Robert McKay: Blog

Language evolves. The English we speak today isn't quite the same as the English of the King James Version, which was perfectly normal in 1611. And that form of English isn't the same as the English of 400 years earlier. For us, Old English is literally a foreign language, even though it is, as the name indicates, a form of English.

Just in my lifetime English - at least American English - has changed. I'm not talking about vocabulary, though there have been changes there (usually, as fads and variations of fads come and go, in the direction of more belligerent, angry English), but about pronunciation and enunciation.

One change has been in the flattening out of long vowels. The long E sound of steel/steal, feel, or real/reel has become a short I - still, fill, and rill. The long A sound of sale/sail, fail, and male has become a short E - sell, fell, and Mel (this last has created some amusement for me - there's a late night radio commercial for a product which the announcer calls "Ageless Mel").

Consonants have also changed. The T following an N has gained dramatically more emphasis than it used to have. Instead of printer and hunter, people are saying prinTer and hunTer (the same is true of the root words, print and hunt). People are pronouncing a D as though it's a T - melted, furled, and printed have become meltet, furlet, and printet (actually the last has become prinTet). And the letter S has really changed. Sometimes people pronounce it as though they're imitating a snake - caress and abscess become caress and abssssssscesssssss - and sometimes they emphasize the S so much that it sounds like a T. For a while there was another late night radio commercial (I work nights, so I hear these things) which advertised a brand of insoles, except the woman reading the copy pronounced the word intsolts.

In 1976 Anne Rice published this exchange:

"We were living in Louisiana then. We'd received a land grant and settled two indigo plantations on the Mississippi very near New Orleans..."
"Ah, that's the accent..." the boy said softly.
For a moment the vampire stared blankly. "I have an accent?" He began to laugh.
And the boy, flustered, answered quickly. "I noticed it in the bar when I asked you what you did for a living. It's just a slight sharpness to the consonants, that's all. I never guessed it was French." (Interview With the Vampire)

Today that exchange is nearly meaningless, and whatever meaning it retains is backwards. In today's American English "a slight sharpness to the consonants" would be the mark of someone who's trained himself almost completely out of the current American accent (though of course Americans only have an accent to non-Americans; to the British queen, for instance, she doesn't have an accent but I do, which is exactly the opposite of how I view it). Sharpness to the consonants - and changes in the pronunciations of the vowels - is how most Americans seem to speak these days.

My characters do not speak that way. They speak as I do, which is the way most Americans, regardless of where they came from, habitually spoke as recently as 20 years ago. I still talk the way everyone did when I was 10, when I was 20, when I was 30...for that matter when I was 40, for although the changes began perhaps 20 years ago, they didn't become pervasive until the past 10 years or so, and possibly an even shorter time (I didn't make it a point to note at the time when the current way of speaking first became current). If you "hear" any of my characters really emphasizing the T in "hunt," or hissing the S in "kiss," or talking about "a still sell" when he means a "steel sale," then you're "hearing" them incorrectly. You need to assume that, unless the story specifically says so, all my characters speak as Joan Lunden did when she was on Good Morning America (and probably still does speak - she's a California native as I am, and roughly of my generation).

Now there are characters in my stories with accents - Yirmeyah Hudson, for instance, who even by Texas standards has a strong accent, or Albuquerque Moreno who when she's engaged in casual conversation sounds like any other black woman (as a side note, it's only in the United States that blacks have a distinct way of speaking; elsewhere in the white world - England, for instance - they sound like everyone else). But thus far I've not had any characters who talk in the self-consciously "trendy" way that has become ubiquitous these days. And unless Darvin Carpenter talks to someone who does, such a person probably won't appear in my fiction. :)

Some people may come into the Carpenter series (the current installment of which is Do Not Despise) out of sequence, and thus not run into every detail about Darvin Carpenter's life (I phrase it thus because we see Cecelia and Darlia, as well as everyone else, through his eyes; I've written one or two pieces in the third person, but most of it's first person narration). I'm not writing for publication, and therefore can dispense with some of the things that are due more to the way publication works than to how people write or read.

One of these things is recapping. I've read authors who in the first few pages synopsize everything that's happened in the character's life up to that book. Others aren't a tad bit more subtle - they scatter such summaries throughout each installment of a series. And others do it in dribs and drabs here and there. I don't.

When in the ordinary course of telling the story Darvin finds it advisable - in accordance with his character and habits - to bring in information from the past, he does so. Otherwise he doesn't. And therefore there may not be, in any given book, his struggles to reconcile the demands of his work with his religious convictions, or his views on disciplining Darlia, or his theology relative to the TULIP, or any other particular thing. If it comes up naturally, he'll talk about it - and if it doesn't, he won't.

And when I put the responsibility on his shoulders, that's not just a figure of speech. I don't know how others write, but for me it's a matter of peering into someone else's life and recording what I see and hear. I am the author, yes - it's my name on the title page (though I don't, in fact, post my title pages, nor my epigraphs). But I can't make my characters do what they don't want to do. If it's not in their nature to do or say a thing, then they don't. I could no more force Cecelia, for instance, to speak an entire paragraph in Darvin's sloppy style than I could use the Sheewash Drive. (If you want to know what I'm talking about, you'll want to read a novella called "The Witches of Karres," by James Schmitz IIRC. I highly recommend it as a piece of humorous science fiction.) She insists on speaking proper English, and I don't possess the strength of will to force her out of that path. If I tried, the result would be wooden, dry, dull, and worth nothing more than the trash.

So if you don't find the piece of information about Darvin's life or thoughts in one story, don't fret - it's probably in another. :)

Today I posted the first four chapters of a new Christian romance called One Flesh (since I don't include the title page, I'll mention that the epigraph is Genesis 2:20-24). I dithered about posting this novel. It's not that I don't like it - I do, not least because it's a fictionalization of how my wife and I met and got married (for the record, we met in late March of 1979, and got married on August 29 of that year). It's that I've had a terrible time making it clear, while at the same time making it fit for public consumption. Precisely because it's my own story, too much of private matters got into the first draft, and I had to rewrite the story so thoroughly that I dubbed the revision Version 2.0. I've since been as ruthless as I can with the story, on two or three separate occasions, but it's always hard for an author to be entirely objective about his own work (OTOH, sometimes the changes editors demand are contrary to the author's style and nature, and to the nature of the work; editors aren't infallible either).

I nearly skipped this one because I'm not entirely confident that I've managed to extrude everything that ought not to be in print. I don't, by this, mean shameful things; I believe the Bible when it says, "Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge." (Heb. 13:4) This verse clearly assumes that married couples will do more in their beds than merely sleep (our society seems to think that couples never just sleep in a bed), and my wife and I are as happily married in the physical sense as in any other, as ought to be the case. No matter what anyone tells you, there is not one single word in the Bible which says that sex is intrinsically wrong; it is the wrong use of sex which the Bible condemns, just as it condemns drunkenness but not alcohol, and blasphemy but not the use of God's name.

Rather, I mean by "everything that ought not to be in print," things that are private. There is nothing sinful in using the toilet, but no one in his right mind makes a public display of it, either in reality or in fiction (though a bowel movement is just as much a natural function as sex, and depicting one would be just as realistic as depicting sex - those who use the realism claim are hypocritical). There are things in everyone's life, married or not, sexually active or celibate, which are rightly private, and I have exerted myself to omit all such things from One Flesh. But I'm not completely certainly that I've achieved my ideal.

I am, therefore, going to list this as an adult book (though these days children quite possibly know more about sex than their parents, both because society and government force such knowledge upon them, and because parents in general - there are exceptions, of course - have abdicated their responsibility to be their children's primary instructors in all things). I don't think that there's anything genuinely objectionable in it, but as Darvin Carpenter says (if you're not reading that series, I suggest you do - it's got more of me in it, it's my primary focus, and the writing is better and more consistently better), it's better to be too careful than not careful enough. :)

Last week I finished both Adown and Unalienable Rights - the first time two books have happened to end on the same day. And so today I'm beginning two new novels.

In the Carpenter series there's Dead and Over, which deals again with Straight, Darvin's friend the thug who worked for him in A Wall of Fire. Here Straight acts according to his criminal nature and habits, and Darvin acts according to his own law-abiding Christian nature and habits.

The next non-Carpenter book is The Walking Wounded, the first romance and the first non-Carpenter book I wrote, and the weakest. First efforts in a new direction, even by a professional author, often show that they're the first, and this one certainly does. Herein a biker from California, newly become a Christian (y'all will remember that while the Carpenter novels have Christians as the main characters, it's the non-Carpenter stuff which is the explicitly Christian fiction), rides into Albuquerque on the run from his former gang and looking for a church. He finds one, and more than that.

For more, read the books. :)

I also want to mention that there's a reason why I don't respond to every comment I receive - or more precisely, various reasons depending on the specific comment. Some are clearly determined that the sender is right and I'm wrong, and not amenable to any other POV; it would be a waste of everyone's time for me to respond to those. Some, even if complimentary, are in the nature of "attaboy" and really don't call for a response. And I've learned that regardless of the nature of the comment, if I reply to it there is almost never any actual conversation - most of my replies go unanswered. That being the case, I only reply when the comment elicits something from me which seems important enough to actually say - if the almost unvarying rule is that those who make comments don't respond to my replies, I can't see replying unless something pops up in my mind that just demands that I say it.

But whether you comment or don't, and whether you engage me in conversation or just comment on my work and ignore any response I may make, I'm glad you read what I write. I hope you enjoy it - what author doesn't? But as long as you're reading, and thinking about what I say (not that I'm all that profound), I'm happy. Keep reading, even if you don't wish to converse with me. :)

Last week when I went to post the latest installments, I found that I only had DOC files available for one of the current stories (I disremember which one, now), and thanx to my computer situation I couldn't, therefore, post the new chapters of that story until today. I've now done that, but I need to let y'all know that next week I may not post anything at all.

You see, we're moving on Monday the 28th, and in any event all the library branches here in Albuquerque will be closed that day. The new place is in a better neighborhood, but the bus service won't be as convenient, and so I don't know that I'll be able to get to the library at all on Tuesday, even if the hassle of the day after moving in would allow it. I may, therefore, not be able to post anything until the first Monday in June. :)