What do I mean when I use the term “meme war”?

When ideologies clash to such an extent that human beings are completely submerged in the defense of their memes and harm each other because of them, that’s a “meme war.” We’ve been fighting meme wars since the dawn of human culture, but now that we’ve got virtually instantaneous global communication, these wars have escalated. Memes are delivered in so many new, sense-bewildering ways that our psyches are on full alert. This creates stress, and so we fall back on comforting memes to bolster our fading strength.

Those who have made it their business to use memes to dominate the will of others are, themselves, puppets of memeplexes as well.

Advertising has developed a plethora of strategies for delivering content and changing minds. It’s a meme-eat-meme world out there, and it behooves us to wake up and try to choose our own memes more wisely rather than let them be chosen for us. We are never “free” of them; they are encoded in the structure of our brains, according to some researchers. But we can use memetics, itself a “recursive” meme, to become more aware of them.

“The God of Battles” features a meme war. It’s turning out rather nicely, I think. Look for it in early 2015.

I’ve enjoyed composing a sound track for the excerpt of “The Soul Thief” I posted on Booktrack.com. The length of the excerpt is identical to that of Amazon’s preview, and I’ve linked it to the Kindle page.

At one point I needed some Romani fiddle music, and the sound library on Booktrack does not include anything that I liked. However, I found a public domain track with exactly what I wanted and added that to the book. I think it worked really well.

I’d be curious to know if any Audible books are done with sound effects or if they are all narrated without accompaniment. I’d also be curious to know if I *could* create audio books with and without accompaniment. Perhaps even switchable within the book.

I’m testing a new service called BookTrack (booktrack.com) which allows an author to add sound effects to text. It works by providing an e-reader that runs on mobile and desktop devices, and it allows you to adjust reading speed. The sound effects provide an interesting ambience, though it’s not for everyone. I’m having fun with this!

Here’s a link:
http://www.booktrack.com/read/0bd89251d2bb415e97506a99aeaf1b15

Got your attention, didn’t I?

But the parallel struck me this morning when I had one of those moments. I was considering a major plotline in the new book, chewing over its implications, when it hit me. There was a detail that I had overlooked, but which dovetailed so neatly with the rest of the story that I had to conclude that part of me already knew about it. I spent a few minutes to develop the notion, but it really wasn’t that difficult.

The beauty of that realization was that I could deliver it to my readers too. They would get to a certain point in the story and, hopefully, see this unexpected twist and say, “Aha! I should’ve known!”

It is my job as a writer to make sure my readers have at least one of those moments. Otherwise, I’m not doing my job. No amount of literary foreplay or character cuddling can substitute for a climactic and entirely satisfying “Aha!”

Today I did it. The scenes marked with “may cut” have, indeed, been cut. I adjusted later places in the story that had referred back to the scenes, and it looks as if I have done minimal damage to the story. This is another sign that those scenes needed cutting; one theory has it that if a scene can be easily removed, it should be removed from the story.

Word count: just under 99,000 words
Page count: 400pp.

‘Nuff said.

I’m in the process of a straight read-through of the manuscript for Book Two. This is the first time I’ve treated the book as a single, indivisible whole, and there are numerous rough edges to smooth and corners to knock off. When I started I was uncertain as to what I’d find and where in the manuscript I’d need to bring out the authorial Key of Deletion and smite my tender prose. Things were going so well, though, and it began to look like I’d get to the Second Draft with little bloodshed.

How wrong I was. One of the crucial tasks before me was to evaluate the pacing for my story. The first thing I noticed was that it was very slow to get off the ground. Thousands of words into the novel, I realized that I was becoming impatient with my *own story.* That’s never a good sign. So I started marking out my story ‘beats’ to see if I was getting to the crucial turning points in time. No, I wasn’t.

What to cut? Which delicious vignette, what carefully crafted scene, what fully-formed child of Wisdom, sprung from my decidedly ungodly brow would succumb to the headsman’s axe?

Upon close examination, I determined that there were several scenes, centered on one of my more beloved characters, that did little more than introduce her and other characters and establish basic interactions. These scenes did not seem to be moving the story forward.

But I lost my nerve. Instead of outright removing them, I decided to mark them as “might cut” in Scrivener. I knew that I’d need to evaluate them in the context of the story and find later places where those characters and their actions would change. I promised myself that I would not simply erase these scenes; they’re my darlings, and actually rather funny, and may find a home in (drum roll, please) Book Three.

This decision having been made, I re-evaluated the rest of the story, and to my profound surprise discovered that the pacing beyond those problematic scenes looks really good. Looks like between 3,000 and 4,000 words will be removed when I’m done, which is probably just as well as I’m pushing 100,000 words, much longer than I’m comfortable with for this novel.

I sheathed my sword, cased my headsman’s axe, covered my red pen, and lifted my finger from the almighty Delete Key. For now.

If I were to cast a movie based on “The Soul Thief,” I’d consider Scarlett Johansson to play Angela:

If Scarlett played Angela

and Rooney Mara for Cassandra:

She’s got the look

I based these ideas on acting skill as well as looks. Ms. Johansson closely resembles the Angela that I have imagined: intense, somewhat curious, very serious, and with a detached air stemming from both her extraordinary past and her otherworldly experiences. I think the actress could probably pull off the demeanor of my half-Romani heroine, too. She’s already demonstrated greater range than most people might give her credit for.

Ms. Mara played a character in “Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” who reminded me of Cassandra as she was when she met Angela. That is, insofar as Cassandra is someone on the run, in great pain, and dealing with traumatic, abusive situations, she would respond similarly to the crises portrayed in that movie. That said, I believe that Cassandra’s character is less emotionally scarred. I think that the look of the character is aptly captured by this screenshot, too.

Without posting any spoilers, what do those of you who’ve read the book think? Who do you think would be a good George? Nadia? I’m curious…

I just finished with some of the prep work for another batch of sauerkraut. Rachel enjoys making it almost as much as she enjoys eating it, and of course I enjoy the fruits, as it were, of that labor too. As I was meditatively squishing the pile of leaves and other vegetable oddments, well salted and oozing their liquid, I found my mind drifting toward the craft of writing.

I’m in the midst of building a new story (and I use that term “building” deliberately), and because of the way that I iterate over each of its pieces, I find that the process very much resembles the making of sauerkraut:

• The cutting of the veggies.
  You trim and slice the vegetables, choosing the bits to remove and cutting the pieces that remain into bite-sized morsels. This is much like the process of writing the first draft, in which you are going for bulk and roughly cutting the ideas into sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters.
• The building of layers and the salting of those layers.
  You begin laying vegetables into the big bowl, alternating with spoonfuls of salt. This actually goes in parallel with the above step, so I liken this to the process of creating the story from the raw materials as you go. It’s still a rough draft, but the basics are there.
• The squishing of the veggies.
  This is what I do, as it requires a steady, strong grip and a certain placid calm. This is very much like the art of rewriting, in that the best frame of mind is a meditative one. You are going to be reducing the size of the pile of veggies, and you will see a lot of the desired liquid appear at the bottom of the bowl. This is the juice of the story, and it tells you that the thing is going to ferment quite nicely.

Maybe the analogy is rough. In fact, it is pretty rough. But the emotional states, the frame of mind that I’m in when I’m writing, remind me very much of what it feels like for me to write. I don’t write it all in one go, but instead build in layers, squishing and mashing and folding and packing. What I want to have at the end is a well-fermented nutriment for the mind that will keep and will be enjoyed for a long time to come.