Things I Saw In Paris

Walking around the streets of Paris with my family, I see Coca Cola, Danon Yogurt, Lay's barbecue potato chips and Snickers on the shelves of every grocery store and deli, the movies Green Lantern, Bad Teacher, Hangover Part 2 (charmingly retitled Very Bad Trip Part 2) and Mr. Popper's Penguins playing in the theaters, and a McDonald's or a Starbucks on every block.
I understand the idea of exporting culture, but I have a hard time thinking of a single French product, movie or restaurant that I might see casually walking down the streets in New York. Is France accommodating us? Surrendering to us? The other day, a couple came up to me while I was on my way home and, told me they were from out of town and asked me if there was a nice place to eat nearby. I suggested a place I thought had good food and was distinctive. "No," the woman looked at me with clear confusion, "I meant something likes McDonald's or Wendy's." Seems like traveling is becoming more a matter of feeling at home wherever you go these days than really plunging into another culture.
We're all closer now than we've ever been, we all "know" each other with a cultural intimacy we never have before. That's a good thing, right?

Editing, Stage 1

     A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the sequel to Those That Wake had been sent into my agent, Jason, for a first look and that I would give updates along the way as a glimpse into the editing process.  The first round of editing is underway and this is what has been/is going to change, as per Jason's very astute suggestions:
     1. The overall story needs to be streamlined so that the emotional relationship at its heart (that between Mal and Laura) stands out as much as possible.  I do tend to go off on character and idea tangents.
     2. The villain of the piece needs to be better defined, which is to say changed so that he will not confuse everyone who reads the book.  My initial conception of him was that he be very abstract, as the more shadowy and less defined evil is, the more menacing I find it.  Instead, he will be very solid, though his actions and methods will remain shadowy and menacing.
     3.  Something crucial that happens to Mal and defines his role for the middle portion of the book needs to be clarified.  Again, this is a matter of very conceptual stuff being made more accessible.
     So these were the first round of general suggestions.  Clearly, I have a problem with making things too complex or conceptual.  I'm working on that.  Anyway, I will address these issues and turn in a second draft and Jason will return with more specific advice on everything from narrative to style and the next re-write will be far more detail-oriented.  We are determined, naturally, to turn in the cleanest, sharpest, most effective manuscript to my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
     Incidentally, as I predicted in the previous post linked above, there has been a call to consider changing the title.  
 

Teen Writer's Bloc Interview

     Teen Writer's Bloc recently posted an interview with me about Those That Wake and various related themes.  Do please have a look at the link above.

An Idle Question

     In Those That Wake, I wrote about Forgotten Places, parts of the world that people had stopped visiting and thus had left their memories and slowly started to fade from the world itself.  I was put in the mind of this a few days ago as I was driving from Ashland to Sacramento when I encountered a sign that said "You're now leaving Oregon.  Come Again!"  About a hundred feet on, a second sign sprang up, proclaiming "Welcome to California!"  So, there's a good one hundred feet of highway in between these two signs and, apparently, it's not in Oregon and it's not in California.  Where is it, exactly?  Does anyone own it?  Doesn't this same expanse of unclaimed land exist between every two bordering states in the country?  Can I claim this land?  Could I not, in effect, have this strip of land winding its way through the continental United States and proclaim it a massively long (but not very wide) fifty-first state?  Could I not charge a toll every time anyone passed into or out of its borders?
      There's a short story in here somewhere.

The Sequel, Part 2

     What makes a sequel good; not just enjoyable but also a proper, worthy and satisfying continuation?  Seems to me that the key is partially in that last word, "continuation."  There ought to be, first of all, a sense that the characters from the first story have grown, moved forward.  Die Hard 2, for example, is great fun, but not much of a continuation.  The Empire Strikes Back, on the other hand, absolutely continues the development of the main characters (okay, mainly Luke) and relies not only on the fact that you know who they had been, but required that knowledge to create the narrative.
      At the same time, a sequel ought to offer an expanding and a deepening.  You can expand the vision of the world the story takes place in (again, the Empire Strikes Back does this quite nicely as does, for instance, Beneath the Planet of the Apes), but more significantly, the themes that the first one explored should be expanded, given greater weight, examination and perspective.  This expansion would, by its nature, also deepen one's understanding of the thematic undercurrents, which is crucial to a satisfying story.  Are themes whose depths have already been plumbed in the first story really that resonant for being retread in the second?  Notably, I don't think this thematic expansion necessarily requires that the story take on a larger scope.  Indeed, it seems sometimes that if you make the sequel a tighter, more intense narrative it can aid in deeper explorations of character and theme.  Philip Pullman's the Subtle Knife, sequel to the Golden Compass, is a great example of this.
     In discussions of sequels, you often hear about how there is a demand to both give audiences/readers what they expect but also to surprise them.  That has a very superficial ring to me.  It seems to suggest that people want their expectations met but with a twist so they feel like they got their money's worth.  Pushing this idea a little farther down the path, what you really have are audiences who want to visit characters they already know and like and be surprised by these characters in a way that feels fresh but also appropriate to their growth.  Honestly, there's nothing about that that's particularly special to sequel-telling.  Who doesn't want a story with good characters and a good surprise?