Rejection Collection

Here's a great post from the blog of Stephen Parrish. It basically lists a number of famous authors and works, and the ludicrous number of times many of their works were rejected before going on to become massive bestsellers. So if you've got a nice little pile of rejection letters, as I do, don't let that alone stop you. Maybe your prior works just weren't quite ready for prime time, maybe the industry just wasn't quite ready for your book, or maybe it was just dumb luck that passed you over. There's nothing to do but keep at it, and if you start feeling too down on yourself for being rejected, just look at Stephen's list again. You're in excellent company.

On Outlines and Revising

I saw this post over at The Incurable Disease of Writing today. It's called "I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw." The post itself is a reaction to an interview in The Writer, and I have to say that I could not agree more with the original interviewee or Missy from The Incurable Disease. I don't have much to add to her post; you should just read it for yourself.

I will say, though, that I treat anything as an absolute. I do plenty of research and character design and worldbuilding and so on -- both before I ever start writing and consciously as I go -- but my initial outline is never even close to how the book comes out in the end. The characters always take me in unexpected new directions, and new ideas occur to me all throughout the writing process. And yes, I find it impossible to move on if my previously-written chapters have not been edited to some fair degree. Sometimes there's nothing to do but just plunge ahead with nothing but a long-term plan, good worldbuilding, and strong characters -- in such situations, the characters themselves will almost invariably show you what their story will be. And, you know what? I think that's how important parts of the most unique stories come about.

Mozy

A few weeks ago, a client told me about a program called Mozy. It was so inexpensive ($5/month) that I signed up right away, and I've discovered that this program is really a terrific value. It was recently featured in PC Magazine, I'm told, but I haven't subscribed to that particular publication for a number of years now (too consumer-oriented; I've gotten so I much prefer TechRepublic).

I did a popular post on Data Loss and Backup Solutions a few months ago, and I think that this particular product is an excellent solution to the backup issues I outlined before. This is very similar to the more-expensive tools from Connected TLM that I have used in the past, but this tool is much simpler and more cost-effective. They even have a version that is completely free for up to 2GB of data, which should be more than enough if all you're looking to back up is your writing materials. I have a a lot more data than that to back up (58GB for now), so I'm doing the paid account. If you don't already have a backup solution (or aren't happy with the one you do have), check this one out and see what you think.

Lucien's Story

I've been finding myself very stuck with ALDEN RIDGE lately, and this past week I've hit a point where I realized I just needed to set ALDEN RIDGE aside for a bit. A number of life events, some of which I mentioned recently and others of which I don't care to mention right now, have certainly helped me fall into a non-writing rut, but even back in early May when things were easier I was having trouble with this particular story. It's told from the perspective of multiple protagonists, and though it is "dark fantasy" it is still more than a little off the beaten path for my normal writing genres -- that's both good and bad. Variety is good, but being in unfamiliar territory has been slowing me up and giving me a lot of issues to consider that just wouldn't come up in a genre/writing style I am more used to writing in.

A new idea for a story set in the world of THE GUARDIAN has recently come to mind, and in light of these troubles with ALDEN RIDGE I've decided to pursue that for a bit. It's actually something of a prequel to THE GUARDIAN, and adds a number of exciting new elements to the mythology of that world. Right now I don't have a true title for the book, as it is still in pretty early form, so I'm just referring to it as LUCIEN'S STORY. Lucien is the protagonist, who lives about in Ivoria about 10,000 years before Sean Sunderland (the protagonist of THE GUARDIAN) is born.

Now, this isn't to say that I'm giving up on ALDEN RIDGE. It will take a whole lot more planning before I can even start writing LUCIEN'S STORY. I'll be working on both books at once, dividing my attention however my attention wants to be divided at the time. Right now I'm a bit burned out on ALDEN RIDGE, and LUCIEN'S STORY is still new and exciting, so I'm solely focused on the latter. I have a feeling that will change over the next few weeks, as I rekindle my enthusiasm for writing through this new work. Once I've got a little bit of distance from ALDEN RIDGE, I'm not as likely to feel like all my eggs are in that one basket, or that I'm in some sort of rut or that it's bad that I'm off doing something outside my usual specialty.

I've been warring with myself about making ALDEN RIDGE more traditional-fantasy-like, or adding more elements of Science Fantasy, but that's counter to my original vision for the story and I keep having to make myself not do that. I want this story to been broken-earth fantasy, with some elements of magic but not in a reassuring way. This is a world of fear and supernatural darkness, and frankly it can be hard for me to exclusively inhabit that world for months on end. If you were to pick up the book, it would only take you a few days at most to finish it, and there wouldn't be any problem. In most respects, writers like Stephen King are far darker than I am, anyway, and it's not like that has hurt their readership. But as a writer, while I truly want to produce a work like ALDEN RIDGE, it's not my "bread and butter" and so I find my thoughts turning to my world of Ivoria again. Indulging my hunger for visiting Ivoria should actually make it a lot easier for me to finish ALDEN RIDGE in a timely manner, with all its original darkness and spareness intact.

Hopefully the two stories will feed off each other -- when I hit a block with one, I can just divert attention to the other. I've read of various professional authors who do this, Orson Scott Card chiefly among them. I've long thought that this is how I would like to handle things if I were writing full time; writing something off-beat (for me) while at the same time continuing to service my core worlds. I hadn't thought I would do this unless I was able to make writing my full-time job, but seeing as I'm not writing much at all these days, I feel like this tactic will get me out of the rut I've fallen into with ALDEN RIDGE.

Of course, now I'm tempted to tell you more about LUCIEN'S STORY, but there's quite a lot I can't say. I will say that this story tells of the beginnings of Ashmedai, the lord of the demons that Sean Sunderland struggles against in THE GUARDIAN, and also Arc, the vampire who aids Sean. LUCIEN'S STORY is actually set back when Ashmedai and Arc were both human, before demonkind had even appeared. I also get to explore how the links between Ivoria and our world (the real world) first came about, back when Ivoria was free and still fairly advanced, and yet people in our world were barely learning agriculture. The story will be told in third person, but will follow Lucien about as closely as THE GUARIDAN follows Sean Sunderland. The other two most notable characters in this book will be Morgan Reed and Vincent Valerian, Lucien's two closest friends and companions.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Fear not, there will be no spoilers here. I know that it seems like everyone in the world is reading Harry Potter just now, but I haven't yet had the heart to look out into the news and blogosphere to find out what everyone else thinks about this last installent. Truthfully, I don't really care what anyone else thinks: to me, this was the last great book in a great series, and Rowling's best yet (The Goblet of Fire and The Half Blood Prince were previously my favorites of her work).

The day before the last book's release, I saw blog post from a reviewer at The Guardian, and they were really smashing Rowling's writing in prior books. The only specific complaint leveled at her, however, was her use of saidisms, which is currently very un-trendy. Personally, I think if that's the most serious complaint you can give to someone's work, that's really saying something.

But I know how people can get when something is this popular. I actually avoided reading the Harry Potter books until the fourth one came out (and then I started at the beginning and read all of them). I myself tend to think that anything wildly popular can't be good (and I'm often right), and so it took years of prodding by my wife and other members of my family before I consented to read the books. But once I did -- wow. I'm a huge fan of Rowling's genre, and yet I've never read anything like her books before.

I was less captivated by the first three books in the series simply because they are not as deep as the later ones, and because they are clearly aimed at a younger audience. Not to say that I wasn't captivated to some degree, or that I didn't enjoy them, but for me they failed to reach the level of personal connection that the later books evoked. Reading the Deathly Hallows, I found myself utterly in its grip, and the sadness that I feel at its close has, for me, only ever been evoked by three series before: the original Ender Quartet, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Dark Is Rising Sequence. Maybe The Chronicles of Prydain as well, but it has been a long time since I read those books.

Were there things that could have been handled better in Rowling's books? Yes. Undoubtedly, yes. There are things that could have been handled better in all human works, no matter how venerated. With older written works, such as Shakespeare's plays, we may be too culturally removed to see the seams in the writing, but I feel certain that the great authors and playwrights saw them in their own works. What author doesn't see the seams, however minor, in even the greatest that they have created? The only way authors become great is by seeing those flaws, and overcoming them.

Whatever her detractors may say, whatever they may point out as failings in her style, it is clear to me (and many others) that J.K. Rowling will be remembered as one of the great masters. There is a universality, a depth, and a poetry to what she has created that I am certain will endure. I look forward to sharing these books with my children someday, and I am certain they will find it curious how their parents remember the times when the entire world was caught up by the tales of Harry Potter all at once.

These are some of the happier thoughts that I have now that I have followed Harry's story to it's amazing close. These are the thoughts that battle with my feelings of loss, now that yet another great tale has come to an end. Whenever a series like this concludes, it is as if all breath is stolen from my body, and life seems shallow and pale. It is as if someone very close to me has died, quite frankly, because I know that I will never read anything new about Harry or his friends ever again.

If there is one true complaint that I can leverage against the end of this series, it is that I would have liked a little more closure between the last chapter and the epilogue. I would have liked a little more chance to say goodbye. But, after all, it isn't really goodbye, is it? Harry's world will live forever, or at least longer than I will, and I can experience his first day at Hogwarts any time I like simply by going to my bookshelf.

And yet, right now, all I am conscious of is that his world is now closed to me. All I have left are moving photographs, a pensieve full of rich memories. In a few days, or perhaps weeks, I will be able to feel that this is enough. But at the moment, I must feel that something very special has been taken from me. So bravo, Ms. Rowling, for in my mind this is the greatest achievement of all literature: You have created a world so compelling, so robust, that readers like me find their very selves entangled in the stories you weave. Harry Potter has changed me, like so many others, and for the better. My greatest hope, not just as a writer but as a human being, is that I may someday create something that will do the same.

Blogger Reflection Award

Many thanks to the very humorous and insightful Stephen Parrish for tagging me with the Blogger Reflection Award, which is, as he notes, not so much an award as a gesture. Still, it's nice to hear that one's blog has been of value to someone (even if it's not updated as often as one would like recently).

Now it's my turn to tag, so here goes (in no particular order)...

- Stephen Parrish himself is the funniest and has the most-interesting-topics-I-wouldn't-otherwise-read-about.
- Anne Mini is the most knowledgeable person on everything writing that I know. And she shares her knowledge for free! Amazing!
- Colleen Gareau (through her blog) has taught me more about Canada than I ever knew before, including an number of things about Canadian politics and civil rights that I might never have encountered before (since I live in the USA).
- Karen Mahoney (who has only recently left livejournal for Blogger, so has few archives at the moment) is by far the most refreshing aspiring writer's blog that I've found. She undergoes the same trials and tribulations as the rest of us, but her posts generally try to find the positive in these things, and she is frequently insightful. Just check out her recent post on Writer's Block if you aren't convinced.
- Jamie Boud is the only diary-style blog (about nothing in particular) that I read. It's a really good read (and the pictures are routinely excellent as well).
- Rachel Vincent is the most interesting new-author blog that I read at present. It's exciting and informative to see how her career is progressing.

Of course, there are many other blogs that I read and enjoy, time permitting, but these are just a few highlights (out of those that don't belong to agents).

Wherefore art I?

No, I'm not dead. A confluence of life events this past month has pretty much wiped me out, though, so that blogging has been a bit less of a priority. I don't care to go into specifics, but at any rate the normality of life has been interrupted by a few family medical emergencies, several large batches of new work at my day job all at once, and also the Independence Day holiday and the attending family visits. Some good stuff, some bad stuff, a large amount of stress from various items, a smaller amount of relaxation to recuperate.

That's largely what the art I've been doing over the past few weeks was all about; relaxing my brain. As a writer, you'd think that I would find writing relaxing, that I would find my solace from the world into escaping into the worlds that I create. I suppose that's partly true; certainly, if I stray away from writing too long, I get really antsy to get back to it. But in truth, I don't think that any career (or hobby, or anything else) should dominate one's entire life, or all of one's leisure time. That seems to be the impression that a lot of writers give on the Internet: that to be a successful writer, you must let writing consume virtually your entire life.

I posit that this is not true. Certainly, you must be prepared to let writing consume virtually your entire life on occasion--say, during revisions, or at the end of the novel when things are really flowing fast or a deadline is looming. That seems quite reasonable to me. However, keeping that mad pace (or anything close to it) up at all times seems to me to be, well -- mad. As writers it is expected that we have stories to tell, things to write about. In order for that to be true, I should think it an obvious corollary that writers must thus have lives of their own; after all, if most of their life experience comes from reading and writing alone, they aren't likely to produce much that is startlingly original.

Perhaps some of you will read this as a long-winded excuse for the fact that I have not written anything new for about two weeks now. Feel that way if you must, but someday I hope you'll find that you are able to take long breaks of your own. It will do you good, in any endeavor; any ruts you were in before the break, you'll tend to break out of. I've also been doing a lot more reading over the past few weeks, since I haven't been so busy writing. Harry Potter has been the order of the day for most of this time, as I'm rereading years four through six in preparation for the fairly imminent release of the closing seventh book. Despite the differences that some take with her style, I must say that J.K. Rowling really is an incredible writer and storyteller. You might not think that there's much I can learn from Harry Potter for a broken-earth zombie novel, but there certainly is . . . .

At any rate, before my life-imposed writing hiatus, I had had a number of breakthroughs on my manuscript. Aside from greatly expanding my second chapter, I've also now greatly expanded my first. The new opening that I have provides a little more depth, and is significantly less teaser-ish. I'm very excited about it. At some point in the next month or so I'll post the new versions of both chapters on my website, but I'm going to wait until after I've let them sit a bit longer, and until I've had a chance to get a bit more outside editorial feedback.

I've also made it about two thirds of the way through chapter 10, so that's some progress there. The planning and writing of the first chapter additions was a major hangup for me for a couple of weeks, so that really stunted my other progress as I wrote three different new openings before I found one that I liked at all (and that one I loved). I've had about enough editing for at least a few weeks, at any rate, so this week I'm going to get back in the saddle and write some new content--finish off chapter 10 for sure, and hopefully get a good ways into chapter 11.

So that's the news from my part of the world; I apologize for not responding to comments as much as I normally would have lately, and for not posting comments on everyone else's blogs. It's just too time consuming at the moment. I am still reading all my regular blogs, however, and I've been enjoying hearing how all of you are getting along (quite well for the most part--bravo!). Until next time . . .

27,315 / 95,000 (28.8%)

Numerous New Art Pieces

I've been doing some new artwork this weekend and this evening, in some new programs. The first two below were done in the (free!) Personal Learning Edition of Vue 6, a pretty incredible program that I'm just now discovering. Those forest scenes that were such a bugbear for me in Bryce are incredibly easy in Vue--and the atmospheric effects of Vue beat even Terragen 0.9, which is saying something. The latter two (abstract) images were done in Apophysis, an awesome freeware fractal flame generator. I actually did a fair bit of post-render editing in Photoshop for both of those images, but I never would have been able to create effects like that by hand alone. If you're into digital art, I highly recommend you take a look at both these programs!

Here are the new pics:

PS: I'm also on deviantART now.

Writing Bloopers

Urban Fantasy author Rachel Vincent has an interesting post today on writing bloopers. Her homophones are pretty amusing in particular. I haven't ever had such a blooper go out to anyone else other than my wife, fortunately, because she's an excellent editor and almost always sees my work before anyone else. That said, my wife has caught several really funny issues in the past:

Partway though writing THE GUARDIAN, I decided to change it from third person limited to first person. This was fine, but I manually had to go back and make a large number of changes in the three chapters that I had written at the time. One of the few that I missed resulted in: "I finished brushing his teeth, and spit out his toothpaste."

Also, sometimes when I'm editing I accidentally wind up splicing several sentences or sentence fragments together. Does this happen to anyone else? It usually happens when I get several good ideas in a row, and I'm rushing to get them all down before any leak away. At any rate, I wound up with one sentence in an early draft of THE GUARDIAN that read: "Which I what I had been studying for to pass."

STAR WARS Fans hate STAR WARS?

Yep, you read that right. Check out this article at Jive Magazine if you're curious. This is somewhat how I feel about the series (given the horrible prequel trilogy), although I love the entire original trilogy and think most of the video games are fine. I don't have any plans to read any of the books, though -- maybe someday I'll try one, if my reading list mysteriously shrinks to nothing and I can't think of anything else.

But really, I've noticed this for a long time: it seems like STAR WARS fans definitely adore the various ideas posited by the franchise, but hate how many parts of the stories actually progress and are executed. It's interesting to me, then, how enthralled so many are by the series if this is true. Perhaps this makes STAR WARS the ultimate "high concept" story, then, if this is true, because it is in fact so high concept that it can withstand any hackneyed story that is actually attached to it. Either way, there's something indefinably great about STAR WARS, and the feeling of magic and adventure it elicits is nearly unparallelled -- and yet so much of the "true believer" fans' reactions are still decidedly negative.

That's interesting, and also unfortunate. I think it boils down to plotting, personally, and a few bad choices in subject matter (Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks, Midichlorians, etc). Also it seems like internal consistency is often sacrificed for that which is most dramatic in the moment (see the JIVE article for good examples of this). These are mistakes that any writer would normally get castrated over by fans, and it's also the sort of thing that would probably keep a debut novel from making it into the market at all in today's publishing climate.

It's funny, because looking at STAR WARS can provide so many good lessons for writers on what not to do -- and yet at the same time, it has those indefinable qualities that we all strive for in our own writing (and which so few published books even accomplish). How does one create that sense of magic? Rich-yet-archetypal characters like Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Luke, Leia, Han, and Yoda? If people hate aspects of the writing so much, why is it that they still love these characters so much? Not to mention all the background of aliens, exotic planet locations, strange technology, and so on. How can a story frustrate and captivate people at the same time?

If you've been reading, thinking I have a suggested answer at the end, I apologize. I don't. My only hope is that I'm someday able to write something that captivates an audience in the way STAR WARS captivated me, and yet do so without frustrating them at the same time. Tall order. But that's why most of us write fiction, isn't it? Because we've been captivated by stories we've heard in the past, and we want to add our own voices to the mix in hopes of captivating other readers with our own new stories.

My list of books, movies, and even video games which have powerfully captivated me is hundreds long, and comprises many different reasons and ways in which I was captivated. I write because, having been touched this way by so many other works, I can't not. Each story I write energizes me with the hope that it will touch someone else in some meaningful, powerful way. I write because I can't not.

Keynotes

Anne Mini recently made a very interesting post on keynotes, or book concepts, as part of her excellent ongoing Book Marketing 101 series. I highly suggest you check it out. The rhetorical question style of keynote is definitely not something to try on literary agent Nathan Bransford, who is well known to loathe rhetorical questions, but for my own keynote that's the style I chose. This keynote certainly won't be in my hook or query letter, but as a one-liner to pique someone's interest (or get them to ask about my full hook) it might be just the ticket.

Here's my keynote for ALDEN RIDGE:

What would you do if you had to choose between your daughter's soul and the life of every other living person you knew?

My Longest Render Time Ever

Whew, this was an interesting rendering. It took me an unusual number of tries to get the trees the way that I wanted, and to get the perspective right for the camera. Once all the models were in place, I realized something surprising -- this scene had over 25 million polygons! (That's an incredibly excessive amount.)

The reason for the high polygon count was simply the number of foreground trees, of course, and the three detailed terrains that make up this image. Worse yet, I had decided that volumetric atmosphere was needed in this scene in order to really get the right sky/fog effects.

Well, I feel like the end effect was worth it, but all of this conspired to make this--by far--my longest render time ever for a single scene: 34 hours and 28 minutes. Yikes!

To add insult to injury, once the render was complete I discovered that the 2D background trees (on the ridge) had experienced a clipping problem during the super-long render, and there were ugly brown boxes obscuring a large part of the ridge. I thought about trying to do a partial re-render of the scene, but there's not a graceful way to do that at high resolution. So instead, I had to spend about an hour in Photoshop, carefully editing out the glitches by hand. I think the result was actually quite good. But one thing's for sure--I don't plan on doing any more scenes of this level of model/sky complexity any time soon!

More Renderings

I've added four new images to my 10th King ablum. This is the first work that I've done since upgrading to Bryce 6.1, and also includes my first Hexagon 2 work as well. I'm pretty pleased with the results.

An incredible deal.

So, it turns out that ownership of Bryce, one of the main 3D rendering programs that I use, has changed hands from Corel to DAZ Productions. I've been using Corel's last version (5.0) for years now, but DAZ has put out two major releases since the version I had been using. Turns out that the first of those versions, 5.5, is now offered completely for free. If you ever thought you might like to get into 3D landscaping, here's a great chance. Additionally, through the 30th of June DAZ has all of their Bryce content on sale for incredible discounts. You can actually upgrade their free 5.5 release to the later 6.1 release for only $20, which is ludicrous. Normally this sort of software is $100 at least; I think they are trying to increase their audience.

On an unrelated note, if you haven't tried Google Sketchup, you might like that as well. It also has a free version, and is even easier to get into than Bryce. Sketchup is particularly useful for modeling objects or architecture, whereas Bryce is more about landscapes, trees, water, and atmospheres/skies.

New Art Online

As part of the rollout of my new art gallery system, I've added a lot of new content to my gallery. Whereas on Picassa I had only ten galleries, in the new system I've now got seventeen main galleries and sixteen sub-galleries. In all, there are now 399 pieces in my online collection -- that's a lot more representative of the work that I've been doing over the last nine years.

Of particular note is a new album called 10th King. This is my latest album, and is still a work in progress. I haven't been doing much art since third quarter 2006, so I was also really pleased to recently produce these:

New Art Gallery System

One of the other new things I'm doing now that I'm running my website with PHP is implementing an all-new art gallery system. As much as I liked Picassa, the new PHP-based SPGM tool that I'm using is much more flexible (if you have prior programming knowledge). I've had to make a number of extensions and changes to SPGM to make it work the way I want, but I think the result is very nice. The new gallery system allows me to do hit tracking on the image pages, add comments to individual images, and more. Before I had no idea if anyone was even going into my gallery at all, or how much anyone looked at. It's also really nice to be able to add little explanations or background notes to each image.

Also nice is the ability to have albums within albums. Many of my albums now have sub-albums that have the lesser-quality images available, but less prominent. This is helpful because there are some legitimately interesting images that fall under that category, but I want to have only my better work showing in the main galleries.

A More Dynamic Website

Well, I've been thinking for a while about switching to a more dynamic website platform than shtml, and now I've finally done it. Over this past weekend I finally made the changeover to PHP. PHP isn't a language I've ever worked with, oddly, and a little bit of the syntax (string concatenation in particular) seemed strange to me. I know about twelve other programming languages, so it's a little unusual that something seems that syntactically different to me when it comes to basic operators.

At any rate, you can see the immediate benefit of the changeover to PHP in the image on the sidebar on the main page. It now cycles through a series of photos taken by my wife, rather than always just showing the same one, so I think that adds a bit of freshness to the mix. I have more complex additions planned, but one thing at a time, right?

Updated look.

So, the look of the blog/website has once again been altered somewhat. I'm gradually carving out the end look that I want. This time there's less white space, which I think ultimately makes it more visually interesting. I tried out a couple of different schemes, but ultimately settled on warm tans for the periphery colors; I think that's significantly more inviting than before. Nothing earth-shattering here, but I think the look has definitely improved.

What's the longevity of blogs?

Today I found this interesting post over at TechRepublic. From the post:

Security expert and tech curmudgeon Bruce Sterling famously quipped at this year’s South-by-Southwest conference that “I don’t think there will be that many [blogs] around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

Interesting. But I agree more with "The Trivia Geek," the author of the post, who puts forth his own theory on why blogs will, in fact, survive. There probably won't be nearly so many blogs, since those participating purely because of blogs' current fad status will likely move on, but good blogs will likely always remain until another tool comes along that is better able to "let writers write."

My new hook.

Nine years have passed since the undead ended civilization, and now all that remains are small bands of survivors huddling in isolated towns. Ex-doctor Darrell Williams lives with his four-year-old daughter Lela and three other survivors in an abandoned electronics factory. Others weather the assaults of the relentless undead in the nearby ruins of Alden Ridge, but Darrell hasn’t been able to enter any town without suffering a panic attack since his wife Mary was murdered. Yet when his tiny community begins to undergo a nightmarish transformation, Darrell is forced to stray from the factory’s shelter.

Darrell knows he is Alden Ridge’s only hope, for he alone has seen this before -- he and Lela are the sole survivors of the collapse of nearby Stantonsburg. He must quickly discover why the land rots, why animals are becoming supernatural aberrations, and why the townspeople are undergoing the most terrifying changes of all -- despite the risk that saving every other living person he knows may mean surrendering Lela to the dark force that touched her when Stantonsburg fell. As Alden Ridge descends into chaos, he frantically searches for a way to save both his daughter and the town.