I’ve got a nephew with Sensory Deprivation Disorder. It’s an uncommon phenomenon, and a strange one at that. Basically (as I understand it), his body has trouble recognizing the physical impact of his environment.

That kinda sounds like the making of a sci-fi novel, or like some dreadful problem. It’s really not that bad. His sense of touch works just fine, but his brain has trouble…okay, I’m going to stop trying to explain it. What do I know about brain disorders?

Here’s the point I’m getting at. Around the time my daughter was one, my Mom started telling a story about a big breakthrough my sister and brother-in-law had had with this nephew. When he was first diagnosed with the disorder, the doctor’s recommended “high-impact” playing.

In other words, just before bedtime, my brother-in-law would wrestle with his son. With most kids, that would just get them all riled up and make bedtime a nightmare. With my nephew, it helped him feel normal. The rough contact comforted him, and helped him settle down, helped him focus.

I thought a lot about that story. And I thought about lion cubs — or, to be quite perfectly honest, about the lion cubs in The Lion King, but I’m pretty sure those guys did their research. I thought about babies of all species wrestling with their parents. And even without Sensory Deprivation Disorder, I think that’s got to be a comforting feeling.

As parents we’re bigger. We’re stronger. We’re in control. And we spend a lot of time trying to teach our kids that while still being tender, and soft, and gentle. Hearing that story about my nephew, though, inspired me to start playing a little rougher with my daughter.

It horrified Trish, the first time Annabelle came crawling across the room toward me and I knocked her over onto her back. Annabelle squealed with delight, though. I loomed over her, and then (very, very carefully) leaned down to pin her against the floor and rumbled, “Squiiiiish!”

She squirmed and wrestled (and laughed and smiled), and then I pulled away and she screamed for more. It became a regular game for us, and as soon as she started walking I added tripping to the game. I’d squish her for a moment, let her escape, let her get two or three steps away (and picking up speed), then lunge out and grab her ankles.

She’d go crashing to the floor, Trish would gasp in shock, and Annabelle would laugh and laugh as I leaned forward to squish her all over again. It’s still one of her favorite games.

These days she’s bigger, though. She’s grown up, and learned some new skills. She’s been paying attention — to the movies I watch, to the games I play — and I can still remember the day she said, “Daddy, what did you just do to that guy?”

“What guy?” I asked, closing the lid to my monitor.

“The monster guy.”

I thought about it for a moment, and then said, “I knocked him down.” She’d seen that much, anyway. “He was hurting some people, and they asked me to help, so I knocked him down and told him to go away.”

She nodded, accepted that as answer enough, and went on with her day. About half an hour later, I got up to go get a drink from the kitchen, and found her blocking my way.

I blinked at her. “What are you doing?”

She screwed up her face in her best imitation of scary, and said, “I’m gonna knock you down.”

I squared up in front of her, arched an eyebrow menacingly, and said, “Bring it!”

Needless to say, she didn’t have what it took to bring me down. I let her try for a while, then I showed her how it was done. Then I spent the next half hour teaching her karate. That’s our game now. We still play squish from time to time, but we’ve moved up to karate.

She knows how to throw a punch, how to kick, and how to block. She’s got a decent stance, and she can throw an elbow like you wouldn’t believe.

Anytime, without warning, I can aim a punch at her midsection (albeit a slow one) and her first response is to block it. Her second, most of the time, is to say demurely, “No, Dad. We’re not playing karate now. We’re princesses.”

Still, when she feels like fighting, nothing beats karate. Or…it hasn’t yet, anyway. But that may be changing. Last Saturday I was setting up for the photoshoot for my next novel, bringing in props from the car, and she looked up from a puzzle on the coffee table as I came in.

Her eyes lit up, and she jumped to her feet. “Ooh, yay!” she said. “You got a gun! Can I have it?”

Last week I started reviewing some of the novels we read in my Category Fiction class with a pretty brutal panning of our Women’s Fiction samples. Along the way, I mentioned a startling similarity in their plots — not just in those two books, but in all Women’s Fiction novels.

I was genuinely surprised to learn about some of the expectations Women’s Fiction readers bring to the genre. When the professor spelled out the required plot structure in stark detail, it rang shallow and soulless, but that’s the world’s most profitable category by far. They’re clearly doing something right.

Catering to Reader Expectations

That “something” is simple enough, too: they’re catering to reader expectations. When that’s done poorly we sometimes call it “pandering,” (and I called it that in at least one of my papers for the class), but the rest of the time we call it by a more generous name: audience analysis.

That’s something I’ve talked about often. It’s something I recommend to every new writer I talk with, and it’s critical to any kind of effective communication.

A good writer absolutely must spend some time considering where his or her readers are coming from, understand what expectations readers bring with them to the book, and write with those expectations in mind.

Practicing What I Preach

As I said, that’s a principle I preach pretty vociferously, but this course was an education in just how little I practice it. Every book I picked up opened my eyes to unexpected reader expectations concerning at least one of my active writing projects.

I’m not writing any romance novels (and wouldn’t even consider trying), but studying Women’s Fiction shed remarkable light on the romantic subplots I’m deliberately weaving through all four of my series in progress.

In the same way, listing out the specific elements that create tension in mysteries and thrillers — and discussing in class why readers respond to those the way they do — offered a ton of insight for my own suspense novels.

A couple weeks ago, Trish took the kids to Wichita for a weekend and left me home alone. And, no, I’m not talking about my lonely Christmas. This was a few weeks after that.

It was on the calendar as an opportunity for me to get some work. I tend to do that when Trish takes the kids away, whether it’s for the night or for a whole weekend. This time, I had two things on the schedule:

• Pick up my friend Dan from the airport Saturday morning
• And meet with my publication team all day Saturday to develop a publishing process

That left my free Saturday pretty booked up…but my Friday night was wide open. I was getting toward the end of my work day when I got a text message from Dan, who was at a convention in Las Vegas. It read:

Dude, hop a plane to Vegas tonight. I have a plan and need a grease man.

I laughed because, y’know, “hopping a plane to Vegas” isn’t the sort of thing I do. I sent him back my obligatory “lol,” then I packed up my stuff, headed out to my car, and pointed my way home while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my evening.

Just then, a big ol’ Boeing took off right in front of me, curled gracefully through the air, and pushed its way out west. It wasn’t such a surprising sight — as I’ve said before, I write documentation for the FAA, which puts my workplace half a mile from the Will Rogers International Airport.

So while I watched that plane take off and wondered what I was going to do for dinner…I couldn’t help thinking, “Why not?”

I’d dropped him off for his flight out Wednesday, so I had a good guess there might be another going out in about half an hour. I popped over to the airport, pulled into the overnight parking, and headed toward the terminal to see how much this was going to cost.

Halfway to the door, I thought to call Dan. He picked up on the third ring, and said, “What?”

I asked, “How serious were you?”

“About robbing a casino and needing an accomplice?” he said. “None. None serious.”

“Well,” I said, “I was just thinking…I’d need to find out how much it costs to pick up a ticket last-minute, but I could come over for the evening, crash in your room tonight, and we could fly back tomorrow morning.”

He laughed, and it’s no surprise. Like I said, I’m not the adventurous sort. My night was wide open, though, and with all the crazy things I’m doing in my life these days (by which I mean “The Consortium”), hopping a plane to Vegas seemed almost reasonable.

He popped my bubble with one small correction, though. “I’m not flying back in the morning. I come back at nine tomorrow night.”

I stopped where I was, ten feet from the door to the airport. Couldn’t make it. I had an all-day publishing meeting scheduled for tomorrow. And then, standing there, I finally stopped to think through how much it would really cost. I couldn’t afford that! And how much hassle it would be to fly out tonight and fly back tomorrow.

And, really, how much would I get out of the trip? One evening in Vegas? I’d either get one really expensive dinner and then spend the rest of my time there sleeping, or I’d be absolutely wiped out for the next week. I’m not as young as I used to be.

So I turned around, went back to my car, and headed home. I watched the clock tick over, watched it pass the time I knew the plane would be taking off, and felt a deep sense of regret that I hadn’t at least gone those last ten feet and asked.

It’s kind of a sad story. It’s a missed opportunity. But it’s also fun in ways, because I really was that close to having an adventure, and until Dan told me it wouldn’t work, I barely even hesitated.

More than that…my all-day Saturday meeting was a blast. I worked with four amazing artists and we came up with a plan, we accomplished real things and set even bigger things in motion. It sounds like a downer ending — skipping the overnight jaunt to Vegas to spend a Saturday in work meetings — but it’s so much better than that.

My life is an adventure now. My new job’s boring old demands feel a lot more like a party, and my coworkers are some incredible new friends.

I’m playing against type. My life has become surprising, in every way, and I absolutely love it.

I started this week with a brief description of the Category Fiction class I took last fall. One of the big surprises in that story was how much I enjoyed the class.

The class’s merit wasn’t the only thing that caught me off-guard. I’d spent some time dreading all the driving I’d have to do, the scheduling necessary to work a Masters degree into my life…but it had somehow never occurred to me that I’d need to make time for homework.

Making Time to Read

The very first class period brought the reality crashing home, when the syllabus spelled out in dreadful detail the semester’s workload: three big papers, nine little papers, and (as I mentioned) eleven novels in need of reading.

That last one took me most by surprise. The papers didn’t worry me too much. I write all the time. It’s what I do.

The thought of reading a novel a week was more than a little intimidating, though. Over the course of the semester I ended up reading as many novels as I’d read in the previous six or seven years combined.

That’s a pretty dreadful statistic for a novelist. I’d justified it in a handful of ways, mainly by insisting that I spent every bit of reading time I could find on writing instead. I was also reviewing unfinished manuscripts (my own and others’), devouring short-form non-fiction by way of the internet, and maintaining a writing advice blog to help all the novice writers out there trying to find their voice.

With all that on my plate, it was a real challenge just to find time to read the new Pratchett novels when they came out one or two a year. Anything else was just impossible.

Didactic Literature

Of course, the class proved that completely wrong. It took an assignment — an imposed deadline — to drive to me to it, but even facing eleven books on a pretty rigorous schedule I never once had trouble finding the time to finish reading a novel that semester.  And that was on top of a schedule already crammed with the addition of my Master’s studies.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned (even if it is the most depressingly prosaic) was simply that I can make time to read on a regular basis. My other projects and responsibilities are no excuse to leave this aspect out of the pursuit of my art.

Without that kind of constant, wide exposure, everything else I do as a writer suffers. Nothing revealed that to me quite as clearly as two books I really disliked. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about them.

In the fall of 2010, by decree of my graduate advisor and in support of my pursuit of the Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Oklahoma, I was required to take the “elective” course Category Fiction. I was less than thrilled.

From the course description it was clearly a lecture-based, informational class, and I was far more interested in the program’s practical classes:

• Writing the Novel
• Writing the Nonfiction Book, and
• Writing the Screenplay

Worse yet, the course was scheduled mid-day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I knew going into it that I would have to leave work twice a week, drive forty minutes down to Norman, sit through this class for ninety minutes, and then drive back to work — where I’d have to stay late making up the lost time.

I showed up (late) to the first class period dreading the semester that was to follow. That dread lasted for all of five minutes, before I saw past the one-line catalog description to realize what the class really represented.

Over the course of the semester, we read eleven novels across six major categories. Barely half of the class consisted of lecture and all of that focused on intensely practical consideration of the real-world markets for these categories.

The rest of the class was dedicated to discussion of the individual texts, including their merits and their weaknesses. The discussion was often engaging, always enlightening, and a surprising amount of fun.

Instead of a hassle, I came to see the class as one of the highlights of my week — the world’s best book club meeting in the middle of an otherwise-dreary workday. Every meeting of the class made me a better writer, in a lot of different ways.

I want to share some of those experiences with you over the next few weeks. I’ll be starting with a review of the books we read, discussing some general principles on Thursday then talking about specific strengths and weaknesses of the individual titles on Friday.

That should last into mid-February, when I’ll probably take a break to promote Ghost Targets: Expectation, the hotly-anticipated sequel to 2010’s sci-fi thriller Gods Tomorrow.

After that, I’ve got a couple specific writing techniques I learned about for the first time last semester (and will probably be learning about in more detail this spring, as I finally get to take “Writing the Novel” under the same professor). I’ll probably give you several weeks of discussion on those techniques, too, before calling this series done.