot to make it clear. But it didn’t interest me at all. Also, I was trying to make Akira’s experience of late-onset morning sickness very real. It was, because it’s a familiar experience to me–I spent the last couple of months of my pregnancy throwing up ten times a day. But story-wise? Boring. Boring. More boring. She’ll still start out nauseous because it’s funny there, but she’s going to start feeling better almost immediately because it’s not funny or fun on an ongoing basis.

I read a blog post today, 5 Self-Publishing Lessons I Learned Between Books #2 & #3, by Molly Green, who says that her first lesson was that she figured out what she writes. I really need to do that. Realistic settings and realistic experiences are all well and good, but I don’t think they’re me. Real characters in unreal, entertaining situations maybe.

I’m going to continue working on Ghosts of Belize for a few days and see how it goes. It may wind up being a true short story, under 10K words and that will be fine, as long as it manages to be entertaining. That’s where it was going wrong in January. It was dark and not fun and that’s not me.

And many days later…

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Randomness

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I spent an intensive month editing A Lonely Magic. It was grueling. Lots of rewrites, many chapters completely rewritten. I finally sent it off to the editor two weeks ago, which means it’s time to get back to writing. But my head is still in ALM and my list of edit changes for my next round gets longer and longer. I know that I’m going to learn a lot from having a line edit (or at least I hope I am) but I wish I had another month to spend on it before sending it to the editor. If it was being copy-edited, I’d be even more annoyed at myself, because there are entire chunks of text that might get changed, maybe even a couple of big chapter revisions. I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t want to turn into one of those authors who spends forever trying to make a book perfect. It’s just a fun little fantasy, not some literary masterwork.

I got one strongly negative beta read back. It’s the first time that’s happened to me. I want to say that most of my beta readers have been a lot more professional. I guess I can say that, it being my blog and all. But I was so unimpressed by the comments. Not that they were negative but that they were, well, I’m searching for a word that means not well-read, without being quite as pejorative as all the ones that come to mind.

Examples: She thought the use of attractive people who were older than they looked was too much like Twilight. Um, yes, or any story about elves ever, because that’s who they’re supposed to be based on. Please. Lord of the Rings, maybe. (Not that anything happens that is in any way similar to LotR, but the Sia Mara are meant to have that graceful, ageless quality.) She also thought a scene at the end was too much like Star Wars, because of a piece of technology. Right, or you know, all of Star Trek or The Matrix or Quantum Leap or… you get the idea. She thought the names were too complicated, picking one out as the “last straw”–it was a generic Spanish name. I did my best to respond with appropriate polite thanks for her time and efforts, but she’s a lesson in picking beta readers more carefully. But I’ve got lots of other sensible and smart suggestions from my other beta readers and I’m really looking forward to diving back in and implementing them. Not until I get it back from the editor, though. June 1.

I gave a presentation at a library on Saturday on using criteria-based content analysis to choose the right kind of details for your writing. I think I need to find a writer’s conference to present at so that I can get feedback on whether I’m stating the obvious or actually telling people something interesting. My library audience consisted of 6 people including 2 kids and I have no idea whether I gave them anything valuable that they will be able to use. I think it’s really interesting stuff, though. Contextual embedding is my favorite.

In an attempt to provide evidence that thinking this way has improved my writing, I went and read some of the Goodreads reviews of A Gift of Time. I read the Amazon reviews, usually, because sometimes those reviewers ask questions or say things directly to me, and they tend to be very nice, but I mostly just check Goodreads for messages and don’t read reviews there. Wow. Some of my reviewers are better writers than I am. “…the author handled this shocking twist in the story with surgical precision. The narrative vibrates with tension…The villain is terrifying despite his lack of paranormal abilities. He is as mundane as your neighbor and as dangerous as a suicide bomber.” And, “The writing is almost lyrical, and Ms. Wynde’s ability to weave magic from one page to the next is remarkable…. It’s paranormal without being overly supernatural, if that makes any sense; you can actually believe that such things (even ghosts) are possible in real life. That’s how dense and lush the world Ms. Wynde has built truly is.”  On May 23rd or 24th, I’ll be putting AGoTime into NetGalley and I’m definitely going to be using those reviews in the Advance Praise section.

Anyone interested in learning more about Criteria-Based Content Analysis and how to use it in your writing? If I get some takers in the comments, I’ll do a series of quick blog posts based on the different elements and my presentation. It’ll keep me distracted while I wait to get ALM back. Of course, I should be writing the next book instead, but… well, so far it’s just not stirring around in my mind. I’m going to have to do some free-flow writing to try to get back into the habit and it might as well be about a writing-related topic.

 

Mother’s Day

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Food, Personal, Randomness, Self-publishing

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Mother’s Day is hard when you’ve lost your mom and your sole chick is the entire distance of the country away. I should have bought myself flowers. But I made a lovely dinner. This steelhead trout is the first recipe I think I have ever invented completely from scratch and it was just as good the second time as it was the first. Food that comes with a “you thought this up” badge makes me happy. And I ate strawberries that were delicious, so yay!

I spent this morning cleaning out my RSS feed. Obviously, I did this because I have about 20 more useful things to do, including fold the laundry, call the insurance agent, clean out the paper files, organize some tax paperwork, start writing my next book, and so on… but I was glad I did it when I was done. My RSS reader had gotten so full of sites that I’d stopped reading most of it. The slimmed-down version is going to be a lot more usable.

But it made me think about blogging and how it’s changed. So many sites are dead now. And so many sites have turned into simple announcement pages. People who used to tell stories about their lives in their blogs now just announce their books or post book covers. I suppose I understand it, but I still feel like my blog is more of a scrapbook for me–a very long-running easy-to-use journal, maybe. It might be an unprofessional decision, but I suspect I’ll keep posting my random thoughts here. Maybe I’ll make the link in the books link to the business site instead, and that can be the place that I post non-conversational announcements and such. Maybe.

Ran my first paid ad over the weekend. Thirty dollars and… well, I may or may not earn it back. It definitely didn’t cause any great swing in sales. I’m running another–the big one, Bookbub–next Monday. It cost $130, so it’ll be interesting to see if that one’s worth it. Thirty dollars requires some thought, but break into the hundreds and I spend endless mental hours debating.

Hmm, I feel like I’m rambling. I think I’ll go eat some lunch and then get some exercise. Maybe it’ll motivate me to start writing this afternoon. Or at least call the insurance company!

If I were a filmmaker…

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Bartleby, Personal, Pets, Randomness, Zelda

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Not really a serious filmmaker, just someone good with a camera, I would make a movie of my two dogs and their styles of playing Fetch. Possibly I should call it playing with balls, rather than Fetch, because the fetching part… not so effective.

Zelda (a fifteen-pound Jack Russell terrier) doesn’t like small balls. She likes basketballs. I think I posted a movie once of her playing with the basketball in the water, but the balls are twice the size of her head. I throw the ball in the water, she jumps in after it, herds it to shore with her nose, corners it and chews it until she succeeds in popping it, and then, triumphantly, brings me the remains. Then we play with the remains for a while.

Bartleby doesn’t know how to play. Not at all. We’ve been working on it, trying to encourage him, being enthusiastic–I actually made him a toy from a couple socks because he won’t go near real dog toys and every once in a while, I can get him to chew on that for a while. But today he was out by the pool with us and I could see that he wanted to play. He kept sort of trying, until finally I got up and found a tennis ball. Tried to get him to take it from me. He wouldn’t. But when I placed it on the ground between his feet, he actually put his mouth on it, then carried it about ten feet away and dropped it. I was so pleased and so proud of him. Yay, Bartleby, you go, you moved a toy! So I went and got it and we did it again. And then again. And then I realized that Bartleby’s version of Fetch requires that the person do the fetching. He does the removing, I do the retrieving. But hey, it’s a game, and he’s playing.

So the movie would be two minutes long, one a super-condensed version of Zelda taking three hours to retrieve the basketball (because she has to destroy it first) and one of Bartleby taking the tennis ball and moving it ten feet away. My dogs. So sweet they are.

In other news, I haven’t written anything for a week. I’m doing a presentation at an Orlando library this weekend and it’s occupying more of my brain than it should. It was meant to be a repeat of a presentation I’ve given before, but I feel like I have new things to say about context and layering and point-of-view. So I haven’t written that yet, but I will and then I have to decide what to write next.

I think one of the reasons that I haven’t moved on is that I really haven’t. I gave ALM to the editor but I have a pretty lengthy list of edits I want to make to it, ranging from stuff like “do I mention cookies too often?” to “make scene x more plausible by adding y details.” Some of them are fairly big edits. I have one idea–courtesy of Barbara (thanks, I think?)–that would mean at least another major chapter/scene to write and more dramatic ending revisions, so I’m contemplating that. Not with a ton of enthusiasm, but if it makes the book better, it’s worth it. But I can’t do anything until I get it back from the editor in June. Writing it was definitely a lot more fun than editing it has turned out to be!

Steelhead trout with sriracha, lime & soy sauce glaze

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Seafood, Spicy

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Costco had very nice-looking steelhead trout filets the other day, so while I stood in the aisle next to the fish, I pulled out my smart phone and pulled up the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s watch list. It said that farmed steelhead trout were a Best Choice (or whatever their highest rating is), so I went ahead and brought some home. I’d never cooked steelhead trout before, but hey, fish is fish, right?

But as I browsed the internet looking for recipes, I felt increasingly dissatisfied. I didn’t want to go the rosemary & lemon route and I wasn’t going to challenge my grill skills with fish filets. I can grill steaks, hamburgers, and chicken just fine but I don’t have a fish grate (or whatever those things are called), and my success (lack of) with fish has not made me eager to keep trying. But I didn’t want any of the recipes I found.

So I made my own.

I made a marinade of olive oil, soy sauce, sriracha, and the zest and juice from a whole lime. Measurements were entirely arbitrary except for the lime: I did the lime first, added enough soy sauce to cover the zest, added a couple of swirls of sriracha and then enough olive oil to bind them all together when mixed. I marinated the fish in it using a plastic bag, so I could easily rotate and make sure it was thoroughly covered, for about an hour, maybe a little longer, turning it a couple of times.

I pre-heated a pan on medium high (7 on my stove). I let it pre-heat for several minutes because I wanted the pan hot enough that the marinade would cook instantly and become a barbecue-ish glaze. On a lower heat or a cooler pan, it might have flowed off the fish. I put a little bit of olive oil in the pan, just enough to make a nice shimmering surface. I put the filets in, skin side up first. I flipped them after a couple of minutes but they were nice fat filets so I had to flip them again before they were through. I’d say they were in the pan maybe six or seven minutes total.

Along with the trout, we had salad of organic mixed greens, red onion diced fine, chopped sugar-snap peas, cherry tomatoes and feta.

C took a picture, so I’ll post it later if it turned out. But it was incredibly good, definitely worth repeating, and extremely creatively satisfying!