Plot & Structure Chapter 1 Exercise 1

When readers read my novels, I want them to feel that they are having a wonderful conversation with a good friend. I want them to consider that which they had not previously considered. I want them to look at the world in a new way. I want them to feel challenged to do more and be better. I want them to begin to notice all that is good and right in the world around them. I want them to desire to be a better person or to learn more about a given subject because something I wrote inspired them to be more and to learn more.

To me, novels are a way to convey truths and spark interest in learning more about the world around us. I like science fiction novels for the way that they stretch our imaginations about the way things could be in the future. I like fantasy novels for their iconic representation of the battle between good and evil and the need to be valiant in our lives. I like historical and political novels for the way they bring those subjects to life.

Although a novel is, by definition, not a recounting of actual events or characters, it can speak plainly to the truth of actual types of events and characters. By so doing, novels help us put the pieces of our own lives together. We can explore the possibilities and philosophies and ideals even as we live in a world encumbered with limitations and practicalities and mistakes. We get to explore the "what ifs" and options present before us. Novels can give us ideas, insights and understanding about other people in that we cannot get by simply talking to others. Novels aid us in the task of walking in another's shoes for a while.

I believe that our lives are what we make of them. And much of what we make of them is captured in the stories we tell about ourselves. The stories we tell reveal the way we look out at this life from our insides. We each narrate our own life's stories. Some of this narration is true. Some of it is false. Some of it is both true and false at the same time. It is what we make of it.

Reading novels can help us put our own life's stories into perspective. In particular, reading novels that speak to universal truths can give us insights and inspiration about how to handle our own real problems. They can give us a fresh way to view our own stories and can help us create our own stories that are both true and beautiful.

Plot & Structure Chapter 1 Exercise 3

My lead is Eli, a 14-year-old boy on vacation in North Carolina with his family. They have traveled there from Utah for a family reunion.

His objective is to heal family wounds by re-uniting a long-dead ancestor with the rest of his family.

He is confronted by his extended family and family friends, led by a rich great-uncle, who is intent on protecting his place in the family inheritance and hierarchy and willing to kill to maintain it.

The ending will be a knockout when the whole family learns that the neighboring family, with which there is a multi-generational feud, are, in fact, cousins and rightful heirs to the great-uncle's fortune.

Consider the blocks

I'm working on a painting based on a photo I took of the Foxboro Orpheum Theater's production of Cabaret. It's the largest painting I've done, to date, and it has taken me the most time to do.

Today I worked on painting the hands. I have always enjoyed drawing and painting hands, but I have also always struggled with them. Visually, they are full of lines and odd angles. Hands are very expressive and can reveal a lot of emotion. Like the face, subtle differences in the way the fingers relate to each other can have huge differences in the feelings they express.

And then there's the proportion. It's one thing to draw hands by themselves, it's another thing, entirely to draw a hand that looks like it belongs to a character in a scene. Because the hands come at the end of the arms, they can be thrust forward towards the viewer or angled away. These actions can cause the hands to appear larger or smaller in comparison to the rest of the character.

This ability of the hands to put themselves out away from the rest of the body can lead to other interesting visual effects. If you put your hand, palm out in front of your face and directly in front of your friend's face, you can make it appear to your friend that your hand is not really attached to anything.

Although this is fun in real life, it can be difficult to capture on canvas without leaving the viewer to wonder what happened to the figure's arm.

It's a lot of pressure to put on an artist to capture all the subtleties of the hand's expression while keeping it in proper proportion to the rest of the figure and still seem somehow attached and belonging to the figure.

I faced up to some of this pressure today as I worked on the Cabaret painting, and I learned a thing or two:

• First, you don't have to show a continual connection between the figure and the hand in order to let the viewer know they are connected. You can use color and proximity to connect the hand.
• Second, treat the hands as if they were made out of several connected blocks. Each of the four fingers is built with three rectangular blocks linked together. The thumbs have only two.

This second concept is illustrated in this image taken from the painting work I did today. By treating the fingers as being built from blocks, I find it much easier to paint them. Each digit is made up of several straight strokes. Highlighted strokes across one plane and darker strokes across the perpendicular planes.

Treating the fingers and the hands like as blocky strokes and planes, helped me get over my hand hurdles today.

You have to take a lot of pictures to get the really good ones

We recently purchased an SLR camera. It was a birthday gift for Lee. She's been wanting to expand on her visually artistic talents, and I, having worked with film in the "old days" as a reporter, convinced her that if she wanted to really get serious about photography, she had to work with an SLR.

I like SLRs for several reasons:

• The lenses - Photography is more about the lens than the pixels. Yeah, you need to have decent pixel depth, but your ability to get depth of field or shoot in low light with a fast shutter depend upon having a good lens.
• WYSIWYG - This web-site editing paradigm can also be applied to taking photos with an SLR. You can see exactly what you will get when you press the trigger. True, you can do that with those point and shoots with the LED screen on the back, but there is something cool about viewing your subject through the lens and being able to capture that completely real, completely analog image in a digital format.
• 3 photos per second - I understand that the technology used to capture images on an SLR is different from your typical point and shoot cameras. It allows you to shoot 3 frames a second on our entry-level camera. Click-click-click ... cool!
  
• Total control - You can set the f-stop, the shutter speed, even the ISO on these cameras. Granted, you can do all of that on a nice point-and-shoot, too. But with a point and shoot, changing all those things seems almost pointless. Without the good lens to gather the light and provide the depth of field, changing those things seems to have little good effect.
  
• They "feel" more professional (an important trait if you want to take yourself seriously).

Having convinced her to go for the nice camera, I got to enjoy some residual benefits: I got to play with the camera for the last few days. Lee had two concerts and a birthday this weekend. Since she was at the center of much of the activity, I had to step up and do my part as her husband and take the pictures. It was a great opportunity to play with the settings and to recall some of the lessons I had learned with film.

Thankfully, the instant feedback on the LED screen of the camera helped reduce the learning curve. I could play with the aperture and immediately see the depth of field. I could modify the shutter speed to balance between blurred hands of the conductor and getting enough light to see anything. It was a lot of fun.

I was also able to take advantage of another benefit of digital SLRs: 8 GB of storage space. I realize this isn't unique to SLRs, it is available for all digital camera types. But it is still something I love about these cameras. I can (and did) take more than 400 pictures with one battery and one card.

And the cool thing about taking 400 pictures? It's the law of the harvest - you can only reap what you sow. In photography, you have to go through a lot of pictures before you find the one that captures just the right expression with just the right lighting and just the right context. So, the more pictures I can take, the better my chances of getting a few worth keeping. Click-click-click!

Maybe the same thing works for blogging ... CLICK!

Where's this thing going?

Thank you for joining me on my little journey. Most journeys start with a goal in mind. There's a place the journeyman wants to go. There's a mountain to climb, a loved one to save, a sea to cross, an exotic land to catalog.

I don't have any such goals. My goal is a little more audacious than that. My goal is to find a goal worth traveling for. One of these days I may find it, and you're gonna want to be there when I do. In the meantime, I'm just going to try and share the most interesting things that I find on this journey to a journey.

Every journey, even a journey just to find a journey, starts with a single step. This is my step two.

A lot of people are making a lot of money on Apple iPhone applications. It's the latest, greatest thing. Programmers of all levels and interests are able to use Apple's SDK to create an application, post it to Apple's application store and let the money come rolling in.

Here's an app I'd like to see: What's your mood. The app would give the user a bunch of smiley faces to pick from. There would be happy ones, sad ones, smileys in love, angry smileys, mischievous, and at least a dozen more emotions. When the user selects one, that selection gets cataloged and combined with the selections of thousands of users all over the world. You can then view a map of the world and see the average emotions of people in the U.S., in the world, in your hometown and your neighborhood.

What do you think? Wanna build it? I'll bet you could be rich in no time!