"The Young Writer"

The English teacher told him there was no spark in his writing. She said it lacked passion.

The young writer remained composed. He thanked her for her honesty before leaving. Walking to the parking lot, his manner betrayed nothing.

Once inside his electric blue Dodge Neon, however, the young writer sounded his barbaric yawp.

“Why must I be male and middle class? Why was I not born gay? Why was my mother not black and my father not Jewish? Where is my addiction, my depression? Where is my story?”

***

I write humor very rarely. If I cannot see the person in front of me laughing, I lose faith in my jokes and references and puns. This, however, was supposed to be funny, and it was supposed to give me an audience that would laugh or not, that would allow me to know whether it was funny or not, but then I had to go and lose in the first round, and I never found out.

What do you think? Does it make you giggle? Chortle? Snort in derision? Yearn for the simple pleasures of Marmaduke and Family Circus?

A first novel: Break

I took a break in writing this week. Not that I particularly deserved or needed one. I struggled to put down just over two hundred words and gave up, called it a week. Part of this was due to the appearance of Spring Break. Demetra and I spent the week at her parents', and that is not conducive to writing. There are new relatives to visit everyday and errands to run. There is also a TV with a diagonal that pushes four feet. That is a lot of distractions.

Also, I had run out of timeline. The timeline had helped my writing more than I understood. Knowing what was going to come next and only needing to fill in the details and taking the time to better understand the characters within the situations made it all come so smooth that when I ran out of timeline, it jarred hard. I don't even know how to finish this final scene before they leave for Nairobi. This break week has been an opportunity to develop that as well.

With any luck now and without any further breaks, I should have this earliest draft done by the summer, and there will be a lot of fun in revision to look forward to then. Good times.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Seventy-three.
Words? Fifty-four thousand, two-hundred and forty-five.
Named characters? Thirty-one.

"Car Shopping"

Good news everybody. Since The Inlander redesigned its website, the pieces read in its 2009 flash fiction tournament are no longer up. That means I am free to share the three pieces I wrote for it with you. Please enjoy "Car Shopping."

****

Mom took me car shopping this morning. I graduate next month, and she said I deserved it, that he would be proud of me. We went to a lot, and a salesman said he knew what I needed.

“Ready?” he asked, gunning the engine of a 1975 Pontiac Grand Am.

Dad asked me that when I was younger. Sure of my grip, I would lean forward in my red wagon and give a fevered nod. The car would never make me choke in exhilaration like that wagon when Dad charged ahead, kicking up leaves on the street.

I miss him.

****

There were rules for the tournament, themes and phrases that had to be included. This story had to include a red wagon. Of the three I wrote, I had the least confidence in this one, but I read it in the first round in the hopes that by keeping my stronger stories for later, they would propel me to the championship. That was a mistake. I lost in that first round and didn't get to read my other two stories at all. Then again, I don't think even my best story would have sent me to the second round. That was a really good story I lost to, and I knew it when she was done reading. I didn't feel so bad when the judges announced her victory, but the woman who sat behind me in the audience said that she had liked this one more. That felt good.

A first novel: Character

There is only a single piece of writing advice I have found common between writers as diverse as Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut and George Orwell. It's basic. It's to cut additional, unnecessary words.

I'm not quite at that point yet. I would need the characters and setting and all the rest of the details developed before I could begin to consider taking words out. I do, however, believe that I have found at least one additional, unnecessary thing: one of the main characters, the second eldest brother in the Lochilangor family. The intention was that he would serve as a foil to the eldest and third eldest brothers. Not as talented at football as his younger brother, he falls in with his older brother and becomes an enforcer for him. Unfortunately, so far he has been no more than a pale imitation of both. He has done absolutely nothing to distinguish himself. That is kind of the point, for purposes of theme or something, but it doesn't make for an engaging character.

I don't know what I'll do. For the time being, I'll keep him in the story. Maybe I will find some inspiration in the next month or two that makes him more interesting and a better character. Maybe not. In that case I will be scrubbing him from more than a hundred pages of story before the second draft.

I'm curious whether this is a validation of my strategy to just go with a few vague ideas and develop them on the fly or not. Had I taken the time to fully envision the characters and their situation would I have realized this earlier? Had I taken the time would I have better understood what made the second eldest unique and necessary? I don't know. I guess those sorts of questions will have to wait for their answers until I see the rest of the mistakes I'll make.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Seventy-three.
Words? Fifty-four thousand and twelve.
Named characters? Thirty-one.

Lent 2011

Another Ash Wednesday, another Lent, another opportunity to deepen one's faith through sacrifice and spiritual activities. The plan this season was to practice a Muslim fast, absolutely no foods or drinks beside water during the daylight hours. It's something I've wanted to try for a few years now, but as I gave it further thought in the days leading up to Mardi Gras, it began to seem less and less like a good idea. Not for any particular physical reason. Millions of Muslims manage it for the duration of Ramadan without suffering ill effects. The problem was what sort of guest it would make me. If I went out with friends for lunch, if I was invited to a friend's home for dinner before sunset, what sort of impression would it set if I insisted on holding to my fast? A poor one, that's what, and I would hate to be a poor guest. So that plan will be scuttled for a few years until I manage to spend Ramadan in a Muslim nation where the entire community is behind the fast. It's on my list of things to do before I die.

Instead I'm trying something much more mundane, reading the Bible daily. I've tried this before, beginning with Genesis and working my way through sometime in high school. That failed miserably, somewhere in Leviticus understandably, so I'm trying to follow the day's selected readings. The United States Council of Bishops makes it really easy, posting the entirety of the day's chapters and verses from the New American Bible Revised Edition translation on their website. I don't even have to open a physical Bible. Maybe I'll make it carry this on next year with a more Catholic twist and read the papal encyclicals and bulls.

A first novel: Pre-writing

Those who follow this blog through an RSS feed or regular visits to the site missed an insightful comment to my last Sunday post regarding this novel. My best man pointed out on Facebook that these last few posts make it sound as though I'm still pre-writing, putting down all my thoughts on character and plot and setting and refining and organizing them rather than really writing this novel even though I am more than sixty pages in.

He's right. It may be more traditional to write extensive timelines and character descriptions, but this works for me. I had some vague ideas of the characters and their settings and plot just went at it. I test them out and get a sense of what is most right and what I want to continue with.

The worry that kept me from writing detailed notes was that once I began writing, I would discover I was not actually interested in these wind-ups I had created once they were set free and I would have to rewrite significant pieces. To some extent, this has already borne out. One of my early interests in this novel was treating is as some sort of redemption for bad movies. The protagonist loves film, but seeing as how he lives in Kenya and is entirely without access to any film but those with the broadest appeal, he only sees the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and other men who have since become punchlines. The working title, The Subber, is a reflection of this as the protagonist begins to write subtitles to these and other movies. That theme is still present but much reduced as my interest has moved toward more fundamental themes like storytelling.

Maybe I would have realized this earlier or found ways to stay more excited about bad movies with different pre-writing techniques, but I'm content with this. Beside when I better understand what this novel is about and who its characters are, the actual writing will be much less intimidating when there are already some hundred pages of foundation to build from.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Sixty-six.
Words? Forty-nine thousand and eighty-one.
Named characters? Thirty-one.

Considering Ngugi wa Thiong'o's "Wizard of the Crow"

We have an obsession with villains. Victorian readers turned Satan into the hero of Paradise Lost. Grendel and Sauron became the protagonists of their own novels by John Gardner and Yisroel Markov. Darth Vader is the most enduring character in Star Wars, and Heath Ledger won his Oscar as the Joker, while no one paid any attention to Christian Bale or Gary Oldman. For the kids, this summer saw the release of Despicable Me and Megamind whose protagonists respectively planned on stealing the moon and defeated Metro Man.

Maybe it has something to do with Tolstoy's line that all happy families are happy in the same way while the unhappy are miserable each in their own way. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that villains are active. They rob banks, kidnap presidents and threaten cities while the heroes passively react to them. Maybe we all just want to be villains and be free law and morality to do whatever we will. I don't know.

In any case, the trend continues in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow. The villains are the best part of the novel. When the story followed the Ruler and his plans for Marching to Heaven, a project to rival the Tower of Babel in size and ambition, and the power plays of his ministers Machokali and Sikiokuu, the story rollicked. When the story followed Kamiti and Nyawira as they healed peoples' souls and advocated for equal rights for women and against the dictatorship in Aburiria, a thinly disguised Kenya, the story collapsed.

The problem is that you already know Kamiti and Nyawira. There is no mystery to what they will do. They are prophets with ideas heavily inspired by Buddhism. Without guile, they treat everyone who asks for their help. They lack conflict and bore.

The Ruler and his lackies, however, you never know what they'll do, who they'll double cross, from whom they'll beg forgiveness. Tajirika takes over an entire prison with the bucket he used as a toilet for a week and cows all of his guards by telling them he has the death virus. Machokali has surgery to expand his eyes to the size of light bulbs in order to see the Ruler's enemies no matter how far they run, and Sikiokuu takes ears the size of a rabbit's to hear the most private of conversations regarding the Ruler. Urged by the Global Bank to turn Aburiria into a multi-party democracy before they will release the loans necessary to fund Marching to Heaven, the Ruler gives birth to Baby D and makes himself the titular head of all parties.

In a masterstroke, Ngugi does not make these villains implacable opponents on the level of Lex Luthor or Archie Costello. Rather, they have more in common with the Shredder and Cobra Commander of the 1980's cartoons. Their insanity only serves to mask their gross incompetency. Ambition paves the fastest path to the crocodiles of the Red River. Sycophancy and groveling are the keys to success. When lines of people converge in protest in the capital, the Ruler decrees that no more than five people can stand in line together, forgetting that he had earlier dispatched motorcycle riders in every direction of the compass to make lines in support of the government. The Movement for the Voice of the People disrupts the Ruler's birthday with plastic snakes. The ministers overhaul the education system so that the only proper textbooks are those written by the Ruler.

By all rights the government should have collapsed under its own weight long ago, but it has had support in the West. The Ruler came to power by slaughtering some seven thousand suspected Communists during the Cold War, and now, when times have changed, the West is pleased with the slightest movements toward democracy. A complete lack of understanding of Aburiria and its people only complicates the problem. In one of the best scenes, women protesters disguised as tribal dancers and official entertainment for the Ruler and representatives of the Global Bank moon their audience and proceed to defecate all over. The Global Bank men want to laugh but see the stony expression of the Ruler and become convinced it is actually a very solemn dance.

In this, Ngugi draws a clear picture of the ills that continue to afflict far too much of sub-Saharan Africa. His ambitions to prescribe remedies are not as effective, but what he offers us is enough.

I read another of Ngugi's books, Petals of Blood. You can read my thoughts on it here.

A first novel: Impatience

I am growing impatient with this draft. When I began writing, I had estimated this first sketch of a plot and character to run somewhere around eighty pages, certainly no more than one hundred. This week I broke sixty pages. It'll be at least another two weeks of writing, somewhere around another fifteen pages, before the characters leave their tribal homelands for Nairobi. I've been expecting the Nairobi portion of the novel to be the longest, something like half of the entire work. Assuming these estimates are any more accurate than those I made at the onset, this original draft will run near one-hundred-and-fifty pages, and I won't complete it until the end of April. That's a lot and a long time.

On the one hand, this is cool. The novel's long. That's legitimate and respectable.

On the other hand, what I'm writing right now is garbage. There are no details. There is barely more dialogue. It's characters doing things in the minimum number of words, so they can hurry on to the next thing.

This was the idea. Write quick and write dirty now, and write it better later. So far it has worked. I'm glad I've done it. I haven't gotten myself hung up on names and eye color and all those other little minor points.

But I find myself lately wishing that what I was writing now was better. It'd be nice to have more fully developed characters who spoke to each other not through paraphrase. It'd be nice to take some time to imagine what these characters and the landscape look like.

For now I am quashing the wish. I believe it's better to know where it's all heading before I start putting an effort into these details that might later be invalidated by the novel going in entirely unexpected directions. This week I sublimated the wish by writing a few stories for The Inlander's contest. Maybe working on and completing other short works in the interim will keep me happy until I can bring a greater attention to the novel. Maybe you would like to see some new fiction from me. We'll see.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Sixty.
Words? Forty-four thousand and one-hundred-and-five.
Named characters? Thirty-one.

Peeling beets

Turns out Demetra really enjoys beets. She really enjoyed the beet curry with green peas I made last fall, and I admit that the borscht a few Sundays back was excellent. Myself, I'm ambivalent. They're another ingredient with which to experiment. They stain my hands and everything else purple.

They are also beautiful. I was quartering beets for dinner. Every sweep of the peeler revealed rings like those of a tree, and the rings followed the angle of peel. It was like the sheen of oil on a puddle in the parking lot. It was like gazing into the swirling mists of a fortune teller's crystal ball.

And tonight I will braise that beauty and eat it with a horseradish sauce.

Kenyan TV

When our first volunteer to the Nakuru center arrived in Kenya, Demetra and I were sent to pick him up from the airport. Part of this was to simplify the process for him. It would be easier to spot us in the crowd at Jomo Kenyatta International than another African. Part of this was that Demetra and I really needed a break from the kids. In any case, during the drive back to the center, the volunteer kind of stared out the window in amazement. He explained that he hadn't expected Nairobi to look like this. He was prepared for mud huts, not paved roads and steel and concrete buildings.

The point is Kenya is developed. It's not wealthy, but it's developed and only becoming more so. Its three major television stations (NTV, KTN, Citizen TV) even upload daily reports to YouTube. It's a chance to hear some Kenyan accents and see the land, if you are so inclined and so bored.

Here are a selection of choice reports on the Pokot: "Samburu and Pokot Peace Initiative," "The Turkana-Pokot Conflict," "West Pokot Early Marriages," "Pastoralists Killed in Pokot," "Pokot Disarmament." Super.

Flash fiction contest

The Inlander is sponsoring another flash fiction contest. Write a story in one hundred and one words or fewer. Submit it before March 10. Perhaps be published. Perhaps be invited to compete in a flash fiction tournament in Spokane. It's fun, and it was the first place I was published outside of Gonzaga publications after leaving Minnesota. Also, it's an opportunity to link to the stories I wrote for the first tournament. They're good if you have a minute or two.

"Jump"
"Her"
"Miracle by the nanosecond"
"That One Guy"

A first novel: Timeline

It worked. Writing out last week all those things that should and could happen while the characters remained in the bush and forming those things into a timeline helped. The first day of writing was still a struggle, but then it all just slid into place. I wasn't sitting and wondering what should come next or what the scenes needed to lead to. I only had to check the timeline. I can only hope that this easy writing continues for the next week or two until the characters move on to Nairobi.

Like I wrote, the timeline works. I'm not going to stand some principle of the ideal writing process. So long as timelines help me coast through any and all ruts, I will continue to write and use them. Still, I cannot help but to wonder whether they will lead to the best possible story. A friend told me this week that when Umberto Eco wrote fiction he first imagined the setting and characters. When he finally understood them in their entirety, a process that could take two years, he began to craft the plot. Then he began to write. I respect that. I admire that. I could never do that. I don't have the patience to wait two years before I begin writing.

Characters are central to the best literature. Plot should be driven by the characters, their motivations, their goals and their relationships. My tool, my timeline is an artifact of plot. It is a list of the things that happen. That does not necessarily mean that the characters become plot-moving tools. I still try to base these future turns on what I know of the characters, but that changes as I write. I write quickly and inconsistently. For a few days I may emphasize a character's cowardice or another's viciousness. A few days later I try something else with them, make the one a schemer and the other a struggling goatherd.

I like to think that my style of writing is more a process of discovery than Eco's. When he begins to write, he is putting in motion fully-formed characters. When I write, I am still learning about my characters. There is a lot of room for change, and I will be doing some heavy rewriting as I try to bring into line my different conceptions of the characters through the novel, but we will see in the end who has chosen the better course.

This sounds an awful lot like I'm comparing myself to Eco. So be it. Confidence and motivation and whatnot.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Fifty-three.
Words? Thirty-nine thousand and fifty-seven.
Named characters? Twenty-eight.

A first novel: Challenges

There were some struggles in writing my five thousand words in the last week of January, as discussed here. I stand by that week as the most difficult to write, but this coming week could pose a significant challenge to that title, for whatever its worth. The challenges are different. In January it was a problem of inspiration. This week it is a challenge of technique and craft.

The progression of the story has been pretty simple so far. Something happens, and the characters respond to it. There is cause, and there is effect. While I have not adhered to Aristotle's unity of time, only about six weeks have passed in the pages. That is not very much. Though not every minute of every day is explored, you know what the characters are doing. They always have an immediate goal or destination driving them, but things are changing. Now they have spent some three weeks in their tribal homelands. They have overcome the earliest and most significant obstacles to life there and are beginning to settle into it. Things must slow down as the characters find their rhythms. There are another two years to fill before they leave. Things still happen and theere is still cause and effect, but it is distant. The relation between events is neither immediate nor clear.

I don't know how to write that. I don't know how to set a timeline in motion and then slip in, picking and presenting the noteworthy moments. My short stories are tight and unified in time. There is no summary of years or even months because the story is in a day, a morning, a single conversation. I've never tried anything like this before.

For the time being, I wrote out a list of the things that need to happen for the story to move forward. I wrote a second list of things that could happen and opportunities for characters to distinguish themselves. Not that all this helps me the act of writing these things, but it does provide some framework and guidance. We'll see how it goes.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Forty-seven.
Words? Thirty-four thousand and eighty-three.
Named characters? Twenty-eight.

"Haiti and the truth about NGOs"

Edward Stourton conducts a necessary investigation of the aid industry in this BBC Radio 4 documentary. There is something very wrong when billions of dollars in aid and thousands of NGOs leave somewhere around a million people still in tents in refugee camps and can neither stop an outbreak of cholera nor begin large-scale reconstruction in Haiti a year after the earthquake that killed over a quarter million people. Stourton leaves little hope when he presents the choice as between small NGOs led by incompetents who struggle to coordinate their efforts with others and large NGOs led by the corrupt who are dependent on national governments for the bulk of their funding, but the points he raises are good ones. It's worth a listen.

A first novel: Research

This novel begins in Nakuru during a riot. It spends two years in the bush before moving to Nairobi's slums. I like to think that I know some things about Kenya after spending nine months there, but I admit that of these things, of some importance to my novel, I do not know so much. I was not in Nakuru during the riots, and I only spent maybe two weeks total in the bush and another two weeks total in Nairobi, none of that time in the slums.

I have yet not done any research to change this, which, I guess, is understandable. This is, after all, only a very early draft. I don't want to be captured in the details national history and tribal quirks and force them in. I want words and characters and events on paper that I can respond to and develop into something better with time.

Less understandable, perhaps, is that I do not intend on doing any research at any point. I feel that I know enough of the details to make it real. The rest I will make up. The Nairobi slum will be fictional. The bush tribe will not because I would rely way too much on my experiences with the one tribe I know to create it, and it would be nothing more than the clearest imitation with only a few names and letters changed around.

Otherwise it's just about a family, staying alive and making your way in the world. How much can any amount of research help that? The rest is window dressing.

Single-spaced pages with one-inch margins? Forty.
Words? Twenty-nine thousand and thirty-four.
Named characters? Twenty-eight.

A first novel: A hard week

This past week may has been, with no argument, the hardest to write yet. The daily thousand were a struggle as I grasped at and filled out mundane and redundant details to reach a thousand. This past week my characters spent a lot of time complaining about the heat and their hunger and thirst and how exhausted they are after days of walking. It will be no surprise to me if I come back to this section and hack words with a vengeance, paring it down to half its present size if not more.

The first fifteen thousand words were pretty easy. Things happened, and the characters responded to them. They moved from plot point to plot point. There was a clear destination and immediate goal, and they ran between them. Now they've attained that goal, and they're going to be hanging around there for another two years or so. Things are happening slower now. I know why and how things will change at the end of those two years and what will proceed from there, but things need to develop to that point. They can't just happen.

That's the problem, trying to fill all this time. It's an opportunity for the characters to develop, to be themselves at their leisure and not focus on staying alive until the next scene. I need to write things that don't matter as much and don't serve solely to advance the plot. That's harder, but that's why I have this goal of one thousand words a day. Without it I would be sore tempted to take a break now. Ostensibly this break would be to think about what came next. In truth it would be because the work became too hard. Now I don't give myself this luxury of long breaks from writing. I just have to keep pushing through and putting down whatever comes to mind first. A motive for a secondary character appears and guides the day's writing. A minor errand fills another thousand words. Maybe it's stupid, but it's something. I'll take care of it later if I have to.

Word count as of today? Twenty-four thousand and eight words.

McDonald's Adventures: The end

Two Fridays past I gave notice that I would quit McDonald's. Yesterday it happened. I worked my last shift. In two weeks I'll pick up my final pay check and turn in my uniform. For this, we can thank Mrs. Mallory Ferland Ramos who let me know about a place online that would 15 dollars for how-to articles, allowing me to make more money in less time according to my own schedule without three levels of managers and not requiring being on my feet all day. We can all show our appreciation to her by visiting The Salty Cod and reading of her baking adventures as an expatriate in Brazil.

To McDonald's I say so long, farewell, good riddance. I never wanted to work there, but when no other place would accept my application, I had to take what I could get to pay the rent and buy the groceries. I never liked working there. I never looked forward to the upcoming shift. I did not want to put my bachelor's degree to use in scraping eggs and meat off a grill. I did not want to come back from a year in Kenya and Indonesia to pull chicken and fish from deep fryers. Whenever the managers needed a volunteer to leave early because there were too many of us in the back for too few customers, I was always among the first to offer.

At some point, not so long after I started, this line of thinking mutated. It changed distaste for to an active hatred of my job. From there it was not such a leap to a demand for justice.

A ridiculous thought, yes. No wrong was ever done. They didn't treat me poorly. McDonald's offered me a job when no else did. No one shouted at me. So long as I dropped meat on the grill and delivered it to the heating cabinet as requested, they left me alone, all I asked or hoped for. My only complaint was that they scheduled me for the late shift on Christmas Eve and opening on Boxing Day, not even allowing me to spend a second night in Butte, but then they gave me New Year's Day off. Still I believed that wrong, somewhere, sometime, had been committed, and I needed to respond to it. To give it the simplest formulation: I didn't like my job. Someone had to pay.

Not that I pursued this anywhere either. Working slow would only inconvenience the customers, most of whom were senior citizens looking for a meal out that wouldn't break their Social Security check. Skipping a shift without a call would force more work on the rest of the crew, none of whom liked their jobs particularly much either. I didn't argue with the managers. They didn't make enough money to deserve it, and in keeping with the trend, also didn't want to work at McDonald's. Who was I to make their shifts any worse?

That only left the owners, a couple I saw pass through to their office in the basement a few times a week. What was I going to do to them, trip them? By the end, I resolved to spend as much of their money as possible. Not that this came to much of anything either. I wasn't going to steal food so long as I was a vegetarian or had culinary standards. I wasn't going to throw food away on a whim when kids were starving in whatever developing country. Instead, I used new paper tray liners for every run of meat and new boxes to microwave every batch of biscuits. These were the sorts of things that were taught in the training slideshows but no one bothered to follow day to day. I was reduced to trying to get back at the owners for hiring me by following the rules to the full extent.

Even on my last shift I took no vengeance. I didn't curse out the idiot manager whose idea of leadership was telling the crew under him to do what another manager had just asked him to do and who could only toast English muffins during breakfast because he had no idea how to do anything else. I stole a biscuit that would have been thrown out in any case because I was hungry. The opening manager was even pleasantly surprised that I showed up. Most people blow their final day off. I steamed the grill and left promptly when my shift was over. I just wanted it to be over.

I'm happier now.

A first novel: The longest

As of yesterday evening, my novel was seventeen thousand and twenty-six words. My thesis on service-learning, with a title page, table of contents and five pages of bibliography, is sixteen thousand, six hundred thirty words long. That makes these early scratchings of a novel the longest unified, coherent work I have written as of yet. That makes me happy. That is all.

A first novel: Dramatis personae

Today I began a dramatis personae for my novel. I had a character list before I began writing, but it was little more than the names of the five siblings at the center of the action, their relative ages and their motivations. This new character list includes the other twelve characters who've appeared so far, their relationships with relevant characters, their professions, their motivations and more precise ages for the children. It makes me feel awfully professional to have this. It makes me look like I know what's going on when I'm really just throwing words at the page as fast as I can to get the characters to the next place they need to be.

The names part of the list is the most important for me. Deciding on an appropriate name for a character can knock me off my writing stride for a good five minutes. I can never just pick a name and call it good. The name has to have a thematic resonance with historical or mythological overtones. It has to look good on the page and sound nice, too. It's a little bit easier when the vast majority of the characters so far are from a single Kenyan tribe, and I only know so many tribal names, but it can still throw me. I've avoided that particular block for these first weeks by just calling them by a family name and title, but no longer. They all have names now, even if no one ever actually says their name. It seems smarter than just calling a man "the uncle" or "the father" sentence after sentence.

I have another reason for this small writing diversion. It reminds me that a character exists. In general, I know what the five main characters want, and I even have some idea of whether they will get those things or not. What I don't know is how they'll get to that point or how it'll change them. I need to remember these characters that they can appear again, drive the leads to or from their goals. I don't just want these characters to appear for a scene or few pages, to say their bit and leave. I want them to really exist within the story. I want characters to come back later in the story in different circumstances. This novel is going to cover years. There will be plenty of time and opportunity for revenges to be carried out and goods rewarded.

I wonder if I should include this in the completed novel. I haven't seen one in a contemporary novel for years, but it could help the readers navigate all the foreign names, especially when every woman's name begins with 'Chep.' I guess people manage through Russian novels somehow without though.

Word count as of today? Fifteen thousand and eighteen words.

McDonald's Adventures: McMore

Everyone is familiar with McDonald's affinity for the 'Mc' prefix. Its their thing like square patties are Wendy's thing, fried chicken is KFC's thing and E. coli is Jack in the Box's thing. McDonald's has McNuggets, the Big Mac, the McChicken, the McDouble, the McRib and those are just for lunch. There are McMuffins, McGriddles and McSkillets for breakfast along with the McCafé line of drinks, and you can finish it all of with a McFlurry for dessert.

I would like to add two more items to this list, less obvious to the typical customer and ones you are advised not to order. The McFree is found underneath the back sink. It's a drain cleaner. The McBulk is a stainless steel tank taller than me deep in back storage. It's a carbonation system. McDonald's might have gotten a little carried away with those, or it has an inside line on the best carbonation and drain cleaning systems on this planet. I'm thinking the former. Unless the idea of the drain cleaner is to make a soup with the consistency of mud and the color of flesh rot. Then it works great.