Well, January was a pleasant vacation. Aside from the work of searching for and writing to agents, I did very little in pursuit of the fictive craft. After a few weeks of this, a sense of maddening idleness began to bore like scarab beetles into my brain. I’m happy to get back to work this month.

As you know, dear reader, I’ll begin my next novel in March. That means that February will go to research and pre-writing. My schedule will accommodate; I have only ten days in which my school mandates my attendance, and, even then, no work is required from me, giving me long stretches of desk-time. Delightful!

Right now, I’ve got a bunch of loose ideas kicking around. The heroes - and villains - of this novel will be the Knights Templar. There will also be the Nephilim. There will be Mamelukes. It will take place during, probably, the third or fourth Crusade. It will reference the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It will be more tightly plotted than Papillon, probably with greater concern for historical accuracy, and definitely with a larger cast and multiple narrators. Overall, a much more ambitious work. I’m comfortable with this. Papillon was a modest accomplishment on a small scale, but it showed me that I can finish a novel. Now, on to bigger things.

I’ve got a stack of books to read! I’ll be immersing myself in the Middle Ages, until I vomit saints and Holy Roman Emperors.

Give me some bullet points!

• The Templars, by Piers Paul Read. The definitive history of the subject, objective and free of the conspiracy-theorizing that surrounds so much Templar scholarship. Starting here.
• The Knights Templar of the Middle East: The Secret Islamic Origins of Freemasonry, by HRH Prince Michael of Albany. And here is a blatant piece of conspiracy-theorizing. For balance.
• A Concise History of the Catholic Church, by Thomas Bokenkotter. Seven hundred pages is not concise! (This was a gift of Ko-friend Emanuel Serra.)
• Medieval Culture and Society, by David Herlihy. As much fun as the title makes it out to be.
• Sea of Faith, by Stephen O’Shea. Now this looks interesting. It’s specifically about the interactions of Christianity and Islam in the medieval Mediterranean world. Precisely what I need.
• The Mystics of Islam, by Reynold A. Nicholson. Probably mostly about the Sufis. Not exactly what I need, but, whatever.
• The Everything Middle East Book. Primer history.
• Sword and Scimitar, by Ernle Bradford. The most balanced history of the Crusades I could find. The other two had cover copy like this: “The Crusades were an egregious example of ethnocentric religion-crushing, as the vainglorious, savage Franks slaughtered the noble Muslims…” And the other: “The Crusades were a necessary assertion against the Mohammedan menace, a menace, this book will show you, that is still menacing today…” No, thank you. Sword and Scimitar does nothing more unprofessional than tempt you with licentious descriptions of the low price of blonde girls in mid-Crusades slave markets. Sign me up!
• Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval Castle, by noted historian-lovers Frances and Joseph Gies.
• A History of Pagan Europe, by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick. Interesting!
• Chronicles of the Crusades, by Joinville and Villehardouin. Primary source for the Crusades.
• The Medieval Reader. More primary sources. I found some excerpts of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis that I integrated into Papillon, as well as an excellent, helpful essay by an anonymous thirteenth-century Jewish philosopher entitled “Jewish Penis Is Better than Christian Penis”.
• That’s all I have to read for this novel. I’ve got a bunch of other books that may prove useful, but which I do not consider absolutely necessary for this novel, including: Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, the Koran (with which I unintentionally infuriated over one billion of the faithful by shelving in my fiction section), a history of the ancient Mediterranean, and Barbara Tuchman’s essential A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. During my childhood, this last text was often cited by my father over the breakfast-table as a necessity for understanding the ebb and flow of western civilization. However, it describes a period after the setting of my novel, so I may go unedified for a time. (Seven hundred pages is not concise!) (Such was my childhood. One-half of my breakfasts were filled with horror stories from my father’s work [as a firefighter]. “Let me tell you about this interesting suicide! Let me tell you about the comical symptoms of brain-death caused by smoke inhalation!” The other half was theories of civilization.)

Umberto Eco once described, in one of his hilarious essays collected in “How to Travel With a Salmon”, the proper way to respond to the impossible and irritating question of “Have you read all the books on your shelf?” One says, “Most of my books are at the office. These are just the ones I have to read this week.”

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My very serious essay on the creative process (while in a zeppelin) has been published at Every Day Weirdness. Read it!

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I wrote an essay this morning, a helpful essay entitled “The Difficulties of Writing a Novel (in a Zeppelin Fortress)”. I posted it as a journal entry on this selfsame webpage, and, amused, sought to share it with anyone who happened to be in gmail chat at that moment, including N.E. Lilly, editor of some fine web publications. He recommended I take it down and submit it to everydayweirdness.com, which I did. It’ll go up January 28th. It… is… FUNNY!

Felt good to write again, I tell you what. It’s been a month. This vacation has rotted my brain.

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I care about the environment. I wear serious sweaters and somber hats.

I listen to the Arcade Fire and the Shins.

I eat organic foods.

I know the value of a dollar. It is $1.00.

I appreciate irony in small doses.

Stupidity does not interest me.

I disdain the naivete of the young and the cynicism of the old.

I hate the filth and corruption of cities almost as much as I hate the ignorance and stagnation of small towns.

I know how to poach an egg, because I am nobody’s fool.

I understand large books. Moby-Dick is about a whale. The Brothers Karamazov is about some brothers. Bleak House is about a house that is actually very happy. That last one is a trick title. As a serious person, I am not fooled.

I understand the superiority of cilantro over parsley.

I wear scarves properly. I signal my turns, when people are watching. I have wild revisionist plans for the English language, but I say nothing - for now.

I would never hurt an animal, though I eat lots of meat. I enjoy Italian food. I have a bold destiny at hand. I appreciate vivid paint colors. I know that vinyl records have better sound quality than mp3s, even though they sound scratchy and weird.

Leather is cruel; heirloom tomatoes are the best tomatoes of all.

I am a serious person and I demand to be taken seriously.

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I’m still on vacation! I’ve had time to get through some books, but occasional duties to friends and family interrupt my reading.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve read:

• A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore, which I discussed in a previous post.
• Between Planets, by Robert Heinlein. You know, sometimes his writing for juveniles is better than his writing for adults. Starman Jones is a good example of this. Between Planets is another good example. Young Whatshisface is born in space, has parents on Mars, lives on Earth, which is attacked by Venus. Interplanetary war! What is a boy to do? An exciting adventure, good-enough characters, fun science - did you know that Venus is actually quite cool, almost chilly? The major inconvenience of life there is the constant damp fog. Also, the dragons.
• Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson, who won the 2005 Hugo for best novel with Spin, on my shelf in Korea. I’m looking forward to it now. Darwinia has the following mind-bogglingly huge concept: one night in 1912, shimmery lights like the aurora borealis appear all over the globe. When they disappear a few hours later, Europe is gone. It is replaced by DARWINIA, a continent filled with all sorts of crazy fantasy creatures. And the plot gets even huger from there, until it gets amazingly, crushingly, brain-expandingly huge - and then it gets small, disappointingly small, for the ending. But it’s really good until that part.
• More Neil Gaiman. A story about a sexy, pulpy tiger-taming biogeologist, a fascinating story about an unpleasant pedophilic hired killer, an amusing one about a shy child bassist, and so on. I keep reading these stories.
• A Sinclair Lewis story called “Ring Around a Rosy”. As with much of his short fiction, it has an unpleasant mercenary feel to it - I don’t blame a writer for paying the bills, though. A couple in New York hates their local hustle and bustle, so they flee to England, where folks can relax, and rent the estate of a wealthy British couple, who, tired of the insouciance of English servants, move to Italy with its complaisant servants; they rent the villa of an Italian economics professor, who, wanting only political discourse, exchanges the rigidity of Mussolini-era Italy for the relative freedom (viz., political chaos) of mid-war pre-Hitler Germany; there the Italian rents the house of a German engineer, who, disliking the talk, talk, talk of this time of social upheaval, wanting only to invent and build, accepts an offer from an American company to move to New York and design tractors. He rents the penthouse of the first couple. Ha ha!
  But, seriously… it’s a funny story about how some people can’t be happy wherever fate has put them, and about how minds and times work together, or don’t. Lewis’s customary wit makes it a breezy, pleasant read. Hey, why don’t you click here and read his very good1918 story “The Willow Walk”? Do you have anything better to do than ingest an excellent example of the short fiction form? You do not. Click there.
• And now I’m reading John Scalzi’s book Old Man’s War. It’s good enough to deserve an unbulleted exploration.

Ah, here we go! No bullets here. Yes. I’ve read more military sci-fi lately than I ever thought I would. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers set up the genre nicely, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War just as nicely took it apart. Old Man’s War continues their tradition very well. First, though, its publication history deserves notice. Scalzi couldn’t find a publisher, and put the book up for sale on his webpage. He said it kept him in pizza money for several years, and it finally got the notice of Tor, who published it. It was nominated for a Hugo, and won a John. W Campbell award for best new writer. It’s a remarkable novel. Good science, good characters, good plot, fun style. I’ll be checking out his other books, because I’ve already bought a bunch of ‘em.

This is part of my effort to read more “living” authors. This effort includes Tobias Buckell; I’ve got his debut Crystal Rain. He’s a mere four years older than I, and has published three novels. Sigh. Must remember to search for an agent tomorrow…

Also, a random quote from Edward Gorey that has stuck in my mind.

The seaweed on the shore cries out, but no one knows what about.

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Can’t remember the order of the new ex-Soviet Baltic countries? In order from north to South, we have “Eggs Like Bleach” - that is, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus. What about the final Aztec kings? “Try All Monkeys!” Meaning, of course: Tizoc, Ahuitzotl, Motecuzōma Xocoyotzin.

No doubt you can never keep straight the names of all six types of quarks. I know I can’t. Here you go: “Ungulates Defenestrate Botulism To Sirocco Cadavers”. Each standing for: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm. Now you’ll remember!

How about the subdivisions of the Cambrian system (in the Russian-Kazakh nomenclature)? Nothing could be easier! Just remember: “Nebbish Tropes All Break Tumultuous Atlatls; Many Billions Against Six Absolutes” stands for Nemakit-Daldynian, Tommotian, Atdabanian, Botomian, Toyonian, Amgan, Mayan, Batyrbayan, Aksayan, Sakian, Ayusokkanian.

Write these down for quick reference.

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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!

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It’s been a while!

Christmas came and went. You may have detected its passage! This year I was fortunate to be home, with all my sisters and nephews and cousins and aunts and uncles present. My older sister gave me a box of business cards with the address for this page; I’d better make it professional tout de suite! My parents gave me The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede; I’m trying to read more primary historical texts, rather than secondary sources (that is, books from history rather than books about history). They also gave me Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice and Gene Wolfe’s Shadow and Claw, the first book of the New Sun cycle. I’m looking forward to that one. I got the second book some time ago, but haven’t read it yet, obviously.

My cousin, with whom I have a long-established birthday-and-Christmas book swap, gave me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and an autographed copy of Neil Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things. Right inside the front cover: “To Jens - fragile wishes - Neil Gaiman.” We are now linked. In five years, I will encounter him at some scifi con, shake his hand, introduce myself, and he will say, “Yes, Jens, I remember.”
I’ve read about a hundred pages of the book. The stories are sometimes haunting, sometimes creepy, usually effective, and once or twice a bit dreary. So far they seem mostly to be ghost stories, which I wasn’t entirely expecting; one brilliant exception is A Study in Emerald (Hugo for best short story in 2004), a Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft pastiche. You can read it in glorious illustrated format online.

I bought a few books for myself, as well: a number of Heinlein: The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, The Number of the Beast, Between Planets (a juvenile, finished this morning, good fun), Expanded Universe (short stories) and Grumbles from the Grave (letters); also Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson (Hugo for novel Spin); two by Tim Powers, Earthquake Weather and another that I can’t find right now; Ivanhoe; Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigade by John Scalzi (trying to read some still-living authors - hopefully, Mr. Scalzi will not be inexplicably marked for death once I begin his novels); Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles; Olympus, by Dan Simmons, the other 900 pages after Ilium, which I still haven’t read but look forward to; Memory and Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold; Little Sister by Raymond Chandler; some history: Medieval Soldier, Life in a Medieval Village, Records of the Crusades, Mystics of Islam, The Medieval Reader, Life in a Medieval Castle, and History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russel. You may detect a them in my nonfiction selections.

Further gifts that I neglected to mention: How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, wherein Umberto Eco reveals his unexpectedly hilarious side - from my wife; Amphigorey Again, from Ali, guaranteed to amuse and disturb; A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore, from Kerry - already read it - amusing though rather do-nothing plot bolstered by good world-building, interesting, sympathetic characters and rapid-fire Bendis-style dialogue; Barry Lyndon, by Thackeray, from Joel. Whew! I wish I could find that other Tim Powers book…

I gave my cousin, in turn, Stranger in a Strange Land and Moby-Dick. We were in Half-Price, and I pointed out that august whaling epic and asked her opinion. “Never read it - looked like a dumb boy’s book.” And I silently vowed to inflict it upon her. It will make her wiser. I described Moby-Dick as the reason one learns to read; it is the wellspring of life; along with The Brothers Karamazov, one of the two pillars that prop up Western Civilization, our morning star and evening star, without which we would surely perish. Did humans survive before these books? Science says yes; aesthetics says no.

I’ve also got the few books that I brought along to read until I picked up more books: Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers (can you believe I’ve never read Herbert? Me neither!); Elmore Leonard’s Forty Lashes Less One, which will be my first exposure to the Detroit scribe; Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone. Looks fun.

I hope your Christmas was as merry as mine, and filled with more books than you can ever hope to read!

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