Vocations (no, this isn't a religious entry)

Last night I used all four hours of scheduled class time struggling through a final exam in Advanced Accounting. Afterward I told Fred, the CPA and UoP instructor, "Another four hours and I'd have nailed it.  As it is, I'm not happy." 

Even on the open book, open laptop test, I simply couldn't do all that work in the time allotted.  My spreadsheets didn't balance.  Good thing Fred gives partial credit for getting most of a problem right.  Maybe I'll get a C on this; if I'm really lucky, a B. 

Until my previous course, Intermediate Accounting III, I hadn't gotten less than an A for a course at University of Phoenix. Now it looks like I'll be A-less for two courses in a row.  Rats. 

It matters, because all this is a warm-up for taking a CPA exam next year.  I have to learn this, or $20,000 worth of student loans will be for nothing.  I was so good at this stuff in the early stages, but it's getting harder, and I'm getting slower at working it all out.  I keep reassuring myself, Stewart Smalley style, that I'm good enough and smart enough.  But my confidence isn't, shall we say, at an all-time high. Still, I have to keep going.  It's a bit late to study for some other profession, even if there were something better suited to my talents, interests and personality.  Accounting is a good profession for an introvert, and that's what I mostly am.

All I want to do, really, is finish the final edit on Heirs of Mavarin, and work on To Rule Mavarin for a while before revising Mages of Mavarin. But there's no money in that, especially if I don't submit anything anywhere. I haven't sent out a query in 18 months.

So this weekend I'll do a little Mavarin stuff, and start reading downloaded chapters for the tax accounting course.  It's supposed to be an easy course, and the instructor is really good. 

Maybe after that course, I'll feel less desperate about whether I'm really up to this accounting stuff.

Karen

Guilt

I'm all discombobulated today because of my disproportionate response toa pair of unpleasant emails from a man claiming to be a minister and longtime friend of Madeleine L'Engle. He accused me of promoting saccharine falsehoods on my L'Engle pages, said I should be ashamed of myself, and called my site fawning and obsequious. I eventually figured out that he was objecting to certain items on my L'Engle FAQ page. That page had not been updated since March, 2001, and was so labeled. The man was apparently incensed that I hadn't always known that some of L'Engle's reported details of her life were not entirely accurate, and said so, in the most perjorative terms possible. Or, failing that, that I did not update the site to include the most negative details of the New Yorker article on the moment I read them, or the moment he told me of them.

This whole thing has been distressing to me, especially this attackfrom a stranger who expects me to believe every word he writes, butdoes not provide his last name. Readers of this blog and the AOL sfwriters' boards are aware that I've agonized about the New Yorker article and my best response to it.

Well, I've updated the FAQ page. I acknowledged most of the points raised in the article, but not all of them, and I've done my best not to attack either L'Engle or her family. Still, I'm not comfortable about all this. I have no perspective at all. That explains why I'm wasting time at work writing this when I have so much work to do (I'm terribly behind!), and why I got virtually no studying done last night for my accounting final tomorrow night. I need to stop worrying about this and get on with my life!

This is much worse than obsessing about the Mavarin prequel.

Karen

Living the Fictional Life

I've interviewed dozens of actors, writers, producers and other creative people over the years, mostly in connection with Doctor Who and Quantum Leap and, decades ago, Star Trek. Celebrity tends to accrue more to on-camera types than behind-the-scenes people, so it's the actors who turn up most at conventions and golf tournaments. The writers are more easily found in production offices or at home, and there are fewer opportunities to meet them unless they're named John Vornholt or Ed Bryant or David Gerrold. Consequently, most of my interviewees are actors. That's fine with me.

When I talk to an actor, the question I'm always driving at, usually without arriving, is this: what happens in the actor's mind at the moment of performance? When I do ask the question, I get a variety of answers.

Some actors claim that it's simply a matter of hitting their marks, saying their lines and not bumping into the scenery. But is that truly all they're doing? Is it as calculated and external as that, just a matter of saying the lines convincingly, without ever feeling them?

The next level goes along with the cliche, "once more with feeling." In this scenario, the actor uses his or her own feelings and experiences to inform the performance. It's a relational thing. The actor has not been through quite what the character is going through. The character is upset about the death of a sister, but the actor isn't upset about the character's sister. The actor remembers the death of a dog,or a mother, or a friend in high school. It's enough to put real feeling into the lines about the death of the sister, but they're not the character's feelings.

One level deeper, and one gets to "being out of your head," as Richard Herd puts it. This is the level of controlled madness, or, perhaps, loss of control. This is the edge of, I suppose, the Method, but I've never read An Actor Prepares, only a short story by Harlan Ellison ("All the Sounds of Fear," I think it's called). The actor actually slips into the personality of the character, and maybe, in some fashion, experiences what the character experiences, lives bits the character's fictional life.

I'm not sure whether that really happens, or whether it''s just another way an actor chooses to look at the process. It may be that the line-sayer and the method actor are doing pretty much the same thing, but perceive it differently. It could also be that the idea of an actor becoming the character, however temporarily and vicariously, is just my flawed interpretation of what Scott Bakula and Richard Herd and others have said.

I'm not an actor. I took an acting class at the age of five or six, and appeared on stage in Syracuse in1965 in one of my mom's musical revues. In school I played a skunk, was a narrator several times, and beat Dan Cheney as "Bobby Fischer" in a sketch that marked my last stage appearance ever. I have no feeling for acting, no drive for it. The closest I get to acting is when, like today, I get to read a passage to the congregation in church, especially if there's dialogue in it, or read a passage from my novels aloud to a friend.

What I am, aside from a bookkeeper and student and wife and all the other things I am, is a writer. My creative process that isn't the same as what an actor does, but in away it's similar. Like the actor who has an inkling of what it's like to be an alien or a member of the opposite sex or Lee Harvey Oswald by virtue of playing and embodying that role, I have an inkling how a tengrem thinks because I've written from a tengrem's point of view. It doesn't matter that there's no such thing as a tengrem. It doesn't matter that Rani and Del and Crel and Fayubi aren't real. It doesn't matter that Scott Bakula and Willie Garson probably don't really know what it was like to be Lee Harvey Oswald,and that nobody really knows what it's like to have two hearts and twelve regenerations. It's still an important and valuable thing,bringing these people to life, on stage or page, big screen or small.Knowing how Crel feels about power, how Fayubi feels about playing the fool, and even how Rani feels about rabbits, gives me a chance to experience and feel and, most of all, think about concepts and principles and emotions that I'd never come across while balancing credit card accounts against vendor payables--at least, not unless my mind is seriously wandering at that moment!

There's one more level, one more step in the process. That's when the reader or viewer reads the book or watches the performance. If the creative people have done their jobs well, the reader or audience will also have some inkling what it's like to serve on a starship, be shot in Philadelphia, escape from Castrovalva, or catch a rabbit and eat it raw. Whether the experience itself is a good or a bad one, the consumer of the entertainment will enjoy it, be shocked or inspired by it, learn from it, or all of the above. Some of those consumers will then create or embody fictional people of their own, and pass those real emotions and unreal experiences to further audiences.

Neat, huh?

Karen

Testing capabilties

 Aha!  I've been wondering how Shelly got pictures into her entries without those big ugly white boxes around them. Cool.  I've now got the journal set to wrap the text around the big white boxes when I do use them, and now I know I can do the little clip art thing, too.

I also added the "not Rani" picture to the About Me box, and added Wil Wheaton, of all people, to the journal list.

As long as I'm using the book quote gif thingy, I'll go ahead and recommend the book I'm reading now, Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. I'm not fond of the title, but the book itself is excellent. (In case you've missed the minor hoopla about it, it's a British bestseller about punctuation--really!)

  Karen

Character profiles on mavarin.com...

...have all been written and uploaded. Each character page has a portrait by Sherlock, a brief introduction to the character, a brief quote by him or her, and either a fictional "journal entry," a book excerpt or both. The journal entries are the same ones posted here, and do not appear in the books themselves. Eventually I hope to have both an original entry and a book excerpt for each page.

While I was at it, I reordered the "next character profile" links to cover all eleven pictured characters with no orphans. (At least one page was accidentally "left out of the loop" before.)

A propos of my earlier musings about writers, privacy and family relationships, I made a link from the Rutana page to the Ruth Anne Johnson page, but not from my mom's page back directly to the Rutana page. People can just use the back function or go to the index page.

My mom, Ruth Anne Johnson, was a Renaissance Woman of sorts, a psychologist and singer and playwright and composer-lyricist and teacher and administrator and all-around overachiever. Her page doesn't really go into all that, or what she meant to me; and really, you probably wouldn't be interested in such details unless you knew her. What is on the page, the part that may be of interest to people who care about music and writing, is the lyric to one of her best songs. Take a peek sometime, if you feel like it! Perhaps one of these days, I'll post lyrics to Merry-Go-Round or The John Burp Marching Song. And if anyone has cheap-and-easy ideas for transcribing my mom's handwritten, faded sheet music from 1964-1972, please drop me a line. Mind you, there's a lot of it, so transcribing it all is probably not something you want to volunteer to do for me!

Karen

The Inconvenience of Inspiration

Okay, now I'm in trouble.  I just spent part of lunch working on my prequel, Prince of Mavarin, which will probably be renamed To Rule Mavarin. The book will take Jor from teenaged prince to widowed prisoner of the tengremen.  Most of the characters from his generation - Fayubi, Sunestri, Lormarte, Genva, Jami, Lokvi, Pol, Wil, and Harisoni - will be in it.  I think it opens with Fabi (the future Fayubi) writing his most important prophecy while Hari/Harisoni hums in his sleep.  It will probably end with some version of the scene with Jor shown here as Otherworld Journal Entry #5.

Why now?  I have no time for this!

Karen

Otherworld Journal Entry #5: King Jor

From The Memoirs of King Jor:
Chapter 12: My New Home

It wasn'’t really a palace.  I knew that as soon as I saw it. I never quite forgot that bitter truth--almost, toward the end, but not quite.

The less-than-palatial building before me was made of wood, probably oak, not stone or brick. The single tower on top was short and boxy, and tilted a little to the left. Worst of all, Calezundi had ordered some tengremen to paint the whole thing an unnatural bright pink.  I could tell that tengremen had done the work, because several of them had left tufts of blond and brown and black fur in the paint.

To be honest, I didn'’t really care that the fake castle in the middle of Gathmak was meant to mock me.  The important thing was that it was a building, with walls and a roof and not so much getting wet if it rained.  After many weeks on the back roads of Mâvarin, my hands tied together, the only full human in the company of tengremen, a roof and walls represented a definite improvement.

It was true that I would still be a prisoner, but what of it?  I had nowhere else to go, not any more. My wife was dead.  My children (so I thought) were dead. My cousin Richi had died of a fever three years before, and his sister, Bete, had married the king of Fãrnet at a time when Mâvarin'’s order of succession had been less in doubt.  Now there was only me, and I no longer deserved to rule Mâvarin.  Why not stay here, I thought, and let Nishi Awer rule in my place?  He would do no worse than I at the job.

My captors laid a foot-wide wooden board across a sludgy green moat.  I started across it alone. Strange eyes peered up at me from the moat. The eyes lay atop the head of a twenty-foot-long green monster I later came to know as Monte the alligator.  I walked to the end of the board as steadily as possible, until I came to a wooden platform in front of an unpainted door with crooked hinges.  I stepped off the board, and the tengremen pulled it away.  (Years later, Canda and Cort built me a real drawbridge for my birthday.  It wasn'’t terribly big or especially well-made, but it was better than the board.)

I opened the door. It was rather dark inside, but I saw an armchair and a bed, and a small bit of brown that was probably a rug.  The chair was on a little platform, like my old throne in Thâlemar, nowhere near as nice-looking but, I hoped, more comfortable than the real seat of power.

Well, I guess I’'m home, I thought, and went inside.