In one of those strange moments when I was drinking vodka and Diet Pepsi, eating a late supper because I had been in class, and reminiscing about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I went googling for images from the episode Superstar (the one where Jonathan casts a spell to become king of the world and [spoiler] it all goes wrong [not really a spoiler]). The search also produced some links with pictures of Barnabas Collins, and I followed one of them to a “reprint” of a Marvel Comics interview with Jonathan Frid from 1975. The interviewer was none other than Chris Claremont, whose name I learned in college a few years afterwards, back when I thought the X-Men were the coolest superheroes around.

So, I had to read the interview. (You can read it here: http://www.collinsporthistoricalsociety.com/2017/03/chris-claremont-interviews-jonathan.html)

The interview was done after Dark Shadows went off the air, and the initial thrust was Frid’s most recent film, Seizure. I liked the interview because it has the flavor of an actor talking to a fan who is also a story-teller in his own right. It gets technical sometimes, and is pleasantly different from the kind of interview you get from a talking head. Eventually, they started to talk about Dark Shadows, and Frid made the following observation:

That’s the fun about soap operas; that’s the reality of soap operas. There’s something about soap operas that’s much more close to life, in spite of the put-downs—and they are very trite very often—but they do have that relation to life, in that there’s no end, there’s no beginning. It will not end. As one trouble starts to get solved. there’s another one coming in there. It’s like politics…

As a kid, I had been taught to avoid the soaps. (Dark Shadows was still on then, and it gave me a three-decade case of the creeping willies whenever I went up a flight of stairs in the dark. Even in my 30s, I would run up the basement stairs if the basement light was out.) My grandmother would iron clothes while she watched the soaps and talked to the characters. (“John! Don’t start that drinking again.”)

But reading Frid’s comment puts a new perspective on soaps for me. I had thought of their never-ending-ness as tedium, but Frid is right. That is real life. Real families have issues, and those issues don’t change for decades. Run the lawnmower over a handful of unmarked seedlings in a scraggly part of the yard because you weren’t told to look out for them, and twenty-five years later someone still feels compelled to mention it yet again.

Maybe if I hunted hard enough, I could find elements of The Heroes Journey in soap opera plots, but I haven’t tried yet. Maybe they aren’t there, because after the resolution of the Hero’s arc, the story ends. People often don’t want a good book to end, but it has to, doesn’t it? And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days was how Bilbo wanted to end his story. As hard as it hurt when Sam said “Well, I’m back” and the story ended, I know that I wouldn’t want to read about the ongoing saga of life in The Shire. Yet that is somehow what the soaps are–ongoing sagas of life without end and without much in the way of arc (that I have observed). I can’t pretend to understand why they are so popular, but now I need to look at them in a new light and try.

Sometimes when I’m editing, supposedly minding my own business, I add some exposition to the book, then discover that the same exposition was already there a chapter or two later. Or I find myself explaining (to myself) “that part is not preachy and here’s why.” Now, people only say “that isn’t preachy” when it is preachy and they know it! They might as well get out whatever holy book they use and start wiggling it at people while theatrically modulating their voices. (I’ll delete the preachy scene. You’ll never see it.)

When I catch myself writing like that, I attribute it to spending too much time with the book (too many hours for too many days straight). Buried that deep in the process, I have somehow lost track of the bigger picture. The same thing used to happen when I was writing software. So I take a break and step back for a better view. This time, it happened halfway through a polishing-edit of “Daughters and Doorways”, so for the last two weeks I have been studying something else entirely (the FAA private pilot written exam).

One of the side benefits of backing off is that my brain starts wandering over the whole story. I think about completely different (and possibly better) ways to begin it. Of course that can be destructive doubt at times, but self-doubt comes with the territory in any artistic work. Self-doubt and artistic sense are like two shoulder angels, and what most people don’t realize is that those angels look identical. Shoulder angels in popular fiction (my favorites are Kronk’s from The Emperor’s New Groove) usually dress and act differently in accordance with whatever cultural meme is in play (e.g., angel/devil or working-man/lawyer). In real life, the bad angel dresses and talks exactly like the good one. And he switches shoulders without warning. For some reason, the image of two identical shoulder angels reminds me of the Buffy episode where we had two Xanders. “Shoot us both, Spock!”

And, oddly enough, sometimes “Shoot zem both” is the right thing to do. When I read Larry Gelbart’s autobiography, the one thing that stuck with me for decades was his recollection of being approached by A. Famous Writer after A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. (I don’t remember who the famous writer was, but I recall recognizing the name at the time.) The famous writer asked if he could give Gelbart some advice. Gelbart eagerly assented. The advice was “Don’t change a word of it.”

At some point, it’s done. Put it down and don’t look back.

But not yet. In fact, maybe I should rewrite the first few chapters of the first novel. Maybe it jumps around in time too much. I’ll take a walk and think about it.

I spent four years in graduate school at large state universities. Towards the end of that time, someone posted a copy of this Matt Groening cartoon on the bulletin board. (Bulletin boards were a primitive read/write social media structure, made from tree-bark, to which humans once attached printed sheets of paper using tiny steel pins. Think of them as two square meters of anonymous Facebook.)

It was late 1987 or early 1988 at the time. I had no idea who Matt Groening was, but the comic struck a chord with me as it did with so many students. Check out the poor chap in the lower left panel: halfway through my last year, one of the faculty members suddenly departed for a job in private industry on another continent, abandoning the students he had been advising. The students had to find new advisors and start over. I don’t know how many gave up and quit.

The phrase in the comic that originally caught my attention was “the stomach-churning agony of having to finish your thesis.” That phrase still goes directly to the core of why I’m writing in this phase of my life. Writing was never stomach-churning agony for me. It’s difficult and time-consuming, but it was never stomach-churning. Here’s a little story about that:

When I was working on my Master’s degree in 1984-1986, there were two paths to graduation–Thesis or Comprehensive Examination. I was 25 years old then, and new to Enormous State University academic politics, so I paid attention to what the other students were saying. The general consensus was that the Comprehensive Examinations (“Comps” for short) were a nightmare. Students had to pass three Comps, each of which covered a different specialty of computer science. The tests themselves varied in difficultly and emphasis, depending on which faculty member drew the short straw and had to write the questions. Some students said that if Professor X was writing the Comp that year, you had to take his class in Specialty Y to have any hope of passing. An even shorter straw was reserved for the unfortunate faculty member who had to grade the Comps. The answers were complicated. This was not learning by rote, where every question had a simple and exact answer. This was graduate school, with multiple approaches to any given problem. Knowing a student made it easier for the grader to differentiate between minor misunderstandings and outright incompetence, but it also led to hints of favoritism. There could be partial credit, but that was nearly impossible to quantify objectively and led to additional complaints.

On the other hand, to go the Thesis route, a student had to find an advisor, do some work for that advisor (for course credit!), write up the work (for course credit!), and get three faculty members into a room for a one-hour presentation called the Thesis Defense. The last step was often feared, but if the student was well-prepared, the defense was largely a formality. Mind you, “well-prepared” included making certain to select faculty members who didn’t hate the advisor and who knew the student, but that wasn’t hard to figure out. Despite the apparent simplicity of the Thesis route, the student consensus was “I can’t face the thought of writing a paper that big.”

Really? They thought that writing a single 100-page paper was the unclimbable greased pole? I couldn’t understand why students would choose the Comps (which were, in fact, three greased poles of unknown height). Thirty-five years later, I still don’t understand, but I can at least accept that they honestly felt that way. (When I was 25, I just thought they were idiots.)

Back then, I couldn’t articulate the difference between the two processes quite as well as I can today, but even then I could sense it intuitively. The prevailing myth was that the Thesis was subjective and the Comps were objective. The subjectivity of the Thesis route was obvious. The Comps route appeared objective to the careless observer, but even a cursory examination revealed a process riddled with subjective decisions. The fundamental difference was not in the question of objectivity or subjectivity, but in the feedback available to the student. Students taking the Comps received no feedback until after the tests were graded. Students writing a Thesis had feedback at all stages of the process: searching for an advisor, doing their research, and writing. The feedback wasn’t formal (until the end), but it was there if the student paid attention to the advisor.

So, as you might guess, I took the easy road. I did research on models for a semester, then I spent the next semester re-doing the models and writing it up. I was able to achieve in two years (while working half-time) something that took other students three or four years, just because I wasn’t afraid to write.