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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And so that y’all don’t think I never publish any more, I will direct your attention to Big Pulp, where you can find my story “Thirst,” a pirate vengeance tale. This has a strong female protagonist, which I understand some people like. Also, murder, which even more people like.

“Spot of murder with your biscuits, dearie?”

Hahaha!

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Talented Friend Erin Kinch has a story up at EDF. Read it! Vote it!

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Aside from being a pretty great name for a rock band, this is also a terrific story. Howard, of course, is the standard bearer of the pulp author who doesn’t “just write pulp.” Yes, he wrote stories to entertain, and he wrote them for money, in a mercenary fashion, but each breathes such quality that they rise above that cheaply printed medium.

This particular “yarn” (as Howard, a Texan, called his stories) comes from my “Lord of Samarkand” collection, all of which are historical fictions set in the Crusader era of mid-11th to mid-14th centuries. Like most of his stories, his protagonists are massive men of almost Herculanean strength, untamed warriors unable to fit into society by merit of their ferocity and savage individuality.

Here we must take a detour for an interesting biographical note. The relationship between writer and writings always fascinates me, and Howard provides a particularly fine example.

Howard viewed himself as one of these barbarian renegades, and to a certain extent it was true. Many of Howard’s heroes die in battle against overwhelming odds, raging to the last against the inexorable weight of the world - individuals who will not conform, and so they are crushed (sometimes they do the crushing; Conan, for example, becomes a king, bringing society to heel instead of the other way around; but the struggle of individual versus structure remains). As revealed in his letters and in the interesting (but deeply flawed) biopic “The Whole Wide World”, Howard put himself in the same mold. He wanted to swing swords in battle; he wanted to carve out kingdoms for himself; he wanted to live lustily, like one of the historical icons he read about or one of the fictional icons he wrote about. But he lived in 1930s conservative small-town Texas, surrounded by dyed-in-the-wool Southern Baptists who frowned on so much as a glass of beer or a revealed ankle, let alone a quaffed mug of ale or a scantily clad wench - the red-blooded stuff of Howard’s fantasy. Howard sought out bareknuckle prizefights in boxcars. He paid hobos to fight him. These scrapes failed to satisfy the guy with a thorough knowledge and keen appreciation of military tactics and history; no matter how far he lost himself in books, he was still stuck in small-town Texas.

This is not to say that these qualities of Howard’s character are laudable. In person, this sort of machismo annoys or disgusts me. But it makes a fine fiction. And I’m saying that this is how the man was, and this is how his world was, and in the contrast we find that attractive fatalism that America’s cult of individuality reveres so well.

An excerpt of one of Howard’s letters is particularly moving, especially for a writer. I’m paraphrasing it from memory. Howard sees the film “The Cossacks,” an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella, and writes excitedly to his friend: “What I would give to live a life like that! Riding, fighting, loving; not even knowing how to write.” That last sentence gives me chills.

Howard, like “Sowers” protagonist Cahal Ruadh O’Donnel, struggled and was crushed; he killed himself at the age of thirty. A tragedy for writings lost, but a poetic choice for a man too big for his time.

Anyway, back to the story. “Sowers” hits on all cylinders. Howard often neglects character and theme for plot and action, but here, as in his excellent Conan story “Beyond the Black River”, he succeeds on all fronts. You have the thwarted king Cahal making his fortune by his blade in the languishing Crusader kingdom of Outremer, with the Mongols and Mameluks pressing in from both sides. (The Mongols were a favorite device of Howard, the epitome of barbarism in his perpetual fascination with barbarism against civilization.) Opposing Cahal is the historical Baibars, a typical Howard hero; strong, cunning, ruthless and unapologetic in achieving his ends. It’s difficult to tell much of the story without spoiling it. It offers a thrilling account of the fall of Outremer, a remarkably epic tale for twenty thousand words or so. Howard’s accomplishment lies in making this fall of a decayed kingdom seem relevant; he puts blood into people and a struggle long dead and says some truly profound things on the problem of violence in human culture.

The story is a gem lost in the pulp wastes of the 30s. This collection was printed by the University of Nebraska, which is hardly a mover and shaker in the literary world. The foreword and the conservative design make it clear that this is no effort to present Howard’s works for a new generation, but a no-frills attempt at collecting the work so that it not disappear amongst the slush of the pulp era. Who would be the audience for a collection like this? It’s hard to imagine anyone besides Howard purists seeking it out. Many fantasy fans neglect to experience any of his work beyond Conan and maybe Solomon Kane. Few people are interested in historical fiction, either; the intersection of these factors makes the work doubly forgettable; it may vanish except that it is an indelible, enduring tale. But, honestly, who has time for something like that? It’s a minor story by a minor author. (This opens up a whole ‘nother can of worms; how can a writer make it when people can’t be bothered to read? Especially in an age where we are flooded with fiction. It’s hard to keep up with the few remaining print zines, let alone the hundreds of online publications bursting with great fiction. But I’ll leave that subject alone; it wouldn’t be fun to read.)

You can read the whole thing here. It’ll take an hour of your time.

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Talented Friend Alex Burns has a story up at EDF!
Jens loves the title.

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Here’s a first sentence to a story that goes nowhere:

“The problem with alternative universes is that they’re alternative.”

… and then what? The best I’ve come up with is a floundering interdimensional travel agency trying to figure out new ways to sell time-shares in parallel universes. It’s actually not as fun as it sounds. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

B&D is crawling along. A week of work has yielded 4000 words, alas, many of them boring. Back to that drawing board, too. I need something new and fun.

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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:

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My night of Hong Kong cinema and beer continues.

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I’ll put this below a cut so as not to annoy you, my dear sweet readers.

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