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.”

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“Ars Draconis” has cracked the top ten of the past thirty days - it’d be nice to crack the top ten of ALL TIME - and it’s just two hundredths of a point away! Click here, vote, vote!!

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Head to Every Day Fiction and read “Ars Draconis” (”Art of the Dragon”, not “Dragon Arse,” thank you). It’s a funny little piece. Please vote for it!

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You’ll notice that the “Publications” page over there on the right has been updated: a full menu for your dejeuner à la Jens!

Finished reading Nana. It was okay. Not my favorite Zola, not my least favorite. It suffered from being serialized in its original incarnation. According to the preface, it had something of a tortured writing process, with Zola struggling to meet deadlines. It shows, particularly in the final postmortem scene, where we have a wilting anticlimax rather than the emotional payoff for which we’ve endured 467 pages. Bad form, Monsieur Zola!

I took a break for some Conan - sex on a battlefield! Wow! - and then began Shards of Honor, a Hugo winner and the first (chronological) book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s lauded Vorkosigan series. I loved her complex characters and graceful use of science in Falling Free. She’s got something like twenty hundred dozen books in this series. I look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with my new favorite living authoress. I even used her name in Papillon (in a subtle, non-copyright-infringing kinda way) for that of a barbaric spirit-swallowing tribe.
“Gasp! Not - the spirit-swallowers of Bujold?!”
It works better in context.

Today I coalesced (is that a transitive verb? Is now!) my pages of notes on “untitled Franco-Prussian war story” into a concise, well-plotted outline. Circumstances - school botheration - prevent me from working on it tomorrow, but Friday - WATCH OUT! I have the happy feeling that I am about to bring forth something monumental. I’m also hungry. This work will be complex, texturally rich, and quite possibly boring to the point of inducing tears. Still working on that last one. I theorize that if I write with radiant style, engrossing characters, and irrefutable wisdom, I will prevail. Anyone can do that!
Once I got a rejection letter that said the editors found the dialogue too dependent on italics for emphasis. I’ve since tried writing around them (I’m venting my italics in this post). I find that makes my style cleaner, and allows for greater impact when I do employ italics - nuances with which you can crush a car into a cube!

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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.)

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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 »

First, Talented Friend Erin Kinch is published over at “A Thousand Faces,” with glowing words from the editor. The story is “Bridge Club,” the quality of which I can attest.

Second, EDF has published their TOC for November; Stephanie Scarborough has a piece up November 5th, and my own “Ars Draconis” appears November 20th. I wrote that story while drinking tea and eating papayas on the balcony of our Ubud bungalow in Bali, listening to the rain pelt the banana leaves… so from this Indochine scene we have a tale of medieval Europe.

Third and final, EDF has released the TOC of their “Best of Year One” print antho, and my humble “Socks and Banshees” is on it, along with tales from all the WI crew: Alex, Erin, Stephanie. Hurrah!

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I just finished East of Eden. It’s a monumental book, and I’ll be digesting it for a while. It’s six hundred pages of radiant prose. Steinbeck’s characterization is absolutely beautiful, subtle and deeply moving. I’ve read this, Tortilla Flat, and Of Mice and Men, but never considered myself a “fan” of Steinbeck; this book has made a convert of me. It’s hard to say that a winner of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes is unappreciated, but he’s often crowded out of the American canon in favor of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Hemingway had the power but not his brilliance; Faulkner had his brilliance but not his grace; Fitzgerald had the grace but lacked his fire. Ay! What a writer.
My mind’s too full of this book to write more right now.

Instead, let’s talk about Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, for which he was nominated for the Pulitzer prize (only to lose it to that bitch Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence [the book that almost destroyed my marriage {just kidding}]); specifically, the issue of Carol Kennicott’s relationship with her husband, the venerable Dr. Will Kennicott.
I read this book four or five years ago, the second of Lewis’s novels that I read; I read Arrowsmith first, and came to this book with a building glee in having discovered this remarkable author (grace, power, brilliance - but a tad too much snark for his own good). Main Street was less humorous but much denser than Arrowsmith, and an accurate, excellent encapsulation of Americana - like much of Lewis’s social commentary, it’s just as (IF NOT MORE) relevant today, with the “Main Street/Wall Street” thing tossed around until we all puke. The narrowness that “real America” can breed is given life in this book, explained for all of us city folk, humanized, made real and sliced into cross-sections to be studied under glass. A brilliant book.

However, today, five years later, I was SUDDENLY stricken by the hollowness of the protagonist’s relationship with her husband. The marriage is the device that keeps her stranded in a small town and strangles her ambition, yet Kennicott himself is a non-factor, almost a cypher.
Having been married for over two years now and therefore knowing all there is to know about marriage, this incongruity is (all of a sudden) much plainer to me. Carol Kennicott hardly ever speaks to or about her husband or her child. Most of her struggles are with the small-minded residents of Gopher Prairie, not with her family. I - don’t know what to think. Have you read Main Street? What’s your opinion? Haven’t read it? Why, then, have you wasted your life until now? Go read it, dear reader.

As long as I have your figurative ear (literal eye), I’ll take a moment to lay out a brief observation on the collected works of Lewis. I am amused to state that he has two essential types of protagonists, and every protagonist in his twenty-four novels (or at least in the eleven I have read) falls into these two types.

1) The average middle-class guy who undergoes an intellectual awakening and comes to see the world is unstimulating, and his old friends are imbeciles, and his new friends are those he once thought eccentrics or socialists: Our Mr. Wrenn, Babbit, Mantrap, Dodsworth, Kingsblood Royal, World So Wide.

And 2) The intellectual misfit who eventually learns the inevitability of compromise and the impossibility of achieving his or her goals in this world filled with imbeciles: Main Street, Arrowsmith, Ann Vickers, Cass Timberlane.

One can form a pretty good idea of Lewis’s opinion of himself through the briefest acquaintance with his protagonists.

But, wow, what a writer! I’ve never known another with his gift for invention - besides Dickens. Ideas, characters, piccadillos, and beauty just fly from the fingertips of these two writers.

I suspect Philip Roth may have this ability, but my research was inconclusive: the first two pages of The Great American Novel scared me off. Dude’s insane.

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