D is for Do Something

There are a few quotes I tend to keep top of mind. For me they serve not only in writing and thought but in life. My kids know it by heart as well. For me, the concept Roosevelt so concisely summed up is a simple one that provides the answer to many of life's issues. Teddy Roosevelt is responsible for my favorite quote of all time.

In any moment of decision,
the best thing you can do is the right thing,
the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

A wonderful antidote to the old "paralysis by analysis" that is so often seen by those in our society charged with the necessity to "do something".

C is for Core and Gap

Boscobel's famous native son gets full credit for today's phrase - Core and Gap. Where is Boscobel and who is the native son? Why am I writing about it?

Boscobel is an itty bitty little town on the Wisconsin River. Firmly in the heart of flyover country like most of the rest of the state. Pretty much due west of Madison, let's just call it southwest Wisconsin and leave it at that.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the native son responsible for "Core and Gap". He offers up a pretty cool success story, maybe even the classic "country kid makes good" and goes to Washington, D.C., which is what he did.

Why am I writing about Core and Gap? For once I haven't digressed by this point in my harangue. Straight to it.

"the Functioning Core and the non-Functioning Gap" is a theory and a map (see the link to the left) developed by Mr. Barnett describing the state of the globe. It might be a view of the "have" and the "have nots", with some interesting exceptions. The civilized part of the planet that basically works, lives under the rule of law, and interestingly experiences more suicide than murder is the "functioning Core". The part of the planet filled with terrorists and sadness and moral decay (at least defined by western morals), not to mention anarchy, chaos, and evil (again from a western cultural reference) is known as the "non-functioning Gap".

River and Ranch and New Grass Growing are two books in a series revolving around the lives of Cale Thomas and Lane Nygard, two Special Operations Forces operatives, charged with unique special duties. In R&R they are on the cusp of retirement. In New Grass Growing, they are retired. In their careers though, they roamed the planet providing plenty of kinetics via their trigger pulling. In the course of researching these books I stumbled upon the Core and Gap. Fascinating. I'm incorporating this concept into the tactics, strategies and events in the lives of my two SOF MCs.

Personally, as a college educated, white collar US citizen I find this view of the planet to be fascinating and quite compelling. He pulled it together in the years shortly after 9/11 and I'm sure it's been revised in the years since. For me, it remains the first thing I trot out when in the company of those wanting to discuss global politics as they intersect with culture and lifestyle. From my civilian perspective I've found the "Core and Gap" to be the best method of explaining global politics, and maybe even civilization.

Buy his first book or go to the library and check it out. It is a dense read requiring thought and concentration, but the outcome it 100% worth it. At least for me it is.

The fact this dude is from Wisconsin is icing on the cake :)

B is for Bechdel Test

With the passage of a mere 85,560 seconds since the premier post in this, the thrilling 26 days of the A-Z blogging challenge, we now find ourselves at the post for the second day. I may have mentioned it explicitly yesterday, if not, for sure I hinted at it. Yes, the Bechdel Test is today's entry, brought to you by the letter "B".

Following on just a bit from yesterday's rambling discourse on "agency", today's word (phrase) comes from the fertile mind of a cartoonist, possibly someone who read the work of that cartoonist and was inspired to credit the cartoonist for something her cartoon characters said in one of her episodes. Check out the ever helpful Wikipedia entry on the Bechdel Test and all will become clear(er). The cartoonist is Alison Bechdel and the friend who may have noticed is Liz Wallace. The founding incident took place sometime in 1985, back in the halcyon pre-internet days when ink stained paper in a far larger volume than it does today.

In my media consumption world, the introduction of the Bechdel Test was quite revealing, and it continues to be. First of all, it has further dimmed my respect for mainstream media content creators. To be fair, they are under pressure to create revenue from their media creation efforts, so they are certainly biased in their efforts and hesitant to change anything that would lessen their success. Such is life in our capitalist frame of reference. Regardless of that though, the Bechdel Test reveals in a very interesting way, just how lopsided media tends to be STILL in 2015 when it comes to portraying women.

Inquiring minds want to know, assuming they didn't click away to the Wikipedia entry, just what is the Bechdel Test? It is a simple protocol consisting of three parts. The media in question:

1. has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

That's it.

Almost half of all films made in the last 20 years FAIL this test. Going further back in time this ratio is worse, way worse, as you might expect. I won't repeat the Wikipedia article, I hope you will click on that link though and read up on this notion. For me it is eye opening. In a moment of self-congratulatory back patting, I am also EXTREMELY proud of myself for writing Dana, a main character in my books in such a way as to pass the Bechdel Test, before I even knew this test existed. You can bet that all my MCs with the xx chromosome are going to continue very much in this fashion.

One recent example of successfully passing this test, to me anyway, is a Sunday night prime time TV show we stumbled across, Madam Secretary, starring Téa Leoni and Tim Daly (of Wings fame). To my eyes, when it comes to passing the Bechdel Test and agency for its female MCs, this show PASSES with flying colors. That this is a Sunday night prime time show on an old letter network, CBS, makes it even more impressive. Once again, a well done Wikipedia entry on Madam Secretary informs the discerning media consumer that this show was created by a woman and is produced by a woman. There is one other producer surprise. Go read the entry....

As an aside, tiresome though they may be, I am shocked at how much I am using Wikipedia. I am going to have to make a contribution. The body of knowledge stored in Wikipedia gets more impressive by the day.

Back in the day when our college freshman was a mere lass of five or six, she began playing soccer, which remains a foundational part of her young life. In those early days, I remember watching her outrun the boys on the team. She was the team's leading goal scorer and quite the little athlete, small in stature and age though she was. Somehow, around that time in our family life, my wife and I began using the phrase "girl power" around all three of our daughters, even the littlest diaper filler, who was already hard at work keeping up with her older sisters. Dora the Explorer comes to mind as one possible inspiration. I cannot clearly remember how we came around to using that phrase, but it clearly had to do with our parental awareness of our daughters NOT playing second fiddle to boys. We really pushed this notion of standing side by side, not one in front of the other. Looking back, this is one of the things I am most proud of as a parent, even more so, when things like the Bechdel Test serve to remind us just how far in the wrong direction Hollywood continues to go in terms of portraying women.

Thanks for reading this far! Until tomorrow's thrilling diatribe on the letter "C", I bid you farewell.

Writing About Women? Consider the word "Agency"

Years ago as I started writing fiction, a question came up about adding more main characters into my series of books. It's true. I was asking it of myself. No one else was in the room.

Cale Thomas was rapidly filling out and developing as THE main character. The plot was coming along, aided by numerous research discoveries that left me shaking my head over how truth and fiction were colliding (more on that throughout this month). But Cale couldn't just talk to himself nor could the books rely on internal soliloquies as a tool to move things along. Enter more characters.

It's only natural that a lonely military guy camped out in the middle of nowhere needs to meet someone right? Sorry to be so predictable, but yes. Cale meets Dana, back in the beginning of River and Ranch, the book prior to New Grass Growing. So we have these two characters now. They are together BUT...they are also apart. And that is the segue leading up to today's letter.

Yes, the letter "A" is brought to you by the always fascinating word "Agency".

Just what is agency? Why is it the first entry in this 26 day A-Z blogging challenge?

It is the first entry, because the women that appear throughout this book series are complex strong, capable, and more than nuanced enough to carry their own plot lines. Does anyone beside me think of Prairie Home Companion, where "the women are strong"? Garrison Keillor's voice rolls through my head carrying that phrase, but I digress.

Thanks for hanging in there and tolerating my sudden left turns into trivia.

Back to "agency". Wikipedia's definition of agency is more than enough to start this ball rolling. Go ahead, click the link and read the definition. I'll wait, I need more coffee anyway.

Before I forget, I hope you will tune in for one of tomorrow's entries. Yes tomorrow is a double day. One of those entries is "the Bechdel Test", a neat way to consider agency, initially in female movie characters, but now used in fiction as well.

Turns out there's a ton of mostly relevant content you can find with Google's help on the word "agency". One that does not appear on the first page linked to above comes from Chuck Wendig's authorial wanderings. His version of the meaning of agency hits home for me. Agency implies strength, so initially you have strong female characters and this leads the reader's eye to somewhat expect men in women's clothing and character roles. I think The Athena Project from Brad Thor is a good example of this.

Chuck Wendig's blog entry (above) about strong female characters and agency does a superb job of working through this stereotypic treatment of women in lead roles in action type genres. I won't repeat what he writes and what the always worthy comments (and there are hundreds of them) further flesh out. Suffice it to say that "agency" as it applies to female characters, at least the female characters in my books, means more than just strong in a male definition of the term. I like "nuanced" and "complex" at least as much as "strong".

For me, the heart of this word agency is writing characters that are women leading their own lives, solving their own problems and happily enjoying the company of men all in such a way as to be human and independent, rather than falling back on the annoying tendency in fiction where most female characters fit in the narrative where the male characters need them to be. Think "Nell" tied to the railroad tracks in the old Dudley Do-Right characterfrom the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon back in the day.

Being the father of three daughters has helped me in understanding the balance that "agency" carries. My wife and I have raised and are still raising our three daughters to be strong and independent. One of the many meanings I take from this word comes from listening to my daughters talk about boys and their "hotness", "who is dating who" and "who said what". But in the next second, they are talking summer jobs, physics test, why a low cross is better or worse than a cross that comes off their foot and goes high, where the oldest one wants to live next year, and how can they find a room mate because one of them suddenly decamped to another school (sorry for the long string of dependent phrases there). In short, they are living their lives, much of which revolves around them and what they need to do to get by, and less of which puts them in an orbit around someone with a Y chromosome.

Why Writing?

So our youngest daughter is a ninth grader. First year of high school. She has a language arts class. Seems like a typical LA class, not much changed from the classes I vaguely remember taking back in the day. She comes home with an assignment to write three poems.

She does.

I know that as a parent I am hopelessly biased, but nonetheless her poems were wonderfully shockingly good. Heartfelt and well written, they were a view into the world of a young teenager.

Anyway, life goes on and a few days later we're talking again about something school related and she says, "...Dad that's all school is - is memorizing. We sit there all day. At night I memorize [x] and the next day we take a test...." Again, not all that far from what I remember of my days in the class room. By and large rote memorization and then regurgitation of said facts is what many think of as education.

I have a point and I'm getting to it I promise...

The 3/1/2015 Sunday paper comes along and "Pearls Before Swine" by Stephen Pastis, has Willy and two characters talking about studying for a history test. All three question the worth of history. The column ends with the mouse character whipping out his smart phone and googling the answers to the history questions that Willy asks. Ridiculously easy with a few seconds on a phone keyboard. The point driven home being one of the worth of traditional education, when in so many cases in these times, all you have to do is whip out a device and do an online search for the answer. Many would say that traditionally storing facts away in a young cranium is now of questionable value, as simplistically illustrated in this comic. That I really like by the way.

For me this is a valid point. Should the bulk of education still consist of fact recitation and regurgitation, followed by forgetting said facts and likely never using them again? If not, what should education become? A HUGE questions to which NO absolute answers have emerged, only a few smaller relative answers.

Now my point......

Why write?

Man, woman and child should write because the act of writing, simplistically and with much being left unsaid, is analysis and raw creative effort. Writing is not a fact you memorize and spit up on a test. Writing poetry is delving into your brain and creating something original and unseen. Some NOT memorized. In clichéd consultant speak you are "adding value". I think you are. I think my daughter did. She did it amazingly well and in a way that shows the power a young brain has when it leans into something and really wants to create in lieu of memorize.

To me that makes writing, one of humanity's first great creations and possibly our most used commodity, something that is special and worth the effort. You can't memorize, you have to sit there and work your brain until words come out on paper or screen. For me, in a time where so much education is still fact-based memorization of ever-lessening value, writing endures as a skill well worth developing in brains regardless of age or place.

The Mysteries of Genre Selection

Writing blogs abound. Not just author / writer / indie publishers, but people that consult on the art of writing. People that take and make money polishing and honing the written words of others. Many of them advise, and I always imagine them looking over the tops of their bifocals, to "write for your genre". This makes sense, I also think it should be half way obvious though as well. At some point in the writing life cycle I think everyone comes up with the curiosity of "who is going to read my book?". For some, including me at the moment, recognizing your target audience is important, but that is a goal not always easy to meet.

For example, one of the main MCs in River and Ranch, a book I will soon be publishing, lives in Idaho, on a ranch. So I kind of lean towards calling it a western. But most of the western genre today seems to be historical in nature, the MCs are men, and the women are large breasted and waiting around for Mr. Handsome. River and Ranch takes place in the present day. It is a woman who lives on the ranch. She pulls her weight, is a nuclear geophysicist, and somehow makes it through the book without a description of her feminine attributes. She's also independent, although I have to admit she is willing to talk to (and maybe a bit more) the other MC. Can I find a hint of modern Western? as a genre? Not so far.

The other MC is a river guide on the Salmon River, also in Idaho. Not much land-based action, and no horses, except when he meets the other MC and sparks fly. Most of this MCs action takes place on the river as a guide. It is outdoors, in the west. This still kind of wants to be a modern Western, but I hit the same problem, it is "not exactly" a western. Of course the two MCs meet and sparks fly, so this could actually be a romance, and it is, the two characters do fall in love (and much more as well hint hint). So romance does fit. And don't take the prior statement the wrong way, River and Ranch is family friendly. I've discovered there is a "sweet" label in the genre world, that is commonly understood to mean no sex and nothing graphic. River and Ranch fits that. There is adventure throughout the book as the guide is down the river in much of the book. The rancher is also up in the mountains dealing with cattle on the way to their high meadows. Stuff happens in an active adventurous way.

There are two daughters involved, and some of the story is seen through their eyes. So I could push and call River and Ranch young adult. This would fit some of it. Finally there are a couple bad guys acting separately as antagonists to both rancher and river guide. So there are elements of suspense and thrills found throughout.

In the end I am writing the book that I would like to read, as some of those advisors on occasion advise to do. I'm doing it. I also confess to being a bit burnt out on the many genre "traditions". Suspense, thriller, and adventure tends to move at a very fast pace. No time to sleep, no time to eat, no time to engage in surroundings. A fast pace, tight plot, centered on catching the bad guy, etc. They are formulaic. I love the many formulas, but I am also looking for a good read that is beyond the usual suspects when it comes to formulaic genre traditions. I want to read about food, I want to read about the surroundings. I want to read about sleeping on a beach on the Salmon River, one of the most remote spots in the USA and watching the Milky Way and shooting stars (I guess that could be construed as a spoiler, sorry). I want a strong female lead, who can shoot guns (except she corrects everyone who calls them that, they're rifles) and can saddle her own horse and grew up barrel racing. I want to have grandparents involved in the story. You never read about grandparents.

None of which makes fitting this assemblage of places and faces into a narrow orderly genre any easier. Stay tuned for the ongoing adventures of Genre Boy as he struggles to find his fit in the cold world of fiction.
Jeff Bach

Your Main Character Needs a Partner!

In genre fiction no one goes it alone. Or at least very few. This is one of the top three observations I've made as a reader over the years. As in life, everyone should have someone. This applies in romance and it applies in genre fiction as the main character runs through the pages of the book, saving the world, and surviving the harrowing circumstance that writers conjure up on the way to completion.

Let's look at a few of the authors I like in the genre fiction world. I tend to pick adventure, thriller, suspense. Clive Cussler, Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais, and Harlan Coben are at the top of my list, although many other authors also have some of my money as well. Cussler brought to life the fabulous pairs of Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino (the first pair), Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala, as well as the rare married pair of main characters Remi and Sam Fargo. Robert B. Parker brought Spencer and Hawk to the reading world and I thank him for it. I've passed many late nights with those two. Robert Crais brought about Elvis and Pike. Another pair well worth the money and the time to read and reread. Last but not least is Harlan Coben. His fertile noggin produced Myron Bolitar and Win, whose last name I cannot remember. Possibly because in the books he is always just Win, the nasty badass partner that comes in and cleans up as needed.

Not all of my favorites come in paris though, so there are exceptions. Other favorite authors include Brad Thor, Ted Bell, Ben Coes, and the sadly departed Vince Flynn. Scot Harvath, Alex Hawke, Dewey Andreas, and Mitch Rapp, the characters belonging to those authors do not generally have tight partners appearing throughout the book. If you compare Spencer and Hawk to Rapp you see an immediate difference. Likewise with Elvis and Pike compared to Scot Harvath. Same drill.

Interestingly, at least to me, there could be a third group in this discussion. James Rollins writes another bunch of really awesome books in the same categories. While I've read all of his books and greatly enjoyed them, his characters, to my mind, are in a group. Not so much an MC and a sidekick. He features a main character that is at least part Native American. He also features the rare pair of partner characters who are married. Quite the ground breaker this Rollins guy. Well worth reading! As an aside, one of his books has the most compelling interesting and fascinating look at quantum mechanics that I've ever come across. Moreover, it was in a religious/prayer context. Incredibly well done.

So of course it can work in many ways ways, but pairs of characters enter my writing thoughts first. Especially Spencer and Hawk from Robert B. Parker and Elvis and Pike from Robert Crais. Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino follow closely along with Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala, all four of those characters coming from the fertile mind of Clive Cussler.

In all cases, the bad guy always seems to be going it solo. That's probably another topic though.

So while your MC is out saving the world, consider writing in a partner watching the shadows and providing the comic relief and additional drama that only a partner can provide!