Faith and New Ideas for Death Man

The past few days have been a blur. My friend from Solstice, Faith, came to visit me while she attended the Sasquan (World Con) Convention in Spokane area. It was such a treat getting to spend time with her and she really kicked my ass on brainstorming and storyboarding for my novel. I asked her to help me figure out how the hell to make three books out of my massive missive of mischief. And she did. Now I just have to keep with it, I'm excited because I've restructured my hierarchy a little, changed some of my beloved characters' names (neither Faith nor Hannah were happy about that!) and also figured out the ten commandments of my theocracy. Pretty much I made everyone's lives a bit worse in the novel and have given the slave boys something very, very dangerous and depressing: hope. 

I have a French/English dictionary waiting for me at the Library and once I pick that up I'm going to begin fucking with the language. One of my goals when I started this Dystopian was to create a bastardized Frenchlish language similar to the Nadsat language Burgess created in 'A Clockwork Orange.' I freaking love that book. I'm going to re-read it this next week to get me in the mood for language making.

I'm going to reformulate my map of the city as well. I think for me the best thing to do will be to have a crystal clear vision of the defamiliarization of the novel before I really delve into this new draft. Now, don't worry, I'm not scraping the old draft. Most of it is incredibly workable. But I will be rewriting a great deal of it and then editing and revising from there. Which is why I need to get my ass in the chair and get going on the actual work. The novel is going to be tight. It really will be. And I know the changes I'm making are going to help. At least I'm fairly certain they are. So now I need to finish up the draft and put it away for a bit so I can work on number two and number three. By the end of this year I will have Book One of the Death Man trilogy print ready. That's my goal. I don't have much year left, however, so the pressure is on.

The Commandments of the Theocracy

1. The Luminary is God incarnate. The Luminary’s Word is Law.
2. None but the Luminary and the Elderkin may read or compose writing. Slaves, Paysan, and Gendarme shall not read or produce writing of any form. To read or write on their own is to incur death
3. Apostasy is the greatest crime and demands the highest restitution else the offending party shall die.
4. All shall attend at least one Tournament and ten executions a year and will be punished for lax behaviour.
5. Slaves must obey all commands unless it directly violates an order given by the Luminary. All Paysan and Gendarme must obey all commands given them by their Patrons unless it directly violates an order given by the Luminary.
6. All Death meted in honor of the Luminary is sacred and celebrated.
7. Women must obey and satisfy their Masters/husbands as it is the will of the Luminary.
8. Unless acceptable restitution is offered for crimes of civil disobedience, theft, fraud, and attempts to upset the social order, the penalty is Death.
9. All children born out of wedlock are slaves. 
10. There are monsters beyond the wall. No one shall go beyond the wall. To go beyond the wall is to incur the wrath of the Luminary and verily ye shall die.

New Happenings in the Facets of My Life

I'm sitting here in a mild panic waiting to embark on the final leg of my graduate school career. So much has happened in the past month and so much is going to happen in the following month that I feel the best way to tackle this info-dump is through a list. And to make it even more palatable, I've divided it into Spiritual Life, Fictional Life, and Real Life. There may be some overlap as my fictional life typically overruns my real one.

Spiritual Life:

• Went to the annual camp out for the IEPG (Inland Empire Pagan Guild). This years theme was Hammered with the Heathens and we did get a bit hammered here and there. But when we weren't drinking, we had a great time interacting with friends in the community and trying new things, Such as: I led my very first ritual! It was my first time writing and leading. We performed a Nightmare Banishment Ritual with a My Little Pony twist to it. I actually had a wonderful time leading it and the feedback that I've received has all been positive. Already I'm excited to lead some more rituals in the future.
• Saw two Handfastings at the camp out! Both rituals were renewals of handfasting vows and intentions but they were both lovely and gave Hannah and me some ideas about our own future handfasting.
• Woke with the sun one morning and greeted the day. Saw a sea hawk nest complete with babies!
• Hannah and I have been asked if we are interested in joining the Pagan Ministry Council and both of us have said yes! We are going to submit our pleas for consideration to the full IEPG group sometime this week. If it doesn't work out that I am able to take part in the council, that's fine. I'm still gearing up for future rituals and classes. This is a great community and I will be part of it in any way I can be.

Fictional Life:

• In Dungeons and Dragons with the neighbors my character has finally gotten his memory back and, I was correct, he is indeed a prince! All sorts of crazy questing is happening right now and Hannah's character is starting to catch feelings for the irreverent 'live for the moment' barbarian. We'll see how that plays out. He has never had a real relationship before, not even a real friendship. Or at least not in the past thirty years. So for him this is all very new.
• Been thinking about Death Man a lot recently. I've decided that this November during the National Novel Writer's Month, I'm going to try and finish up some more of the draft as well as begin serious plotting for the overall structure which, I reckon, will be quite a bit different than it is right now.
• Working on finishing homework for the final leg of the residency. I want to really spruce up the stories that I submitted for workshop and maybe submit one of them for a magazine at some point. But the other piece is the first chapter to a novel. So that might be my future project for next year. We'll see how Death Man goes. So many novels, so little time. I must manufacture some time. 
• Been doing a little role-playing again in the past couple of weeks. Very little. Just a post here and there or maybe a couple a day when we're on a roll. But it's like a little treat to reward me for being good and abstaining from it for so long whilst finishing school. I am not going to let the RP take over my life, but I am going to enjoy the hell out of it as long as it doesn't interfere with other responsibilities including the November goal with my novel. Basically right now, the RP is a total excuse for vampire and werewolf conflict, lots of blood, and the fun in creating new rules for old supernatural entities. And I'm sure at some point there'll be sex. (If they all don't die first!)

Real Life:

• Had a lovely graduation party at my aunt's club house. Lots of my friends were there as well as a decent grouping of family. I made a little over $200 dollars from cards and well-wishers and that is basically going to feed me on my trip. The party was great because it was a pool party and that is the first time I've ever thrown one of those. It was certainly hot enough to merit it!
• SCOTUS! Finally a move in the right direction for this country. This year, for the first time in a long time, I'm proud to be an American. Hooray for marriage equality and boo on all the haters who truly believe that equal civil rights for all will somehow destroy the fabric of existence. In the words of Taylor Swift: the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, but I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. Shake it off!
•  Got a surprise graduation mini-party at work. On Monday, when I arrived for the early morning meeting, I was greeted with a cake, a card full of monies, and a sign that said "Congrats Amanda." It was such a sweet gesture! 
• I'm on the hunt for a new job. Which is very bittersweet because despite the occasional drama at the bra shop, I really do love this job and the gals who work there. But it's time for me to get something that can provide for me and my mate while we continue to work on our fictional and spiritual lives. Today I'm finishing a cover letter and application for the Newspaper in Spokane. Wish me luck with it!
• Getting ready for the Residency. Homework, finalizing my class that I get to teach, and pretty much stressing about it on all levels. 

Writing and Me Part I: Bad Dreams, Bad Language, Bad Ass

A recent graduate of the Pine Manor College Solstice MFA program asked me to write a small article about what it's like being a writer and also about my experience being in an MFA program.  I'm not sure where to start exactly and I'm afraid it might exceed her 1-2 page limit, but I suppose, as my mentor has said, chronology is my friend, so I'll start at the beginning.

When I was a kid, I had difficultly sleeping.  Between a busy mind and recurring nightmares, nighttime was not my friend.  However, I did discover two pretty reliable cures for my restlessness: the first was lucid dreaming wherein I controlled every aspect of my dream down to the central players and the plot, the second was to write.  By the time I turned ten years old, my ability to dream lucidly was falling by the wayside, and so I wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote some more.  Pretty soon I'd written a novel.  

To borrow a metaphor from Harold Clurman, author of "On Directing," writing is like gardening and in order to get something good out of it, you have to lay down some shit.  There's a place for bad plays/writing and that is to provide fertilizer for the good stuff to come.  Well, that first 'novel' was pure fertilizer.  And that's exactly what it was supposed to be.  When I was younger I always had a book to read and a book to write in.  My diary did not chronicle my daily affairs, I filled it, instead, with the adventures of Jeremy Arbuct and his extra-terrestrially raised paramour from the past.  That was also shit, awesome shit, but shit nonetheless.  Luckily for me there were a few undigested seeds in the shit pile and they started to grow.  Over the years I gave my garden a constant supply of manure while watering and weeding and tending the small, determined sprouts.  This was my happy place.  One of them, anyway.  The only thing I loved as much as writing and reading, was acting and singing.

I majored in Music Theatre at Mesa State College (presently known as Colorado Mesa University) and took writing classes for electives.  I studied screen play writing, stage play writing, poetry and short fiction.  But there was one class that changed everything for me.  And not in a good way.  I took a fiction class from a professor who looked and spoke like Jimmy Stewart.  He was a nice enough man, but his ideas on writing and literature were dated and, I've come to realize, incredibly destructive.  He wrote his own manual for the class - a sort of 100 page manifesto of what he deemed to be decent literature - and then expected us to practice what he preached.  If you were a female, you could not write from the POV of a male character and vice-versa (which was incredibly limiting and sexist to boot).  Your protagonist cannot swear (which was a real fucking downer) and he or she must be an upstanding moral citizen (another downer because sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man!).  And the piece that I turned in for class was a dry, horrid, literary nightmare.  

I reread it years later and recognized that the story had a decent plot and interesting characters, but it was completely and utterly devoid of voice.  The class not only killed the 'me' in my writing; it killed my desire to write prose at all.  I switched to screen play as my primary writing for a while and eventually that fizzled, too.  But even with my desire gone, I couldn't stay away forever.  I dabbled in science fiction and angel mythology and then I learned about role-play.  For a while my writing hinged on the instant gratification that came from the give and take of partnered writing.  I became a little dependent on it, but, in the end, it was what pulled me out of the shell I had created around myself ever since the Jimmy Stewart look-a-like silenced my voice.  I could write from the viewpoint of a man if I wanted.  Hell, I could write from the viewpoint of an alien, an android, a cat, a sentient and sassy toaster!  And my protagonists could be bad boys with drug habits and foul mouths, or sweet young hookers with hearts of gold, or even tortured souls with violently repressed desires.  I even tried a little fan fiction and that is a strange and delightful creature unto its own.  But the point is, I wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote some more.  I added a fresh layer of  manure of cliches and passive voice to the garden, watered my dried up stems with metaphor and simile, and invited the sun to warm my dialogue once again.  

In November of 2010, I finally officially participated in National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo), and won.  I wrote a vampire story with a little guy-on-guy action (pretty much two of my favorite things).  With 50,000 words behind me on a single project, I started to feel like myself again.  So I signed up for Script Frenzy, too!  For Script Frenzy, I had to write a 100 page screenplay.  This time around I wrote about dragons and reached my hundred pages easily.  So now I had two projects with some weight to them.  Suddenly the idea of writing things, of being a writer, didn't seem that far-fetched.  I wanted to grow, I needed to grow, and the next logical step was a Masters of Fine Arts.  Seven years after graduating from Mesa State, I applied to two MFA programs, both on the eastern coast.  Only one accepted me.  At the time I took it to mean I was only good enough for one - but I don't think of it that way now.  Somehow I was meant to be part of the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College and that next January began a new and bad ass chapter of my writing life.

A Surprise Visit and a Few Good Books

Today at work one of my Solstice MFA fellows came by the store!  Geographically this is very cool.  He's from Oregon but is driving through to Montana and stopped at Post Falls to hug and squeeze none other than me!  K introduced me to his wife and four kids (aged: baby, 2, 4, and 6).  Apparently when they were driving up, his wife said, "Do you guys wanna meet one of Daddy's friends?" To which their replied, "yes."  But when I rushed out of the store to come and greet them, the eldest, a daughter, cried, "But she's a girl!"  I thought that was pretty cute.  Yes.  Daddy's can in fact have friends that are girls.

But not only was my sex a surprise, I was also of great interest to the second eldest, a son, who asked what my medal was for.  I was wearing a pretty cameo necklace that I had borrowed from Hannah.  It was strung on a pretty white ribbon about my neck and I guess the shape of it reminded him of award medals.  Because when I cocked my head, he asked again, "What did you win that medal for?"  I wasn't sure what to say but I told him I won it by wrestling it away from Hannah, ergo it was a wrestling medal.  To which he was pretty impressed.  

They weren't able to stay long but it really did make my day!  Aside from K's surprise visit to the store my day was filled with helping pre-teens and teens find starter bars.  I swear today must have been drag your daughter to get fitted day, alternately known as "Please, honey, you can't wear shitty sports bras the rest of your life!"  I fitted three girls - there was a fourth but she didn't let me fit her and she was an absolute sour puss and hated all of our bras (what she really wanted was a Victoria's Secret bra to push up her knockers and ours were just too practical for her).  A couple of the girls I fitted though were a real delight to work with and they went home with a good selection of cute but supportive bras and some matching panties!  

After work I came home and ate all the things.  I ate several slices of a crumb cake that our friend, C, left here as well as a very good sized portion of biscuits and gravy.  I don't even know how I fit it all in there.  I'll chalk it up to period binge and try to eat with greater balance tomorrow.  Speaking of tomorrow, I need to get it over with because I really need a day to just work on homework.  Apparently Monday (my day off) is going to be filled with Kroc exercise, plasma donation, and getting new tags for the car.  This translates into a long ass day.  I also have to go to the library for a while on Monday and pick up some new books and drop off an old one - that book being Zombie.  

E told me not to read Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, so of course I immediately went off and read it.  I actually really liked it.  There was one part that made me a little sick (the very graphic description and visual aide of lobotomy) but other than that I found the gore and sexual violence to be just disturbing enough to make the point but not over the top.  Overall it was just a heartbreaking novel and written well enough that I found myself empathizing with the killer as well as his victims, his zombies.  I actually really want to own this book.  There's one line in it that I almost want tattooed on me: "If you had a heart, that is how it would be broken." Now that I've read a book that wasn't actually on my reading list, I suppose it's time to get down to business with the ones that are.  Currently I'm reading Structuring Your Novel by Meredith.  And it's kind of amazing.  I'm doing all the exercises in it to map out my Death Man novel and I'm already excited to use it to map out my other novels, too.  

Yule and Sirens

Tonight, Hannah and I decided, rather on the spur of the moment, to take some food, some wood, some matches, and some sodas and go out to Kiwanis Park to cook a Solstice meal and enjoy nature.  Well, the park technically closes from "sunset to sunrise" and since today is the shortest day of the year, sunset came at 3:59 PM.  Meaning our trespassing began shortly after we arrived.  In the time it took us to walk from the car to the pavilion, there went the sun.  For all my talk, I'm actually a pretty rule abiding citizen, same with Hannah, and so with the dark came a feeling of breaking the law.  Fear of being fined (we are so freaking poor right now) and fear of being arrested (thank you Cracked.com articles featuring the bad apple/barrel police department encounters) quickly overshadowed the slight adrenaline high that comes from being rebellious.  Maybe it was the mixture of fear and adrenaline that kept us there because before we knew it I was starting a fire in the grill pit and Hannah was fixing up the MP3 player with the speakers.

The air was filled with the crackling of summer wood and the melodies of Solstice carols.  We were about to put the tinfoil wrapped casserole and bacon onto the grate when I pointed out that lacked a stick for poking and proding the food and fire.   I was pretty certain we had a metal poker in the car so I got the keys and readied myself to venture back to the parking lot alone (probably a three minute walk but still, it was dark!).

And then, through the trees we see headlights moving nice and slow, somewhat reminiscent of how a cop car might drive through a closed park to keep all Pagan shenanigans to a minimum.  So Hannah and I freeze and watch the balls of light as they slow to a stop and then disappear.  Suddenly I decided I didn't really need to go to the car.  It had to have been a cop, right?  And I just knew that he'd either taken down the license plate number so he could fine us later or left a big fat ticket on the window.  And if he wasn't a cop then it was a random person out looking for someone to tattle on.

Our hearts beating a little faster after the mysterious drive-by, we threw the food onto the fire and cuddled together to wait for the feast, hoping that we could still enjoy our evening before the police showed up in force to haul us away. It was nice to just sit there in the woods, surrounded by snow and the pretty orange glow of the fire.  But that ended when we heard, way off in the distance, the sound of a police siren followed by the loud belching alarm of a firetruck.  We gave each other nervous smiles and tried to ignore it, but it kept getting louder and louder and louder.  Until it sounded like they were pulling into the park.  Hannah immediately began piling snow onto our nice fire sending a whoosh of smoke up into the night sky, making a kind of 'guilty' beacon.

The siren sound gets closer and closer and then goes right on by.  Yep.  But we've already killed the fire and it seems like a good time to make a run for it before something does happen, so we grab our half cooked food, our blankies, music, and sodas and head home.  I half figured there would be a police road block waiting for us at the park entrance, but the only thing waiting for us were a couple of deer and they were beautiful. The best part of the story, however, is that later, when explaining how we freaked ourselves out over a random car driving slowly through the park, dad replies casually, "Oh, that was us!"  My parents went out to see if the area was plowed because they worried that we might be stuck in the snow.  We weren't stuck.  Just paranoid.

Sad Day and Sad Ending, but it's Looking Up

For no reason at all, today has been a depressed and dreary day.  It started well enough with singing and dancing in the kitchen and two episodes of the anime, Mythical Detective Loki.  Then we watched a documentary on the Dust Bowl, which I enjoyed immensely despite the depressing content.  I think it was the act of leaving the house to go to the library that set me off in a bizarre way.  Sometimes when a person is depressed they can pin it down to one or a couple of things and relate the emotional backlash to some kind of trigger, but today it was a very out of the blue kind of low.  It was a good old fashioned depression, caused purely by chemicals in my brain, I suppose.  Either that or it's the weather really getting to me.  I hate that it was dark before four o'clock today.  But other than that there wasn't anything that really stands out as a reason for weepy Mc-weep pants today.

It got better though.  When we got home from the library, I felt really dismal.  I almost didn't even eat dinner and, for those of you who know me, that is a huge red flag.  Mom made steak and eggs and toast and it was delicious - and I told mom this - but I ate it with a frown on my face the entire time.  However, after dinner, mom and I retreated to her bedroom and I proceeded to read her two large scenes from my Dust Bowl novel.  It was cute.  She thought I was setting up a short story.  I'm not.  And she also proposed some great ways to give the story a happy ending.  Well... there isn't going to be one.

I think it shocked her.  I actually know exactly how the story is going to end and it makes me want to bawl and that is how I know it needs to happen.  Reading to mom helped get me back into the mood for Bertram and August.  Now I just have to keep going.  For workshop we have to turn in two manuscripts of about 3000 thousand words each and I want to have chapter 1 and chapter 2 ready to go by December 2nd.  Also, I'm thinking of giving Death Man a short hiatus so that I can keep going on the novel that I actually know how to end instead of the novel with a mystery ending that simply won't reveal itself to me even in abstractions.  We'll see.  The residency is like a dose of crack cocaine and afterwards I may jump back into Death Man with both feet, or I'll carry on with Dust Bowl while I work on my critical thesis.

Bertram's Atheism (a brief segment)

            “Bertie?”  It’s Mama’s voice.  I picture her standing by the chicken coup, her hands balled into fists and driven into her thin waist as if she’s squeezing my name out from her body like how I squeeze toothpaste from the tube.  I think about ignoring her.  She only calls me ‘Bertie’ when she wants something from me and right now I don’t figure I’ve much to give.

            I pick up my magazine and thumb through until I find the story I’d been about to read when I fell asleep.  It’s by Lovecraft, so I know it’s going to be dark, but it’s called “The Cat’s of Ulthar.”  There’s nothing all that objectionable about cats, is there?  Maybe Mama wouldn’t mind if I let Sissy read this one, but then again, Mama didn’t even like Daddy reading Weird Tales.  I reckon it’s the covers she finds so distasteful.  The last issue that came to the house before Daddy’s subscription ran out two years ago had a very provocative cover.  It’s one of my favorites.  There’s a girl, or a woman I ought to say, naked as the day she was born, kneeling all shameful-like before a man in a hooded robe.  Her wrists and ankles are bound, her breasts firm, and her hair like golden wheat, a memory to me now. 

            When that particular magazine came in the mail, Mama said to me, ‘You’ll go blind looking at those things,’ and I thought long and hard over what ‘things’ she could have meant.  Breasts?  Is that what would blind me?  Why now?  If I didn’t go blind after the September issue from 1933 what chance did this new issue have in rending me sightless?  Maybe she meant real breasts.  I considered this and decided there must be some sort of talisman to protect married men from losing their eyesight during the dangerous task of love making.  But what about babies who breast fed?   Surely everyone should be blind.  No, it couldn’t be that.  Perhaps my blindness would come from the stories contained within.  But Daddy was a voracious reader of pulp and fantasy, yet he was always the first to see a duster coming, sometimes when it was still just a haze on the horizon.  And why should the words in Weird Tales have any such power over a man’s sight when the words in the bible do not?  So perhaps, and this is what I finally settled on after a good deal of rumination, Mama doesn’t know a damn thing about the real world.  Her mouth would move and the Preacher’s words would come out, mixed and remade to sound like her own, but I knew better.  Had it always been like that?  Had she ever had a thought that was her own?

            I cried myself to sleep that night.  Mama overheard me and lectured me thinking I was crying because the subscription had come to an end, but that wasn’t it at all.  I sobbed because it suddenly seemed that my mother had never really belonged to me.  Even when she used to sing me to sleep, it was always for Him; I was just an excuse for the song.  Whenever anything good happened it was God rewarding us, and whenever anything bad happened it was God testing us.  It wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I wasn’t so sure there was no one up there listening to her.  Thinking on it now, I guess she was right.  I did ‘go blind looking as those things’ and now I’m lost in the dark, no God to save me, no Preacher’s assurances to make it better, no life-everlasting-world-without-end, amen.  I’m fine with it, though.  Life everlasting would be pretty boring, anyway.

I have the Anger!

Dear Walmart out by Cabella's, I have to say, you suck.  I've been in your store twice now, the first time it was to purchase two laptop computers from your electronics department.  The total purchase came to a little over a thousand dollars and the only reason we came to you was because the Walmart closer to my house didn't have the one I wanted in the box.  They had a floor model but I know how that goes and didn't really want that one.  So off we go into the night to get two computers.  We waited in the electronics department for an hour and a half.  Several stock-people tried to help us, but no, the people who had the keys were too busy to be bothered.  Almost two hours later we get out of the store with our computers and get home.  The second time... it was also concerning a computer.  Mine.

I am not typing this on Vignette.  I am back on the big old Commodore.  Poor Vignette has a loose wire or something and I called Vizio Tech Support and the guy was very nice and all he needs to make it better is the receipt.  Unfortunately it has been misplaced BUT the good news is that I can get Walmart to print me a new one.  Well I have to know the exact day of the purchase for them to zero in on it.  This is fine and dandy.  But when I went in to talk to customer service it took over half an hour to get to the ONE PERSON who was manning not only customer service but the photography department as well.  Whatever genius decided to put those in the same damn corner should be bitch slapped into tomorrow.  But I digress.

He had to help Ms. Geriatric and Computer Illiterate at the digital photo booth which normally I wouldn't mind except that she had like a hundred pictures that she needed to go through and she needed help with each one.  Now, a smart corporation would call in someone to help!  But not Walmart by Cabella's.  Nope.  I asked a sales associate if there was a way to call someone else into Customer Service and she says - but there's someone there already.  Then she smiles and starts to walk away.  I ask her if it's possible to get anyone else here (as there is now a rather large line forming and the old woman still has the reps full attention), and the lady just says, nope, there's no one else.  A lie.  Because after my half an hour wait (and by the way, I was there first and somehow ended up being serviced dead last) the man quickly gets another woman there who is better equipped to help me.

And now... now after all of this, she says I have to have the exact date.  How fucking hard would it have been for someone to come and help me and tell me this so that I could get the date and get this whole mess taken care of?  But that is what I have come to expect from this Walmart.  And what I'm starting to expect from all Walmarts and all big businesses in fact.  There's issues with hours now (and it's not the employers that are doing it to their employees, it's the fucking government), as well as various other economical crunches in place, but I'm sorry, fucking suck it up when you are dealing with the public.  And if you have a rude customer, take it in stride and then cuss their stupid ass out when they are gone.  Yes, customers are starting to suck, but it's absolutely unacceptable for those who work in customer service to be neglectful/rude/or otherwise unhelpful to decent customers who wait patiently for their turn.

Ten Rules I Don't Agree With

I picked up a book at the library today and read it in about ten minutes.  Considering that this book is 89 pages that might seem fantastical or impossible.  The book is Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing and while, just as I had suspected, I found that I already knew of these rules through various means, I learned something much more interesting through reading this book.  I learned of true pretentiousness.  Surely I am not alone in this assessment but even if I am, I stand by it.  This book is nothing if not a lesson in the snobbery of fiction writers.  On the very first page Leonard tells us: 

"These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story.  If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.  Still, you might look them over."

This on its own would not strike me as overly condescending (perhaps a bit confrontational and accusing), but when combined with the rest of the book, I feel that, right there in the first blurb, he draws the line between what is wrong and what is his way.  The book continues on to list the ten rules while making extreme use of white space and drawings.  Sitting at the library and reading through it, I couldn't help but wonder why he didn't make it an essay or a pamphlet instead of a book.  The rules are terse and his thoughts and examples concerning them are just as terse.  But this does not annoy me as much as what he says after nearly every rule: don't do this unless you are (insert name of various authors whom Leonard respects).  If you are one of these people then the rule does not apply to you.  This is incredibly belittling.  What if I'm the next great Steinbeck, or Conrad, or Joyce Carol Oates?  What if I'm better than them?  What if my descriptions are paramount to anything Leonard has ever read?  Overall, I see the validity behind his rules but dislike greatly that he goes on to excuse others of these rules just because they are somehow better writers than I am.  

He speaks a good deal about removing himself from the writing and letting the characters do their job in showing and revealing the story at hand.  I agree with this, but I don't agree with him that we have to step back from describing places and things and even what the characters themselves look like.  My rule of thumb, forgive the cliche, is to make everything count.  When I describe the main character my aim is to give the reader some greater insight about him or her and not to 'listen to the sound of my own voice.'  

The Rules are as follows:

1. Never open a book with weather.  (Unless you're Barry Lopez)
2. Avoid Prologues.  (Excepting of course if you are John Steinbeck)  
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"...
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.  (Unless you are Tom Wolfe)
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell breaks loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.  (Unless you are Annie Proulx)
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.  (Unless you're Margaret Atwood or Jim Harrison)
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Of these rules, the last is the one I actually do agree with, it also happens to be a suggestion that Monica Wood touched upon in The Pocket Muse.  It is important to cut the fat and keep the meat but why not make the meat as appealing or as mysterious as possible through use of adverbs and adjectives and clever turns of phrase and intriguing dialogue?  On the subject of adverbs, however, Leonard not only abhors the use of them to describe 'said' but considers any use of them to be a writing mortal sin.  I am confused by this.  I thought adverbs were a part of speech, modifiers which might facilitate understanding or add to the intensity of a scene.  Perhaps he had a bad experience with an adverb a long time ago and just hasn't let go of it yet.  It seems to me that these rules are not so much rules for writing, but a segregation tool attempting to place the principles of fiction on a pedestal over the lesser form of genre and bumbling genre writers, which is interesting since Leonard himself is a genre based writer.  It is important to remember, especially when looking at a list of rules such as this, that there is such a thing as 'bad' literary fiction and 'good' genre fiction.  The lines that divide the two forms can be blurred and even erased.  Rules are never absolute in writing.  Never.  You learn them to break them and then you break them as beautifully and startlingly as you can using the parts of speech that best serve to communicate the story.  Maybe that was his real goal behind this book.  Maybe he set out these rules hoping that we would break some of them, and, if that's the case, then I am more than happy to comply.