Cooperation and Competition
Whether its writing fiction people love or finding the gap between another racer's ability and his desire, there's competition involved. It's the nature of the game, the way the world's set up. We often like to pretend otherwise in the modern world, but even when we cooperate, its to compete with an outside group.
Publishing is a cooperative competition. It's not that unnatural to want to be good enough to publish. Roadracing motorcycles is individual competition in it's purest form. I happen to enjoy both.
What you'll find here
Updates on my books, what I'm writing, what I'm shopping for publication. You can find first chapters of manuscripts I'm shopping around. You'll also find updates on my hobby, motorcycle roadracing. If you're looking for the humorous writeups, they're on a different site, run by my teammate Brian. I'll update this with a link when he updates his site.
What's New in Dave's World
Monday, May 4, 2009
5/4 Update - It's good to have friends
Lessee... Amazon contest, first. Drained out with a workman-like pitch, not exciting enough for the pool of folks who review such things. I don't think I'll enter this contest again next year, it's too much like "American Idol for Writers". For what it's worth, none of the writers I know who entered made it past the pitch/review stage.
Okay, now to the motorcycle racing. March races at Arroyo were cold, and I was even colder. I was as bad as I ever was the start of an Amateur season, at 1:17 pace, frustrated as all-get-out, not feeling the traction, and showing it in my laptimes. DFL in every race but one. Ugh, that was harsh.
April races were only slightly better. I ran off the track in one race, just screaming in my helmet, mad that I blew braking so badly - my glove pinched my throttle, and I tried to brake with the throttle open. This is a setup issue, normally fixed by relocating the perch (mount), if there isn't lever adjustment left. I chose to sulk over it instead of fixing it... another really crappy weekend.
So, it's good to have friends. C-Bass (Sebastian), my pit-mate for the season crashed last fall, also. Both of us had a really bad start to this season, and it was entirely due to lack of confidence. The track owner in New Mexico would rather have both of us competitive and happy than not, and so we were able to rent the track (C-Bass and I) for some laps with the owner last Monday. With a little 'push' from the track owner, I made some suspension geometry adjustments that helped a lot, too. Only a few laps into it, on a warm April day, and both C-Bass and I were suddenly in the 1:15's, and I got down into the 1:13's. Hallelujah, and pass the ammo, Brother.
May races were much better. Now I can be mad at myself for mental 'race management' issues - failing to block one turn in a race I led from the green flag resulted in getting passed on the last lap without enough track left to catch up again. That got me mad, but in a different way, encouraging me to flog the bike. This had a really cool effect: I really began to feel the tires again, and the suspension action, and began seriously putting power down to drive out of corners while still leaned over - all things you HAVE to do to go fast. I haven't seen the laptimes from that last race yet, but I think I may have equaled my personal best.
This makes me look forward to next month.
I'll probably do a trackday in Pahrump, Nevada (Spring Mountain Motorsports Park) in late May, to keep the feeling current.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Feb 28th Entry - New Paint
New paint on the bike.
I'd purchased paint back in December for the bike, after the crash in October. I'd raced Fontana (the first WERA West round of the season) in primer. I'd intended to buy candy mid coat, to apply over a gold base. Neither the black nor the red candy mid coats were mids - they were color, opaque. It still came out looking pretty good, though it is highly reminiscent of my friend Roger's paintscheme. C'est la vie.
I'll also need to recut the gold ASMA logo smaller, (and there are various other stickers to be applied when I get to the track and get them from Tech inspection).
Monday, February 2, 2009
Feb 2nd Entry - ABNA Madness
Seriously. Getting my novel Specialist Sparks ready for the ABNA contest was a serious drag through broken glass, barbed wire, and antipersonnel mines. Okay, it was just painful.
I started three weeks ago with a manuscript that was 91,000 words, but only two acts of the story. I brought in some material I had from the sequel - completely unedited - for the third act (my friend Terry Mixon suggested a while back I use the traditional screenwriting three-act format. I've used the three-times rule in a lot of the subplots, but now applied it directly as the macro-plot). I added 23,000 words doing that.
Then, I added 4,000 more, for the 'pinch scenes', where I remind you, the reader, that there's a threat brewing over the horizon (in this case, in the Southern Hemisphere...) and that rust never sleeps... I won't ruin the story for you. This left me at 114,900 words.
The genre - Action/Adventure - wants less than 100,000 words, as close to 90,000 as a first-time novelist (I have no prior sales to point to to justify a longer book). This caused me to have to edit...
I lost about 2,000 words right off the bat in kicking out unneeded or too-heavy-handed-repetition-of-a-theme scenes. Yeah, we know Sandy's a great soldier, one scene's enough, not three... that sort of thing.
I then got painful, and got rid of some cherished scenes developing a relationship between Kate and Sandy, and trimmed even more from two really key monologues. That was painful, because they were strong, but the story still stands with weaker monologues.
Feeling bad, I then shifted the attack to wordcount, and started trimming descriptive clauses. Stuff that really wasn't needed - characters looking at scenery, wondering about inconsequential stuff. Figure I lost about 9 words a page that way.
Next, a purely mechanical attack on passive voice and contractions. I also broke up complex, multi-clause (run on?) sentences, making them no more than three, mostly two, clauses long. This lowered the Fleisch readability score a bit, too. I finished with 1% passive-voice: there are some phrases you cannot, especially in dialogue, make active. These include "the formation was dismissed", if you don't want to spend words on who led the formation (think a class graduation - the leader isn't part of the story), and "Sandy was shot". Oh well.
This got me down to 99,400 words.
More painful elides and minor scene/sentence edits.
98,700.
Then I got to write a bio, pitch, synopsis, anectdote, and other impedimentia for the contest.
The pitch was tough. This would cut the contest entries by a factor of 20 - from 10,000 possible entries to 500. I did my best to answer the points they asked for - and spent less on the synopsis than I might have. I also used the pronoun "I" in the pitch, something most other people avoided - but they wanted to know my motivation and qualifications for writing a novel, and who I aimed it at.
After the submission period's over, I'll post up the pitch here.
Anyway, after the game yesterday (there was a game? The Superbowl...), I hovered over my keyboard, and at 10:00 AZ time, got my entry into the 2009 ABNA contest in.
Whew.
A drag through rocky riverbeds, thornbushes, and pine forests. But I'm done... now I just get to wait until 16 March when I find out if the pitch was good enough.
More later...
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Where did December go?
December, the holidays, flew by. November ended, with me not having a lot of words written on my NaNoWriMo project (Ilse). I shelved it for December, since work got busy.
Along with work, I had a lot of social engagements in the month (it's the holidays...), and I had a bike to repair for the races in Fontana, which were very early in January this year. My gym closed with only one week's notice, and I had to find a new one. I'm not sure I like the new place that much - it's about seven miles from my house, six miles further than the old one. My oldest daughter had dance performances all month long, which kept us running from place to place most evenings.
I haven't even had enough time to update my website!
What's new? Well, it's a new racing season. Please see my schedule page if you're curious about my plans. Also, Amazon has a new ABNA contest, and I'm rearranging SP4 Sparks to enter into the contest - I have only a few days' free time this month to get that done in.
Should I fail to get my entry into the ABNA in time, I'll post the story online.
What else? Races at Fontana! It was a hectic, and tragic weekend. See the Results page for the laborious details.
The Kids go back to school next week - can't quite come soon enough (sorry, Kids) for Mom and Dad. It's a good thing they like school - all three are A students - and a return to normalcy will be much appreciated.
I'd attended the Southern California Writer's Conference last year at this time (early Feb), but I'll have to forego it this year, as I expect no annual bonus from my employer, making my racing/writing budget rather slim. Someone buy the rights to a book, please!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Wow, it's November, and...
It's been a really tough month for me at work, and I really worry about the viability of my employer. Others in the industry aren't doing real well. This is distracting me quite a bit, and I'm afraid I'm not going to get 50,000 words of the proto-novel Ilse done in November. I do have 13,000 and a few thousand of another novel underway, though. I'll work on it when I can.
SP4 Sparks will be my entry into the new Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, coming up on Feb 2nd. I'll have made it into a three-act plotline, and I'll have to cut a bunch of words in order to fit some words from the sequel in. It won't be super-hard to do - I have enough time. I think this (the new ABNA) was what I was holding out for (subconsciously) with this story. Wish me luck!
It's November, and at least one of the organizations I race with has promoted me to Expert (I expect a letter in the mail from the other sometime this week). This is really cool, since all my writing needs is another distraction ;). Seriously, I need to have the bike repaired and painted by Jan 3rd, my first race as an Expert, at Fontana, California (AutoClub Speedway).
All the parts are ordered for the bike, I need to get some mechanical repair done (a broken frame slider bolt extracted, and a broken swingarm spool lug ground off and a new one TiG welded on).
Then I need to get busy with fiberglass, filler, and, ultimately, new paint.
And I get to order a new helmet and leathers - the leathers not due to crash damage, but to me losing over 80 lbs since January last. This is the scary thing for me - I have the cash, but I'd rather KEEP the cash in this environment. See what I said above about employment...
Buy a novel, ye Agents who lurk. Sparks is a good one.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Well, I was riding my motorcycle... until I wasn't
First, let me apologize for not posting in a month... I did fairly well in my September races, and my weightloss has been proceeding apace into October.
First lap in practice last weekend for racing, I highsided at 15 MPH. A highside is a low-speed crash where the wheels of the bike become out of line, then the slide of the rear wheel is arrested - usually by regaining traction - and the torque vectors produced by the wheels try to precess (turn around each other). Violently. This typically throws the rider some distance forward, while the bike flips over.
My apex was about 12 feet.
I now have a 'permanent injury', a type-III separation of my left shoulder, which translates to a bump on my shoulder where the collarbone ends, and practically not much else. A whole lot of pain this week and next while the blood from the internal bleeding goes somewhere (goes necrotic inside tissue and then is ultimately cannibalized, but you probably didn't want to think about that...).
I have about $700 in damage to the bike, more if I want to repaint it. Plus a $600 helmet to replace.
It's a season-ender for sure. My next races are likely to be in 2009 as an Expert, with WERA, at Fontana, the 25th of January. We'll see what the blown shoulder feels like then - it'll likely be my first time back on the racebike (it's not street-legal...). If I can't ride or stand to brake from 165 MPH on that track, it'll be a REALLY expensive way to find out; maybe I'll try a trackday in Phoenix in early Jan.
The economy sucks, you don't need me to tell you. I promised my wife a new washer/dryer, and I have no pile of cash to do both - appliances and bike. She wins on this one, so I may not make Fontana. Such is life.
The way out, of course, is to supplement my income. I've been trying to do that (you may recall :)) by selling novels.
Hell's Own has been roundly ignored by the latest agency - you try to be a nice guy and wait out the 16 weeks they ask for before hounding them - and before you know it, four months have gone. I may try to put it on Amazon's Kindle list, or something else, I don't have a firm plan for it now.
I signed up for National Novel Write Month (NaNoWriMo), and will try to complete 100,000 words of Ilse in the 30 days. This is the story of a Wendish/Saxon girl and her brother, on the eve of the Northern Crusades. Ilse commits suicide with a family heirloom (a black dagger), and immediately comes to regret it. With her brother's best friend, Ilse and her brother agree to return the heirloom to it's rightful place - in it's original world. Opening a tale of vast panorama, the novel shows how the fugitives from a harsh culture find a place in the sweep of history rushing toward war and revolt against the established order of an old, old world.
Sounds like fun to write. It'll be in my usual style, with elements of sex, tragedy, comedy, humanity, betrayal, trust, redemption, death, life, and all kinds of good stuff to keep pages turning.
Darned thing better sell.
That's it for now,
dave the one-shouldered (I jest)
