An almost (mostly not) true story: Part II

When we last left our adventurous heroes, they were flying into space on a surprise mission. As far as they knew, their job was to offer aid to a life form named Rooll, who had fled from a slave hunter...

(Fair warning repetition: Just in case you're a Trekkie/Star Wars nerd who's going to get all upset about my terminology and garbage — I really don't care. Therefore, don't bother… Space camp was a campy mix of Star Trek episodes, storylines, and vernacular, and therefore, the terms are those used in the experience and it is what it is.)

"Set course for the Romulan Neutral Zone," the captain commanded.

"Aye aye, Captain," the Right Wing Flight Officer said. The Left Wing Tactical Officer pushed a series of buttons and the ship slipped smoothly forward as the warp drive began to pulsate with power.

"Let's go to maximum warp," the captain said.

"Aye aye, sir," came the reply.

The stars, still pinpoints of light in the vast emptiness of space, began to blur together as the warp drive pushed the ship forward. Traveling faster than the speed of light will never get old, the captain thought to himself with a small grin. Wiping the smile of his face, he quickly returned to business.

Within minutes, the ship moved out of warp speed. Everyone on the deck went quiet, staring out the forward viewport as the stars returned to normal and a wormhole appeared in the distance. And there—growing larger as the Voyager neared—was the tiny, scarred ship belonging to the life form known as Rooll.

"I'm getting a communication from the ship," the telephone officer said.

"Put it over the speakers," the captain commanded.

"Help!" came a frantic voice. "My ship is burning! I need help!"

"That must be Rooll," the captain said. "Beam him aboard."

"Yes sir," came the reply.

The security officers hurried to receive the newcomer while a tiny voice whispered in the captain's ear, "You forgot to perform a bio scan—your medical staff is dead."

"Oops," the captain muttered sheepishly.

The two security officers returned moments later with Rooll between them.  The science officer perked up with interest. Rooll didn't look like an unidentified species, being humanoid in form, but you never could tell.

"Take him to medical," the captain ordered, getting to his feet.

"Sir, I'm getting a new contact," the scanners officer spoke up. "It seems to be coming through the wormhole."

"That's him!" Rooll shouted. "Shoot him down! Don't let him find me! Blast him!"

The alien ran to a console and shoved a crewmember aside as he began pushing buttons frantically.

"Security, take him to medical!" the captain bellowed, the severity of his voice demanding obedience. Two security guards pulled Rooll away from the console and out of the room, while the crewmembers returned to their spots and began trying to undo whatever damage he had done.

"Sir, I'm getting another communication," the telephone officer spoke up.

"Broadcast it," the captain said, returning to his seat as the bridge quieted in anticipation.

(Note: I really, REALLY can't remember the bad guy's name, so I'm going to call him Grooll. Okay? Okay.)

 "USS Voyager, I wish to speak to your ambassador," a dark, grating voice said over the ship's speakers. No image accompanied the voice, giving it an air of mystery as it echoed through the quiet corridors. The crewmembers shifted in their seats and traded glances as the captain paused.

"This is Captain Willis of the USS Voyager," he said at last. "Who am I addressing?"

"I wish to speak to your ambassador!" the voice roared in reply.

The captain nodded at the ambassador, who had been listening silently to the exchange from his seat. The ambassador stood, walking across the ship while the rest of the crew watched, and coming to a halt in front of the viewscreen.

"This is Ambassador Gilbert of the USS Voyager," he said. "To whom am I speaking?

"I am Grooll, leader of the Pennou," came the growling reply. "You have taken one of my slaves on board your ship. I demand the return of my property."

"I'm sorry, sir," the ambassador said. "We will not send our guest to your ship."

"You will not?!" Grooll thundered.

"We will not," the ambassador repeated firmly. "As representatives of the Federation, we do not agree with or condone slavery, and we will not be a part of returning the individual known as Rooll to your custody."

"But he belongs to me!" Grooll shouted. "If you do not return him, I will be forced to fire on your ship."

"Shields up," the captain ordered in an aside to the nearby tactical officer. The officer complied, and Grooll noticed.

"Your shields are up, but they will not be able to withstand our weapons," he said. "Return my slave and I will allow you to leave unharmed."

The ambassador turned to look at the captain, who shook his head. Giving him a nod, the ambassador turned back to the speaker and gave a firm, temperate "No."

"So be it," Grooll said. He cut off the communication abruptly.

An almost (mostly not) true story: Part I

I have a secret obsession with those headphones that have a mic attached. I love them. I love them so much. In fact, it is impossible to describe how much I love them.

Want to know why?

Two words:

Space camp.

The obsession with outer space (and headphones with mics) didn't start in 5^th grade, but 5^th grade provided the experience that fanned the flames. I've always loved looking at stars, I track meteor showers, and I tend to dance around in glee when I unexpectedly see a shooting star. When I was younger I dreamed of being an astronaut because — naturally — outer space was where the Star Wars characters lived. Glowing stars on my ceiling. Pretending to be Han Solo when playing laser tag. Star shows at planetariums. Countless dreams of flying.  It's sort of my deepest wish to be a space tourist.

So, in 5th grade, when my class had the chance to go to outer space, I was beyond thrilled—I was delighted, overjoyed, and positively giddy.

Now, my memories of space camp are editorialized to the extreme, but luckily I've got friends who were there too. I also found the website for the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center, which is where space camp is located. (Word of advice — don't go to the website if you remember space camp — it dims the euphoric glow of memory.) But here, utilizing my flawed memories, my friend's better memories, the website, and a touch of fiction, is the "true" story of what happened at space camp:

(Fair warning: Just in case you're a Trekkie/Star Wars nerd who's going to get all upset about my terminology and garbage — I really don't care. Therefore, don't bother… Space camp was a campy mix of Star Trek episodes, storylines, and vernacular, and therefore, the terms are those used in the experience and it is what it is.)

 A long time ago…

In a galaxy far, far, away…

The mission assignment wasn't entirely unexpected. Trips to outer space were the norm for Academy students, but this emergency mission brought along the challenges of the unknown. For the crew, stiff from a long ride to Starbase 12 aboard the yellow troop carrier, the tension was apparent, but controlled.

One by one, the 20+ core member of the crew — captain, first officer, ambassador, and other bridge officers—stepped into the teleporter and beamed aboard the ship. The teleportation was a seconds-long trip of sudden silence, solitude, and darkness that ended when each crewmember stepped into the blue-lit hallway of an inner room aboard the USS Voyager. After quickly changing into their uniforms (the first officer noting with dismay that the captain still had more stars on his shoulder than her) the crew hurried up the metal circular staircase and onto the quiet bridge.

Focused on their jobs, the crew spread out across the ship. The captain, first officer, and science officer claimed their positions on the raised platform overlooking the buzzing hive of activity below. The first officer took a moment to glance at the diagram of the ship hanging above her before putting on her headphones, adjusting the microphone in front of her mouth, and giving the captain an all-clear signal.

The captain sat straighter in his chair, watching with satisfaction as the records officer, right and left wing power officers,  damage control officers, and flight officers, assumed their positions. The scanners officer, sensors officer, decoder, long range officer, and engineer followed, while the security officers performed a final check of the ship before climbing to their perch overlooking the entire bridge. Each crewmember put on their mic'd headphones and waited for further instructions.

"Quiet on the deck!" the first officer commanded.

With everyone silent and waiting, the communique from the captain of the USS Ranger — the message that had inspired the urgent call from Starfleet Command — was shared with the Voyager crew.

According to the message, a small ship had been discovered near an unstable wormhole in the Romulan Neutral Zone. The ship housed a single life form that had traveled through the wormhole. The life form, calling himself Rooll, fled from another species that had reportedly enslaved Rooll and his kind. After fleeing from a relocation camp on his home planet, Rooll traveled through the wormhole, narrowly escaping a slave hunter. However, in his encounter with the slave hunter, Rooll's ship was damaged and he was injured. The USS Ranger, in need of supplies and repairs, had called for assistance.

It was assistance the Voyager was now prepared to give.

Jane Austen and the worst character ever

I have a terrible fear of Fanny Price.

For those of you who may not have undergone the torturous (okay, okay, at least call it tedious) process of reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, let me tell you a little bit about Fanny Price:

She's worried about appearing rude or impatient.

She's "extremely civil."

She gets headaches from "nothing but the heat." She quite literally gets a headache from cutting roses for 45 minutes in the sun. And from walking.

She's ridiculously weak.

"The sudden change which Edmund's kindness had then occasioned made her hardly know how to support herself." C'MON.

"That he should forego any enjoyment on her account gave her pain." No, seriously.

"Every sort of exercise fatigues her so, Miss Crawford, except riding."

She tells a boy that she's glad they didn't perform a play, and then, since she had never said anything so angry before, "she trembled and blushed at her own daring."

"The sight of so many strangers threw her back into herself," but "she found herself occasionally called on to endure something worse. She was introduced here and there by her uncle, and forced to be spoken to, and to curtsy and speak again. This was a hard duty."

I think by this point you understand what I'm trying to say. To sum it up, Fanny Price is arguably the most dull, uninteresting, colorless character ever written—or at least she was, until Bella Swan swooped in and stole that title away.

If you MUST watch Mansfield Park, always choose the right.
You'll forever regret choosing the left.

Ever since Mansfield Park became one of the few books I returned to the library without finishing (claiming a spot along with Alice in Wonderland and ... nope, that's about it) I've been afraid of writing a Fanny Price. I never want to write a Fanny Price.

Fanny Price isn't the only literary character I've hated over the years. When I went through my LDS fiction phase back when I was 12ish, I ran across a couple of books that I absolutely loathed because of the main character. Characters who are too perfect are horrible, and yes—I'm always grateful when a too-perfect or an annoying character bites the dust. I feel like Thumb Wars' Loke Groundrunner when a fistfighter blows up the Stray Dog/Red Rooster/Swollen Ostrich pilot…

THANK YOU

I think writing a character people want you to kill would be terribly depressing, a la Maid Marion in the BBC Robin Hood (bless you, writers) or Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight (bless you too, writers). If Fanny Price had contracted some fatal fatigue disease and withered away to a boring, dry shell, I probably would've liked Mansfield Park more. Sad but true.

It's this depressing thought—"thanks for killing your character! The story is better without him/her!" that makes me worry, because I think I'm writing a Fanny Price.

OH, THE HORROR!

See, I'm trying to write a character who's a bit shy, a little timid, and who allows himself to be bullied for part of the story. And dagnabbit, he's turning into a character I would dislike. I obviously don't dislike him because he's mine, but if I were an unattached reader… I don't know…

I've been watching a boatload of Bollywood movies lately (Dil Bole Hadippa, guys – it's just like She's the Man, only with cricket… and dancing…) and I thought I had found the answer in Pyaar Impossible!, which is about a shy main character. I thought I could learn from the movie. Unfortunately, he got on my nerves within the first twenty minutes. I just wanted to yell at him. "Speak up! Stop letting people walk all over you! Be a man!"

So there's a challenge, and I want to know how other writers deal with it. Shy, timid people occur in real life, so how do you write about them in a way that keeps them endearing, relatable, and likable? How do you make the story worth reading when your character is sometimes less than interesting? Every single character can't be charismatic, outspoken, and forceful, because that would make every character the same. But how do you avoid walking into the boring/too perfect trap when going for an unobvious hero in a story? So many questions.

Hopefully I'm just being too picky. Hopefully my shy character doesn't annoy anyone else. Hopefully he's got more gumption than he appears to have thus far.

And hopefully I can avoid making the worst mistake of all…

Writing a Fanny Price.

The chopping, er... chapter test

I call it the chapter test.

I've been editing a book for months and months. It was about 27,000 words too long (which, if you're keeping score at home, broke down to about 44 single-spaced pages in Word). That's a whole lot of wordy. And — as pretty much every entry on this blog clearly shows — I have a problem with wordy.

That's why I invented the chapter test.

In order to speed up the pacing of every story I write, I force myself to read back through it and chop chapters. Now, chopping chapters is extremely difficult. Like, hold-still-while-I-cut-off-this-arm difficult. You feel a little bit like the mom in the King Solomon story, where you'd rather give away your baby than see it cut in half. In my first edit of the book that is almost ready to be sent out to agents (curse you, you evil appendix), I probably cut out 50 words, and every one of them hurt like the dickens. At that point, I thought the pain was over.

However, after reading some interviews with book agents, I concluded that my book needed to be around 75,000 words long — a far cry from where it was. That convinced me that I had to get serious. Rather than scraping away a few words here and there with a scalpel, I had go full Jack Nicholson and attack the story with an axe. The chapter test helped me do it.

See, I decided that every chapter needed to drive the narrative forward. That seems like a stupid conclusion — OF COURSE the chapters should drive the narrative forward — but you wouldn't believe how easy it is to veer off course with your characters. Nobody loves your characters more than you do, so it's easy (so painfully easy) to transform into a doting parent. Your characters become your baby, and you want to capture their every move.

Walking?

Yes!

Talking?

Yes!

Shopping?

Yes!

Breakfast?

Yes!

It's very, very easy for the actual story to get buried under things that seem important to you as the writer, but tend to bore the reader to death. Hence, the chapter test.

So (having put it off for this many paragraphs — see the wordy problem?!) let me explain:

The test probably evolved from my journalism background. All through college I worked on the campus newspaper, and part of my job was writing headlines. An 800-word story would need to be summed up in eight words, or maybe five words, or even (heaven forbid) as few as three words. It was terrible, but I learned, and I've transferred it over to my writing. With the chapter test, I read through the chapter and summarize it with a brief headline explaining what it's about. If the chapter doesn't push the narrative forward, it's eligible for axing.

I've got 33 pages of chopped chapters saved on my computer, and they can all be summed up like this:

"Character tries to avoid girls"

"Character remembers a conversation"

"Character draws a picture"

"Character gets annoyed"

Let's face it — none of those chapters were make-or-break-the-story types. They needed to go. I may have loved them to death (the drawing one is a favorite) but they were bogging down the story, stalling the narrative, and belaboring points that could have been made more succinctly elsewhere.

That's the chapter test — sum up the chapter, see if it adds to the narrative, and then chop if it doesn't. It's clinical, it's clean, and it's far less painful than you might think.

Once you get the theory behind the chapter test, you can apply it to all sorts of books. If I had a copy of Twilight (I don't, but if I did) I could probably narrow down the chapters like this:

"Bella whines."

"Bella mopes."

"Bella stares."

"Bella wonders why everyone likes her." (So do the readers…)

Don't think I only pick on "Twilight," though — other books could benefit from my brilliance. If I were to cut out all of the "Harry whines" chapters from the fifth Harry Potter book, it would've been about 400 pages shorter. And if I cut out all of the "Fanny is boring," "Fanny is tired," "Fanny is silent," "Fanny is dull," chapters from Mansfield Park, that book would cease to exist. Take out the "Dang, these Parisian sewers are awesome" chapters from Les Miserables, and that book would be a breeze. If only Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, and Victor Hugo knew about the chapter test…

Parents may love their kids to death, but they're also willing to tell their kids to stop being ridiculous when the kids act out. The same theory can apply for authors.

So, chapters, stop being ridiculous.

In which there was rage and reading

Someone recently made me angry. 


To clarify, it wasn't anger like I normally feel. (Which is not actually anger, by the way - it's more of a perpetual state of annoyance with humanity.) This was anger like spitting nails/breathing fire/seeing red.


Now, my first impulse was to fight back. I'm not easily cowed, and I'm certainly not easily intimidated. I may be a walking South Pacific song (a hundred and one pounds of fun, only sixty inches high, etc.) but personality-wise, I also fit the part of the song that happens to say, "Ev'ry inch is packed with dynamite." Sometimes I can be... er... explosive, if you will.


But in this situation, I thought maybe I should try to relax. Just because someone made me mad doesn't mean I have to fight back, right? So I tried to follow my roommate's example and turned to some Mormon personal revelation for guidance. By "Mormon personal revelation," I mean the normal process a lot of Mormons talk about from the pulpit on Sundays - I decided to open my scriptures and see what verses my eyes landed on first. The guidance I needed would then come from those verses. My roommate loves to talk about this method of personal revelation. From what she's told me, it works like a charm for her every time. It has answered her prayers about college plans, dating, and more. It has worked for me, too, and (on a serious note) it can be a very inspired way to find guidance from God about life and its challenges.


So, full of rage, I pulled out my scriptures and let them fall open. I expected to read verses like this:


"And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." (Ephesians 4:32)


Or maybe this:


"But I say unto you, that ye shall not resist evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also;" (3 Nephi 12:39)


Or especially this:


"And blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." (3 Nephi 12:5)


However, the verses I turned to included nothing like that. Instead of finding some happy verses about being calm, I turned directly to stories about war. To specify, I turned to Alma.


Oops.


When trying to decide between fight or flight, reading verses like this is probably not the best idea:


"And he caused that all the people in that quarter of the land should gather themselves together to battle against the Lamanites, to defend their lands and their country, their rights and their liberties; therefore they were prepared against the time of the coming of the Lamanites." (Alma 43:26)


Or this:


"And now, as Moroni knew the intention of the Lamanites, that it was their intention to destroy their brethren, or to subject them and bring them into bondage that they might establish a kingdom unto themselves over all the land;" (Alma 43:29)


Or this:


"Nevertheless, the Nephites were inspired by a better cause, for they were not fighting for monarchy nor power but they were fighting for their homes and their liberties, their wives and their children, and their all, yea, for their rites of worship and their church.


"And they were doing that which they felt was the duty which they owed to their God; for the Lord had said unto them, and also unto their fathers, that: Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies." (Alma 43: 45-46)


So clearly, if this was personal revelation, God wasn't telling me to take the situation lying down. Either that, or my personal revelation function was broken, and I was being fed all sorts of bad suggestions...


Later that day, I was reading an old Ann Coulter book while brushing my teeth. (What? Doesn't everybody read while brushing their teeth? If not, you totally should. It eliminates the boring factor in teeth-brushing, and it also leaves your teeth sparkling clean...) Yeah, yeah, I know, Ann Coulter is controversial or whatever, but hey - I've met the lady, and I think she's hysterical.


Anyway, I stumbled upon this passage in her book:


"Liberals simply can't grasp the problem LexisNexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty - hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte."


OH SNAP!


Seeing as how my anger had everything to do with one person's documented statements, as well as this same person's overreaction to the truth and this person's accusation of lying on my part, this was outrageously fitting to the situation at hand. Let me just change a few words to illustrate... (while still maintaining some sheen of anonymity, of course)


"[Person in question] simply can't grasp the problem [his/her] [words] pose to [his/her] incessant lying. [He/she] ought to stick to [his/her] specialty - hysterical overreaction. The truth is not [his/her] forte.


It makes more sense if you know who my anger was directed at, but...


Anyway, here was yet another encounter with the written word telling me not to surrender.


And then it got worse.


The next morning, I was reading while blowdrying my hair. (What? Doesn't everybody read while blowdrying their hair? If not, you totally should. It eliminates the boring factor in hair-blowdrying, and it also... leaves your hair dry? No, mostly is just makes the process less boring.)


Anyway, I've been reading Page Smith's "A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution" (because 1,700 pages of sometimes dubious and sometimes hilarious history is an excellent way to start off the morning...) and somehow - as my rage still simmered within me - this crazy book managed to speak to me too. 


I encountered passages like this:


In spite of each parasite, each cringing slave,
Each cautious dastard, each oppressive knave,
Each gibing ass, that reptile of an hour,
The supercilious pimp of abject slaves in power,
We are met to celebrate in festive mirth,
The day that give our freedom second birth.
That tell us, British Grenville never more
Shall dare usurp unjust, illegal power,
Or threaten America's free sons with chains,
While the least spark of ancient fire remains.


That's not exactly screaming, "don't fight - just surrender," is it?


Then I hit this:


"That England should have repeatedly emphasized the ingratitude of the colonies is significant. The call for gratitude is the unmistakable signal that all moral authority has been dissipated; nothing is left but a generally fruitless appeal to gratitude. It is the cry of all parents who have lost, usually through their own obtuseness, the obedience of their children. And so Mother England mourned her ungrateful children, and was determined to punish them. Charles Townshend saw himself as the instrument of that chastisement. In the words of Edmund Burke: 'The whole body of courtiers drove him onwards. They always talked as if the King stood in a sort of humiliated state until something of the kind should be done.'"


This all makes sense in context, but I'm not going to give any context. Suffice it to say, though, I saw the instigator of my rage playing the role of England - completely in the wrong, but unwilling to acknowledge it; demanding gratitude and respect, and yet failing to earn it. 


To quote William Pitt, "Here I draw the line."


So, to sum it up: Was I angry? Yes. Did I fight? Not to the full extent that I could have, but yes. Was it (all of my reading materials in a one-day period of time) personal revelation? Maybe. 


It could have been three things:


1. Coincidence. So everything I read just happened to talk about fighting for a cause and/or defeating someone who deserves to be defeated - so what?


2. Me personally reading things into the materials at hand. I only saw the passages that applied to the situation, i.e. they didn't really apply, but I bent them to fit the narrative.


3. Or maybe God hates bullies as much as I do.

Not bored enough to post

Happy almost April!


As usual, I've been neglecting this blog. Writing posts helps keep me from being bored, but life has been so busy lately that I haven't actually had time to get bored. Just to catch you up, here's a quick rundown of what the last month involved:


Had a lovely time visiting my darling Bree Anne in her hometown. It was my first visit there, and I got to see her home, her dog, and "Once Upon a Mattress." ("You swam the moat?!") All of those things, plus Bree Anne (of course) and her husband Travis, made the visit just perfect.


Attended the Broadway tour of "Beauty and the Beast" ... three times. Good thing they didn't do a month-long sit-down show like "Mary Poppins," or I would've been in trouble... The problem is, when I watch a movie or go to a live show, I always pick a favorite character to cheer for. In this case, it was Lumiere (Michael Haller was delightful) and I went back twice hoping to see him again. Unfortunately, those other two performances were two different understudies. What are the odds?


Created a clay masterpiece(ish). (See above.) Apparently my new hobby is making and selling clay pageant girls. Not really, but the last three things I've made have been pageant girls. It means I'm getting very good at making crowns.


Read "The Hunger Games." I know, I know, I was late to the party. Loved the first, liked the second, was ho-hum about the third. The film score is quite pretty. Every movie needs a little James Newton Howard.


Experienced "Zorro the Musical" at Hale Centre Theatre. It should probably (more appropriately) be called, "A lot of The Gypsy Kings and some random dude in a mask." Also, since that kicked off a slight Zorro obsession, I watched every episode of the old Disney "Zorro" TV show for the first time. It was marvelous.


Scrubbed my carpets. You know your life is exciting when... Actually, real excitement came when I discovered that I've been accepted into the grad school I was hoping to attend. Whew.


Showed Bree Anne around the big city when she came out here for a visit. Three days of shopping, hanging out with Hobie and Bree Anne, and getting very little sleep - it was delightful!


Made about 5 million picture frame projects. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but only just.


Attended the yearly Miss Utah meeting to talk about our massive service project coming up in May. I did some math today, only to discover that my mom bought enough material to make almost 400 puppet kits for Primary Children's. I get quite excited about how wonderful that is, until I remember that I volunteered to cut them all out and sew them together... Suddenly less excited...


Neglected to eat Cadbury Creme Eggs, which means I'm about 20 eggs behind Erin in our annual Cadbury competition. I'll either have to concede defeat for the first time in years, or I'll have to eat roughly 20+ eggs in the next two weeks... Don't worry, though. I'm up to the challenge...

An alumnus with an axe to grind

February 29, 5:08:25 p.m.: The professor just called me at work and threatened to sue me for slander, so I'm removing part of my introduction. He also said, "I know your bosses."

Update: Due to the fact that the professor actually contacted my employer and out of respect for the company I work for, I removed this post. If you want to know more, contact me.