Just finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game. Love.

The Great Annual Breakneck Reading Steeplechase, now name-changed to READAGEDDON, will begin May 25th. This year’s selection is Doctor Zhivago. If you want to join us in our QUEST FOR ERUDITION (and why wouldn’t you?), then cruise on over to the Facebook group and sign up.

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Let’s talk about the next round of Hugos!
I won’t be at the 2009 Worldcon in Denver (?) or Australia (?) to cast my vote, but if you are, you’ll know where I stand, and can vote accordingly. The nominees for best novel!

• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
• Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
• Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

I haven’t actually read any of these books, but I’ll do my best to speculate on which is best!

Stephenson! This novel’s about a “math cult” on a distant philosophy-driven planet. Sounds intense! Cerebral! Stephenson has a penchant for making up words and writing lengthy books. I’ve got the first volume of his Baroque cycle on my shelf, but I’m loathe to get into it, for it represents a 5000-page investment. I’m indifferent as to his prospects. Stephenson is heaped in laurels already.

Gaiman! I’ve heard The Graveyard Book is “magical”, “lyrical”, all those words one associates with Gaiman’s work. Good for him! But I hope he doesn’t win. Why? Because his mantle is already covered with Hugos. Spread them around, Mr. Gaiman! He won (à mon avis) unjustly for American Gods and justly for “A Study in Emerald,” his delightful Holmes-Lovecraft pastiche. Never mind his Newberry and Nebula Awards.

Doctorow! I reserve judgement. I’ve never read anything of his.

Stross! Who? Whatever. He can’t win, because the Hugo must go to…

John Scalzi! I’ve read just one novel of his (Old Man’s War), but it impressed the hell out of me. Heinlein, but without the self-satisfaction. Or, The Forever War, with less pathos. The poor guy’s been up for the award several times now - come on, voters! Do him a “solid”! As we say.

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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—-

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… that I should read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series. What do you think, Internet?

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Some of the searches that lead people to my ethereal Internet door:

• “a mask was forced over her face” That’d be from my story, “The Death-Mask,” available via that link to the right - I’m guessing that the searcher had bondage in mind.
• “a serious person”. What can I say? I’m a serious person.
• “penis print jens”. I honestly have no clue. I wish I knew which search engine these people are using, because “penis print jens” doesn’t link here for the first ten pages, and I really can’t be bothered to search further. Someone really wanted their penis print jens.
• “sex jens arab”. Well, that makes sense.
• “strained look on her face”. Gratifying for its blandness. Who knows what they were after?
• “the angry wife pearl buck”. From my critique of that book. Hey, this one shows up in the first page of Google hits. I am preeminent among scholars of this particular book!
• And, my favorite, simply the word: “titillate”. Who would sift through eight pages of “titillate”? Someone on the Internet, that’s who. Undoubtedly this refers to my Tales to Titillate.
• And, while looking back through my page for this post, I re-discovered this very helpful and necessary dispatch that you might have missed, but sorely need.

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I’ve been thinking about fun things I’d like to do with this journal should I publish a novel and acquire a readership, and I’m going to jot them down here lest I forget.

• Communal Art. It’d be fun to have weekly or monthly projects wherein everyone creates a piece of art of some sort, be it a story, a drawing, a song, or *ugh* a poem, based on a word, phrase, or idea. Then I could post the winners on the page. Joel and I very briefly tried something like this last year.
• Reading race, or the Great Annual Breakneck Read-Hurdle Steeplechase. Last year, Joel and friend Donna and I read competitively. I wanted to get through the 1400 pages of Bleak House, and I wanted to do it in a timely fashion, lest I be reading that brick of a book for all eternity. So we all started at the same time and posted our daily completion percentage (page numbers don’t work unless you all have the same edition). We’re thinking we’ll do another this year. The criterion is that one selects a massive book that one would not normally get through otherwise; Joel has suggested Atlas Shrugged, for which he may be strangled. Ha, ha. The benefits of the reading race are many: you actually complete the novel - how many people have given up on War and Peace? You have someone with whom to discuss the interesting parts and commiserate on the drudging parts. The winner gets bragging rights, which are hard to come by these days. Anathem would be a good selection.

Here’s a list of the world’s longest novels. I’ve read… two.

Wow. Linked from there to the Strange Case of Henry Darger. I’d never heard of the guy, but his life and work are a powerful example of the artistic urge; he had a story within him that he to tell, and he told it over the course of six decades. Amazing.

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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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