Robert J. Sawyer frets that the full-time scifi novelist will be extinct in a decade. Why? Book sales, those internets, etc. There’s a funny moment where he blames the death of Flashforward (the TV series based on his book) on people downloading it and not on the series being terrible, maligned by critics, detested by viewers. I guess he can’t really say that sort of thing. Then he says that really ambitious, complex works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy can’t really be done on a part-time basis. Maybe, maybe not. There are numerous examples of people who believe so much in the power or worth of their projects that they bring them to fruition under the most adverse circumstances. (Then he mentions his WWW trilogy in the same breath as KSR’s majestic Mars trilogy, which, sorry, no.)

Then Scalzi rebuts that Sawyer’s only fretting about a very small percentage of writers. Only a very few, regardless of genre, regardless of point in time, have made a living at writing. Huh. Now that I think about it, wasn’t Poe the first person to make a living from his writing? That would mean that Austen, Defoe, Milton wrote part-time, or as a hobby. Melville wrote everything in the second half of his career while working in a customs office. T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land while working in a frikking bank. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov under the most penurious poverty. It seems that if you have inspiration and passion, then you will make it happen. Perhaps Sawyer is worried because he doesn’t have the inspiration or passion to keep writing if he can’t do it full-time.

(Well. That’s not exactly fair - after all, he made it to the big time, back in the 80s. He had to have been  struggling writer once, working on his lunch breaks or whatever. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Continuing on this tangent, there are plenty of writers who claimed that they wrote only for money and would quit if they had enough, or couldn’t make any more - Jack London, for one. To myself, and most writers I think, writing is a thing we do because we like to do it, and we’d do it anyway. There’s a lovely Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free”, which seems like a reaction to file sharing - “Everything is free now/ that’s what they say/ everything we’ve ever done/ they’re gonna give it away”. Then, “I can get a tip jar/ gas up the car/ maybe make a little change/ down at the bar/ because we’re gonna do it anyway/ even if it doesn’t pay.” Yesssss, thinks I. It’s a simple affirmation of her love for her art form.

Cultures do require excess wealth to produce art, but perhaps we overestimate the amount of excess wealth required. It’s not essential, for example, to have an elite of full-time novelists pushing our prose forward. Primitive hunter-gatherers living at a subsistence level had their cave paintings and their oral traditions. It’s the human impulse to create, to make narratives as a tool for understanding the world or enlivening our experience here, and I’m not at all worried that impulse will go away; simply that the model of a few full-time novelists (representing the very top stratum of novelists, each one resting on top of a hundred dayjobbers) can’t survive. That doesn’t bother me. No mistake: I would love to be a full-time novelist. It’s the one thing I’m good at, the one thing I want to do. But I don’t expect it, and I won’t be devastated if it doesn’t come to pass. I like to think I know better than to build my life plans around the whims of indifferent, overwhelmed New York editors and indifferent, overwhelmed audiences. Maybe Sawyer doesn’t realize this because he’s been a pro for so long, but the traditional publishing model is broken, broken, broken, and it must change to survive; or maybe he does realize this, and he’s worried because he doubts his ability to change with it.

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Videlicet, the novel proceeds apace. I’m so very close to wrapping this up. That carries with it the normal sense of triumph that comes with completing any lengthy work, a work that takes multi-months, or “polymonths” to complete. I could say that I began this novel in March, when I started this draft, but it is more accurate to say that I began it in January, when the idea occurred to me and I wrote out the notes; but it would be more accurate still to say that I began it in 2006, when I wrote one-third of an egregious first draft, now scrapped, but nonetheless providing the raw genetic material that would become this draft; and it would be most accurate of all to say I began it in a Waffle House in 2005, tossing around ideas with Joel, and this came up: “Maybe, like, there’s a street urchin thief-type character, and a guy who owns a zeppelin, and they have adventures and stuff.”

The idea has gone through a nonillion iterations since then; I have taken the skeleton of the “street urchin with a heart of gold” cliché and mangled it, forcing it into unnatural positions until, I hope, one can no longer recognize its original state. I have taken the skin of the “band of adventurers and misfits” cliché and crafted it into a variety of household items and fashionable summer garments until that, too, is unrecognizable. I hope. Most stories begin with archetypes; the goal is to move on from those.

So, to digress, this story has been in the pressure cooker of my brain for a long time, and I will be delighted, nay, relieved to have it geyser soupily forth. I expect to report my success within six days. Possibly sooner. Then I can get on with this shambling, makeshift charade that humans call “life”.

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I didn’t get much work done today, because this morning my mind exploded with possibilities.

Tobias Buckell’s blog is in my morning RSS diet (even though I don’t like his books very much), so I read his latest entry, about an attack piece from Publisher’s Weekly on JA Konrath. Who’s that? Some writer. Never heard of him. But he’s the kind of guy you should know about, because he’s making almost $500 a day selling self-published e-books online.

I spent the morning reading through his supremely encouraging blog and got his story: he spent forever breaking into traditional publishing, amassing over 500 rejections, writing and rewriting many many novels before he finally got published. His initial sales were okay, and then worse than okay, until, as happens to too many writers, publishers started passing. Not wanting his books to go to waste, he stuck ‘em online, sold ‘em on Amazon for the Kindle at low, low prices. And now he’s rolling in dough.

He’s often described as an outlier by other novelists and publishers, something that not everyone can do, and, yeah, that’s true. Your book needs to  be good. It needs to have an eye-catching cover, and you need to work to promote it. He also prices his books incredibly cheaply. Many ebooks produced by major companies sell, incredibly, in the $6-12 range. JA Konrath prices his at $2-3 and makes up for it with volume - volume and the amazing 70% royalties Amazon pays.

Think about that. 70%. Most traditional publishers pay the author a criminal 15% - granted, 15% of $20 or so. But $2 is the “Well, why not?” range. More people are likely to try your stuff, and advertise through word of mouth. If it’s good, of course.

Another criticism against Konrath is that he already had a fanbase before he tried e-publishing, so he didn’t have to get noticed amongst the sea of dreck. Maybe. Certainly that wouldn’t hurt. But here on his blog he talks to Karen McQuestion (great name); she began with no prior publications, no website, nothing, and in nine months sold 30,000 ebooks. Damn.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s spent any time looking at the procedure of getting published traditionally that the traditional system is decrepit, obsolete, slow, and maddeningly unfair. My novel has been stuck in slush for sixteen months now. It passed the first round, quite quickly, and went on to round two, where it would take “quite a while” to make a decision. Sixteen months and counting. No one has this kind of time, but publishers think nothing of sticking someone’s work in a stack and ignoring it for a couple of years. Oh, and don’t you dare submit anywhere else at the same time - that wouldn’t be fair to the publisher. Jesus.

And then, if I were lucky enough to get accepted, I could wait another year or two for editing, layout, printing, and finally distribution, when it fits into their schedule. And then I’d be on my way to 15% royalties. Great. In my recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I noted how few of my favorite authors had books on the shelves - which are physically limited, after all - and how much dreck was on the shelves with them, and how was good stuff supposed to stand out?

Currently e-books only represent 6% of all book sales. But, as Konrath points out, the e-reader market is nowhere near saturation. Lots of people are buying ipads, iphones, etc. etc. Many markets, many illimitable electronic bookshelves to fill.

Konrath actually gives away his books for free on his webpage. He encourages piracy (good publicity). No DRM on his stuff. Spread the word, spread your books.

It’s powerful, it’s democratic, it’s good news for authors. It may be the actualization of POD. Print-on-demand, of course, is rarely ever profitable because you still have to put the books on paper. Yes, it’s democratic, anyone can do it, but the cost of physically printing the books put them into a prohibitive range for many people - who wants to pay $25 for a poorly printed paperback? $2 for a digital, though - well, why not?

Workers control the means of production!

More:

Some writers view this as a means to an end. Boyd Morrison’s books did so well on Kindle that Simon & Schuster offered him a deal, and now he’s a “real” author. John Scalzi gave away “Old Man’s War” for free on his website for years, until it got enough buzz for Tor to pick up; now all his books are published traditionally. He says he wouldn’t advise the giving-away-for-free method as a way to break in. He also came out against self-publishing in an amusing and long blog post that I can’t be bothered to look up right now - basically, you self-pub, you hire your own editor and artist, spend a lot of time on marketing and junk that your agent is supposed to do for you, so much time that you can’t write on your own. Nice. Great. Yes, that’s true, if you’re a freaking professional author already. For those of for whom writing, sadly, is a side gig, for those of us whom the agents reject (if they even bother to answer letters), we’ve already got stacks of books doing nothing, being read by no one at any price. Why not? Well, why not?

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Proceeds apace. 25,500 words. I can’t wait for you to read it. (For $11.95 paperback or whatever.)

It is both a challenge and an easement to write something plot-driven. Papillon was episodic, picaresque, Khatima was - ah, let’s say, “character-driven” - but this book, which I was not a good enough writer to finish four years ago, is what you may describe as a “nonstop roller coaster ride of thrills and chills.” There are points A and Z and twenty-four points to hit in between. Ordering those points was a challenge, and there will certainly arise further problems as yet unconsidered; I’ll screw those bridges up when I get to them, eh wot? But for now I know where the plot is going, I know just what to write next. I filled a notebook with notes of excruciating detail, and that preparation is paying off; witness last year’s Piccolet, an attempt to write a novel with no preparation whatsoever; yes, let’s say that it was an improvisatory approach to writing, an attempt to infuse literature with the quality of jazz, to let the pony of creativity run unbridled and poop where it may; let us say that, rather than it was the product of laziness and inadequate foresight. Yes, much better.

Anyway. A challenge to plot, but easy to write once that challenge is overcome. When there are things to be done, the words spill out. My plot does not seem terribly complex nor is it terribly original. But it does what I need it to do. I am satisfied with it. Were it a lover, I would cook eggs for it the morning after - but not biscuits.

Today I wrote about horrible people doing horrible things. I tried to consider how one can be virtuous in a world that tries to crush virtue. Then I wasn’t sure I had succeeded, so I had a naked woman shoot off a man’s fingers.

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Well! Well indeed!

We’re back from vacation. Two months is a long time to brush your teeth with bottled water. We ate biryani - or is it briyani? - in Singapore. Drank a Singapore Sling, too. Swam in waterfalls in Malaysia. We explored a shipwreck in Thailand. We violated immigration law (also in Thailand). We kayaked raging rapids in Laos. I learned things about raging rapids the hard way, namely rapids = rocks, and they are not to be charged at full speed in hopes of doing a wicked sweet jump, or whatever I was thinking.

I read a lot, wrote a lot, wrote the notes to an entire novel, in fact, which I’m writing now. I’ve got less than two months to write it, too, before we return to the states and my writing schedule goes all cattywumpus. To accomplish this I must write 2000 words a day. The only reason this is remotely possible is because the novel is thoroughly plotted, outlined to a depth of five levels - that’s where you use lower-case roman numerals, bitches! I’m exuberant because I’ve never been there before. This novel is outlined so minutely because I wrote about a quarter of it before, in 2006. I had no experience and no concept of writing and no discipline and good ideas turned to shit. Now I’m a million words older and ready to take another crack at it. It is good to scratch long-festering sores and release the baby spiders of creativity within.

Anyway, the novel is four days and 8700 words long. It’s dynamite. It’ll be a challenge for me because it balances multiple points of view and narrative threads. The plot is fairly straightforward and the themes are fun ones - corporate greed is the big one. (I decided to return to this novel on the day the Supreme Court mortgaged America’s future to corporations.) But there’s also good stuff on how to create meaning in a meaningless world, etc., etc., I’m bored already. Huh. Well, there’s also a cardiogolem and neurogrenades and press-on curses. That stuff is fun.

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I read a massive interview with David Simon this weekend. It took me an hour to get through and left me speechless. (Do yourself the favor of reading it. If you haven’t seen The Wire, there are spoilers; but if you haven’t seen The Wire, you’ve wasted your life. Go see it, now. It’ll make you a better human being.) Simon has an uncanny gift for cutting to the heart of incredibly complex social issues in a few sentences; in the course of the interview, he explains why Americans are addicted to drugs, why the drug war can’t be won, why reform is desperately needed but virtually impossible, why our popular representatives in government have no idea what the populace wants, and why this is unlikely to change. It’s deeply distressing.

He also calls out journalists; they are the watchdogs of society, and they are now toothless. He says that good journalism is what keeps us free. I always found this far-fetched, but one recalls that journalism brought down Nixon, journalism damaged Clinton’s political power, and it was the lack of good journalism that enabled us to tolerate Bush for eight years. (That’s not 100% true, is it? I remember reading Seymour Hersh’s scathing article on Bush and the Iraq War in a 2004 New Yorker; was it the irrelevance of the medium that let these truths go without a ripple? The stories that people need to hear about are out there, but the populace is too jaded/drugged on disposable pop culture/preoccupied with toys/uneducated to care. So, journalists and teachers are the watchdogs of society - but Simon has his say about teachers in season 4 of The Wire. Turns out they’re compromised by the very system they work for! Just like journalists.)

Anyway, it made me want to be a journalist. Not a for-real, works-at-a-newspaper journalist, because my personality is too retiring and subtle for the dog-eat-dog hustle and bustle of a newsroom, where the assertive thrive, but also because newspapers are, of course, dying. It reminded me of a project me and Joel have been kicking around for years; we want to travel through east Texas, talk to people, photograph them. We expect to have an excess of material, so some will be released via blog, with the best stuff saved for a book, wherein we will try to knit it into a narrative. We have no idea what thesis we are after; the region is not afflicted by any particular economic or cultural misery or stagnation; perhaps we will come up with nothing more specific than a portrait of life in this part of the country. I can say that we will be speaking mainly to working class citizens. Everyone loves to hear about the plight of the working man.

I’m excited because the work will be quite different from my usual output, and because it’ll give me a chance to work with a guy whose creative sensibilities are more in tune with mine than anyone I’ve ever met, even if our talents lie in different areas. I expect the project will yield artistic and personal satisfaction. If it’s fruitful, we’ll probably pursue similar projects. We’ll become a powerful, unique voice for change and hope in America, which no one will ever pay any attention to because what we have to say can’t be rendered into ten-second sound bytes or tweets or Call of Duty multiplayer maps.

Posted in Politics, Writing | 2 Comments »

Because I wrote a story today. It’s a Blankenship & Dawes story, it’s fast, funny, and absurd, and I feel satisfied with it. I’m happy to return to these characters after a too-long hiatus, and happy to produce something after a few weeks of video games rotting my brain. Huzzah!

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No, I mean the controversial kind! Who cares about fetuses? Not me, that’s for sure! Hahaha! I’m talking about my book, Piccolet, what would have been my third novel if I hadn’t decided to pull the plug on it yesterday.
I’d been struggling with the book for some weeks; whenever you write anything, there’s always a healthy amount of doubt and second-guessing (and it’s necessary, or else you’d never self-edit and would just turn out brain-garbage), but with Piccolet, the doubt of my own work had turned to loathing, and the happy anticipation with which I normally regard a day’s writing had turned to dread. I found that at the end of each chapter, I was thinking, “I’d better delete that chapter and rewrite it entirely next time through.” I started without a plan, and I was floundering. Floundering in writing is not like floundering while swimming, which everyone forgets as soon as the swimmer sinks and the ripples fade; in writing, you work through your flounders with words. Ideally, you tune up those words later, but I’ve always had trouble with revision. Once my ideas crystallize in written form, I find it hard to change them materially.

I thought I could get through this novel without a plan, because that’s pretty much how I wrote Papillon and Khatima. But each of those had such a solid central idea that everything fell into place. There are the stories where that happens, conveniently, and there are the stories at which you must work. With a little adjustment, the latter can sometimes flip into the former, but Piccolet wasn’t flipping.

I began this novel without sufficient research, and, I think, without sufficient development as a writer. I want this book to be bigger than I currently have the power to make it. My work environment has become more hostile to writing, and my library is sadly limited. I just sent most of my medieval books home in August. I also need to revise my first two novels, because elements of them will feature heavily in Piccolet. I want Piccolet to be the grand closing chapter of my writings in the medieval world, but I haven’t yet gained enough distance from those writings. This novel will still happen, but at some point in the future. That’s okay - its reliance on the plot of the other two novels means that it couldn’t be published first. If I ever sell any novels, I think Khatima will be picked up first. It’s most easily summed up in a paragraph, it has the most unique premise, it’s the shortest, and, hey! It’s the best. A mon avis.

I’ve got plans for at least two future novels. One will be a space… western… I hate to use that genre title, because few publishers seem interested in ‘em, so I’ll just describe it as a scifi adventure. It’d have elements from my Red Coyote world, where I set 1.5 previous stories, but be expanded with my now greater understanding of science and science fiction. And then I’ll be writing a novel in collaboration with the talented Alex Burns sometime next year. We thought about steampunk, but then we both read China Mieville’s Iron Council, which is so good that it had a paralyzing effect on me. Like listening to Led Zeppelin II for the first time an hour before your band heads into the studio.
In the meantime, I’ve got some ideas for short stories. It’s been over a year since I’ve completed anything between flash fiction and novel length, so I may give a novella a try; I’ve been wanting to write The Vicissitudes of Monster Island for some time.

Posted in Piccolet, Writing | 4 Comments »

So I had long ago intended to write a novel this fall set in Texas. It would take place both in the modern era and during the Frontier Wars of the 1870s. It would blend science fiction with horror and history. It would have a likeable protagonist and a lot to say. It would be a helluva book. Toward this end, I asked my grandfather to please ship me some books on Texas history that he thought I might find helpful. And he did, and how.

I’ve read many of those books, and enjoyed them, but my ideas have gone nowhere. I’ve elaborated them, but it’s only so much embroidery. The main idea still sits there, lifeless and uninteresting. I think I may have researched for too long. Possibly the tighter plot daunts me. I don’t do well with tight plotting. I’m more a picaresque kinda guy. And then I realized that, no, I don’t really want to write a book about Texas, I want to write another book about the medieval world. Unfortunately, I sent most of my history books home with Ben and Vivienne a month ago. Quelle drole!

I have left to me a book on the ancient Mediterranean, The Concise History of the Catholic Church, and a book of Robert Howard’s Crusader stories (most of which I’ve already read). I have a borrowed copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, recommended by two of my friends. I ordered a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels and a book on the Mongol Empire. Let’s hope this, along with the secrets that fester in my brain, will suffice for this book.

This novel will about a jongleur, a wandering minstrel in medieval Europe. He’s played in courts and he’s played in taverns; currently his fortunes are low. He’s a wit and a comic, but also wise, and with his profundity he has a measure of sadness at the depravity of the world. He loves wine, women, and song; my notes say “13th century Cyrano”. That’s a bit problematic, as Cyrano de Bergerac would be murdered even sooner in the 13th century than in the 17th. Like Cyrano, he is critical of systems of oppression: governments, religions, ideologies. Though an expert swordsman, he despairs at the wanton use of violence. He is larger-than-life, the smartest guy in the room, depending on the room. Unlike Papillon and Khatima, his flaws will not be overpowering, but just enough to give him a little flavor. Writing a likeable protagonist will be tricky for me. I’m more interested in monsters, I think.

He’ll also be a little bit Marco Polo. He’ll travel to China and meet the Khan, witnessing the destruction and generation of empires en route. Philosophically, the book will be a middle ground between my last two. Where Papillon was a questing agnostic and Khatima a virulent antitheist, my jongleur is the cheerful humanist. I’ll start in a week or two.

My article on Lost is up at RevolutionSF.

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Last Tuesday, I began a short story, a dark fantasy based loosely on the penultimate chapter of Papillon, telling the story of the demon-fed plague, but from the Rat King’s point of view. It was a blast to write, and I got down 4500 words in one day. Then I was hit by a truck, and I haven’t been able to write very much at all.

But this is the first paragraph. I’m pleased with it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Photographer Kyle Cassidy photographed (as is the wont of such creatures) a whole gaggle of fantasy and science fiction writers in their various creative spaces. They run the gamut of “functional” to “dignified”.
(I’m also unsurprised to see that many of them are old men with beards.) Joe Haldeman, for some reason, writes in full-on neo-Goth mode, with candles and - is that an oil lamp? All he needs now is a guttering tallow candle melting atop a human skull. It’s strangely unfitting for a writer of hard military scifi, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Samuel R. Delany looks like some sort of chronomancer in an exploded fish-bowl universe, creating not only fiction but new realities.

I’d like to get a picture of myself in my own writing space, but that means I’d have to put on pants, and then the creativity stops.

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Khatima is in the home stretch. I expect to be finished with the first draft this week. Let it sit for a few weeks, read some Zhivago, and come back to carefully stitch up plot holes and deflate my prose. Like draining blisters. My style tends to get rather bombastic at times, so when I re-read it later, I am stricken by its excess, by its overwrought melodrama. I’m comfortable with a certain amount of mélédrame; it’s a genre like any other. Hugo wrote in the mode of mélédrame. I also feel that, when writing of magic and demons, to a certain extent, verisimilitude must be put aside. I once got a crit from a friend with the comment, “No one talks like this.” True, but no one rides black-winged pegasi, either, and that was in the story, too. So I like to think of my prose as heavily stylized; the question becomes whether it is so stylized that it interferes with comprehension (I hope not!) or tone (possibly) or characterization (potentially).

What I dislike is the concept that style and storytelling must be at odds. Someone - Marion Zimmer Bradley? W. Somerset Maugham? Phineas J. Butterball? - said that good writing, like good breeding, never calls attention to itself. Another article I read, “The Reader’s Manifesto,” (now a book apparently - good for him) attacks at length the self-absorbed, self-obsessed, inflated prose of Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, and a whole mess of authors we consider the modern masters. The writer tackles the conundrum that calling a book “very readable” seems to be damning with faint praise. He posits that the author’s job is to disappear, to erase the barrier between reader and content, that is, the barrier between the reader’s brain and the author’s brain. I agree with much of this. Not all.

The last newsletter from the quarterly Writers of the Future contest teased an article with the SECRET TO THE GREATEST WRITING: “L. Ron Hubbard knew it. Anne McCaffrey knew it. Etc etc.” Click through and it turns out to be: “Style must serve the story, not the other way around.”

These two examples both foster the notion that style and substance must be at odds, and that substance is inherently superior. I think I would rather read a plainly written marvel, by the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold or, oh, George MacDonald Fraser or Carson McCullers than a beautifully embroidered nothing like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Any Henry James. Books so interested in their own bookishness that they forget their duty to the reader. (Duty to the reader is a whole ‘nother can of worms.)

But I have read so much incredible literature that delivers on both counts. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which I’m reading now. Sinclair Lewis. W. Somerset Maugham. Moby Dick. Zola. Dostoevsky. Theodore Sturgeon. These are books that bear the indelible fingerprints of their makers. They could not have been written by anyone else.

To conclude, then, we find that the answer, boringly, lies in the middle ground. Too much style and too little substance may win you Pushcart Prizes, but leave you an overwrought intellectually elite totem of snobbery (and broke, too). Substance without style might sell books, but hollow you out inside; one day, you throw yourself from your balcony to the jagged rocks below, and they find nothing within the shards of your author-shaped shell.

So, dear reader, accept please that books are books, and they are not simulacrums of reality, they are not vessels of pure thought that you can inject via hypospray directly into your own brain. They are not your thoughts; their job is to warp your thoughts into the author’s thoughts. For now, the limitations of technology require that we suspend our disbelief; while we are at it, why not accept that a sorceress in 12th-century may speak a bit more dramatically than we do?

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Yesterday I wrote the sentence, “Then I decapitated the body, because that is something people like to see.” That felt like a good place to stop.
Khatima’s at about 34000 words, a little over a third of the way through. I hope to end the book around 85-90,000, shorter, more concise than Papillon, which sometimes feels like the sum of trying to make quotas everyday - viz., “I must make 500 more before I can quit! Let’s have an interview with… the Archpoet!” In Khatima, the story is doing more of the work.

Just finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, and it was good. The author writes with intense elegance and profundity on points with which I wholly disagree. Now I’m reading Misogyny, a history of the candy corn industry in North America - actually, I just remembered, it’s about the history of misogyny. I’m fortunate to be free of all prejudices, even against those filthy Australians, and so misogyny is something I don’t wholly understand. This is something of a handicap when writing a novel about a woman in the Middle Ages.

I’ve also been reading the Sandman comics, essential titles that I missed the first time around, probably because I was six years old when they were printed. Neil Gaiman wrote stories about stories, very interesting in the smart post-modern way that academics love - self-aware, smart, succeeding as stories and as commentary on the art of fiction and “textuality”. Interestingly, his longer arcs are less successful than the one-shot stories, some of which stand among the best comics I’ve ever read. This reinforces my theory that he is a skilled and savvy storyteller when working within strict word counts, and sloppy and dull in longer works (Sandman and Fragile Things versus American Gods). I’ve started following his blog, which is fortunately on the skilled, savvy, and brief side. My RSS aggregator doesn’t give me enough to read in the mornings, so I’ve added a few current writers: Gaiman, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell (whom I haven’t read, but expect I’ll like when I get around to it). I can’t get enough of the information.

Maintaining a writing schedule has been difficult - first, my current school has overloaded me with work, but I’ll be out of here soon, thank Satv, and on to greener pastures, where I’m done by 12:30 every day. Further botheration includes last weekend’s hangover, “the wages of sin,” that is, followed by dog botheration. The new pup likes to wake up about an hour before I do, which makes for clinical sleepiness, which makes for difficulty in concentrating. All will be well once I change schools… the new school is the the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

Posted in Khatima, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

I’ve mentioned several times that I’ve been working on “Khatima”, and you may have concluded that is the name of my next novel project. You would be correct. You would be insightful and clever. And that’s why you read my little posts.

“Khatima” is a story of revenge and the nature of evil, set in the “medieval” Middle East - mostly Syria, but also present-day Jerusalem and Egypt. The title character is Khatima, a young nun in a Christian convent in Syria; when the convent is sacked by Bedouins and she witnesses all sorts of horrible things, she declares that she will do whatever she must to keep herself and her loved ones safe. This sets her on a Nietzchean path to evil as she builds an empire and pursues her enemies with progressively brutal methods. My goal is to keep her a empathetic character by making her do the wrong things, but for the right reasons, or the right things for the wrong reasons. I want the readers to understand why she does the horrible things she does, and I want to make her actions seem justified.

It’s going to be a tough row to hoe; in Papillon, I had a protagonist who was ugly and weak, cowardly and of no convictions, yet I loved him throughout, because he was just a poor schmuck making the best of some absurdly bad situations. But some of my test-readers didn’t like the character. If Papillon, a generally okay guy with abysmal luck, isn’t likeable, I wonder how long the reader will stick with Khatima, who in the first chapter alone mutilates and murders some twenty-one people.

I want to destroy the reader’s sense of right and wrong, creating a caste of sociopaths.
I want to make the reader question right and wrong, and what’s justified in our pursuit of safety.

There is the secondary consideration of whether a sympathetic character is even necessary in fiction. Certainly, the reader needs an “in”, but how broad an opening does that need to be? I’m thinking of Blood Meridian; no one would argue that that was successful fiction, and the protagonists were rapists and murderers. By the end, though, I was happy to see them all killed. The Flashman series, which I adore, and Barry Lyndon, which I quite enjoyed, both feature irredeemable protagonists that I liked throughout. No one would want to associate with Harry Flashman or Barry Lyndon, but their unique voices make their respective narratives interesting. Lyndon, in particular, with his great resourcefulness when justifying his own actions, provides a template for my heroine.

Khatima takes a few cues from Papillon; it’s a linear story with a single protagonist and POV, and it’s set in a conglomerate Middle Ages, with real events, locations, and personages thrown together with little actual regard for dates. There are fewer jokes, as fits the grimmer subject matter. When I write, I worry that if I don’t insert enough jokes, people will get bored when reading. Perhaps because I get bored when writing seriously, so I expect the reader to get bored. But Khatima has been a joy to write. I’m at 15,000 words, right on quota. I was behind for four or five days, but a test day yesterday left me with no classes; I wrote all morning and put away about three thousand words. An infernal cold has possessed me this past week as well, which makes it difficult to sleep, which makes it difficult to concentrate, which makes it difficult to write. But I do. For you, dear reader.

I am still reading Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, or Sex Can Be Boring After All. How did the guy spend the second half of his luminous career making sex so dull? Stranger in a Strange Land is all about sex; Friday has sex wall to wall; but none of it is remotely interesting. I like sex; as a storytelling device, for building and elaborating upon characters; it is one of those easy shortcuts to revealing something hidden within your characters. The only thing that comes close is the “get everyone drunk” device. Count how many episodes of “The Office” feature wild drinking parties.

(What’s that? You want to know more shortcuts of the storytelling trade? Prophecies. Visions or dreams. Hallucinogenic episodes. Easy. These are the things writers do when they’re tired of thinking. I despise them where I find them. They’re very easy to use and very difficult to use well. But sex, when used properly, is more than just a shortcut; it is the medium of revelation. How many people use it properly when writing, you ask? Well, how many use it properly in real life?)

Anyway, to digress. I Will Fear No Evil follows the story of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, an aged billionaire who transplants his brain into the body of his recently murdered and stunningly beautiful secretary. Inexplicably, her personality lingers, and they fuse. Sex ensues. Lots of boring sex. It’s not erotic; Heinlein does not write erotica! It’s hardly described, just mentioned and talked about (but not in detail, because that might get interesting). There is almost no plot to speak of; there’s hardly an antagonist, and there’s no conflict; in short, not a narrative hook on which to hang your hat.

Heinlein has some interesting things to say regarding polyamory, all of which he said better in Stranger in a Strange Land or Friday. This novel reads as a long letter of congratulation - to the characters, for having the fortune to be beautiful and rich, and to Heinlein, for recognizing the virtues of acceptance and love (free and otherwise). Everyone sleeps with everyone; there’s no jealousy, and it’s great, and everyone talks about how lovely everyone else is.

In the background, civilization crumbles. Heinlein has some rather unsavory things to say about the future of mankind - a good chunk of America has been designated “Abandoned Areas”, where government gave up and walked away - these are lawless zones, like Louisiana in the 1840s (seriously!), where one does not venture without an armed complement or armored hovercar. The law that remains is little better; the rule of law is often subverted for “common sense” or nepotistic corruption, with Heinlein winking at us as if this is really the way that the courts should be run.

How do the ugly people fare in Heinlein’s polyamory scheme? We don’t know. There isn’t a single one in the book. There are some who have the misfortune of being poor, but this is balanced by their physical beauty and moral saintliness - they’re almost Dickensian in their happy acceptance of their plight. It’s a weird beast you have crafted, Mr. Heinlein.

Heinlein’s known for bringing sex into science fiction (along with Philip Jose Farmer), but I’ve yet to read a single interesting thought from him on that subject. We should abolish jealousy. We should all sleep with each other. Great. But it’s utopian thinking, one man’s ideal that is far from realistic or practical; it ignores too many thorny human realities.
I said before that I prefer Heinlein’s juvenile books to his adult works, and this book cements that. When let off the leash of plotting, Heinlein drifts away. He’s much better when he’s trying to sell a story to kids in under two hundred pages than when he’s selling a paradigm to adults in five hundred.

Next I’ll be reading The Possibility of an Island, one of these very smart modern novels that one must not call science fiction even though they contain fictional science (in this case cloning). (I mean you, Margaret Atwood!)

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I started my latest novel four days ago!
I quit it one day ago!

It was awful. I don’t know why I sink so much time and effort into projects that I know won’t work out. It was apparent by day two that this novel had no emotional core. The narrative was solid, but the characters crafted of cardboard, and the individual moments cut from the abrasive, unrefined cloth of cliché. So I threw it out - the plot, the characters, and 90% of the ideas. I made a list of the elements of the novel that I like, and scaled back my ambition. One narrator instead of six. One plot instead of ten, and that plot will go from A to B to C. I’m not ready yet for the A-Q-F-6-C plots. I need to finish more than one novel first.

Instantly a new idea sprang to mind, and it has been expanding in my mind like a frozen octopus in the summer sun. The more I think of it, the more I like it. It follows the simpler formula; it focuses on one character’s life. In a twist from my last novel, I’ve decided to make the protagonist a female. The plot is diabolical and should be fun to write. Last night, when I told Randi about it, she furrowed her brow and said, “That doesn’t really have much to do with the female experience.”
“What is the female experience?” said I. “Having babies?”
She declined to elaborate further.
So I ask you, dear female readers, to tender your opinions as to what constitutes the female experience. You can message me if you’re too embarrassed to comment but nonetheless possess some burning ingot of unalloyed wisdom.

Posted in Writing | 1 Comment »

I’m in the pre-writing phase of novel #2, and my mind is a blank when it comes to character names. I thought I’d open up the floor to you, dear readers. It’s something to do when you’re bored at work today.
I need:
At least three medieval male French names. It’d be nice if I had a longer form with surname and maybe honorific, as well as a short form for actual use. I.e., I don’t want to be typing out “Sir Jehan de Joinville de Champagne” every dang time. Also, these names should convey “I am a tough guy who will fuck you up in a horrifyingly violent medieval way.”
The same amount of medieval Turkic names, with the same long form and short form. Honorific not needed. Example: “al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Bunduqdari”, also known as “Baibars” or “Baibars the One-Eyed”.
A few Arabic names.
Some medieval English names.
Perhaps a medieval German name or two. (Let’s assume I want all medieval names, so I can stop typing it.)
A Mongolian name. Or two!
Two Arabic female names.
Two Turkic female names.
An Italian male name for an evil sorcerer. The name shouldn’t be evil at first glance, but become evil upon repeat readings.
A French female name of some fancy Countess. “Countess de _________.” Fictional location, please.

And, finally, I need at least a half-dozen male names in Enochian.

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Phone rang at 7:15 local time this morning; it was my mom, and I was certain she was going to tell me a beloved relative had just had a stroke. Rather, she almost gave me a stroke by telling me that Penguin/DAW had sent back my SASE, containing a letter saying that Papillon has passed Round #1 of reading. Now there’s Round #2, and then the Final Round. My book has moved from something like a 0.1% chance of being published to a 1% chance. It’ll take months to get through the next round. But, I’m one step closer to publication!

So, yeah, I didn’t go back to sleep this morning.

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments »

I’ve been reading the “Arabian Nights” (or “The Thousand and One Nights,” or, in the more literal translation that I can’t decide is retarded or coolly archaic, “The Thousand Nights and a Night”) as research for my next novel. The frame story, for those who don’t know, is thus: the Sultan, to take revenge on womankind, takes a new bride every night, “enjoys” her, and then cuts off her head in the morning. Scheherazade saves her neck by telling the Sultan a story every night, ending it just when it gets most interesting.

So, I propose, one should endeavor to write. Imagine that if your book cannot hold the reader’s interest, someone willchop off your head. Who could have writer’s block in circumstances like that? (Neil Gaiman wrote an excellent poem on this that you can read right here.) I once thought of putting a picture of my hated boss over my writing desk, to remind me why I’m working; Jack London posted his bills over his typewriter; I’m going to put up a sign reading “THE BLADE IS AT YOUR NECK.”

Alternate, or, rather, complement: the Samurai method for building discipline. Paraphrased from The Way of the Samurai: “The true samurai’s focus should be so great that, even if his head is separated from his body, his body will go on [typing].”

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So, in the week we’ve been back, I put away the Sword and Scimitar book, the Templar book, and The Terror. Sword was a very good, fairly unbiased history of the Crusades. Brief but thorough. The Templar book was longer - 350 pages versus 200 - and had disappointingly little information on the Templars. The author was attempting to hew away the myth that surrounds the order, but it seems that in doing so he pared it a little lean. There are brief passages scattered throughout on their Rule, their modus vivendi, their equipage, etc., but most of the book is simply a history of the Crusades - more exhaustive than Sword’s, granted - with frequent mentions of the Templars and what they were doing at any point in time. I wanted something unbiased, but the book didn’t quite deliver what I was after. It appears that I need some blatant mythmongering after all.

The Terror was superb. A historical novel, a thriller, fantasy - it succeeds on all counts. The book is an epic in praise of suffering. Page one gives us horrible, horrifying conditions, and every page steadily worsens the situation until you really don’t feel like reading the book anymore. But you do, because it’s just that good.

That said, I’d recommend Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos before this one. The Terror is 950 pages long, but it only adds up to about 500, 600 at the most. After reading certain lengthy books - Bleak House, American Gods, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - I find myself thinking, “If I were the author, and I had taken 600/800/1350 pages to tell my story, I would wish I’d accomplished more.” The Hyperion books are equally massive, and they have much more to say. There are still scenes in The Terror that only Simmons could write, thrilling scenes that spark with energy, horrific scenes that make you want to put down the book and keep reading at the same time.

I’m steadily making notes for my next novel. There’s a bunch of loose ideas and threads of plots and characters. I love this point, when the novel’s wide open and it could come out any which way. I’ve got: secret societies. Immortality. Epic battles on the dusty plains. Bearded ascetics in mail. The embalmed head of Christ. Giants. The end of the world, but in a good way.
I’m looking forward to writing this one. It’s going to be more ambitious than Papillon, more difficult - for me and for you, dear reader -more demanding, more complex, and, if I can pull it off, much much better.

One writer, can’t remember who, said, “Make sure that you really want to be a writer. There are much easier ways to be miserable.” I can’t tell you how many times that quote has made my stomach hurt with doubt. There is misery. There are days of agony over plots and characters, days spent juggling wholly imaginary figures and ideas, the motives, wants, and needs of other (imaginary) people, trying to make them all fit together into a consumable, entertaining whole. Hundreds of hours staring at a blank screen. Hundreds of hours deleting and rewriting your last sentence, a hundred times. Never mind the misery of the road to publication.
But I often find myself in my spare time wanting to play video games, read more science-fiction, comics, even watch television. And I think, “Ah, I could do all those things if I didn’t have to write!” So there you have it - I have to write.

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2008 is dead; long live 2009! Well, for 363 more days, anyway.

Fervent hopes that 2009 is not as crappy as 2008; unshakable dread that it will be worse. The economy’s not likely to climb out of the toilet; international geopolitics are not likely to unsnarl themselves; Obama may be revealed as a mortal; and once we unsort our international, economic, and ecological crises, if it can be done at all, we’ll still have failing schools, overcrowded prisons, and the endless war on drugs to tangle with! Hurrah!

Ends-of-years necessarily call for reflection on the past and prognostication for the future. We are in a unique point in history where either of these activities breeds deep, justified pessimism. What a time to be alive!

In 2008, I wrote one novel, one Blankenship & Dawes novella, two Dixie O’Dell novellas, maybe twelve other short stories, including flash. I wrote four Farmerian stories that are all hilarious: “Killipedes”, “Lunacide”, “Planetworld”, and “A Surfeit of Eels”. I published twice on EDF: the B&D piece “Chrono-Conundrum” and the Papillon-world “Ars Draconis”, which briefly hit the top ten of all time. I read over a hundred books. I think I wrote perhaps about a quarter of a million words. I lost interest in short story publishing after reading several disillusioning articles about how uninterested agents and editors are in short story publication credits. The biggest of all these accomplishments was undoubtedly writing the novel. I did it; I can do it. I know that I have long, marketable stories in me, and I know I have the tenacity to finish them. This was HUGE HUGE HUGE.

In 2009, I intend to write two novels. I’ll do research and plotting for the next one all throughout February, begin in March, and finish in May sometime. I’ll revise in July, plan the next one in August, and begin in September. The first will be an expansion of the world introduced in Papillon; it will feature the Templars and perhaps the book of Enoch and the Nephilim. It will largely take place in the Holy Land, and study the collision of Christian and Muslim cultures there. It will not have anything to do with Assassin’s Creed or the goddamn Da Vinci Code. It will be bigger, more complex, and more serious than Papillon. The novel after that will probably be fast, breezy, and funny, and set in modern-day Texas. I don’t know much about it yet, except that it will be a pastiche of King of the Hill and HP Lovecraft.

I’d really like to sell a novel in 2009, but there’s only so much I can do towards that end. Too much of that is out of my hands that I cannot set it as an official goal. However, I will do everything I can to make sure that happens. Ad astra!

Posted in Reading, Writing | 1 Comment »

Thanks are in order, dear readers; “Ars Draconis” clawed its heart-warming way into the top ten stories of all time on EDF. Considering that that illustrious market has published something like FOUR HUNDRED STORIES, this is an accomplishment! Thanks for your votes.

I’m five thousand words into my current novella, which puts me about halfway through scene #3 of 10 (if I stick to my outline). Does that mean this novella will be 17,000 words, coincidentally the upper limit for entries to Writers of the Future? Plausibly!

It’s coming along swimmingly. I feel that it’s more intelligent than my usual work, my usual work being, of course, a succession of flatulence jokes and racist humor that degrades all who experience it. Characters are more complex than usual. Some of them carry gold-topped canes, which is how you know you’re reading a work of class. I also use the word (or words?) “pince-nez” twelve times per paragraph. I’m pleased with the results.

The work is glacially paced, though, which is worrisome. I’m coming to the realization that this work will likely be unsellable; it’s historical fantasy-horror of an unapproachable length. If WOTF doesn’t want it, it may have nowhere to go. The last time I queried Weird Tales with an 18,000-word piece, they said no. I may end up trying to publish it as a standalone novella through some indie press that sells wholly on the internet. We will invent a new system of numerals, a cross between negative numbers and imaginary decimals, to describe the circulation of this work, my heart’s labor.

Ah! Publishing!

I finished Nana, read The Explorer (lesser Maugham), skimmed a little-known book called the “Koran”, and now I’m reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. It’s an alternative history with this premise: the Black Death, instead of killing a third of Europe, kills 99% of the population. Instead of white man shaping world history, China/Japan (the Orient, I guess, is an apt but not PC term to describe them) and the Middle East rise to prominence. Islam and Buddhism dominate the world stage, and Christianity is a footnote.
An alternate history of this scale blows my mind. I live in Korea, you know, and the extent of Western influence here is hard to overstate. They build houses like we do, their cars look like ours, and businessmen wear suits instead of hanboks. They eat pizza and fried chicken a helluva lot more than Americans eat bulgogi and kimbap. Elsewhere in the world, “development” is often analogous with “Americanization”; as soon as Angola gets oil wealth or Somalia gets pirate wealth, they build internet cafes, drive Mercedes, wear suits, and listen to ipods - not necessarily because they want to be like Americans per se, but because these are the standards of affluence.
So just imagine a world where these standards are reversed, and the few remaining Caucasians emulate the, I don’t know, oil shieks or jade merchants…
And, of course, there’s the re-drawing of seven centuries of world events. No Europe means no Napoleon, no World Wars (as we know them); try to imagine the Enlightenment, largely a realization of the importance of self, but in a Confucian context. Also imagine the first Muslim explorers in the dead lands of France, stumbling across the skeleton-filled ruins of the Notre Dame or the Louvre. Wow! I don’t have the imagination to approach a book like this; I’d be scared. KSR has my respect. Perhaps it’s telling that the book is almost 800 pages.
Anyway, it’s a good read so far.

Now here’s an excerpt of my novella. This is the first section - a rough draft, emphasis on rough. There’s a good bit of exposition mixed in here - but there’s a good bit to exposit! Trust me, in the final draft, this will be smooth as swallowing marbles (which are very smooth).

Read the rest of this entry »

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I began today and made 1500 words in a frenetic two hours. The focus of this novella has shifted somewhat - oi, a precis, then, for those who have forgotten! During the Siege of Paris, the penultimate battle of the Franco-Prussian War, a young painter named Emile is thrown for a loop when his world suddenly collides with the horrible fantasy world that lies under the surface of this world. There’s also an evil ballerina. The story draws heavily upon the most absurd battle of a brief and brutal war, as well as succubus lore and paganism.

Originally, this was going to be the story with which I would finally win Writers of the Future; however, the pre-writing keeps taking it in a horrific rather than fantastic direction; WOTF isn’t averse to a little dark fantasy, but the darkness outweighs the fantasy. In fact, this story could almost happen in real life. I couldn’t seem to bend it to fantasy, and after days of trying, I decided, what the hell, let’s write a horror story.

I write little horror, except where my speculative intrudes into that realm. I read little horror beyond Lovecraft and his ilk. Modern horror fiction bores or annoys me, and horror films haven’t been good in many a year. I worry that, with my low horror intake, I have little understanding of what makes horror work; indeed, my own experience with the genre reflects that. I can’t recall ever having been scared by a book. (Movies don’t scare me, either, beyond the obvious surprise scares, which, of course, are impossible in the written word.) I enjoy Lovecraft for his wild imagination and interesting cosmological bestiary, and, at points, I acknowledge, yes, that monster or whatever sure is horrifying, but not particularly terrifying. Vive le difference!

In any reading, you are striving to put aside the fact that the book is not real, the characters are not real, and that it doesn’t matter one way or the other whether Hamlet lives or dies. The writer is trying to help you forget that. You jointly participate in this illusion. If the writer is good and the reader is patient, success! You can’t wait to see what happens to the characters. You may weep or smile at the end. If the writer is poor and the reader distracted, failure; you can’t bring yourself to care, and you never cross that boundary of forgetting that they aren’t real.

But, honestly, aren’t you more moved at Hamlet’s death than at a headline reading “Six people killed in California train collision” or “Nine thousand dead in China earthquake”?
Think about it!

I am frequently amused by protagonists in my reading. I was happy when Elizabeth and Darcy finally confessed their undying love. I was devastated when Queequeg died. But I’ve never felt dread for a character when the protagonist says, “He was terrified! Fear saturated his brains!” or whatever.

So, dear reader, I ask you, what makes horror fiction work? Have you ever been scared by a book? How do you get scared by a book?

And don’t say “The unknown… the unknown is really spooky.”

Posted in Writing | 3 Comments »

I’ve been looking at the statistics for my page, and I’d like to thank all my fans in Nicaragua and the Republic of Seychelles! I was worried about how I was doing off the east coast of Africa. Next: Madagascar!

Pre-writing continues apace for the novella I’ll begin next week. I have a thrilling setting, rich characters, and a limp plot. That’s why we plan, children!

Currently reading: Nana, by Emile Zola.
I used to be crazy about Zola before science fiction rotted my brain. It was actually this book that turned me off him a few years ago. The endless procession of new characters overwhelmed me by the second chapter and fiftieth name, and his dense, microscopic descriptions staggered me. However, now it’s relevant to my writing, so in I delve! There’s also a naked woman on the cover, which helps.
I don’t remember Zola being this moralizing. The introduction of the novel assured me that he wrote with a fair, sympathetic eye, but so far I really only see contempt for his characters. I recall this in L’Assommoir, less in L’Ouevre, and not at all in Bonheure des Dames. I guess he got soft in his old age. In Nana, it’s detached contempt - empathy, certainly - but contempt.

Still, though he depicts the world as full of either fools, swindlers, or whores, they are varied and interesting fools, swindlers, and whores. His primary gift is capturing the “crowd scene”. This doesn’t sound very interesting on the surface, but what that means is that he can create a scene with a multitude of characters, assign them each actions that are colorful and express their personalities in some way, and fire each of those descriptions at you without breaking the pace of the prose. A neccessity in a book with approximately one hojillion characters. It’s compact, concise characterization that doubles as narration - great if you can pull it off.

It makes me consider that many of my stories have only a few characters talking at any time, and rarely more than three talking to each other. I don’t have the brain to juggle these competing threads of conversation.

Zola! You may no longer be first in my heart, but you’ll always be last on my bookshelf.

(My bookshelf is alphabetized.)

Posted in Reading, Writing | 3 Comments »

First, head over to EDF for “Why Pews Don’t Come With Pistols,” by Talented Friend Stephanie Scarborough. It’s droll!

Second: the first round of Honorable Mentions for the Writers of the Future contest has been announced. My story “Crocodopolis” is not among them. That means it’s either headed for an Honorable Mention or - something greater. I’m collecting these Honorable Mentions like bobbleheads!

Third: Jordan Lapp, editor of EDF, won first place in last quarter’s WOTF. Wow. This is the most competitive contest in speculative fiction, and it’s amazing and awesome to place first. Congrats to him.

Fourth: I finished a Dixie O’Dell novella earlier this week. It’s merely okay. It needs work. I must get it polished before sending it to Space Westerns, my market of choice.

Fifth: I’m pre-writing a novella set in the Franco-Prussian War, specifically, the Siege of Paris. This was a fascinating conflict. I’m researching it by reading Alistair Horne’s The Terrible Year. The theme of my novella - and the war - is absurdity. I’m fortunate that the actual history provides so much fodder for this. For example, it’s the only war I can think of where hot-air balloons played a major role. How fortunate that the incompetence and occasional silliness of the French side, in the life-and-death context of brutal conflict, created a tragic absurdity that plays directly into the needs of this writer a century and a half later! When at last you enjoy the novella, reflect that only 250,000 men had to die for me to write it. Haha. I jest. The great thing about being a writer is picking over the bones of this senseless war (more senseless than most!) for scraps of sanity, and turning those scraps into meaning. For you, dear reader. The more prewriting I do, the better this story gets. I still have a lot of reading to go.

Sixth: Don’t forget to head to EDF on November 20th for my story “Ars Draconis”.

Posted in My Talented Friends, Stories, Writing | 2 Comments »

There are no limits anymore.
We have destroyed all barriers before man.

Haha, just kidding. However, today’s message of creative fulfillment does rather tie in to my occasional contemplation of certain Satanic themes: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law”, eh? I’ve used certain variations on this in my stories when examining the potential of unchained will (most notably, the Jensian critics say, in Chapter VII of Papillon). Today, I found myself ruminating on my recent creative frustrations: my last Blankenship & Dawes story went nowhere and was abandoned, and my current story has taken two weeks to hit the 7k mark. Then I recalled reading in East of Eden last night one character saying that she’s written poetry, too, “pages and pages of it all over the table.” This capsuled description of pure generation inspired me in a strange way. Why am I struggling with these stories? Has my mind run fallow? Am I out of ideas at twenty-six? Of course not. These obstacles are nothing!

Then, this morning, I chanced (random clicking) to listen to some Ryan Adams. He’s a musician who, at age 34, has released something like fifteen albums, and has maybe a dozen unreleased. His songwriting is wildly uneven, of course; it takes a genius to be that productive without sliding occasionally or often into mediocrity, and Adams is no genius. But his reckless generative power is impressive.

Taking these random factors into consideration, the problems besetting my current story suddenly seem infinitesimal. I’ll give it a kick in the pants, I’ll take it on a wild left turn, I’ll drive it into the ground. I can do anything!

The more I learn about writing, the plainer it is that sheer production is the singular mean to the end. Things like Nanowrimo understand that. Get words on the page. Who cares if they’re crap? Get the words out on paper, revise them later, just get your brain into the state of logorrhea. Feel the creative impulse. It feels wonderful. All my friends currently gearing up for the next Nano know this. Or, Joel just announced his plans to produce a piece of art every day for a week, which is laudable. You cannot produce quality until you produce something.

The writing habits of certain greats like Anthony Trollope back me up here. Trollope wrote a certain period of time every day, even when on vacation, even when sick. If he finished a novel and his time wasn’t up, he’d start another. Harry Harrison writes hours every day. Flannery O’Connor forced herself to sit at a desk every day, even if she didn’t write a word. Many scorn this approach; the muse keeps no schedule. This shows naivete and ignorace - a lack of understanding and a lack of knowledge of the subject. The muse is a fickle bitch, and the average novelist is lucky to get a pinch of muse every few months. Trollope wrote forty-eight novels, and they’re regarded as “pretty okay” to “really quite good” - but people still read them a hundred and fifty years later. The muse is the privilege of geniuses. Are you a genius? Of course not. You’d have better things to do than read this blog if you were a genius. Now get to work!

Edit: To bring it full circle, Alan Moore describes any sort of creative process as magic - creating something from nothing. Bringing something new into the world. He lays this out in the penultimate book of his Promethea series - would our great (toxic) cities ever have existed if not for the imagination of man? Creativity = magic = Satan. But, creation = generation = God. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!

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I’ve started writing the next Blankenship & Dawes story, which deals with the undead invasion of London. I’m 1700 words in. It’s always a treat to write these characters, to be as verbose and stylistic as I want, to make all the nerdy jokes I want. One of the challenges, though, is describing them anew every damn time. I’m pleased with this story’s attempt:

Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been reading and writing a lot this vacation. It’s dandy.

Two days ago I wrote a short-short called “Ars Draconis.”

Yesterday I wrote a story called “Lunacide”. I’ve had the first sentence of this story for a long time, but could never figure out the rest: “It was 2016, and we were finally blowing up the moon.” So, yesterday, while the wife was at yoga, I took a lone table overlooking an emerald-green rice terrace, ordered a papaya smoothie, wrote the one sentence I had, and let the rest flow. I’m very satisfied with the results.

Today I wrote two stories: “Planetworld” and “Killipedes”. I admit that these were both written title-first. They’re both funny and deeply strange. I like them. I find it easy to write in a tropical paradise. I’ll send these pieces to Space Squid and EDF, though I don’t know which to where.

I recently read Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, and was deeply impressed. I quite literally writhed with joy while reading it. His language is delightful. His metaphors are renowned, and for good reason: “She was about as cute as a washtub.” “I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief.” Even though I’ve never written noir or mystery fiction (too scared to try), I can admire his commanding style.

Now I’m about halfway into Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which is pretty good. It has some pacing issues - I’m 300 pages in and almost nothing has happened - but the world he’s building is rich and interesting. I’ll happily read on.

Also, I neglected to upload the images for the next story. Nor did I get a guest column for next Friday. So I’m afraid the Tournament of Titillation will peter out with a final book review this next Wednesday. It was good while it lasted!

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Wrote a short-short today! It begins thus:

“The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by the masterful Tadao Ando, is that city’s foremost cultural treasure. Its five shining concrete-and-glass pavilions are surrounded by a glittering reflecting pool, beyond which the skyscrapers of downtown thrust into the blue prairie sky. The Modern’s galleries hold some 2,600 works of art by the likes of Picasso and Pollock, Serra and Serrano. The high glass walls are designed to flood the galleries with natural light; they are not designed to repel an attack by Clobbersaurus.”

And you’ll have to wait and read the rest in some prominent market!

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Strangely, when I mentioned bird flu on here the other day, my journal got linked to on several bird flu blog-watching sites, which amuses me deeply. Let’s see if it works again!

Papillon is at 72,000 words. I think the current part is very strong dramatically, but it has almost no jokes. I’ve found that one of the hardest things to do as a writer, after one has mastered crafting compelling plots and complex characters, of course, is maintaining tone. This is especially difficult over the course of an entire novel. Tone, you see, is a product of many things: my precise mood when sitting down to write, my caffeine level, whatever music may be playing nearby, the weather, etc. It is less frequently a product of intention. “Papillon” is particularly difficult in regards to tone. I want it to be fundamentally serious, if absurd, but not funny-absurd, but sprinkled with many hilarious jokes that amuse and inspire laughter but don’t detract from the impact of the drama. This tone is a knife edge!

Some good examples are the television shows “Deadwood” and “The Wire”. Each features uncompromising verisimilitude in acting, direction, and dialogue; the quality of those elements makes for wrenching, highly effective drama. Yet each show is frequently side-splittingly hilarious. It is a mark of incredible skill that they can have a foot in comedy and drama without falling into the respective pit-traps of farce or maudlinism. The two elements complement each other exceedingly well. Comedy relieves the tension of drama, and drama keeps the characters relevant and interesting. Leavening comedy with drama means not letting your jokes get the better of your characters, cannibalizing them for laughs - see the past ten years of “The Simpsons.”

(”Farscape,” that sweetest of shows, is not a good example of the balance I’m talking about; it falls into farce and camp, and leaps the fence again, with the greatest aplomb, and it always works. As far as I know, it is unique in this respect. The works of Joss Whedon are a better example.)

Why is this approach so effective? Because it most resembles life, methinks. Life is alternately difficult and joyous. We laugh and cry; works that evoke both reactions fire all our emotional cylinders. I keep going to television shows - something like “Heroes” leans too far to the drama camp, and, when watching it, the absurdity of so many straight lines in a row, with no one cracking a joke, simply strikes you as unrealistic. This quickly devolves to tedium (an unfortunate victim of lowest common denominator scripting). Purely comical works, though, become amusing nothings; enjoyable whilst consuming them, but forgotten within days or hours.

“The Office” strikes the sublime balance of which I speak; a comedy that doesn’t forget its characters.

The works of Sinclair Lewis often do this. What else? Glancing at my bookshelf: Eco, Philip Jose Farmer, Heinlein, Terry Pratchett (sometimes), George MacDonald Fraser, Balzac, Roald Dahl, Steinbeck.

I’m not saying that this is essential to producing great works. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Hemingway are not known for their ability to make jokes. I am saying that great works can be produced this way.

What say you, dear reader?

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Papillion: 48,000!

I bet you want to talk about something else now.
Flash fiction, then!
I think my initial problem with “flash fiction” was the nomenclature. It gave me the idea of writing stories in an impromptu fashion, with no preparation and no polishing. Why would you do that? Why would we have markets specifically for that?
(Of course, I later identified this as a misconception.)
I was fine with simply writing very short stories, though I preferred to call them “short-shorts”. This also makes one think of Daisy Dukes, which are sexy and fashionable, as well as the timeless pop song regarding the wearing of short-shorts, and the participants in this activity. More importantly, it gives the impression that so-called “flash” pieces are just very short stories, given the same thought and meticulousness as any other work, regardless of their length.
More troubling, though, was the existence of “flash authors”. You sometimes encounter them on the Internet. They are difficult to recognize in real life. I wondered, what sort of author would work solely on stories under a thousand words? What kind of madman limits his artistic growth so?
Answer: I don’t know, but I don’t really think of it that much.
Now I have come to value “flash fiction,” though I still prefer my term of “short-shorts”. “Flash fiction,” or simply “flash,” as it’s known on the streets, is edifying as a writing exercise. Furthermore, story ideas too gimmicky or half-baked to work as a long piece can be quite successful in five-minute form. The brevity of “flash” is also very convenient to a modern audience with the attention span of a rabid African white-toothed shrew. Every Day Fiction knows this, and succeeds accordingly. And amazingly.
All this is to say that I can’t wait to start posting my weekly short-shorts on the website. Katie McCullough is putting together some grand art for them. You’ll love them.
But let’s not call them “flash”.

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Papillion: 22,200 words. 300 behind quota. Yesterday’s installment included a hilarious yet titillating sex scene. I haven’t written many sex scenes, because they’re very hard to get right. All I’ll tell you about this one is that it includes the sentence “Now gallop, boy!”

Some writers scoff at the idea of quotas, saying that you can’t force the muse. If you do, obviously, the product will feel forced and the lack of inspiration and fun in the piece will be evident. William Styron (Sophie’s Choice) worked that way, sometimes producing only a paragraph a day. He only wrote four novels in his long life, but they were among the greatest of modern American fiction. Not everyone has his talent, of course, or his financial freedom. For humble pulp authors, regular production is a must.

I have a quota because it’s the only way I can get through a novel. I began and discarded three novels because I tried to write only when inspiration hit; they never went anywhere, and I worried that I’d never produce a novel and never become (what I considered to be) a “real writer”. When I threw myself into last fall’s NaNoWriMo, though, I actually produced a hundred thousand words in a few months. I learned I could do it, but only as long as I forced myself.

The thing is, it’s not working without a muse. It’s not some sort of inspiration-less grind. When you apply discipline to your writing schedule, you learn quickly that you can make your own inspiration. Your muse works for you, not the other way around. You produce, you create, you become adept at slipping into the realm of thought with a minute’s notice. (Until one day you vanish altogether, leaving a pair of glasses and a mug of cold coffee in front of the laptop, and are never seen again - poor wife and children!)

Anthony Trollope might be the most known quota writer. He produced a set number of words every day, without fail, and if he finished his quota but not his sentence, he would come back to that sentence the next day, by God. If he finished a novel and still had words left to reach his quota, he would go right into the next novel at the same sitting. He wrote on vacations. He wrote on trains. He wrote forty-eight novels averaging 150,000-180,000 words, towering, colossal novels. Trollope was no genius; among 19th century British novelists, he was a distant second to Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, the Brontes… but they were geniuses. I am not a genius, so I must make a quota, and maybe, maybe, I can do half as well for myself as Trollope did.

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Papillion” hit 18,000 words today. Score!

I spent some time catching up on critiques for my good ol’ writing group. Critiquing, the jolly dissection of someone else’s hard work, is an educational experience. Reading unrevised works with an especially critical eye, you detect weaknesses of prose, structure, or storytelling that would be weeded from a more polished story. (Please note that my writing group produces stories of uncommonly high caliber. All values of quality in this blog post are relative!) In so detecting, you learn to avoid these errors in your own works. Or, you might learn from something that your friend did right, something you wish you did, and you quietly steal that something and wait for an opportunity to bring it back in another form. Hee hee.

And I want to tell you of one of the stories I read. It’s called “Bridge Club,” by Erin, and it’s hilarious and subtle and joyful to read. I wish I had written it. I’m sure I’ll be able to link to it sometime soon.

Posted in My Talented Friends, Papillon, Writing | 1 Comment »