Potpourri, June 18th (2016 edition)

It’s been a few months of hardware madness here — and if you know my tastes in computer stuff, you know they lean towards the software rather than the hardware side of things. So I haven’t been entirely happy during that time…

Back in mid-April, my two-terabyte (2TB) hard drive abruptly failed. It took me several weeks — educational ones, to be sure — to admit that I probably could not resuscitate the thing. I replaced it with a 3TB one, and all went swimmingly at first…

…at least, until I installed Windows 10 on it.

I won’t get into all the details for now. (I do have a page with all the details here in the “draft”-status bin, with copious screenshots and such. But it was a tedious slog, most of it.) Just accept, for now, that I was very unhappy for about two months.

(During that time, by the way, I was booting my home computer from a flash drive. Yes, this is possible, and it was my sanity’s only life preserver throughout the process — but it’s not something you’ll want to do for very long. I know I sure as hell don’t want to do it again right away.)

More recently, though, I decided it was high time that I replaced my computer’s monitor. (I justified this by considering (a) the age and, shall we say, the pedigree of my current monitor — it goes back to 2003, across multiple computers — and measures 21″ diagonally; and (b) the fact that sometime this summer, I will receive my first AT&T pension $$$. It will be only a partial month’s payment, but plenty big enough to cover the monitor’s cost.)

So the last couple weeks of my hardware adventure has been much more fun, I’ll say that. It feels like my reward for enduring the hard-drive torture.

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You could be forgiven for wondering what’s up with Seems to Fit, about which I’ve been silent here for a long time.

Short answer: I’m taking it apart and putting it back together, sorta. This is the kind of analysis which I’d get from hiring a professional “development editor,” except of course that I’m doing it myself (and except of course that it’s several orders of magnitude less expensive).

The mystery ingredient, I guess you could say — the reason enabling me to do this now, on my own — is that I now have a formal, knowledgeable template for how to go about it.

I think of myself as a good reader, smart enough to pick up on a story’s weaknesses while being honest about its strengths. I think both of those abilities would serve a client well if I myself ever thought of doing development editing. The drawback: I am really lost when it comes to analyzing my own fiction. (The strengths are obvious enough, but the weaknesses appear to me only in vague, shadowy form.)

The “template” comes in the form of a workbook written to accompany a writerly-advice text. Both the main book and the workbook come from the same author, a successful agent named Donald Maass; it’s clear from his career, both as an agent and a teacher, that he knows what he’s talking about and knows how to talk about it.

I’d picked up Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel book a few years ago, and blew through it. Maybe I was too eager for a quick fix or simple answers, I don’t know; but in any case — while I could recognize the validity of the advice — I couldn’t see how to apply it to my own story.

A few months later, I got the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. This time around, I didn’t even get through half of the book.

The problem? I wasn’t actually doing the exercises. I’d read the intro material to each chapter, and I’d read the instructions for the exercises, and I’d think, like, “Okay, I can see how I might do that,” and so on. But again: if I actually did the exercises, well my gosh, I’d have to spend an awful lot of time on yet another revision, wouldn’t I? I couldn’t have that!

Still, I knew things were not quite right with the story. And it bugged me enough that I jumped right on the first chance to go through the workbook together with some other writers struggling with their work.

It’s been a revelation. Not at all easy, as I recognized just when I first picked up the workbook, on my own — but ye gods has it been valuable. It’ll take me close to the rest of 2016 to finish (I’m averaging one chapter a week), but the book will be so much stronger as a result… even if I stop doing the exercises right now.

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My earworm this week has been Herb Alpert’s “More and More Amor.”

Wikipedia tells me that it’s the English-language version of a song called simply “Amor” in the original Spanish. That original song was written in 1943, with lyrics as well as music, and was something of a hit when recorded by Bing Crosby. I’ve listened to Crosby’s version, and several by more contemporary performers. None of them feel quite right compared to Alpert’s take on it, though. Nor quite as haunting.