I’ve got my books for Bali all picked out.

During our three-week beach lollygag, we’ll just be swimming, strolling, and reading. It’s a good opportunity for me to clear some of the more fun books off my shelf, the books I didn’t have time to read these past three months while writing Papillon, when I read books with titles like Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages and How to Read a Church: A Primer of Christian Symbolism and The Great Mortality.

You’ll notice these are all science fiction works, and all Hugo winners. Let’s roll out some bullet points!

• Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Hugo for best novel. Simmons has a reputation for hyper-intelligence; this work is inspired by The Canterbury Tales in structure. It’s “harder” than I usually read, but I’m eager to essay it!
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve just finished The Lathe of Heaven (for which I’ll post a review sometime soon - already written, waiting in reserve on my hard drive!), and was duly impressed. This is supposed to be her watershed work. Also netted a Hugo.
• Falling Free, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I admit that I first learned about this writer because of her name. First, the phonic crackiness of “McMaster”, which would satisfy most people; then the satisfying “Bujold” tacked onto it. Wow! No wonder she is known as “the writer with the name”. By me. She’s known for her mystery-comedy-scifi Miles Vorkosigan adventures, of which this book is not a part, and a Hugo-winning fantasy series, of which this book is also not a part. This book did win a Nebula. Not as nice as a Hugo, but I’d take one. Anyway, I snapped it up because it’s a stand-alone story that didn’t require three other novels to read, and it was in the same country as me, where science fiction is hard to come by. Looking forward to it!
• Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. I’ve spoken at length about my burgeoning love of Heinlein’s work; this is supposed to be one of his greatest. It made scifi sexy. I will read it on a sexy island. Can’t wait.
• American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. I haven’t read Sandman, but I did enjoy Stardust, and recommendations for this book and Anansi Boys have been pummeling me for years now.

I’ll pick up a few more books in Seoul and in the book swaps of Bali. Book swap bins in backpacking areas are hit and miss. They’re particularly light on genre fiction. I browsed many yellowed, sweaty paperbacks in Vietnam; the two genre titles I found were The Goblin Tower by L. Sprague de Camp (hit) and Sister Alice by Robert Reed (miss). I don’t like trusting my reading fate to chance, but I also don’t like carrying around a hundred goddamn books on my vacation.

Brooding atop these books like a malevolent hen broods over the Earth, her egg for the cracking, you notice the dread visage of Cthulhu, God of the Living, Lord of the Damned, the Sleeper in Darkness. Fortunately, he is rendered here in yarn, so your sanity is preserved, for now. We have my good friend Ali Heep (née Dean) to thank for creating this mind-blasting figurine; considerable technical skill went into its blasphemous creation. She is to be lauded.

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So I stumbled across this article by Harold Bloom from 2003, published when Stephen King earned the National Book Award; I know, I know, we all love Stephen King, and to speak ill of his populist works is the very foulest intellectualism and pretension. Well, Dr. Bloom thought otherwise, and spoke out in a delightfully scathing way.

“What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Haha! I titter in delight. What can I say? I slogged through The Stand and some short stories. They were all right. I respect King’s ability to produce and sell, and his On Writing has some solid advice. I am “okay” with King, but I am an aspiring writer; were I a Yale Sterling Professor, I would no doubt feel otherwise.

Bloom is important as perhaps the only living literary critic that college graduates may be able to name; as an English major, I’m familiar with his theories of “pure” reading. Discard social charges, discard political purposes in reading. Reading is a purely aesthetic experience. A feminist or Marxist interpretation of Hamlet may teach us something of feminism or Marxism, but very little of Hamlet. (Well, yes; reading is a subtle and complex experience, and any work certainly ought to be considered on an aesthetic level; I would even say first and foremost; however, the primacy of aesthetics absolutely should not rule out political and social depth; books do not exist in a vacuum!)

Furthermore, Bloom says, the idea that we do some sort of service to an ethnicity or demographic merely by reading authors from their respective groups is absurd; why read Aphra Behn so we men can experience feminist narratives, when females can just read Shakespeare, which is universal in its appeal?

Now, the knee-jerk reaction of a modern moderate liberal would be decry this as ethnocentric, but Bloom has a point. As he states in the article:

“I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can’t write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.”

It is true that many minority or female writers of dubious merit have sneaked into curricula alongside minority or female writers of obvious merit. However, in no way are Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Blake, and Coleridge in danger of being unseated. Aphra Behn will certainly not displace Shakespeare, and it is preposterous, as well, to think that Sandra Cisneros or - I don’t know, who do kids read? - Mildred Taylor, say - could unseat the Bard. However, it is equally (and sadly) inconceivable that an average tenth grader could struggle through MacBeth. I think Bloom might not actually be familiar with the American people beyond the tiny percentage that goes to Yale.

Yet I’m in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with him when he later derides Harry Potter. While I am delighted that so many millions of kids who previously sat slack-jawed in the radiation of the TV are now reading (or were reading, since the final book was published) for entertainment, I am dismayed that their selections do not seem to venture beyond HP and its progeny; it seems when I was a child or preteen I read Roald Dahl, Alice in Wonderland, HG Wells, Frank Baum and the like, and I read omnivorously. And yet I still have hope that these children can at least be shown that there is pleasure in pages, and may one day pick up some book they may not have otherwise (maybe a book with “Jens Rushing” on the cover…). It’s pretty clear that this doesn’t matter a damn to Dr. Bloom; if they aren’t going to read Percy Bysshe Shelley, to hell with ‘em!

But still I giggled in delight at his descriptions of reading Harry Potter:
“I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character “stretched his legs.” I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.”

The invective! Delicious to my ears! I love to imagine Harold Bloom in some giant dusty high-backed chair, perhaps a snifter of cognac on the desk before him, envelope clenched in his bony hands, muttering in disgust. Perhaps the first robin of spring settles on the windowsill; he hurls a bust of Henry James at it.

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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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Well, today is my second straight day without writing. To occupy myself, I’ve been catching up on critiques with the writing group, reading, and playing a lot of video games. Hurrah! Also, I’m doing laundry.

Yesterday I finished Flashman in the Great Game. Fantastic, as usual. I’ve yet to read a bad book by Fraser. I started The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Leguin; likewise fantastic. Her hyper-intelligence hooked me immediately, and the urban dystopia that she develops casually, almost as an afterthought to the plot, is convincing and eerily plausible.

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… the last two words I typed today.

“Papillon” stands at 112,243 words at the end of the first draft. Nine chapters. 176 single-spaced pages.

73 days, 435 cups of coffee, 26 cups of tea, two terrible hangovers, forty gallons of sweat - and I’m finished!

Now I have about two and a half weeks of off-time before we jet to Bali. So much time to fill. What do you non-writers do with your lives?

I guess I will turn my attentions to mastering the banjo.
… just kidding. The Tournament of Titillation approaches! I must generate content! In exchange for you guys reading my boring descriptions of the novel-writing process, I will fête you royally throughout August! It will be so exciting!

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Papillon’s at about 110,000 words. I’ll finish it tomorrow. I will … finish … my first novel … tomorrow.

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“Your word is like unto a bucket of shit.”

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Stephanie Scarborough’s short-short “Naked Confusion” is up at the Cynic Online. Featuring imaginary nudity!

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So, soon I will finish the first draft of “Papillon”, and then I will jet off for three weeks on the tropical beaches of Bali, sipping mojitos, eating roasted suckling pigs, reading science-romances, and generally taking it easy! Tourism is the new colonialism!

Anyway, while I’m en vacance, I certainly can’t be bothered with the upkeep of this website, which is why I have planned a series of events united under the poetic name of “Contentpalooza.”
Scratch that. “Parade of Scintillation.” No. “Parade of SINtillation.” No. “Tournament of Titillation.” Yes.

This is a three-pronged attack on your pleasure centers. The first and deadliest prong is a series of illustrated short-short stories, featuring the artwork of the talented Katie McKraken. These will be posted on Mondays, Seoul time, which I guess is the middle of the night on Sunday for most of my readers.  The second prong will be a series of book reviews by me. I read interesting things all the time, but I rarely take the time to educate you, dear reader, as I should. That will change; look for these on Wednesday. The third prong is a series of “guest columns” by various writers of renown, to be posted on Fridays.

The Tournament of Titillation will run from August 4th, when the first story goes live, through the end of the month.

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Papillon is at 102,133 words. This probably seems like a less important milestone than yesterday’s. And it would be - to the casual observer! To the learned, though, today’s milestone is COLOSSAL, for I finished writing “The Reign of Vermin”, the eighth (of nine) and by far the longest chapter. And it’s a jim-dandy-fine chapter, too - it probably contains the best writing in the book, and it’s the culmination of the themes and characters I’ve worked so hard to implement. There’s one more short chapter left, and I almost feel like I should make it an epilogue. Structurally, the novel’s over.  In terms of character and theme, I have a lot left to do. Also, the action of this planned chapter is actually what I conceived first; it’s important to ME. The reader, as always, will just have to quit his gol-durn belly-achin’ and enjoy it!

I intended to write some about the immediate future of this website, but now it’s time to go home! So off I go!

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My cousin, Cindi Reed, just snatched her Master’s Degree from the talons of the University, and, suddenly free after all these years, she has launched herself at writing. And who could ever hope to be a writer without a snazzy webpage? Visit hers here. Cindi is no novice at writing, either; she enjoyed a successful editorship at youth-and-beauty temple 944 Magazine, sharpening her skills to a killing edge. We expect great things from her!

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Hurrah!

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Read the rest of this entry »

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Papillon’s at 91,500 words, right at quota! Hurrah! This book is totally not going to be finished at the 100,000 word mark. I still have three major scenes to write, and have to insert that segment way back in chapter IV. Maybe 120. It will be nice to have something else to talk about, eh?

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How negligent of me! Talented Friend Erin Kinch was published over at Electric Spec a few days ago, and I totally forgot to inform that small section of the world that reads my blog but not hers. Well, this is for you, guys! Read her story.

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Papillon’s at 87,000 words. As I come closer to the end, I realize that this will probably be a 110 or 120,000 word first draft. Good or bad? Who knows. All I know is I have really, really got to finish by August 9th, when we head to Bali. I will NOT go on vacation with a 95% finished novel, like I did with the last one, even if it means writing 5,000 words a day. No way. This novel is too good to do that too. Oh, yes.

… the artistic process isn’t that exciting to watch, is it? Sure, there’s a lot of mental wrestling in the crafting of a narrative. How do I decide what the characters? What comes next? What each scene, symbol, and line of dialogue means? But ultimately it comes down to: “I wrote X words today; I will write X words tomorrow; and so on, until it’s done.”

That is all!

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Fat ones! Skinny ones! Pretty ones! Ugly ones! The Lord God loves them all!

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Papillon topped 80,000 today. Exhilarating to think I could be done within two weeks. “Exhilarating” is a word I can never spell right on the first try - one of the few!

I just finished reading “Starship Troopers,” by Robert Heinlein. I have many well-formed thoughts on this book that I will not put down now. All I can say is, damn, Paul Verhoeven was so far off the mark that he had no idea there even was a mark. Satire is only effective if we can tell recognize its subject; if the title did not link the book and the film, you would be excused for not realizing one is (very loosely) based off the other. (Of course, Verhoeven admitted that he never even read the book. Oi. Is understanding of one’s subject necessary for effective satire? Methinks.)

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Papillon’s at 76,500 words. By the end of the month, I’ll be - done!

In other news, I was interviewed at Space Westerns. I don’t come off as too pretentious, either - just pretentious enough!

Posted in Interviews, Papillon | 1 Comment »