Apparently, there is no November blog. But I did pass the FAA Private Pilot Airplane written exam.

In one of those strange moments, when I was drinking vodka and Diet Pepsi, eating a late supper because I had been in an evening 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). My search also produced links with pictures of Barnabas Collins, which made me curious. I followed one of them to a “reprint” of a 1975 Monsters of the Movies interview with Jonathan Frid. The interviewer was none other than Chris Claremont, whose name I had learned in 1978, back when I thought the X-Men were the coolest superheroes around.

So I had to read the interview. [Edit: I used to have a link to it, but as of 2025 the Collinsport Historical Society domain (or webpage) has been taken over by some creepy crypto casino scam operation. Bits and pieces of the Collinsport website are still there, but not the interview.]

The interview was done after Dark Shadows went off the air, and the initial topic was Frid’s then most recent film, Seizure. I liked the interview because it had the flavor of an actor talking to a fan who is also a story-teller in his own right. It got technical sometimes, and was pleasantly different from the kind of interview you get from a talking head. Eventually, they started talking 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. My grandmother would iron clothes while she watched them and talked to the characters. (“John! Don’t start that drinking again.”) 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. Who knew what was coming up from behind? Even in my 30s, I would run up the basement stairs if the basement light was out.

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. If you run the lawnmower over a handful of unmarked seedlings in a scraggly part of the yard (because no one told you to look out for them), twenty-five years later someone will still be complaining about it at family get-togethers.

Maybe I could find elements of The Heroes Journey in soap opera plots if I looked really hard, but I don’t see them now. Maybe they aren’t there, because after the resolution of the Hero’s arc, the story ends. People don’t want a good yarn to end, but it has to, doesn’t it? Bilbo wanted to end his story with And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days. And as bad as it hurt when Sam said, “Well, I’m back” and the book ended, I wouldn’t want to read the ongoing saga of life in The Shire. That would just be Peyton Place. As The Shire Turns. The Many Loves Of Elanor Gamgee. And people love that stuff.

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 usually dress and act differently in accordance with whatever cultural meme is in play (e.g., angel/devil or working-man/lawyer — my favorites are Kronk’s from The Emperor’s New Groove). In real life, though, the bad angel dresses and talks exactly like the good one. And they switch shoulders without warning, so you never know which is which. 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 memoir, the one thing that stuck with me for decades was his recollection of being approached by Garson Kanin after City of Angels (Gelbart’s musical, not the Nick Cage movie.) Kanin asked if he could give some advice, and 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. Move on to the next thing.

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.

[Edit: I corrected the Gelbart story in 2025 when I discovered I’d misremembered the name of the musical.]