What a blur, these last two weeks. I finished Bitterwood, pushing it up to 116k words. I feel confident in saying that Bitterwood is the most fleshed out work of fiction I've ever created. Nobody Gets the Girl was written with a rather minimalist style. Comic book writing is actually rather terse; having to keep you dialogue into word balloons forces comic writers to be lean and mean. Of course, they have the advantage of art surrounding the word balloons. They don't have to describe a characters, a room, or an action sequence. It's all drawn out for them. With Nobody, I used my prose as a pencil, sketching out a lot of quick outlines and backgrounds, not adding a lot of color, presenting a world composed mostly of shades of grays. Dialogue carries much of the action and reveals most of the characters' thoughts.
Bitterwood, on the otherhand, is a painted novel. It involves races of dragons, in emerald, ruby, and azure hues. The characters in Nobody seldom think about eating; in Bitterwood, primary characters sometimes pause to savor licking the drying blood from beneath their claws. In a world dominated by inhuman creatures, I tried to weave a tapestry of tastes, odors, and textures to bring to life the sensual environment of the dragons.
Perhaps it would be easier to illustrate with examples. The following is the first scene from the first chapter of Bitterwood: (Note: This hasn't been professionally edited yet... any typos or infelicities are entirely my fault.)
The sad little fire gave out more smoke than warmth. The hunter crouched before it, turning a chunk of ash-flecked meat on the flat stone he’d placed amidst the coals. The movement of the stone stirred more smoke. The hunter coughed, and wiped soot from his eyes. He stretched his bony, knotted fingers above the embers, fighting off the chill. He was a thin man, hair shoulder-length and gray, the deep lines of his leathery face forming a permanent frown. He pulled his heavy cloak more tightly around him.
In the tree above him hung the body of a dragon, blood dripping from its mouth.
The creature was a sky-dragon--the smallest of the winged dragon species. Strip away the ten-foot wings and the long tail and a sky-dragon was no bigger than a man, and half again as light. They were known as sky-dragons both for their prowess in flight and their coloring, the pale, perfect blue of a cloudless day. The hunter had killed many sky-dragons over the years. They weren’t particularly dangerous. Despite talons ending in two-inch claws and crocodilian jaws full of saw-like teeth, sky-dragons prided themselves on being civilized. The beasts fancied themselves as artists, poets, and scholars; they considered it beneath their dignity to engage in such menial work as hunting.
The hunter had brought the sky-dragon down with a single arrow, expertly placed on the underside of the jaw, the iron tip coming to rest dead center in the dragon's brain. The beast had fallen from the air like a suddenly dead thing, catching in the crook of a tree. The hunter had climbed the tree and retrieved the leather satchel the dragon had slung over its back. He'd tugged at the beast's body, but found the corpse jammed too tight to budge. Lowering himself even with the beast's head, he'd stared into its glassy, cat-like eyes. Sky-dragon heads always reminded him of goat heads, albeit goats covered in smooth, opalescent scales. With a grunt, he'd cut out the beast’s tongue.
Moments later, he'd built a fire, and now the tongue sizzled on the flat rock at the center, giving the smoke an oily, fishy tinge. To pass the time as the tongue cooked, the hunter searched the contents of the dragon’s satchel. Food, of course. A bottle of wine wrapped in burlap, a loaf of rock hard bread powdered with flour, two apples, some eel jerky. He also discovered a fist-sized crock capped with oily parchment bound on with a string. He punched through the parchment and recoiled at the stench. The crock was filled with strong-smelling horch, a sort of paste that dragons loved that consisted of sardines, olives, and chilies, all ground together then buried in a ceramic jar and fermented. The hunter tossed the jar as far into the woods as his arm could heave it.
Turning his attention once more to the satchel, the hunter found a map, a rolled up blanket of padded green silk, and a small jar of ink. He sniffed the cap, and judged the ink to be made from vinegar and walnut husks. Several quills crafted from the dragon's own feather-scales were in the bag. No wonder the beasts fancied themselves scholars--they were covered with the tools of writing.
The hunter paused to examine a leather-bound book, the linen paper a pristine white, the opening pages covered with sketches and notes about flowers. The drawings were meticulous. Rendered in dark walnut ink, the flowers had a life and beauty. The blossoms swelled on the page seductively enough to tempt bees.
The hunter ripped out the pages and fed them to the crackling fire. The paper writhed as if alive, curling, crumbling into large black leaves that wafted upward with the smoke, the inky designs still faintly visible until they vanished in the dark sky.
The hunter used his knife to retrieve the roasted tongue and sat back against the tree, oblivious to the blood soaking the trunk. As he chewed his meal, he stared at the inkbottle. It stirred memories. Memories for the hunter were never a good thing.
After he finished the tongue, he wiped his fingers on his grungy cloak. He picked up the book, contemplating the blank pages. Opening the ink, he dipped the quill and drew a jagged, uneven line upon the page. He tried again, drawing a circle, the line flowing more evenly this time. Across the top of the page he began to write A B C D E . . . and it all came back to him.
Dipping the quill once more, he turned the page, and wrote in cautious, even letters, “In the beginning.” He stopped, and drew a line through the words. He turned the page, and stared at the fresh parchment, so white. White like an apple blossom. White like a young bride’s skin. He lowered the quill to the page.
Dear Recanna,
I have thought of you often. What I would say if I could see you again. What I should have said those many years ago.
Twenty years. Twenty years since last I heard your voice. Twenty years I’ve been at war, alone.
If only
Here the hunter stopped. If only. These were weak words, regretful. They had no room in his heart. This was not a night to lose himself in memory and melancholy. Tomorrow was an important day. The most honored ritual of the dragons was scheduled, and he had a special, unscripted role to play.
If only.
The hunter closed the cover on those cursed words, and placed the book upon the coals.
Flames licked the edges, dancing before his eyes like ghosts.
Compare this with the opening scene of the first chapter of Nobody Gets the Girl. Again, this is from the unedited version of the original draft, since it's what I had a copy of on this computer. The actual print version varied a bit, but you'll get the gist of the different stylistic approaches, I think:
"Yeah, all my life I've been lucky," Richard said, transitioning from jokes about driving into current event jokes. "Lucky I don't live in DC for one thing. You been following this? The dome?"
There were maybe twelve people in the audience now. A few were still laughing from the last punchline. A handful nodded their heads at the mention of the dome.
"I mean talk about a waste of money," said Richard. "Seventeen billion dollars this thing’s costing. Gonna put a big old dome over the entire city. Climate control year round. There's, what? Two million people living under this thing? Three million? You could buy umbrellas for everybody for a lot less than seventeen billion. Or maybe not, if the Pentagon was in charge of it. Then we'd be buying the XJ-11 combat ready umbrella. Not only rain proof but bullet proof. They'd weigh 45 pounds each."
He wielded the mike-stand like a very heavy umbrella and staggered a few feet across the stage, grunting under its weight. The audience laughed hard. One of the first lessons Richard had learned about stand-up comedy was that he could make anything seem funny if he attached it to a silly walk.
He straightened up and put the mike back into the stand. "Thanks! You've been a great audience! I'm Richard Rogers! I'll be back here next month!"
He bounded from the stage and shook a few hands. He felt wired, buzzing, full of the same manic energy that always hit him after a set. The charge was the same with twelve people in the audience as with a hundred. This is why he'd drive four hours on a weeknight to perform at the Stokesville Ramada's comedy bar open mike.
Making his way through the small crowd, he arrived at the bar.
"Good set," said Billy, the bartender, who was already filling a glass with Richard's usual beer.
"Thanks," said Richard as he took the glass. "Small crowd though."
"Eh," said Billy. "It's raining. Never a big crowd when it's this nasty out."
"Maybe I'll start driving to DC," said Richard. "Not many nasty nights there anymore."
"Thought you didn't like the dome," said Billy.
"Ah, who cares. It’s too weird to get really worked up about. Everyday I watch the news and think, 'They're just making this stuff up.’ They’ve a bunch of ex-comic book writers sitting in the back room cranking out these stories. Probably cheaper than hiring reporters."
Richard grew aware of a presence behind him as he spoke, someone stepping a little too closely into his personal space. He looked over his shoulder. It was a woman. She'd caught his eye a few times when he was on stage. She was tall, good looking, maybe a few years older than him, but very attractive.
"You were good up there," she said, taking the stool next to him. "My name's Rose."
"Thanks," he said. "I'm Richard."
"So what are you doing here on an open mike night?" she asked. "You're better than most of the pro's I've seen in here. You should be paid for this."
"Thanks again," said Richard. "I don't suppose you'd happen to be an agent, would you?"
"No. I'm the district sales rep for Oxford Financial. I travel a lot. When I'm in town I usually come here. Really, I've seen a lot of comedians, and you're very talented."
Richard shrugged. "I've thought about turning pro, but it's not likely to happen."
"Why not?"
"Oh, you know. I didn't really discover I enjoyed doing this until I was already neck deep in something else. I'm a network manager at FirstSouth. I can't afford to quit that and hit the circuits in hope of some big break. For the time being, the Stokesville Ramada's as far as I travel."
"I wish this was as far as I traveled," said Rose. "My counterpart in the Carolina's quit so I'm covering four states now. Yeesh. But it's not all bad. Some parts of life on the road I really like."
"Such as?"
"Meeting new people," said Rose. "I feel more like who I want to be when I'm talking to someone for the first time."
"Hmm," said Richard.
"You must understand," said Rose, lightly touching his arm. "Isn't it like you're a different person when you're on stage? On the road, you can be anyone you want to be."
Richard nodded. "Yeah. I do feel like a different person up there. Only it's not really different. It's like who I really am. It's everywhere else in my life I feel a bit out of place."
She touched his arm again. "So you do understand. Funny people are often the most insightful."
Richard looked at her hand on his arm. He suddenly felt rather warm.
"So," she said. "Do you have a room here?"
"Um," said Richard. "No. Actually I have to work in the morning. I'm driving home tonight."
"In this weather?" she asked. "Wouldn't you rather spend the night in a warm bed than out in that mess?"
Richard moved his left hand closer to her hand on his arm, to make sure she could see his wedding ring. "My wife would be worried," he said.
"Call her and tell you you're staying over because of the weather," said Rose.
"I'd never hear the end of it. You don't know my wife," said Richard.
"And you don't know my husband," said Rose with a sly grin, leaning closer. "Isn't it marvelous we have so much in common?"
She was looking directly into his eyes. Richard had a strong sense of déjà vu. This was a fantasy he'd played in his head many times over, being approached by a beautiful woman after he'd finished a set, a woman who found him sexy based purely on his ten minutes on stage. Now here his fantasy was, in the very attractive flesh. Did he dare pass this up?
He looked down at his wedding ring. Maybe Veronica wouldn't find out. One night, hours from home . . .. He shook his head.
"Sorry," he said. "I really need to be going."
Rose withdrew her arm. "Okay. Drive safe." She sounded a little miffed.
With Nobody, the world is our own modern, familiar world, with a slight comic book SF twist. I don't waste time describing a comedy club or the taste of a beer... I assume that the readers have experienced such things in their own life and can fill in the details.
Aside from the stylistic differences, and the fact that the two novels fit into two completely different genres, there are similarities between the two works that I hope readers of my work will recognize and identify with. In "Nobody," moral issues get muddied rather quickly. It's tough to say for certain who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, or even if the terms "good" and "bad" have any meaning at all. Yet, Nobody isn't a book dominated by people sitting around agonizing about what's right and wrong. It's driven by action and unfolding mysteries and plentiful cliffhangers. Bitterwood, despite the more textured prose, shares (I hope) the same page-turning pace as the protagonists struggle to survive in a world where everyone wants them dead. Once again, there are few easy moral choices. In a novel that boils down to dragons versus humans, it seems like a no-brainer that the humans should have our sympathy. Then again, dragons are just a helluva lot cooler than people, so they're easy to root for as well.
Both Nobody and Bitterwood are carried by protagonists who don't fit well into the label of 'hero." Nobody's Richard Rogers is, well, a nobody, completely overwhelmed by the strange superheroic world into which he's plunged. Bitterwood's protagonist is difficult to even pin down--is it the dragon king Albekizan, who seeks to avenge the murder of his beloved son at the hand of Bitterwood? Or is it Bitterwood, who seeks to avenge the murder of his family by the armies of Albekizan? Or is it Vendevorex, the dragon who, as Albekizan's most trusted advisor, has committed a long string of sinister deeds to help Albekizan grow in power, but now finds himself on the run after opposing Albekizan's latest schemes? Or Jandra, Vendevorex's human apprentice, who has been raised since infancy by Vendevorex and finds herself a permanent outcast, never able to be accepted by dragons as an equal, but also completely unable to connect with her fellow humans, who think of her only as Vendevorex's pet?
Whew! This has turned into a long post. I'll shut up now. More writing news will be revealed in the next few days, however. Also, a big Laura post coming up before the end of this week, I promise.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Thursday, August 24, 2006
On hold....
This blog will return to its sporadic postings soon, I promise. I'm swamped with my Bitterwood rewrites; this weekend is the effective deadline. Everything now is tweaking; but, 114k words are a lot of words to tweak.
My big news is that I'm going to buy a house, unless things go horribly wrong. But, the seller accepted the offer, the inspector has confirmed my initial judgement that the house has no serious flaws, only cosmetic ones, and all the financing is falling into place. Very exciting and terrifying.
A large update will follow after Bitterwood and after Dragoncon, I promise. Maybe even pictures of the house and my new hometown, Hillsborough.
My big news is that I'm going to buy a house, unless things go horribly wrong. But, the seller accepted the offer, the inspector has confirmed my initial judgement that the house has no serious flaws, only cosmetic ones, and all the financing is falling into place. Very exciting and terrifying.
A large update will follow after Bitterwood and after Dragoncon, I promise. Maybe even pictures of the house and my new hometown, Hillsborough.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
The Origins of Ghosts
The yard sale went off today, moving a tremendous amount of Laura's stuff. I had held yard sales here in the past that always had poor attendance, and since it was overcast and rainy today, I expected the sale to be a bust. But, I didn't know the power of Craig's List, where Laura's brother Mike posted the sale. We had people showing up at 7 am, and a steady stream thereafter. Every time I blinked, something I identified with Laura's living space vanished. The jogging trampoline I bought for Veronica... gone. The push mower (the type that works simply by pushing, no motor), gone. The little windup pony that sat in the window above her kitchen sink. The little peg frame thingy that was covered by a thousand tiny metal pins that would hold the shape of your hand or face if you pushed against it. The canopy she erected in her backyard. Her blue dishes. Even a few things I owned before I met Laura... the little red wagon, the big push broom, got pulled up from the back yard by Mike and sold. I could have said something... I suppose, but, really, I was in the mood just to let things go. I gave away my old grill to a Mexican family who asked what I wanted for it. I didn't want money... I just wanted to not have to look at the grill rusting away in the backyard any more.
I want to move. It's just rough living here in Laura's basement without Laura upstairs anymore. I'm not, at heart, a terribly materialistic person. I don't feel like things define a person. Yet, watching these things I associated with Laura hauled off by strangers was very sad. My instincts were to grab each and every item and hold on to it... but, the colder, more rational part of me didn't see the point.
My real memories of Laura will always be just that, memories. If my memory ever fails, I'm not sure what good having a little wind up pony would do me. Still, the window above her sink looks naked without it. Now her paintings are gone as well, and all the little knick nacks, the little personal touches that defined Laura's living space. A few big things remain, but these will be gone in a month.
Suddenly I feel as if I understand the origins of ghosts.
I want to move. It's just rough living here in Laura's basement without Laura upstairs anymore. I'm not, at heart, a terribly materialistic person. I don't feel like things define a person. Yet, watching these things I associated with Laura hauled off by strangers was very sad. My instincts were to grab each and every item and hold on to it... but, the colder, more rational part of me didn't see the point.
My real memories of Laura will always be just that, memories. If my memory ever fails, I'm not sure what good having a little wind up pony would do me. Still, the window above her sink looks naked without it. Now her paintings are gone as well, and all the little knick nacks, the little personal touches that defined Laura's living space. A few big things remain, but these will be gone in a month.
Suddenly I feel as if I understand the origins of ghosts.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Three Months
I took Simon and Veronica to Laura's grave today. It was a brief visit; very hot, not a lot of time spent sitting around in contemplation. We placed some flowers Laura planted by the grave, and some sea shells we'd collected during our trip to Atlantic Beach. We buried a small black polished stone Veronica had found.
I'm sad that I didn't find any beach glass during the trip to Atlantic Beach. In previous years, Laura and I have walked up and down the shore and collected bits of smooth, sea buffed glass shards. Most are brown, coming from beer bottles, some are clear, some green, and the real treasures are blue. This year, though, despite my best efforts, I couldn't find a single bit of it. There weren't many shells either. The sea was very calm all week, which probably meant not much stuff was getting washed up. Our one trip to Shackleford Banks, an island where we normally find all kinds of good shells and glass, was cut short by a bad storm, complete with waterspout. I feel almost as if I let Laura down, not finding any glass. Maybe if I'd taken the long walk I kept planning, something might have turned up. I had this fantasy of walking all the way to the end of the island, but it never panned out. Laura and I took the long beach walk once, in the dark. We had planned to find a spot to stop and smooch... unfortunately, the sand was crawling with some sort of little biting insect that encouraged us to keep moving. So, this wasn't the first trip where the dream and the actual events didn't mesh up.
Three months out from Laura's death, I find it is possible to go a whole day without thinking about her, but, only barely. I'm no longer reflexively judging restaurants by whether or not they would please her. And, her brother took her car a few weeks ago to sell, so I'm no driving up to the house and seeing her car and thinking, "Oh, Laura's home," the way I did morning after morning in May and June. Whenever I go upstairs, it's harder to remember how much it was the backdrop of my daily life for the last couple of years. I go five, six, seven days at a time without looking inside. It seems like a stranger's house, almost. I feel like I'm invading someone's privacy when I go in.
Next weekend, Laura's family is having a big yard sale to try to reduce the big pile of her stuff that's still lingering. It's amazing what one accumulates over the years. Little by little, her stuff is disappearing. It's a long, slow, fade.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Pirates of the Carribean
I saw "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" last night, and the Pirates of the Carribean sequel today. PotC came highly recommended, but I was disappointed. I didn't remember enough of the first movie to know who all the players were. And, I couldn't figure out why the characters felt loyalty to Captain Jack Sparrow, who betrays them in pretty horrible ways during the course of the film and shows no concern at all about the other characters. So, at the end of the film, when they are all agreeing to journey into Hell to save him, it felt completely arbitrary and unsupported by the movie's events. Finally, the action sequences dragged on way, way too long. I could have chopped this movie by a good hour just by making the fight sequences tighter.
Conversely, MSEG was a movie that had poor word of mouth and bad reviews, and when we went to the theatre, it was empty. But I found it to be a funny movie with some terrific superhero action. The movie was formulaic, yes, but played well within the confines of the formula. The movie also earned my respect by actually making me like the characters. Even the bad guy is easy to identify with. Seriously, if you want a good superhero movie, I think this beats Superman or X-men hands down this summer. I would rank it just below the Spiderman movies. It's even better than Mystery Men, another funny superhero flick.
One annoyance: Early in the movie, the characters are speculating about what the "G" in G-girl stands for, and I don't think that's ever revealed. A casual movie goer probably won't give a hoot, but I formed a theory from her early superhero feats that the "G" stood for gravity. When the whole thing is forgotten about, I felt robbed.
My "G" is for geek, no doubt, for worrying about such a thing....
Conversely, MSEG was a movie that had poor word of mouth and bad reviews, and when we went to the theatre, it was empty. But I found it to be a funny movie with some terrific superhero action. The movie was formulaic, yes, but played well within the confines of the formula. The movie also earned my respect by actually making me like the characters. Even the bad guy is easy to identify with. Seriously, if you want a good superhero movie, I think this beats Superman or X-men hands down this summer. I would rank it just below the Spiderman movies. It's even better than Mystery Men, another funny superhero flick.
One annoyance: Early in the movie, the characters are speculating about what the "G" in G-girl stands for, and I don't think that's ever revealed. A casual movie goer probably won't give a hoot, but I formed a theory from her early superhero feats that the "G" stood for gravity. When the whole thing is forgotten about, I felt robbed.
My "G" is for geek, no doubt, for worrying about such a thing....
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Faking It, Fifteen Years Later
On the codex forum, a question about what elements of the writer's craft I possessed from the start. Did I have some inate gift for dialogue, plotting, characters, or style, even from the start?
Alas, I understood almost nothing intuitively and have pretty much had to work at everything. One of my more brutal friends read my first novel fifteen years ago and asked, in his critique, "Have you even read a novel?" My plots meandered; my characters were clichés; my dialogues were duds. Also, I had no idea how to use a semi-colon.
Still, I did have three things going for me:
1. A masochistic streak. Harsh criticism did little to discourage me. Indeed, I cherished the most savage assaults on my skills.
2. A complete ignorance of the financial rewards of writing. I started this game never having met an actual fiction writer, and was under the horrible misconception that it was possible to write one novel then quit your day job. Actually, that is possible... but it's also possible to win the lottery, or have wealthy relatives you've never heard of pass away and leave you their fortunes. By the time I learned the truth about the likely money to be made by fiction writers, it was too late; I was hooked on writing.
3. A lack of any other talent. I can't sing, play an instrument, dance, paint, sculpt, or act. So, in my early years, I drifted toward writing as my claim to some sort of creative ability simply because it seemed like the easiest talent to fake. A decade and a half later, I'm still winging it. I don't think I'm any more talented than I used to be; I simply have a better bag of fakery tricks.
These are the things I think I'm good at faking:
1. Sucking. I've learned to write openings that suck the reader in like a vacuum cleaner nozzle. Once in the grip of the suction, a reader will be pulled along the twists and turns of the plot like a dust clump navigating the vacuum cleaner hose. In the end, the reader inevitably smacks into the inescapable conclusion, as the dust is caught in the bag. So, when people tell me my writing sucks, I smile and say, "Thank you. How kind."
2. Lying authoritatively. My entire career as a science fiction writer is built on the fact that most people know even less than I do about science. So, if I write that Einstein's theory of relativity states that if a spaceship is traveling at 99.9% of the speed of light, then all the crew has to do is jump vigorously forward in order to land in an alternate reality, readers of Analog will roll their eyes, and the editor might, in fact, vomit. But, the vast bulk of the remaining reading public has no idea whether this is true or not, and sooner or later the old school editors who know a thing about science pass away and are replaced by English majors. As long as I don't smirk when I present my "jump drive," enough readers will buy into it that the story can then move along to the stuff readers really care about; i.e. characters killing each other in creative ways, or some sort of odd sex. Sometimes these can be combined.
3. Symmetry. Since I started with a list of three things I had going for me when I started writing, it is aesthetically pleasant to end with three items. So, here is the third item. Fifteen years ago, I might have awkwardly presented only two, or, garishly, gone over the line into four.
And that's it. Everything I know about writing, fifteen years on. I never claimed to be a fast learner.
Alas, I understood almost nothing intuitively and have pretty much had to work at everything. One of my more brutal friends read my first novel fifteen years ago and asked, in his critique, "Have you even read a novel?" My plots meandered; my characters were clichés; my dialogues were duds. Also, I had no idea how to use a semi-colon.
Still, I did have three things going for me:
1. A masochistic streak. Harsh criticism did little to discourage me. Indeed, I cherished the most savage assaults on my skills.
2. A complete ignorance of the financial rewards of writing. I started this game never having met an actual fiction writer, and was under the horrible misconception that it was possible to write one novel then quit your day job. Actually, that is possible... but it's also possible to win the lottery, or have wealthy relatives you've never heard of pass away and leave you their fortunes. By the time I learned the truth about the likely money to be made by fiction writers, it was too late; I was hooked on writing.
3. A lack of any other talent. I can't sing, play an instrument, dance, paint, sculpt, or act. So, in my early years, I drifted toward writing as my claim to some sort of creative ability simply because it seemed like the easiest talent to fake. A decade and a half later, I'm still winging it. I don't think I'm any more talented than I used to be; I simply have a better bag of fakery tricks.
These are the things I think I'm good at faking:
1. Sucking. I've learned to write openings that suck the reader in like a vacuum cleaner nozzle. Once in the grip of the suction, a reader will be pulled along the twists and turns of the plot like a dust clump navigating the vacuum cleaner hose. In the end, the reader inevitably smacks into the inescapable conclusion, as the dust is caught in the bag. So, when people tell me my writing sucks, I smile and say, "Thank you. How kind."
2. Lying authoritatively. My entire career as a science fiction writer is built on the fact that most people know even less than I do about science. So, if I write that Einstein's theory of relativity states that if a spaceship is traveling at 99.9% of the speed of light, then all the crew has to do is jump vigorously forward in order to land in an alternate reality, readers of Analog will roll their eyes, and the editor might, in fact, vomit. But, the vast bulk of the remaining reading public has no idea whether this is true or not, and sooner or later the old school editors who know a thing about science pass away and are replaced by English majors. As long as I don't smirk when I present my "jump drive," enough readers will buy into it that the story can then move along to the stuff readers really care about; i.e. characters killing each other in creative ways, or some sort of odd sex. Sometimes these can be combined.
3. Symmetry. Since I started with a list of three things I had going for me when I started writing, it is aesthetically pleasant to end with three items. So, here is the third item. Fifteen years ago, I might have awkwardly presented only two, or, garishly, gone over the line into four.
And that's it. Everything I know about writing, fifteen years on. I never claimed to be a fast learner.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Weightless
When the world crumbles beneath your feet, you may experience a freefall plunge. With any luck, you might fall far enough to enjoy the feeling that you are weightless.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Two months
It's been two months since Laura passed away. I intended to come home tonight and write another article about her, or, more honestly, about me, about my thoughts and feelings on life and death two months later. Alas, I don't know I have anything terribly profound to say.
Not having Laura around sucks. I still view the world through the filter of "would she like this?" I'm house-hunting now. I actually went and looked at a house today. And I kept thinking, walking through the dark, empty rooms, "What would Laura think of this?"
Not much, probably. The house wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. My questions about the safety of the neighborhood were answered by the clear evidence of the door having been kicked in at some point in the past, and windows busted in. Still, the house was brick, in better condition than I thought, and had a big bathroom, which is a plus for me. I like bathrooms I don't feel cramped in. It also had hardwood floors throughout. So, from the inside, I could imagine myself living there. From the outside, though, I can hear Laura advising me that if I moved there, she wouldn't come visit me.
My problem is, essentially, I can't afford to buy a house anywhere I'd want to live. Correction: I can't buy a house anywhere I want to live within a reasonable commute of where I work. My budget would by me a quite nice house if I wanted to move an hour or more out of any major city. Up close to the Virginia border, there's a small town called Lillington that has a lot of houses that pop up in the MLS in my price range. It's a lovely old town, where I could get the house of my dreams... and a ninety minute one way commute.
Losing Laura was more than just losing her. I also lost a big part of my direction and purpose in life. I had a clear role when she was around: I was here to make her life a little easier and a little more joyful. Now, I don't know. The big picture stuff is still there: I write. I actually am producing quite a bit of work lately. More and more, I'm seeing the window to success opening. The biggest danger to this is my general all around rootlessness. I don't know where I'm going to be living a year from now, and it bums me out. The place I looked at today... I have a hard time imagining living there for five or six years. It would be purely a transitional home. I could buy it for less than I pay in rent, and make the gamble that two years from now I could sell it at a profit: a risky assumption in today's market, especially if interest rates keep going up.
Not having Laura around to talk over these big decisions makes them a good deal tougher. Laura was a terrific counselor. She'd lived in some pretty horrible conditions. Indeed, she's told me some horror stories that make me thing that the house I looked at today would be luxurious compared to one of the houses she lived in in Boone. I think having lived in poverty gave her a good view of the world. She didn't judge people by their net income. I miss the advice she would have been able to give me on decisions about moving to these marginal neighborhoods.
Not having Laura around sucks. I still view the world through the filter of "would she like this?" I'm house-hunting now. I actually went and looked at a house today. And I kept thinking, walking through the dark, empty rooms, "What would Laura think of this?"
Not much, probably. The house wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. My questions about the safety of the neighborhood were answered by the clear evidence of the door having been kicked in at some point in the past, and windows busted in. Still, the house was brick, in better condition than I thought, and had a big bathroom, which is a plus for me. I like bathrooms I don't feel cramped in. It also had hardwood floors throughout. So, from the inside, I could imagine myself living there. From the outside, though, I can hear Laura advising me that if I moved there, she wouldn't come visit me.
My problem is, essentially, I can't afford to buy a house anywhere I'd want to live. Correction: I can't buy a house anywhere I want to live within a reasonable commute of where I work. My budget would by me a quite nice house if I wanted to move an hour or more out of any major city. Up close to the Virginia border, there's a small town called Lillington that has a lot of houses that pop up in the MLS in my price range. It's a lovely old town, where I could get the house of my dreams... and a ninety minute one way commute.
Losing Laura was more than just losing her. I also lost a big part of my direction and purpose in life. I had a clear role when she was around: I was here to make her life a little easier and a little more joyful. Now, I don't know. The big picture stuff is still there: I write. I actually am producing quite a bit of work lately. More and more, I'm seeing the window to success opening. The biggest danger to this is my general all around rootlessness. I don't know where I'm going to be living a year from now, and it bums me out. The place I looked at today... I have a hard time imagining living there for five or six years. It would be purely a transitional home. I could buy it for less than I pay in rent, and make the gamble that two years from now I could sell it at a profit: a risky assumption in today's market, especially if interest rates keep going up.
Not having Laura around to talk over these big decisions makes them a good deal tougher. Laura was a terrific counselor. She'd lived in some pretty horrible conditions. Indeed, she's told me some horror stories that make me thing that the house I looked at today would be luxurious compared to one of the houses she lived in in Boone. I think having lived in poverty gave her a good view of the world. She didn't judge people by their net income. I miss the advice she would have been able to give me on decisions about moving to these marginal neighborhoods.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Grave Visit
I took Simon and Veronica to Laura's grave again today. We left some roses in a vase. Luckily, the vase fit perfectly into a holder that Laura's friend Anke had left there. And, by chance, Anke showed up while we were there with flowers of her own.
I asked Veronica what she would tell her Mom if her Mom was still around. She said she'd tell her that Taylor Hicks won American Idol.
It was actually a more uplifting trip than my previous visits. Anke and I have been discussing headstone designs. I think that if Anke can find the headstone she has in mind, I can talk to her parents and friends and see that enough money is raised to make it come to fruition.
A couple of people have asked me to think of something to put on the headstone. I admit, I'm drawing a blank. There's just too much Laura to capture in twenty five words or less.
I've thought of using the Oscar Wilde quote, "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." But, I don't know. Love for Laura wasn't that great a mystery. She was pretty easy to love.
I asked Veronica what she would tell her Mom if her Mom was still around. She said she'd tell her that Taylor Hicks won American Idol.
It was actually a more uplifting trip than my previous visits. Anke and I have been discussing headstone designs. I think that if Anke can find the headstone she has in mind, I can talk to her parents and friends and see that enough money is raised to make it come to fruition.
A couple of people have asked me to think of something to put on the headstone. I admit, I'm drawing a blank. There's just too much Laura to capture in twenty five words or less.
I've thought of using the Oscar Wilde quote, "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." But, I don't know. Love for Laura wasn't that great a mystery. She was pretty easy to love.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Writer-space
I believe in alternate universes. Currently, I inhabit one. I’m in the middle of rewriting my novel Bitterwood. I spend a good deal of my waking life oblivious to the physical world where my body is located. My brain has taken residence in writer-space.
The landscape of writer-space changes with each visit. Sometimes I’ve gone there and spent my time weightless, stuck in a tin can on a journey between planets. Other times, writer-space is nearly identical to the world I ordinarily inhabit, but with some strange, dark twist. Creatures with mean eyes and jagged claws live beneath the floorboards of my house in writer-space. In writer-space, comets plunge toward the Earth, the ocean rises to swallow cities, and giants walk among skyscrapers.
Right now, I spend my time in writer-space watching the dragons that live there. These are marvelous beasts, half snake, half bird, with wingspans longer than school busses. I study their toothy grins. I note the way their ruby red, opalescent scales shimmer as wiry muscles coil and bunch beneath them. I watch them lick blood from their dagger-like claws in the aftermath of a hunt. I’ve gotten close enough to one to smell its carnivore breath, hot and humid. I’ve run my fingertips along its hide, hard and smooth and dry. The fine scales of the wings are light and long like feathers. I hold a feather-scale to the light; it’s translucent, with a hollow core. The beast’s serpentine tail twitches at the tip, like the tail of an anxious tiger. I look into its glowing, golden eyes. It stares back, inquisitive, bright, studying me studying it.
I feel quite small next to a dragon. But, that doesn’t stop me from seizing it by the nose and dragging it back home with me.
I am a hunter; a trapper. My job is to capture the beasts that inhabit writer-space and bring them back. I have to put them into the cage of a book, carving out a new habitat where they can survive, or even thrive. I build windows out of words to allow others to glimpse these creatures, so that anyone who wishes can appreciate them the way I do.
The journey back from writer-space is a treacherous one. There are many obstacles to be overcome. I must leap such pitfalls as phone calls and email. I must navigate the swamp of my day job, and swerve around unseen dangers like coming home to discover that a pipe has burst and flooded three rooms. I have to steel myself, drawing on every last ounce of will, to pull myself away from the siren call of computer solitaire.
Then, with the dangers avoided, I’m left with the long, hard slog of simply writing. One key is pressed, then the next, then the next, then the next, hour after hour, day after day. The pages fill slowly. Building a world a letter at a time is as tedious as building a beach by laying down each grain of sand individually. Yet, bit by bit, page by page, the writing gets done. A hundred words become a thousand. A thousand words grow to a chapter. The chapters multiply and grow, and, months later, a book is delivered from writer-space into the real world, pink and raw and still a bit gooey.
Later, I realize I left my wallet back in writer-space. Those damn dragons have my credit cards. But that’s another story.
The landscape of writer-space changes with each visit. Sometimes I’ve gone there and spent my time weightless, stuck in a tin can on a journey between planets. Other times, writer-space is nearly identical to the world I ordinarily inhabit, but with some strange, dark twist. Creatures with mean eyes and jagged claws live beneath the floorboards of my house in writer-space. In writer-space, comets plunge toward the Earth, the ocean rises to swallow cities, and giants walk among skyscrapers.
Right now, I spend my time in writer-space watching the dragons that live there. These are marvelous beasts, half snake, half bird, with wingspans longer than school busses. I study their toothy grins. I note the way their ruby red, opalescent scales shimmer as wiry muscles coil and bunch beneath them. I watch them lick blood from their dagger-like claws in the aftermath of a hunt. I’ve gotten close enough to one to smell its carnivore breath, hot and humid. I’ve run my fingertips along its hide, hard and smooth and dry. The fine scales of the wings are light and long like feathers. I hold a feather-scale to the light; it’s translucent, with a hollow core. The beast’s serpentine tail twitches at the tip, like the tail of an anxious tiger. I look into its glowing, golden eyes. It stares back, inquisitive, bright, studying me studying it.
I feel quite small next to a dragon. But, that doesn’t stop me from seizing it by the nose and dragging it back home with me.
I am a hunter; a trapper. My job is to capture the beasts that inhabit writer-space and bring them back. I have to put them into the cage of a book, carving out a new habitat where they can survive, or even thrive. I build windows out of words to allow others to glimpse these creatures, so that anyone who wishes can appreciate them the way I do.
The journey back from writer-space is a treacherous one. There are many obstacles to be overcome. I must leap such pitfalls as phone calls and email. I must navigate the swamp of my day job, and swerve around unseen dangers like coming home to discover that a pipe has burst and flooded three rooms. I have to steel myself, drawing on every last ounce of will, to pull myself away from the siren call of computer solitaire.
Then, with the dangers avoided, I’m left with the long, hard slog of simply writing. One key is pressed, then the next, then the next, then the next, hour after hour, day after day. The pages fill slowly. Building a world a letter at a time is as tedious as building a beach by laying down each grain of sand individually. Yet, bit by bit, page by page, the writing gets done. A hundred words become a thousand. A thousand words grow to a chapter. The chapters multiply and grow, and, months later, a book is delivered from writer-space into the real world, pink and raw and still a bit gooey.
Later, I realize I left my wallet back in writer-space. Those damn dragons have my credit cards. But that’s another story.
Monday, June 19, 2006
"To Know All Things That Are In The Earth"
I got an offer from Intergalactic Medicine Show today for my short story "To Know All Things That Are In The Earth." Considering I just wrote the story in February and March, this is a pretty good turnaround. I wrote this story for a contest at Codexwriters. It's the third contest I participated in; the second story I've sold after writing it to fulfill the contest requirements. So, two out of three isn't bad, and I haven't given up on the third story yet. It's called "Echo of the Eye." It's a tough sell because it's not SF or Fantasy, and is actually a very rare story for me, icky-horror. I really don't know if icky-horror is an accurate genre label, but it contains a scene in which roasted eyeballs are devoured, so, ick. Yet, despite the cannibalism, the story is actually not terribly graphic; there's only a teeny bit of blood-splashing, which might hurt it in the gross-out horror market. I have it out now to an anthology called, "Until Somebody Loses an Eye." If they don't buy it, I don't know. The New Yorker?
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Aftermath
Last week I got home and found that a pipe had burst in the ceiling of my apartment. The running water had filled up the plastic casing of my stereo and turned it on, full blast, to Prarie Home Companion. I walked up to the house thinking, "Why am I hearing Garison Kielor?" I'm lucky the house didn't catch fire. Then again, everything was pretty damp. Water from wall to wall.
A week later, the laminate floors are starting to warp, although not in an unsalvagable way. It's fairly mild, so far, and now everything is bone dry, so perhaps all the damage that will be done has been done. By running a dehumidifier and two fans I've got the carpets dry. There is a noticable watermark in the carpet showing the far reaches of the flood... if the water had seeped in a few more feet, you might not be able to tell they were damaged, since the color would be uniform all the way across.
For most of the week, the apartment has had a damp sour odor, not unlike sweaty gym clothes left in a locker for a week. But, either my nose has just stopped noticing the smell, or the fans have finally knocked the last of the stink odor molecules loose.
I find myself grateful for the oddest things. I've been happy all week that the pipes waited until Laura had been gone for a month to fail so catastrophicly. She'd been plagued by plumbing problems for years (or rather, her house had) and dealing with this mess would have been the very last thing she needed. Don't get me wrong; if she'd been given the choice to live another year and deal with replumbing the whole house or dying and avoiding the hassle, I suspect she'd have gladly made the phone call to the plumber. But, still, since she didn't get the choice, at least she avoided this unpleasantness. I won't exactly call it a silver lining to the dark cloud, but maybe it's a white, fluffy cloud in a dark cloud.
In the aftermath of the flood, I ran around picking up everything resting on the floor and moving it to the higher ground of bookshelves, tables, beds. Today, I've been cleaning and sorting. I found an old shopping list from Laura. She'd wanted a veggie loaf (fake meatloaf for vegetarians) from the frozen food section. I had this almost irresistable urge to go out and buy it. I felt very connected to Laura for a moment... more connected than I did when I visited her grave earlier today. I have a hard time looking at the patch of broken ground and feeling that it holds any relevance to Laura's life, or mine.
Speaking of broken ground, I live in Laura's basement, and there are no stairs connecting her house to my apartment. So, we had worn a path into the yard from my front door to her front door. No grass would grow there, even though I put down fresh seed the last two springs. This week, the grass has sprouted, and looks quite handsome, bright green and a few inches tall already.
If I were a writer, I might draw some analogy between the ruts we wear in life, and how new life springs up once we are prevented from walking the same path. It might be a good, symbolic way of illustrating new beginnings, or for making a broad commentary on the ceaseless turning of the vast wheel of life. Alas, I'm no good with words. Maybe someone else can do something with the image.
A week later, the laminate floors are starting to warp, although not in an unsalvagable way. It's fairly mild, so far, and now everything is bone dry, so perhaps all the damage that will be done has been done. By running a dehumidifier and two fans I've got the carpets dry. There is a noticable watermark in the carpet showing the far reaches of the flood... if the water had seeped in a few more feet, you might not be able to tell they were damaged, since the color would be uniform all the way across.
For most of the week, the apartment has had a damp sour odor, not unlike sweaty gym clothes left in a locker for a week. But, either my nose has just stopped noticing the smell, or the fans have finally knocked the last of the stink odor molecules loose.
I find myself grateful for the oddest things. I've been happy all week that the pipes waited until Laura had been gone for a month to fail so catastrophicly. She'd been plagued by plumbing problems for years (or rather, her house had) and dealing with this mess would have been the very last thing she needed. Don't get me wrong; if she'd been given the choice to live another year and deal with replumbing the whole house or dying and avoiding the hassle, I suspect she'd have gladly made the phone call to the plumber. But, still, since she didn't get the choice, at least she avoided this unpleasantness. I won't exactly call it a silver lining to the dark cloud, but maybe it's a white, fluffy cloud in a dark cloud.
In the aftermath of the flood, I ran around picking up everything resting on the floor and moving it to the higher ground of bookshelves, tables, beds. Today, I've been cleaning and sorting. I found an old shopping list from Laura. She'd wanted a veggie loaf (fake meatloaf for vegetarians) from the frozen food section. I had this almost irresistable urge to go out and buy it. I felt very connected to Laura for a moment... more connected than I did when I visited her grave earlier today. I have a hard time looking at the patch of broken ground and feeling that it holds any relevance to Laura's life, or mine.
Speaking of broken ground, I live in Laura's basement, and there are no stairs connecting her house to my apartment. So, we had worn a path into the yard from my front door to her front door. No grass would grow there, even though I put down fresh seed the last two springs. This week, the grass has sprouted, and looks quite handsome, bright green and a few inches tall already.
If I were a writer, I might draw some analogy between the ruts we wear in life, and how new life springs up once we are prevented from walking the same path. It might be a good, symbolic way of illustrating new beginnings, or for making a broad commentary on the ceaseless turning of the vast wheel of life. Alas, I'm no good with words. Maybe someone else can do something with the image.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
A warning to all mankind!
So, last night I stopped by the Dollar General and noticed they had two-liter generic soda called "Cloverleaf Cola" that was two bottles for a dollar and I thought, "Hey! How bad can it be?"
As near as I can tell, they flavor it with actual cloverleafs. The closest thing I can compare it to, taste-wise, is wilted celery.
I'm posting this in hopes that the youth of America may learn from my mistakes.
As near as I can tell, they flavor it with actual cloverleafs. The closest thing I can compare it to, taste-wise, is wilted celery.
I'm posting this in hopes that the youth of America may learn from my mistakes.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
One month
These photos are from four years ago. We were at my old house in Stokesdale, the Mountain Goat's "All Hail West Texas" was on the stereo, and the warm breeze blew sunshine through the curtains covering the open window. It feels like yesterday.
A month ago on this day, I stood by Laura's hospital bed, holding her hand as she passed away. It feels like a very long time ago.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Souls of Living Wood
I read "Souls of Living Wood" last night, the Eugie Foster story in Modern Magic. I hate singling out stories in anthologies I'm in, out of fear of offending other contributors, but, wow, this was a terrific story. I had high hopes for it, since Eugie was a fellow Phobos award winner. The story exceeded my hopes. It has the most unexpected character I've yet encounted in the anthology, or just about anywhere in a long time--a talking house. Of course, the house can't talk to just anyone, but there's a real estate agent who, without giving away too much of the story, has what I can best describe as the oddest superpower I've ever heard of--the ability to talk to houses, and have the houses talk back. It's ideas like this that draw me to science fiction and fantasy. I'm 42 years old; I've read, I dunno, a zillion stories in my life, and it's rare that I run into concepts that I've never seen before. I'm jaded. Finding an original idea gives me a buzzy, drunken feeling as my thoughts crowd around to examine the newcomer. It gets me excited again about the power of words.
Even better, Eugie takes this original idea and builds a terrific, moving story around it. Sometimes, great ideas get stuck in stories that don't live up to their promise, but Eugie follows through with lovely writing, a captivating plot, and strong performances from the other characters in the story, all of whom come to life with an amazing economy of words. The stories only five pages long--I'm guessing the word count is probably only 2,000 words. Quite an accomplishment.
Even better, Eugie takes this original idea and builds a terrific, moving story around it. Sometimes, great ideas get stuck in stories that don't live up to their promise, but Eugie follows through with lovely writing, a captivating plot, and strong performances from the other characters in the story, all of whom come to life with an amazing economy of words. The stories only five pages long--I'm guessing the word count is probably only 2,000 words. Quite an accomplishment.
Friday, June 02, 2006
NYC
Laura and I took a couple of great trips together. Very early we took a trip to South of the Border, the east coast headquarters for all things tacky. We had a mutual appreciation of low culture, which was good, considering out budgets made low culture much more accessible than high culture.
But, we did take one killer trip to New York City when my novel Nobody Gets the Girl was released. Phobos Books footed the bill for some train tickets, Orbit actually found reasonably priced rooms in a decent location, and when we got there, expecting to be broke within a day from the legendary high cost of living, we discovered that in the non-tourist parts of the city, prices were pretty much the same as they were in NC. So, we spent four days stuffing outselves with the best food we'd ever eaten in Little Italy and China Town, then walking it off by treking from one side of the island to the other in search of museums and other tourist stuff.
The one regret about the trip was that I was using my digital camera, but when we got home I discovered that somehow all the files had become corrupted. Of the hundred or so photo's I'd snapped, only one was even moderately recognizable--a photo I'd snapped of the two of us in a mirrored building, with a busy street scene behind us. The camera had only saved blue and red pixels, no green, so the color was completely messed up, and it had also only saved every other line of the photo, so the original was full of thin blank lines. Fortunately, I'm pretty good with photoshop, so a few paint filters and a bit of color restoration produced a photo that had a soft, watercolor feel to it, hazy as a memory, but still interesting in the details that emerge as I study it. For instance, is it my imagination or does Laura have exactly the same smile as the Mona Lisa?
So, I only had one hazy, off color record of the trip--until fellow Phobos author and Odyssey grad Matt Rotundo came to the rescue recently with a second photo, this taken in Sandra Schulberg's apartment on Halloween, I think. I've spent the evening in a frustrating trip between three stores tonight in search of a function photo kiosk to print the photos, but have returned home, finally, with pictures in hand. I've never in my life assembled a photo album, but I'm going to put one together now. I wish I'd printed out all these photos while Laura was still around to look at them with me... but, then again, when she was around, I wasn't interested in looking at photos. I could look at her.
I've never been the sort of person to sit around dwelling in memory. Other people I know remember the names of their teachers from elementary school. I can't even remember teachers from High School. And I'm not talking about not remembering their names--I have no memory at all of who I might have encountered back then. The VCR of my mind can only record about ten years before it starts overwriting. I've never had memories I wanted so badly to hang onto before. Hopefully, the photo album will help me overcome forgetfulness circa 2016.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Only 100,000 to go....
I finally got some editorial feedback from Solaris. Luckily, my plan for expanding the novel and their plan meshed well. Since I'd already rewritten the first three chapters, and am working tonight on number four, it would have been rather heartbreaking if they'd said, "Well, we like it, but take out all the dragons." (There was no chance they were going to say this, realistically, but paranoia takes hold in my quieter moments.
They want a finished product of 120,000 words. I'll be close to 20,000 when I finish chapter four. Only 100,000 more to go....
Read some of Modern Magic tonight. Good stuff so far. I'm up to the Eugie Foster story. She's a fellow Phobos winner, so I have high hopes for it.
I feel really scatterbrained tonight. I've got too much on my plate. I need to:
1. Fill out the author/promotional questionaire Solaris sent me. This means, among other things, I probably need a new authors photo. My last professional photos were of me with long hair. Sigh. Laura paid for those for my birthday present. (The sigh is a wistful memory of Laura by the way... not a regret that I have to pay for my own photos this time.) I also need to start a search for a famous author who will plug Bitterwood. I'm thinking of asking Jack McDevitt, since he wrote me a kind letter about Final Flight of the Blue Bee.
2: Is it my imagination, or does my first item entail three things? Questionaire, photo, author quest. I'm skipping to four.
4: The con game. I only attended Trinoccon and Stellarcon last year. But, now that I have a novel to promote, I need to crank up the activity. Dragon*con is the big one--I need to get my application in immediately! Eugie will be there--she edits the "Daily Dragon" for the con. Maybe she and I can do a mutual "Modern Magic" reading. The sad thing about going to Dragon*con is that Laura went there with me a few years back and we had a really good time. We were indoctrinated into the church of the subgenius together. Hail Bob! I have the strangest sentimental memories....
5: and that last item was really two, if you count trying to arrange a reading.
6: Do the rewrite, idiot! Stop blogging!
7: Learn to write more coherent lists. I should go now.
--James
They want a finished product of 120,000 words. I'll be close to 20,000 when I finish chapter four. Only 100,000 more to go....
Read some of Modern Magic tonight. Good stuff so far. I'm up to the Eugie Foster story. She's a fellow Phobos winner, so I have high hopes for it.
I feel really scatterbrained tonight. I've got too much on my plate. I need to:
1. Fill out the author/promotional questionaire Solaris sent me. This means, among other things, I probably need a new authors photo. My last professional photos were of me with long hair. Sigh. Laura paid for those for my birthday present. (The sigh is a wistful memory of Laura by the way... not a regret that I have to pay for my own photos this time.) I also need to start a search for a famous author who will plug Bitterwood. I'm thinking of asking Jack McDevitt, since he wrote me a kind letter about Final Flight of the Blue Bee.
2: Is it my imagination, or does my first item entail three things? Questionaire, photo, author quest. I'm skipping to four.
4: The con game. I only attended Trinoccon and Stellarcon last year. But, now that I have a novel to promote, I need to crank up the activity. Dragon*con is the big one--I need to get my application in immediately! Eugie will be there--she edits the "Daily Dragon" for the con. Maybe she and I can do a mutual "Modern Magic" reading. The sad thing about going to Dragon*con is that Laura went there with me a few years back and we had a really good time. We were indoctrinated into the church of the subgenius together. Hail Bob! I have the strangest sentimental memories....
5: and that last item was really two, if you count trying to arrange a reading.
6: Do the rewrite, idiot! Stop blogging!
7: Learn to write more coherent lists. I should go now.
--James
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Politics again
It's been a while since I wrote about politics here. Laura and writing have commanded my attention for a month. It's been hard to work up righteous indignation about the news while the news in my own life has been what it's been.
Laura was someone who appreciated that tragedy and triumph tend to come at you all at once. The whole time she was in her steepest decline, or in the immediate aftermath of her death, I couldn't open my mailbox without getting some kind of good news. In the span of a month, I (1) got the contract for Bitterwood (edits of which are going great!), (2) sold my novella Greatshadow to an anthology I didn't technically submit it to, and for a dollar amount larger than what I was expecting, (3) resold my short story "Final Flight of the Blue Bee" to the Russian SF mag ESLI, without ever having submitted to them, either. They contacted me. As my fellow Codexian Eric James Stone observed, in America, you submit to the markets. In Russia, the markets submit to you. What a country! Also during this time, I've gotten fan mail about "Final Flight," always a thrill, and I've finally gotten my contributors copy of "Modern Magic," which is just gorgeous, easily the best looking book I've been in to date. (I hope to soon report on the stories. I have reason to suspect they kick ass.)
But, little by little, politics are seeping back into my awareness. The thing that currently has me annoyed is the proposal to make English the official language of America. The other night, before dinner with Greg, I was standing in front of the restaurant and a man and a woman were standing nearby and I overheard thier conversation. The woman was talking about how it was crazy that immigrants didn't want to learn English, and were forcing banks and doctor's offices to offer thier services bilingually. The guy agreed, and from his comments I got the impression that he was fine with rounding up anyone who couldn't speak English and shooting them. Now, ordinarily, I would get angry at this sort of bigotry, but I was too amused to really get indignant. They were having this conversation while waiting to get a table at a Mexican restaurant. So, let them be racist crackers while standing on the sidewalk--within the hour they would be shelling out their hard earned greenbacks to a restaurant that didn't have a single gringo on staff. And, I suspect the people who run the restaurant--all the way down to the waitstaff--would agree that voting for multiculturism with your money is better than voting for it with your mouth.
I would like to point out that no one has forced banks to provide services in Spanish. This is capitalism at work--immigrants have money. Not competing for their business would be crazy. And, while I'm on the subject of the free market, it seems to me that we shouldn't be afraid of having English and Spanish duke it out head to head in the free market of the culture. If Hollywood starts putting out movies in Spanish and we have to wait around for the English translation, I might feel a tiny bit inconvenienced. But, I don't see that day coming. The fact is, if you live in America, and only speak English, you just aren't going to having any trouble at all functioning. Your bank, your doctor, your grocery store might devote a sliver of their resources to serving Spanish speakers, but you are never going to walk into a bank in North Carolina and be unable to conduct a transaction because of a language barrier. Enshrining this in law speaks to me of a certain cultural insecurity on the part of Americans. A fear that our language isn't all that great, and can't stand up to competition.
Wow, a rant. It's been a while. Perhaps the healing has begun.
Laura was someone who appreciated that tragedy and triumph tend to come at you all at once. The whole time she was in her steepest decline, or in the immediate aftermath of her death, I couldn't open my mailbox without getting some kind of good news. In the span of a month, I (1) got the contract for Bitterwood (edits of which are going great!), (2) sold my novella Greatshadow to an anthology I didn't technically submit it to, and for a dollar amount larger than what I was expecting, (3) resold my short story "Final Flight of the Blue Bee" to the Russian SF mag ESLI, without ever having submitted to them, either. They contacted me. As my fellow Codexian Eric James Stone observed, in America, you submit to the markets. In Russia, the markets submit to you. What a country! Also during this time, I've gotten fan mail about "Final Flight," always a thrill, and I've finally gotten my contributors copy of "Modern Magic," which is just gorgeous, easily the best looking book I've been in to date. (I hope to soon report on the stories. I have reason to suspect they kick ass.)
But, little by little, politics are seeping back into my awareness. The thing that currently has me annoyed is the proposal to make English the official language of America. The other night, before dinner with Greg, I was standing in front of the restaurant and a man and a woman were standing nearby and I overheard thier conversation. The woman was talking about how it was crazy that immigrants didn't want to learn English, and were forcing banks and doctor's offices to offer thier services bilingually. The guy agreed, and from his comments I got the impression that he was fine with rounding up anyone who couldn't speak English and shooting them. Now, ordinarily, I would get angry at this sort of bigotry, but I was too amused to really get indignant. They were having this conversation while waiting to get a table at a Mexican restaurant. So, let them be racist crackers while standing on the sidewalk--within the hour they would be shelling out their hard earned greenbacks to a restaurant that didn't have a single gringo on staff. And, I suspect the people who run the restaurant--all the way down to the waitstaff--would agree that voting for multiculturism with your money is better than voting for it with your mouth.
I would like to point out that no one has forced banks to provide services in Spanish. This is capitalism at work--immigrants have money. Not competing for their business would be crazy. And, while I'm on the subject of the free market, it seems to me that we shouldn't be afraid of having English and Spanish duke it out head to head in the free market of the culture. If Hollywood starts putting out movies in Spanish and we have to wait around for the English translation, I might feel a tiny bit inconvenienced. But, I don't see that day coming. The fact is, if you live in America, and only speak English, you just aren't going to having any trouble at all functioning. Your bank, your doctor, your grocery store might devote a sliver of their resources to serving Spanish speakers, but you are never going to walk into a bank in North Carolina and be unable to conduct a transaction because of a language barrier. Enshrining this in law speaks to me of a certain cultural insecurity on the part of Americans. A fear that our language isn't all that great, and can't stand up to competition.
Wow, a rant. It's been a while. Perhaps the healing has begun.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Sappy Memories
So, I was driving home last night, full of memories of Laura that left me feeling both sad and happy. I then started mentally combining the two words, and realized that the fusion of sad and happy produces sappy. So, I'm going to post some sappy memories. (And, yes, for the linguisticly picky, I know that sappy isn't literally defined as a mixture of sad and happy, and that the word I really should be using is bittersweet. But, if you want to write about bittersweet memories, get your own blog. I'm sticking with sappy.)
Several things triggered the memory. I had gone out to dinner with Greg in Greensboro, and on the way home I was thinking about how I would tell Laura about the restaurant. Because for the last four years, I've had this Laura box in my head where I would put certain bits of news that would be of interest to her... and now I don't know how to empty that box. For instance, at work this week, I've encountered the normal day to day frustrations, stuff I used to come home and vent about for ten minutes when Laura would ask, "How was your day," and I'd answer, "Well, let me tell you." I miss that. But, back to the restaurant: Laura was vegetarian, so anytime I'd go out to eat without her, I'd always check out the vegetarian selections to see if it might be someplace she could eat at. I got all excited last night at La Fiesta when I saw that they had a very large vegetarian menu--this was going to be someplace she would love! My enthusiasm, naturally, was followed by a strong sense of loss, not just of missing Laura, but for a missed opportunity. I loved making Laura happy, to seek and the little pleasures in life she might partake in. I felt like I'd screwed up by not finding this place sooner. It was my job, dammit, to increase her joy. I'd been slack in my duties.
Later, Greg and I drove past a Sonic restaurant. Another memory. Sometime in March, or maybe even the beginning of April, Laura had been feeling sick, but also felt bored, trapped in the house. She didn't have the stamina to get up and walk anywhere. A trip to Target would have been too much for her--she didn't even feel like going out to eat. But I proposed that we could go for a drive in the country, take a look at the flowers blooming. It turned out to be a very lovely afternoon. The Carolina countryside was very cooperative, with fields of purple and yellow blossoms over rolling hills as we drove around Saxapahaw. We passed over a terrific, rocky river. We stopped at a fruit stand--she stayed in the car but I went in and bought her a bottle of mineral water which she enjoyed. Then, on the meandering path home, we discovered a Sonic in Mebane, and Laura lit up. She wanted some of thier cheesy tater tots. Naturally, I got her some. It was the last thing I ever saw her really ravenous for, except maybe pickles.
Ah, yes, pickles. If there was a secret to Laura and me making it as a couple, it was our mutual appreciation of really good dills. Over the years, we've sampled every brand available for sale in North Carolina. Laura had a lot of appetite problems on the various chemos. But, until the end, she would never turn down a pickle. The cruel irony is, pickles have, like, five calories. You can starve to death if you make them the foundation of your diet. I should have known she was closer to the end than I did when, the last day I saw her awake in the hospital, I asked if she wanted me to smuggle her in a pickle, and she turned it down. Now I have a jar of pickles in the fridge and every time I eat one I think about her. So, I think about her a lot.
And, as long as we're on the food theme, I wonder when I will have the courage to go back to Tsing Tao. It was our favorite Chinese restaurant. And, any time I've gone in there alone, the lady who runs the place always asks me where my wife is. I've never corrected her. It always made me happy, that the little Chinese restaurant in the strip mall was a kind of alternate dimension, a separate reality where we were married, and we'd never even heard of cancer, and the hot and sour soup really was hot and sour.
Sappy, yes?
Several things triggered the memory. I had gone out to dinner with Greg in Greensboro, and on the way home I was thinking about how I would tell Laura about the restaurant. Because for the last four years, I've had this Laura box in my head where I would put certain bits of news that would be of interest to her... and now I don't know how to empty that box. For instance, at work this week, I've encountered the normal day to day frustrations, stuff I used to come home and vent about for ten minutes when Laura would ask, "How was your day," and I'd answer, "Well, let me tell you." I miss that. But, back to the restaurant: Laura was vegetarian, so anytime I'd go out to eat without her, I'd always check out the vegetarian selections to see if it might be someplace she could eat at. I got all excited last night at La Fiesta when I saw that they had a very large vegetarian menu--this was going to be someplace she would love! My enthusiasm, naturally, was followed by a strong sense of loss, not just of missing Laura, but for a missed opportunity. I loved making Laura happy, to seek and the little pleasures in life she might partake in. I felt like I'd screwed up by not finding this place sooner. It was my job, dammit, to increase her joy. I'd been slack in my duties.
Later, Greg and I drove past a Sonic restaurant. Another memory. Sometime in March, or maybe even the beginning of April, Laura had been feeling sick, but also felt bored, trapped in the house. She didn't have the stamina to get up and walk anywhere. A trip to Target would have been too much for her--she didn't even feel like going out to eat. But I proposed that we could go for a drive in the country, take a look at the flowers blooming. It turned out to be a very lovely afternoon. The Carolina countryside was very cooperative, with fields of purple and yellow blossoms over rolling hills as we drove around Saxapahaw. We passed over a terrific, rocky river. We stopped at a fruit stand--she stayed in the car but I went in and bought her a bottle of mineral water which she enjoyed. Then, on the meandering path home, we discovered a Sonic in Mebane, and Laura lit up. She wanted some of thier cheesy tater tots. Naturally, I got her some. It was the last thing I ever saw her really ravenous for, except maybe pickles.
Ah, yes, pickles. If there was a secret to Laura and me making it as a couple, it was our mutual appreciation of really good dills. Over the years, we've sampled every brand available for sale in North Carolina. Laura had a lot of appetite problems on the various chemos. But, until the end, she would never turn down a pickle. The cruel irony is, pickles have, like, five calories. You can starve to death if you make them the foundation of your diet. I should have known she was closer to the end than I did when, the last day I saw her awake in the hospital, I asked if she wanted me to smuggle her in a pickle, and she turned it down. Now I have a jar of pickles in the fridge and every time I eat one I think about her. So, I think about her a lot.
And, as long as we're on the food theme, I wonder when I will have the courage to go back to Tsing Tao. It was our favorite Chinese restaurant. And, any time I've gone in there alone, the lady who runs the place always asks me where my wife is. I've never corrected her. It always made me happy, that the little Chinese restaurant in the strip mall was a kind of alternate dimension, a separate reality where we were married, and we'd never even heard of cancer, and the hot and sour soup really was hot and sour.
Sappy, yes?
Thursday, May 18, 2006
W.H.Horner interview
The following interview was written for the Writers Group of the Triad Newsletter:
My short story, "Pentacle on His Forehead, Lizard on His Breath" saw print at the end of April in the anthology MODERN MAGIC: TALES OF FANTASY AND HORROR, published by Fantasist Enterprises, edited by W. H. Horner. The anthology is the best I've yet had a story appear in, with twenty-six terrific tales and thirty-five gorgeous illustrations by artist David Seidman. Fantasist Enterprises is a small press that is developing a reputation for high-quality books. One key to their success is their pay-rates, which are competitive with larger presses. But the real key to success lies in the hard work and dedication of publisher W. H. Horner.
I knew something special was going on when, wearing his editor hat, Horner did something very strange: He edited me. I've had stories appear in about a dozen magazine and anthologies, and usually the story has appeared in exactly the format I submitted it, with editorial feedback limited to correcting typos (if that). But Horner made several suggestions to improve the flow of the story. One exchange that impressed me was a series of emails where we discussed the sentence, "Sure, my stuff is illegal," versus, "Sure. My stuff is illegal." (Note: In case your browser is as unreliable as mine, in the first sentence "sure" is italicised, while "my" is italicised in the second.) I wanted the "sure" to be heard as sarcasm, but as I had written the sentence, it could easily have been read as an affirmation of the illegality of the speaker's product. Horner's attention to detail wasn't restricted to correcting grammar. He actively worked to help me sharpen the music of the story. It was a rewarding experience that earned my respect.
To find out more about W. H. Horner, I conducted an e-mail interview where I asked a few questions about Fantasist Enterprises:
JM: What inspired you to start Fantasist Enterprises?
WHH: I have always been in love with story. Especially stories that inspire awe and wonder. I wanted to create books that carry that spark of imagination. During my college years, I also discovered that I have a passion for helping other people say what it is they are truly attempting to say. I love helping my authors make a story the best it can be. FE is truly a labor of love.
JM: Professional short story markets are disappearing, at least in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Markets like the now defunct Amazing Stories were gateways for new talent. Do you see the small press filling that gateway role?
WHH: I love small presses because they are more likely to take chances and stir things up. I see anthologies and the fiction magazines as excellent opportunities for writers to start up their careers by putting some short story sales under their belts, and to learn a bit about the publishing world. Not that it's a requirement in order to sell a novel to one of the big houses, but having those credits will make you look a bit more professional and dedicated.
Small presses can also give authors a chance to play with new concepts and characters. One established author in MODERN MAGIC was recently requested by her agent to take characters from her story and write a novel centering on them. It's very exciting to be able to say I was there in the beginning of something.
JM: One interesting aspect of the themed anthologies you've brought to press so far (2004's CLOAKED IN SHADOW: DARK TALES OF ELVES and the just released MODERN MAGIC: TALES OF FANTASY AND HORROR) is that they are heavily illustrated by a single artist. Which comes first for you? Does a particular artist's work inspire you to think of a theme, or do you think of the theme and then search out an appropriate artist? Am I correct in assuming that you have the artist signed on before you start signing authors?
WHH: It depends on the book. With CLOAKED, Star Sutezzo sent me a sample of her art, including the piece that eventually became the cover. It inspired me to see what people could do with the theme of evil elves. MODERN MAGIC came about because so many of the submissions to CLOAKED were set in modern times, and I wanted to see what other stories people could tell in our world with fantasy and horror elements. David Seidman had sent me his portfolio months before the idea struck, and I knew he would be perfect with his ability to create very real images of fantasy. It was a similar process with BASH DOWN THE DOOR AND SLICE OPEN THE BADGUY and BLOOD AND DEVOTION, with Chris Chua and Michael Dixon, respectively. So far, I've had an artist signed on before I made a final decision on the lineup of stories. In a way, it helps with the selection process, because as I read, I look for scenes that would make great illustrations in the artist's style.
JM: What inspired you to use interior artwork in the first place? In most books, the artwork is restricted to the cover. Also, you mention BLOOD AND DEVOTION and BASH DOWN THE DOOR AND SLICE OPEN THE BAD GUY. What's your normal time from conceiving an anthology to seeing it come to fruition?
WHH: In the history of books, it's a rather new phenomenon to not have illustrations to go along with the text. In the late 19th century, with the proliferation of books aimed at children, it slowly came to be thought that books with pictures were just for kids, but again, this is not historically accurate.
In the early nineties, I read THE GIANT BOOK OF FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, which contained 39 stories and 24 illustrations. That book affected how I came to envision what I wanted to do with the books I publish. I'm also a fan of the speculative fiction magazines such as REALMS OF FANTASY and WEIRD TALES which combine art with words.
My decision to make art such an important part of FE books goes back to that sense of wonder I mentioned earlier. I want readers to turn the page and see a new illustration and say, "Wow." That will hopefully draw them right into the next story since they can't wait to find out what inspired the artist to create that particular work of art.
As for the time it takes to get an anthology out the door, it has taken much longer than I would like! Both CLOAKED and MODERN MAGIC took probably three years from when I came up with the idea to when it finally hit presses. As we get the infrastructure of the company running a bit more smoothly, I'm hoping to cut that time in half, which I know is asking a lot, but I have high hopes.
JM: You call your anthologies a labor of love. But have you also found a way to make money off these books?
WHH: I certainly have faith that a small, well run press can turn a profit with anthologies. I'm not expecting to get rich off this endeavor by any stretch of the imagination, but I do hope to be able to keep the company off the ground and eventually flying steadily.
JM: What kind of reading load does finding stories for an anthology entail? Are you able to read all the submissions yourself? Do you read each story all the way through, or do you know early on if a story isn't going to make the cut?
WHH: Depending on my work load, I try to personally read every story, though with some books I have brought on trusted friends and associates who I know are competent writers and editors to go through the stacks of manuscripts and pull out the top 75% for me to read. The call for submissions for MODERN MAGIC resulted in about 125 submissions, while the most recent, BLOOD & DEVOTION, resulted in about 150. The selection process for B&D was definitely the hardest I've yet to experience. There were so many good stories that I would love to publish, but there is just not enough room. And there were a number of wonderful stories that did not quite fit the theme tight enough to get in.
As to how many pages it takes to know if a story is "in" . . . well, it depends. I can usually tell in about a page and a half if the story is written well enough to warrant taking a serious look at, but I usually try to stick it out for about seven or eight pages to see if things get better. If a manuscript is written well, I usually hope to see confirmation that it will fit the theme within the first ten pages or so (this, of course, depends on length). With B&D, there were a good dozen stories that I read all the way through, since they were so good, and the theme requirements were almost there, in the hopes that something would happen to make it more of a thematic fit--and ended up being disappointed.
JM: What's the best way to support a small press? Would you prefer people purchase books directly on your website, via Amazon, or go into a bookstore and request a copy if it isn't in stock?
WHH: It's good to have a mix of all three of those options. When someone buys books direct from us, that means we and the authors make more from that sale. But most book purchases are impulse buys in stores . . . and if people don't buy a company or author's books in the stores, then stores will not stock them, obviously. Lastly, a book that does well on Amazon.com or B&N.com always gets more attention in other places as well, besides the promotion that those websites give their better-selling books.
To see illustrations from MODERN MAGIC, read story excerpts, or order your own copy, visit the links on the side of this page!
My short story, "Pentacle on His Forehead, Lizard on His Breath" saw print at the end of April in the anthology MODERN MAGIC: TALES OF FANTASY AND HORROR, published by Fantasist Enterprises, edited by W. H. Horner. The anthology is the best I've yet had a story appear in, with twenty-six terrific tales and thirty-five gorgeous illustrations by artist David Seidman. Fantasist Enterprises is a small press that is developing a reputation for high-quality books. One key to their success is their pay-rates, which are competitive with larger presses. But the real key to success lies in the hard work and dedication of publisher W. H. Horner.
I knew something special was going on when, wearing his editor hat, Horner did something very strange: He edited me. I've had stories appear in about a dozen magazine and anthologies, and usually the story has appeared in exactly the format I submitted it, with editorial feedback limited to correcting typos (if that). But Horner made several suggestions to improve the flow of the story. One exchange that impressed me was a series of emails where we discussed the sentence, "Sure, my stuff is illegal," versus, "Sure. My stuff is illegal." (Note: In case your browser is as unreliable as mine, in the first sentence "sure" is italicised, while "my" is italicised in the second.) I wanted the "sure" to be heard as sarcasm, but as I had written the sentence, it could easily have been read as an affirmation of the illegality of the speaker's product. Horner's attention to detail wasn't restricted to correcting grammar. He actively worked to help me sharpen the music of the story. It was a rewarding experience that earned my respect.
To find out more about W. H. Horner, I conducted an e-mail interview where I asked a few questions about Fantasist Enterprises:
JM: What inspired you to start Fantasist Enterprises?
WHH: I have always been in love with story. Especially stories that inspire awe and wonder. I wanted to create books that carry that spark of imagination. During my college years, I also discovered that I have a passion for helping other people say what it is they are truly attempting to say. I love helping my authors make a story the best it can be. FE is truly a labor of love.
JM: Professional short story markets are disappearing, at least in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Markets like the now defunct Amazing Stories were gateways for new talent. Do you see the small press filling that gateway role?
WHH: I love small presses because they are more likely to take chances and stir things up. I see anthologies and the fiction magazines as excellent opportunities for writers to start up their careers by putting some short story sales under their belts, and to learn a bit about the publishing world. Not that it's a requirement in order to sell a novel to one of the big houses, but having those credits will make you look a bit more professional and dedicated.
Small presses can also give authors a chance to play with new concepts and characters. One established author in MODERN MAGIC was recently requested by her agent to take characters from her story and write a novel centering on them. It's very exciting to be able to say I was there in the beginning of something.
JM: One interesting aspect of the themed anthologies you've brought to press so far (2004's CLOAKED IN SHADOW: DARK TALES OF ELVES and the just released MODERN MAGIC: TALES OF FANTASY AND HORROR) is that they are heavily illustrated by a single artist. Which comes first for you? Does a particular artist's work inspire you to think of a theme, or do you think of the theme and then search out an appropriate artist? Am I correct in assuming that you have the artist signed on before you start signing authors?
WHH: It depends on the book. With CLOAKED, Star Sutezzo sent me a sample of her art, including the piece that eventually became the cover. It inspired me to see what people could do with the theme of evil elves. MODERN MAGIC came about because so many of the submissions to CLOAKED were set in modern times, and I wanted to see what other stories people could tell in our world with fantasy and horror elements. David Seidman had sent me his portfolio months before the idea struck, and I knew he would be perfect with his ability to create very real images of fantasy. It was a similar process with BASH DOWN THE DOOR AND SLICE OPEN THE BADGUY and BLOOD AND DEVOTION, with Chris Chua and Michael Dixon, respectively. So far, I've had an artist signed on before I made a final decision on the lineup of stories. In a way, it helps with the selection process, because as I read, I look for scenes that would make great illustrations in the artist's style.
JM: What inspired you to use interior artwork in the first place? In most books, the artwork is restricted to the cover. Also, you mention BLOOD AND DEVOTION and BASH DOWN THE DOOR AND SLICE OPEN THE BAD GUY. What's your normal time from conceiving an anthology to seeing it come to fruition?
WHH: In the history of books, it's a rather new phenomenon to not have illustrations to go along with the text. In the late 19th century, with the proliferation of books aimed at children, it slowly came to be thought that books with pictures were just for kids, but again, this is not historically accurate.
In the early nineties, I read THE GIANT BOOK OF FANTASY AND THE SUPERNATURAL, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, which contained 39 stories and 24 illustrations. That book affected how I came to envision what I wanted to do with the books I publish. I'm also a fan of the speculative fiction magazines such as REALMS OF FANTASY and WEIRD TALES which combine art with words.
My decision to make art such an important part of FE books goes back to that sense of wonder I mentioned earlier. I want readers to turn the page and see a new illustration and say, "Wow." That will hopefully draw them right into the next story since they can't wait to find out what inspired the artist to create that particular work of art.
As for the time it takes to get an anthology out the door, it has taken much longer than I would like! Both CLOAKED and MODERN MAGIC took probably three years from when I came up with the idea to when it finally hit presses. As we get the infrastructure of the company running a bit more smoothly, I'm hoping to cut that time in half, which I know is asking a lot, but I have high hopes.
JM: You call your anthologies a labor of love. But have you also found a way to make money off these books?
WHH: I certainly have faith that a small, well run press can turn a profit with anthologies. I'm not expecting to get rich off this endeavor by any stretch of the imagination, but I do hope to be able to keep the company off the ground and eventually flying steadily.
JM: What kind of reading load does finding stories for an anthology entail? Are you able to read all the submissions yourself? Do you read each story all the way through, or do you know early on if a story isn't going to make the cut?
WHH: Depending on my work load, I try to personally read every story, though with some books I have brought on trusted friends and associates who I know are competent writers and editors to go through the stacks of manuscripts and pull out the top 75% for me to read. The call for submissions for MODERN MAGIC resulted in about 125 submissions, while the most recent, BLOOD & DEVOTION, resulted in about 150. The selection process for B&D was definitely the hardest I've yet to experience. There were so many good stories that I would love to publish, but there is just not enough room. And there were a number of wonderful stories that did not quite fit the theme tight enough to get in.
As to how many pages it takes to know if a story is "in" . . . well, it depends. I can usually tell in about a page and a half if the story is written well enough to warrant taking a serious look at, but I usually try to stick it out for about seven or eight pages to see if things get better. If a manuscript is written well, I usually hope to see confirmation that it will fit the theme within the first ten pages or so (this, of course, depends on length). With B&D, there were a good dozen stories that I read all the way through, since they were so good, and the theme requirements were almost there, in the hopes that something would happen to make it more of a thematic fit--and ended up being disappointed.
JM: What's the best way to support a small press? Would you prefer people purchase books directly on your website, via Amazon, or go into a bookstore and request a copy if it isn't in stock?
WHH: It's good to have a mix of all three of those options. When someone buys books direct from us, that means we and the authors make more from that sale. But most book purchases are impulse buys in stores . . . and if people don't buy a company or author's books in the stores, then stores will not stock them, obviously. Lastly, a book that does well on Amazon.com or B&N.com always gets more attention in other places as well, besides the promotion that those websites give their better-selling books.
To see illustrations from MODERN MAGIC, read story excerpts, or order your own copy, visit the links on the side of this page!
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Laura in her own words, followed by a few of mine
I've been going through emails Laura and I exchanged over the years. I found some moments where she spelled out her attitude toward life very directly, and thought I'd pass them on. These are excerpts from six or seven letters--don't try to read them all as one direct narrative.
Laura in her own words:
Some people have bad credit, some people have addiction, I have this health thing. It has been my greatest curse and my greatest blessing all rolled up into one. I got to see who my people are, and are not. Cancer has made me a very positive person.
--
As far as my spiritual beliefs go, I know there is a source whether you want to call it God or something else I believe its all the same thing. I was raised Catholic and understood pretty early on that what I believed didn't seem to fit in that box well. I've considered joining a church for the community aspect, and if I ever really got around to that it would most likely be Unitarian or similar. Above all I believe in ethics. You do the right thing because its the right thing to do, not because God is looking and taking notes. I believe the source is in all living things a part of the network of what is true and right in everything. I've never blamed or pointed fingers for what happened to me. I know that it was some part of me that needed the "pruning" in order to actually live. I had to get back to what was true and right in my life. Cancer forced that into the foreground for me. One never gets a situation that they can't handle in life, and I'm flattered I was handed such a bucket full.
--
The gift that grows out of misfortune is compassion and wisdom.
--
Sometimes I get very excited when I think of what will happen between now and this time next year. Great things can happen. Life is often like the fruit on the branch, it ripens and becomes sweeter.
--
We finally had rain last night. I know what you mean when you say that rain is lovely. It is lovely in every way.
--
Much like the Buddha laughing with tears running down his face, life is beautiful and tragic all at once.
--
As far as what kind of investment I am, we just have a little more information than the average person as to what could claim me in the end. I get what anyone gets, one lifetime. I consider the time I am with you as time well spent. The best medicine for me is to be able to live my life. I want at least 20 years. My 50th birthday will be a triumph, no "over the hill" black balloons for me. I anticipate feeling like a gold medallist on that day. Any other outcome to my life is too sad to contemplate. I suspect in the meantime I could be in need of a hand to hold from time to time, things can get scary and bravery is easier in numbers. If it comes to that I'll let you in on it.
--
James here again: I considered posting only part of that last paragraph. It is sad to contemplate, and sad that she didn't make it to fifty. But when she went, we were holding her hands. We also were holding her feet--there were five of us in the room, we all had a hand on her somewhere, I think. She was right, of course, that the numbers made it easier, at least for us, and, I hope, for her.
But, it was pretty easy to decide to leave it in, given that she especially knew that tragedy and beauty weren't mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, intertwined in ways not immediately obvious to many people.
It's been just over a week since she left us. Tonight is my first night alone in the house. All of her relatives have returned home, Simon and Veronica have gone to live with their emergency backup parents (divorce does have an oddly positive side effect, in this case), and even her cat, Yoshi, is gone away. I'm left with just memories and lots of clutter. Dying flowers from the funeral are all over the house. By all rights, this should be the saddest night of my life.
Instead, I'm trapped in this borderline psychotic mix between regret and excitement. I keep thinking of things I could have done differently with Laura. Should I have asked her to marry me earlier, instead of waiting so long into her illness? Could I have given her better advice on her treatment? There was a time early in her occurance when she ditched a cancer drug due to the side effects, even though the drug was still showing signs of working. I respected her decision--she was the one having to suffer the side-effects--but at the time I wanted to argue her choice, and encourage her to tough it out a few more months. Would she still be around if I'd given her that advice? Or would everything have just been pushed off a few months more? And the Wednesday when I left her in the hospital--if I'd stuck around through the night, could she have found any additional strength in my holding her hand to make it through to morning? And would it have changed anything in the long run?
Mixed in with all the regret and sorrow, though, is the realization that I'm entering a new chapter in life. It's a strangely giddy feeling. I honestly have no idea what can happen to me in the next year. But I face the year a little wiser, and perhaps, yes, a little more compassionate. I've lived for a long time with the dread of what would come next. And, bluntly, the worst that could happen has happened. Things get better from here.
And, even here, in a lonely house, there's all those flowers, still colorful, still fragrant, even as they fade.
Laura in her own words:
Some people have bad credit, some people have addiction, I have this health thing. It has been my greatest curse and my greatest blessing all rolled up into one. I got to see who my people are, and are not. Cancer has made me a very positive person.
--
As far as my spiritual beliefs go, I know there is a source whether you want to call it God or something else I believe its all the same thing. I was raised Catholic and understood pretty early on that what I believed didn't seem to fit in that box well. I've considered joining a church for the community aspect, and if I ever really got around to that it would most likely be Unitarian or similar. Above all I believe in ethics. You do the right thing because its the right thing to do, not because God is looking and taking notes. I believe the source is in all living things a part of the network of what is true and right in everything. I've never blamed or pointed fingers for what happened to me. I know that it was some part of me that needed the "pruning" in order to actually live. I had to get back to what was true and right in my life. Cancer forced that into the foreground for me. One never gets a situation that they can't handle in life, and I'm flattered I was handed such a bucket full.
--
The gift that grows out of misfortune is compassion and wisdom.
--
Sometimes I get very excited when I think of what will happen between now and this time next year. Great things can happen. Life is often like the fruit on the branch, it ripens and becomes sweeter.
--
We finally had rain last night. I know what you mean when you say that rain is lovely. It is lovely in every way.
--
Much like the Buddha laughing with tears running down his face, life is beautiful and tragic all at once.
--
As far as what kind of investment I am, we just have a little more information than the average person as to what could claim me in the end. I get what anyone gets, one lifetime. I consider the time I am with you as time well spent. The best medicine for me is to be able to live my life. I want at least 20 years. My 50th birthday will be a triumph, no "over the hill" black balloons for me. I anticipate feeling like a gold medallist on that day. Any other outcome to my life is too sad to contemplate. I suspect in the meantime I could be in need of a hand to hold from time to time, things can get scary and bravery is easier in numbers. If it comes to that I'll let you in on it.
--
James here again: I considered posting only part of that last paragraph. It is sad to contemplate, and sad that she didn't make it to fifty. But when she went, we were holding her hands. We also were holding her feet--there were five of us in the room, we all had a hand on her somewhere, I think. She was right, of course, that the numbers made it easier, at least for us, and, I hope, for her.
But, it was pretty easy to decide to leave it in, given that she especially knew that tragedy and beauty weren't mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, intertwined in ways not immediately obvious to many people.
It's been just over a week since she left us. Tonight is my first night alone in the house. All of her relatives have returned home, Simon and Veronica have gone to live with their emergency backup parents (divorce does have an oddly positive side effect, in this case), and even her cat, Yoshi, is gone away. I'm left with just memories and lots of clutter. Dying flowers from the funeral are all over the house. By all rights, this should be the saddest night of my life.
Instead, I'm trapped in this borderline psychotic mix between regret and excitement. I keep thinking of things I could have done differently with Laura. Should I have asked her to marry me earlier, instead of waiting so long into her illness? Could I have given her better advice on her treatment? There was a time early in her occurance when she ditched a cancer drug due to the side effects, even though the drug was still showing signs of working. I respected her decision--she was the one having to suffer the side-effects--but at the time I wanted to argue her choice, and encourage her to tough it out a few more months. Would she still be around if I'd given her that advice? Or would everything have just been pushed off a few months more? And the Wednesday when I left her in the hospital--if I'd stuck around through the night, could she have found any additional strength in my holding her hand to make it through to morning? And would it have changed anything in the long run?
Mixed in with all the regret and sorrow, though, is the realization that I'm entering a new chapter in life. It's a strangely giddy feeling. I honestly have no idea what can happen to me in the next year. But I face the year a little wiser, and perhaps, yes, a little more compassionate. I've lived for a long time with the dread of what would come next. And, bluntly, the worst that could happen has happened. Things get better from here.
And, even here, in a lonely house, there's all those flowers, still colorful, still fragrant, even as they fade.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Homily
This is the homily I wrote for Laura's funeral service today. It makes reference to Ecclesiastes 11:1 "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days." To me it sounds a little strange and detached, since I'm writing about myself in third person. But I felt it was important to make the homily as broad as possible, and talk about the impact she had had on so many lives. There were well over a hundred people at her funeral today--we had been told the church seated 140, and there were people standing around the back it was so packed. I didn't want to make it seem like I alone was claiming her memory by telling a personal story about her. But, I promise I will post some of those personal stories here in the coming days. For now, this is what people in church heard from Reverend Tammy Lee:
---
Whenever Laura went out in public, she always met someone that she knew. It didn't matter if she was at a restaurant, a park, a theater, or just walking through a grocery store--she would bump into people who wanted to stand and talk with her for ten minutes. And she would always give people those ten minutes, or more. It sometimes seemed like Laura knew details of everyone's life. When she'd see people, she'd remember the names and ages of their kids. She could talk about where they'd just gone on vacation, or how their parents were doing, or what their favorite flowers were. It was as if she knew every single person in the town of Chapel Hill, and they all knew her.
Laura had plenty of excuses not to spend time standing in a grocery store chatting. She was a busy single mom who over the years dealt with health problems that sometimes made even a small excursion exhausting. But she cast her bread upon the waters by giving everyone she met her time and her kindness. She was willing to offer her friends help in anyway--giving people rides when they needed them, offering what little financial support she could cobble together to people in tougher situations than her own, and, most importantly, in always being willing to listen to people no matter what their problems. Her sage advice and terrific sense of irony carried her friends through many a tough time. In later years, she saw the bread she had cast upon the water returned to her. Her kindness and charity were given back ten fold by her vast network of friends and loved ones.
Laura lived life with a sense of adventure and passion. Laura once wrote in a letter to James, her companion, "Sometimes I get very excited when I think of what will happen between now and this time next year. Great things can happen. Life is often like the fruit on the branch, it ripens and becomes sweeter." Her optimism inspired the people around her. Yet there was nothing unrealistic in her acceptance of her circumstances in life. Laura lived knowing that she might not live as long as the average person. She never allowed that to make her bitter. She accepted her problems as part of her life, and learned to draw wisdom from them. She believed that the battles she fought in life, even the losing ones, made her stronger. She said, "I get what anyone gets, one lifetime." She made the most of that life. Laura remained focused on what she could do, not on what she had lost or might lose. She found something beautiful in almost every day.
Laura loved her children. She was proud of Bevin's maturity and independence. She adored Simon's humor and insight. She cherished Veronica's creativity and energy. She loved her family, her parents: Bob and Anne, her brothers Mike and Matt and Andy, her sisters Sara and Alicia. She welcomed any and all additions to her already large family, forming a special bond with her sister in law Jessica and her sister in law in waiting Naoko. Her joys in life were many and simple--she possessed an almost inexhaustible knowledge of flowers. She loved Mediterranean food and wasabi and pickles. She wore out many a pencil filling in su-do-ku and crossword puzzles. There was almost no occasion in life where she couldn't find an appropriate quote from the Simpsons. She could find something to laugh about in even the darkest moments.
We all lose something in her passing. But we've all gained something from her life. We can take the seeds of her kindness and love and wisdom and carry them out in to the world and plant them in our own lives and the lives of others. The good she did in this world doesn't end simply because her life has ended. As long as we carry her in our memories, Laura will be with us.
---
Whenever Laura went out in public, she always met someone that she knew. It didn't matter if she was at a restaurant, a park, a theater, or just walking through a grocery store--she would bump into people who wanted to stand and talk with her for ten minutes. And she would always give people those ten minutes, or more. It sometimes seemed like Laura knew details of everyone's life. When she'd see people, she'd remember the names and ages of their kids. She could talk about where they'd just gone on vacation, or how their parents were doing, or what their favorite flowers were. It was as if she knew every single person in the town of Chapel Hill, and they all knew her.
Laura had plenty of excuses not to spend time standing in a grocery store chatting. She was a busy single mom who over the years dealt with health problems that sometimes made even a small excursion exhausting. But she cast her bread upon the waters by giving everyone she met her time and her kindness. She was willing to offer her friends help in anyway--giving people rides when they needed them, offering what little financial support she could cobble together to people in tougher situations than her own, and, most importantly, in always being willing to listen to people no matter what their problems. Her sage advice and terrific sense of irony carried her friends through many a tough time. In later years, she saw the bread she had cast upon the water returned to her. Her kindness and charity were given back ten fold by her vast network of friends and loved ones.
Laura lived life with a sense of adventure and passion. Laura once wrote in a letter to James, her companion, "Sometimes I get very excited when I think of what will happen between now and this time next year. Great things can happen. Life is often like the fruit on the branch, it ripens and becomes sweeter." Her optimism inspired the people around her. Yet there was nothing unrealistic in her acceptance of her circumstances in life. Laura lived knowing that she might not live as long as the average person. She never allowed that to make her bitter. She accepted her problems as part of her life, and learned to draw wisdom from them. She believed that the battles she fought in life, even the losing ones, made her stronger. She said, "I get what anyone gets, one lifetime." She made the most of that life. Laura remained focused on what she could do, not on what she had lost or might lose. She found something beautiful in almost every day.
Laura loved her children. She was proud of Bevin's maturity and independence. She adored Simon's humor and insight. She cherished Veronica's creativity and energy. She loved her family, her parents: Bob and Anne, her brothers Mike and Matt and Andy, her sisters Sara and Alicia. She welcomed any and all additions to her already large family, forming a special bond with her sister in law Jessica and her sister in law in waiting Naoko. Her joys in life were many and simple--she possessed an almost inexhaustible knowledge of flowers. She loved Mediterranean food and wasabi and pickles. She wore out many a pencil filling in su-do-ku and crossword puzzles. There was almost no occasion in life where she couldn't find an appropriate quote from the Simpsons. She could find something to laugh about in even the darkest moments.
We all lose something in her passing. But we've all gained something from her life. We can take the seeds of her kindness and love and wisdom and carry them out in to the world and plant them in our own lives and the lives of others. The good she did in this world doesn't end simply because her life has ended. As long as we carry her in our memories, Laura will be with us.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Laura Kathleen Herrmann
She was dying when I met her. We met through online personal ads, and she wrote me saying that she liked the philosophy I had sprinkled through my post. I don't even recall what it said, really--something about finding humor and hope even in down times, I think. And she told me she'd been through some down times. She'd fought breast cancer, her husband had left her when she was diagnosed with the disease. This might send other people into a spiral of despair and self-pity that they could never pull out of. But, she hadn't surrendered to her worries and woes. She bested them, and went on to live a terrific life. She had gotten a butterfly tattoo--it was her symbol of transformation. The time of her cancer and her divorce were when she had been drawn into her cocoon. But she'd emerged with wings.
At the time I met her, she was cancer free--or, more accurately, her cancer treatment had pushed the disease back to a level below the threshold of detection. She was up front about this--she told me that she was living with the knowledge that her disease might return any day. After I'd been dating her about three months, she put a timeline on it. According to the doctor, she said, all but a handful of people who had been through breast cancer and had it spread to other parts of the body would survive more than five years, even if they were "cured."
We were in the stage of our relationship where we were hungry for each other, very fully in that early, giddy, passionate love that is so intoxicating. And she wanted me to have all the facts. She wanted me to understand, before I fell too much in love, that we would probably never have the kind of relationship where we would grow old and gray together. There wasn't much chance of us sitting on the rocking chair on the porch and watching our grandkids play. Her exact words to me were, "I'm not a very good investment."
I admit, at the time, it staggered me. She said she didn't really know if she would live to see her 40th birthday. It wasn't something I could really wrap my head around. At the time she told me this, she was very healthy--maybe the healthiest person I knew. She ate right, loved being outdoors, and possessed this thirst for life that just made it impossible to think that she might be in any danger from disease. Plus, every day in the papers, there was some new development in the fight against cancer. The genetics were being unraveled. New drugs were better, more targeted. Worrying about death from cancer five years out just wasn't a worry I was prepared to embrace. I really believed at the time that a real cure was only a year or two away. And so I told her I was in this for the long haul. Things would work out.
So, of course, the cancer returned a few months later. Lungs, liver, spine--tiny tumors only millimeters long, but described in the cat scan as "innumerable." The tumors were like shrapnel from the world's slowest hand grenade. Up until that point, we had been able to talk a bit about a future together. But, we hadn't been rushing things. She'd been through a divorce, I'd been through two--we weren't the sort of people who were going to run out and get married in Vegas. We both felt a long, slow courtship was best. If marriage was going to be talked about, it would be talked about after a few years, not a few months. But once the cancer returned, discussions of the future were shut down. We dealt mainly with the day to day, and with the immediately problems caused by her illness and treatment.
Last year, I asked her if she would like to get married. She'd gotten too sick to work full time. It seemed like there was a lot I would be able to help her with as a spouse that I was legally not able to as a boyfriend. She turned me down. She said she didn't want to take me down with her.
Even then, I didn't give up hope. The growth of her disease had been very gradual. The tiny little flea sided tumors would grow to rice sized tumors, then fade a bit, then return as fly sized tumors. A few years ago a few of the tumors in her lung went wild and grew much larger--her lungs began to fill with fluid, and she landed in the hospital with blood oxygen levels at in a range that might have killed another person. That was about 18 months ago--and she beat it back. She had a drain installed in her chest--and every night for weeks we would drain of the fluid. And slowly she got her breath back. She went from near death on New Years Eve to walking over a mile in downtown High Point with me in March as we looked for a Mexican restaurant "just down the street" that turned out to have shut down months before. The chemo she had gotten immediately after her surgury did a good job of holding back the disease. I started to think that anyone who could survive that dark time could beat anything.
She died Saturday morning, May 6, about 3:40. She was 39. I held her hand as she went.
In the days to come, I plan to write a lot about Laura. I didn't write much about her here over the last few years because I worried about her kids reading my blog and discovering my fears and anxieties. For that matter, I didn't want her to read about my fears and anxieties. I had a clearly defined job in Laura's life. She saw a lot of doctors over the years. I was her spin doctor. There was no bit of news she could get that was so bad that I couldn't find some positive or funny way of looking at it. When chemo made her skin peel and crack, I told her to imagine that same reaction going on inside, chewing up tumor. When she was in the hospital week before last with her liver swelling, she was next to a woman who was flat out yellow, like florescent highlighter had been rubbed over every part of her body. That woman was obviously dying, and in a lot of pain. This is a horrible thing to say, but I helped Laura find a grim comfort in it, because, in the presence of someone whose liver had failed, the fact that Laura's liver had swollen didn't seem so bad. Things were going wrong inside her, but obviously her liver was still working, and if she had to spend the rest of her life in maternity pants, well, there are worse fates.
So, for close to four years, I've spent pretty much every day thinking of reasons why Laura was going to beat the cancer, and giving her pep talks. And then I'd come downstairs (I rented her basement apartment) and stand in the shower and groan, on the verge of tears, because I knew, deep down, that I didn't believe it. Little by little, the cancer was winning. Every time a chemo drug exhausted itself, it left her just a little sicker and the tumors just a little tougher and more drug resistant. I knew it was only a matter of time. She knew, too. But the unspoken rule was that we were never going to talk about the possibility of her losing. She wanted to fight until the last possible second, and I had her back.
As she died over the last few days, I've second guessed a lot of my decisions. Because, if someone had given me a calendar, and said, "Yep, May 6. That's the day," then maybe I would have handled things differently. I praised her almost daily about what a fighter she was, and how awed I was of her strength. I told her I admired her courage. But, I wish there was a point where I had also said it's okay to give up. No one was going to judge her or think her weak for letting go. And maybe she could have used the last few days to say good-bye to people. But I don't know. I don't know if she could have made peace with the idea of dying, or if her desire to live was just too strong for her to ever willingly let go, no matter how bad things got. I wasn't there with her when they put her under Thursday morning to hook up the ventilator. I'm told her last words were, "Is there hope?"
The fact that I wasn't there to say yes is going to haunt me for a long time.
I talked to her a lot while she was under the morphine, probably beyond hearing me. I'll never know. A lot of what I said to her is going to remain between me and her. But there was one thing I told her. She was the best investment of time and energy and love I ever made. I don't believe in a soul, or an afterlife, but, I promise you, I believe in memory, and her memory has forever changed me, and changed dozens of others. Everyone who knew her is going to carry part of her for the rest of their lives. She will live on from this day in a slowly expanding wave of kindness and courage and hope that spreads from the people who knew her to the people they know.
She was dying when I met her. She knew it. And it made her truly, deeply aware that she loved her life. She lived with a passion and a grace that I've never before encountered.
Oh, sweet Jesus, I'm going to miss her.
At the time I met her, she was cancer free--or, more accurately, her cancer treatment had pushed the disease back to a level below the threshold of detection. She was up front about this--she told me that she was living with the knowledge that her disease might return any day. After I'd been dating her about three months, she put a timeline on it. According to the doctor, she said, all but a handful of people who had been through breast cancer and had it spread to other parts of the body would survive more than five years, even if they were "cured."
We were in the stage of our relationship where we were hungry for each other, very fully in that early, giddy, passionate love that is so intoxicating. And she wanted me to have all the facts. She wanted me to understand, before I fell too much in love, that we would probably never have the kind of relationship where we would grow old and gray together. There wasn't much chance of us sitting on the rocking chair on the porch and watching our grandkids play. Her exact words to me were, "I'm not a very good investment."
I admit, at the time, it staggered me. She said she didn't really know if she would live to see her 40th birthday. It wasn't something I could really wrap my head around. At the time she told me this, she was very healthy--maybe the healthiest person I knew. She ate right, loved being outdoors, and possessed this thirst for life that just made it impossible to think that she might be in any danger from disease. Plus, every day in the papers, there was some new development in the fight against cancer. The genetics were being unraveled. New drugs were better, more targeted. Worrying about death from cancer five years out just wasn't a worry I was prepared to embrace. I really believed at the time that a real cure was only a year or two away. And so I told her I was in this for the long haul. Things would work out.
So, of course, the cancer returned a few months later. Lungs, liver, spine--tiny tumors only millimeters long, but described in the cat scan as "innumerable." The tumors were like shrapnel from the world's slowest hand grenade. Up until that point, we had been able to talk a bit about a future together. But, we hadn't been rushing things. She'd been through a divorce, I'd been through two--we weren't the sort of people who were going to run out and get married in Vegas. We both felt a long, slow courtship was best. If marriage was going to be talked about, it would be talked about after a few years, not a few months. But once the cancer returned, discussions of the future were shut down. We dealt mainly with the day to day, and with the immediately problems caused by her illness and treatment.
Last year, I asked her if she would like to get married. She'd gotten too sick to work full time. It seemed like there was a lot I would be able to help her with as a spouse that I was legally not able to as a boyfriend. She turned me down. She said she didn't want to take me down with her.
Even then, I didn't give up hope. The growth of her disease had been very gradual. The tiny little flea sided tumors would grow to rice sized tumors, then fade a bit, then return as fly sized tumors. A few years ago a few of the tumors in her lung went wild and grew much larger--her lungs began to fill with fluid, and she landed in the hospital with blood oxygen levels at in a range that might have killed another person. That was about 18 months ago--and she beat it back. She had a drain installed in her chest--and every night for weeks we would drain of the fluid. And slowly she got her breath back. She went from near death on New Years Eve to walking over a mile in downtown High Point with me in March as we looked for a Mexican restaurant "just down the street" that turned out to have shut down months before. The chemo she had gotten immediately after her surgury did a good job of holding back the disease. I started to think that anyone who could survive that dark time could beat anything.
She died Saturday morning, May 6, about 3:40. She was 39. I held her hand as she went.
In the days to come, I plan to write a lot about Laura. I didn't write much about her here over the last few years because I worried about her kids reading my blog and discovering my fears and anxieties. For that matter, I didn't want her to read about my fears and anxieties. I had a clearly defined job in Laura's life. She saw a lot of doctors over the years. I was her spin doctor. There was no bit of news she could get that was so bad that I couldn't find some positive or funny way of looking at it. When chemo made her skin peel and crack, I told her to imagine that same reaction going on inside, chewing up tumor. When she was in the hospital week before last with her liver swelling, she was next to a woman who was flat out yellow, like florescent highlighter had been rubbed over every part of her body. That woman was obviously dying, and in a lot of pain. This is a horrible thing to say, but I helped Laura find a grim comfort in it, because, in the presence of someone whose liver had failed, the fact that Laura's liver had swollen didn't seem so bad. Things were going wrong inside her, but obviously her liver was still working, and if she had to spend the rest of her life in maternity pants, well, there are worse fates.
So, for close to four years, I've spent pretty much every day thinking of reasons why Laura was going to beat the cancer, and giving her pep talks. And then I'd come downstairs (I rented her basement apartment) and stand in the shower and groan, on the verge of tears, because I knew, deep down, that I didn't believe it. Little by little, the cancer was winning. Every time a chemo drug exhausted itself, it left her just a little sicker and the tumors just a little tougher and more drug resistant. I knew it was only a matter of time. She knew, too. But the unspoken rule was that we were never going to talk about the possibility of her losing. She wanted to fight until the last possible second, and I had her back.
As she died over the last few days, I've second guessed a lot of my decisions. Because, if someone had given me a calendar, and said, "Yep, May 6. That's the day," then maybe I would have handled things differently. I praised her almost daily about what a fighter she was, and how awed I was of her strength. I told her I admired her courage. But, I wish there was a point where I had also said it's okay to give up. No one was going to judge her or think her weak for letting go. And maybe she could have used the last few days to say good-bye to people. But I don't know. I don't know if she could have made peace with the idea of dying, or if her desire to live was just too strong for her to ever willingly let go, no matter how bad things got. I wasn't there with her when they put her under Thursday morning to hook up the ventilator. I'm told her last words were, "Is there hope?"
The fact that I wasn't there to say yes is going to haunt me for a long time.
I talked to her a lot while she was under the morphine, probably beyond hearing me. I'll never know. A lot of what I said to her is going to remain between me and her. But there was one thing I told her. She was the best investment of time and energy and love I ever made. I don't believe in a soul, or an afterlife, but, I promise you, I believe in memory, and her memory has forever changed me, and changed dozens of others. Everyone who knew her is going to carry part of her for the rest of their lives. She will live on from this day in a slowly expanding wave of kindness and courage and hope that spreads from the people who knew her to the people they know.
She was dying when I met her. She knew it. And it made her truly, deeply aware that she loved her life. She lived with a passion and a grace that I've never before encountered.
Oh, sweet Jesus, I'm going to miss her.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Modern Magic Artwork
Today I learned about David Seidman's website. He's the insanely talented illustrator of the modern magic anthology. If the stories in this book are 1/10th as good as the illustrations, it's going to be one heck of a collection. Take a look here to see some good stuff.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Funk
So, tonight I'm in a funk. One of those moods where I'm trying to make a list of things I like about the world and I'm coming up with, oh, my girlfriend, her kids, and kalamata olives. And in the list of stuff I hate I have pretty much everyone else in the world, and everything animal, mineral, vegetable, and political.
The odd thing is, this been a great week for me. I accepted the book deal on Bitterwood. It's not as good as my wildest fantasies would have liked it to have been, but it ain't bad, either. Much better than my deal with Phobos for Nobody Gets the Girl, at least. It's with a company that I have good vibes about, Solaris, a new fiction line from BL publishing. They are located in the UK, so my book will get a truly international release, which is damn cool. So, I'll move Solaris out of my hate column, and, what the hey, the rest of the Brits. Good people.
No, I think I can narrow down my hatred tonight to Americans. You hear conservative talk shows going on about how liberals hate America--well, why not? I'm not even a little bit liberal, and I'm fed up with it. The way we spend money at such a crazy pace--both on a national level and at a personal level. Are we insane? We are a nation living on its credit cards, and I see not one politician of any stripe who has the faintest plan of what to do with it. Tax and spend was awful, but borrow and spend is worse. And it's the same old endless cycle of it all that gets to me--the problem's facing the world today seem to be variants of the same problems we faced twenty years ago when I was in college. Social security in crisis, conflict in the middle east, political corruption... it just gets wearisome. I tune out. Then I hate myself for tuning out, because I believe that we've wound up in the mess precisely because people tune out.
I'm not sure what brought me to the snapping point. But it's been a week where every news story just drove home to me that I live in a world full of scummy, awful people. For instance, there's a guy here in North Carolina who was recently let off death row because it was learned that the prosecutors in his case had surpressed clear evidence of his innocence--namely, at the time of the murder, the convicted man was securely locked up in jail for entirely different charges. His name is Alan Gell--you can google him if you want to learn more details about his case. In a way, it's a happy, feel good story if you're an optimist--the system worked, the innocent man was spared, after nine years, from death row. But, if you are in a mood where you hate everyone, you have to wonder why the prosecutor was allowed to almost get away with murder and faces no real consequences for sending an innocent man to jail. Then, to make sure there's absolutely nothing good that came out of this case, this week Gell was again hauled before the court, this time to face charges of cocaine possession and having sex with a 15 year old girl. Were his nine years in prison such a holiday that he wanted to get back in? Here's a man who was literally given a second chance at life--and he seems to have made a choice to live that life in prison after all.
Then, tonight, driving home I was listening to the radio and they had two stories in a row about finding the bodies of missing children. I know no further details. But hearing the news just left me despairing. How do you fix a world where people murder kids? Religion sure as hell hasn't worked. Politics seems to be making a mess of it. Prisons apparently aren't answer. I ask myself, what can I do about this? About anything? Nothing.
So, yeah, I'm in a pretty bad funk tonight. And I'm trying to hold onto it just a little longer. Because, I know, I'm going to get some sleep, then tomorrow I'll be busy mowing the yard, catching up on email, maybe going to a movie--and I'll forget about it. The evil in the world will be a distant and forgotten thing if I stay away from the newspaper and the radio. It will become someone else's problem again, nothing I need to worry about as long as the people I love are safe.
So why would I want to hold onto such bad feelings? Because, often, the further down I go into a dark mood, the more likely I am to surface from it with a story. There's a lot of story potential in the question, "How can the world be made a better place?" In many of my stories, I struggle to answer this question. Which might surprise some of my readers--I'm often told that the worlds I show in my stories are rather dark ones, and I'll plead guilty to that charge. But I think, on the whole, my stories usually move in the direction that allows the lead characters to find happiness or at least peace in the middle of their broken, fucked-up landscapes. Devie in "Perhaps the Snail" finds bliss after having her entire life exposed as hollow and meaningless. Rob in "Little Guilt Thing Goin' On" learns to allow himself to love who he loves rather than who he thinks he should love. Tony in "To the East, a Bright Star" faces the ultimate apocolyptic conclusion, at ground zero of a comet strike, and, with inescapable death seconds away, to live a good, full, final fifteen minutes.
Not all of my stories fit this model, of course. But, a few years ago, in a critique group, a woman named Mary (and, alas, I'm drawing a blank on her last name at the moment), gave me a bit of advice that was probably the best thing I've ever learned about writing. She told me to show my character's beautiful world. She used the example of the movie Trainspotters. The characters are heroin addicts, living lives that by any objective standards are pretty rough, yet the movie still manages to show why they live this way--it finds the beauty that the characters see, the reason they stick with lives others would find unacceptable. I'll take her word on this specific case, since I've never seen the movie. But, it made sense when she said it. Since then, I've written some pretty bleak, dystopian futures (and presents for that matter), but I've always been aware that there are things that my characters do in pursuit of happiness.
I'm rambling, aren't I? I started off talking about hating everything in the world and worked around to beauty and happiness. Dammit, I knew I couldn't hold onto my funk if I started writing about it. Writing is my pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, it's my own answer to what I can do to fix things. Maybe one of two people will see the world in a different light when they are done with one of my stories, and see a path to happiness in a world that seems in active opposition to their joy. I'm writing to save the world!
Now if only I can work up the same enthusiasm for mowing the yard tomorrow....
The odd thing is, this been a great week for me. I accepted the book deal on Bitterwood. It's not as good as my wildest fantasies would have liked it to have been, but it ain't bad, either. Much better than my deal with Phobos for Nobody Gets the Girl, at least. It's with a company that I have good vibes about, Solaris, a new fiction line from BL publishing. They are located in the UK, so my book will get a truly international release, which is damn cool. So, I'll move Solaris out of my hate column, and, what the hey, the rest of the Brits. Good people.
No, I think I can narrow down my hatred tonight to Americans. You hear conservative talk shows going on about how liberals hate America--well, why not? I'm not even a little bit liberal, and I'm fed up with it. The way we spend money at such a crazy pace--both on a national level and at a personal level. Are we insane? We are a nation living on its credit cards, and I see not one politician of any stripe who has the faintest plan of what to do with it. Tax and spend was awful, but borrow and spend is worse. And it's the same old endless cycle of it all that gets to me--the problem's facing the world today seem to be variants of the same problems we faced twenty years ago when I was in college. Social security in crisis, conflict in the middle east, political corruption... it just gets wearisome. I tune out. Then I hate myself for tuning out, because I believe that we've wound up in the mess precisely because people tune out.
I'm not sure what brought me to the snapping point. But it's been a week where every news story just drove home to me that I live in a world full of scummy, awful people. For instance, there's a guy here in North Carolina who was recently let off death row because it was learned that the prosecutors in his case had surpressed clear evidence of his innocence--namely, at the time of the murder, the convicted man was securely locked up in jail for entirely different charges. His name is Alan Gell--you can google him if you want to learn more details about his case. In a way, it's a happy, feel good story if you're an optimist--the system worked, the innocent man was spared, after nine years, from death row. But, if you are in a mood where you hate everyone, you have to wonder why the prosecutor was allowed to almost get away with murder and faces no real consequences for sending an innocent man to jail. Then, to make sure there's absolutely nothing good that came out of this case, this week Gell was again hauled before the court, this time to face charges of cocaine possession and having sex with a 15 year old girl. Were his nine years in prison such a holiday that he wanted to get back in? Here's a man who was literally given a second chance at life--and he seems to have made a choice to live that life in prison after all.
Then, tonight, driving home I was listening to the radio and they had two stories in a row about finding the bodies of missing children. I know no further details. But hearing the news just left me despairing. How do you fix a world where people murder kids? Religion sure as hell hasn't worked. Politics seems to be making a mess of it. Prisons apparently aren't answer. I ask myself, what can I do about this? About anything? Nothing.
So, yeah, I'm in a pretty bad funk tonight. And I'm trying to hold onto it just a little longer. Because, I know, I'm going to get some sleep, then tomorrow I'll be busy mowing the yard, catching up on email, maybe going to a movie--and I'll forget about it. The evil in the world will be a distant and forgotten thing if I stay away from the newspaper and the radio. It will become someone else's problem again, nothing I need to worry about as long as the people I love are safe.
So why would I want to hold onto such bad feelings? Because, often, the further down I go into a dark mood, the more likely I am to surface from it with a story. There's a lot of story potential in the question, "How can the world be made a better place?" In many of my stories, I struggle to answer this question. Which might surprise some of my readers--I'm often told that the worlds I show in my stories are rather dark ones, and I'll plead guilty to that charge. But I think, on the whole, my stories usually move in the direction that allows the lead characters to find happiness or at least peace in the middle of their broken, fucked-up landscapes. Devie in "Perhaps the Snail" finds bliss after having her entire life exposed as hollow and meaningless. Rob in "Little Guilt Thing Goin' On" learns to allow himself to love who he loves rather than who he thinks he should love. Tony in "To the East, a Bright Star" faces the ultimate apocolyptic conclusion, at ground zero of a comet strike, and, with inescapable death seconds away, to live a good, full, final fifteen minutes.
Not all of my stories fit this model, of course. But, a few years ago, in a critique group, a woman named Mary (and, alas, I'm drawing a blank on her last name at the moment), gave me a bit of advice that was probably the best thing I've ever learned about writing. She told me to show my character's beautiful world. She used the example of the movie Trainspotters. The characters are heroin addicts, living lives that by any objective standards are pretty rough, yet the movie still manages to show why they live this way--it finds the beauty that the characters see, the reason they stick with lives others would find unacceptable. I'll take her word on this specific case, since I've never seen the movie. But, it made sense when she said it. Since then, I've written some pretty bleak, dystopian futures (and presents for that matter), but I've always been aware that there are things that my characters do in pursuit of happiness.
I'm rambling, aren't I? I started off talking about hating everything in the world and worked around to beauty and happiness. Dammit, I knew I couldn't hold onto my funk if I started writing about it. Writing is my pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, it's my own answer to what I can do to fix things. Maybe one of two people will see the world in a different light when they are done with one of my stories, and see a path to happiness in a world that seems in active opposition to their joy. I'm writing to save the world!
Now if only I can work up the same enthusiasm for mowing the yard tomorrow....
Thursday, April 06, 2006
The Ugly Clock
So, I own this ugly clock. I first encountered the clock in an antique store, and from a distance, I thought it was a fairly unattractive work of timekeeping, and assumed it was fairly old. But when I got closer to it, I realized it was of more recent vintage--for one thing, it was all plastic. Also, the clock had fiberoptic flowers in its guts. But the thing that truly pushed it over the top for me, and changed it from an ugly clock I noticed in a store to an ugly clock I was willing to shell out ten dollars for, was the crude cloth butterfly glued to the second hand. The notion of the butterfly racing around above the glowing fiber optic flowers, all set within the belly of a gothic, stern-faced eagle somehow touched me. Because someone, somewhere, some dreamy young clock designer thought this combination of elements, of mean-eyed eagle, meth-amped butterfly, and radioactive flowers was beautiful.
That dreamer was wrong, of course. In my darker moments, the clock looks like the sort of timepieces that would be on walls everywhere if the Nazi's had won the war. There's something vaguely sinister about it - as if the cruel eagle of the superman has devoured the flowers and butterflies of the world, and their eventual digestion is only a matter of time.But, perhaps I'm reading too much into this. The clock is from Taiwan. Probably, its true origins are in a tiny factory where some entrepeneur got a good deal on hollow gold eagles, fiber-optic flowers, cloth butterflies, and battery operated clockworks. Then, knowing about America only from pop culture, he figured, well, American's like eagles, right? And women everywhere love flowers and sparkly things. And who doesn't need to know the time? Thus, from the bowels of a third world warehouse, the ultimate American clock was born.
Sadly, time has not been kind to the ugly clock. The clockworks have failed. Apparently glueing a large butterfly onto the second hand wears out the works. Worse, the fiber optics don't work any more. I had to unplug it months ago due to a faint burning smell. I banished the clock to a back closet, and dragged it out today thinking I might sell it in a yard sale this weekend. When I plugged it in, the flowers didn't light up. Time has vanquished the flowers and the butterflies, now faded and dusty, as the eagle looks stoicly onward. I take some small comfort in thinking he will look stoicly onward through nuclear wars, global warming, bird flu, and economic collapse.
Speaking of economic collapse, I'm thinking of asking $5 for him. True, he doesn't work anymore. But, you know, Americans will buy almost anything, as my ownership of this clock proves.
Secretly, I hope he doesn't sell.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Modern Magic release imminent....
So, I've been told that the Modern Magic anthology is going to be going to press this week. There's a link along the side of this page if you want to check it out. If you like my writing, I highly recommend my story in this antho, "Pentacle on His Forehead, Lizard on His Breath." If I become a famous enough author one day to wind up in a trivia game, a good trivia question would be "What was the longest title of any published James Maxey story?" This story would be the answer. No, wait, now that I think about it, it ties with "Earl Billings and the Angels of the Lord."
But I digress. What I intended to say before getting sidetracked by self-admitted trivia is that "POHFLOHB" is actually one of the stories I'm most proud of. It's funny, scarey, weird, and a little heartbreaking. It's got tea made from lizard parts and a pentacle made out of duct tape. Also, a mayonnaise painting. And, sure, some monkeys. Invisible monkeys.
On another publishing matter, some of you may have heard rumors about my novel "Bitterwood" finding a publisher. Currently, I do have an offer, but I feel like a shouldn't talk about the book until all the details are hammered out. So, all I will say for now is, watch this space.
But I digress. What I intended to say before getting sidetracked by self-admitted trivia is that "POHFLOHB" is actually one of the stories I'm most proud of. It's funny, scarey, weird, and a little heartbreaking. It's got tea made from lizard parts and a pentacle made out of duct tape. Also, a mayonnaise painting. And, sure, some monkeys. Invisible monkeys.
On another publishing matter, some of you may have heard rumors about my novel "Bitterwood" finding a publisher. Currently, I do have an offer, but I feel like a shouldn't talk about the book until all the details are hammered out. So, all I will say for now is, watch this space.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Has this ever happened?
So, I was reading an old Fortean Times when I stumbled across a reference to women and children who, in times of panic, gained superhuman strength and lifted cars or other heavy objects. This certainly isn't the first time I'd heard of this--I suspect most people believe that bursts of superhuman stregth occur under the right circumstances. But has there ever been a real, documented case of this happening on film? It seems like if people really go gain superhuman strength in panic situations, we would see that caught on police chase film or something. There are thousands of rescue situations caught on film each year. Can someone point me to proof that panic strength is real? Or is the last second surge of superhuman strength just a myth we embrace to comfort us?
Monday, March 13, 2006
Final Flight of the Blue Bee
So, I've been telling people for months now to look for the "Final Flight of the Blue Bee" in Asimov's in April. My timing was a bit off--it's on the newstands right now. If you like your superhero fantasies straight, this might not be the story for you. On the other hand, it does have a damsel in distress atop the Empire State Building. How wrong can you go with that?
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
More Harlan Ellison Stuff
Recently over at Codexwriters, a conversation got started about Harlan Ellison's teaching style. Apparently, he has a reputation as a bully. I have some insight as to why. But, the bigger question was: Are his methods effective?
I'm not here to defend Harlan Ellison or condemn him. I can say that my writing changed after a week with him, and can never know if I turned back the clock what my writing would have evolved to without the Ellison encounter. It's possible I would have gone on to write exactly as I write today--or possibly better, or possibly worse.
But I took two things away from that week that forever changed my attitude toward my own writing. To boil those two things down:
1: Only show people your best work. Before Harlan, I used to workshop every thing I wrote. There was no trivial bit of unfinished crap that I didn't consider worthy of other people's eyes. I had a workshop mentality--I would show people my unpolished, unfinished work, get their reactions, then tweak it. I didn't pay much attention to detail on my early drafts, and was lazy about spelling, grammar, etc., because, hey, this was only a dress rehearsal, not the real show. I wasn't giving stories to people so they could read and enjoy them, I was giving them to people so they could tell me what was wrong with them. I was letting other people do part of my creative thinking for me. This works fine in workshop world, where everybody turns in poor work. But in Harlan world, it was asking for grief. I made the mistake of writing a story and turning it in without reading it, due to the time constraints of the workshop. Whether the story was any good or not is irrelevant. Harlan started tearing the story apart in the first sentence, because there was an obvious, easily fixed spelling error. When I defended it as a workshop piece, not something I would send to an editor, he tore into me, and said that if I didn't care enough to make sure that my first sentence was free of mistakes, I didn't care about my readers, period. In retrospect, he was right. I didn't care enough about making my writing look professional, even under a terrible time crunch, even for a workshop story. I told him it wasn't the best I could do, but I'd be glad to mail him a copy of the best story I'd ever written. He wasn't interested. It was too late. I didn't get a chance for Harlan to read another James Maxey story until I published work in a market he read.
I'm not making any kind of claim that I write error free work today, or that everything I write is golden on the first draft. I actually write horrible first drafts. But I no longer workshop a piece until I'm sure that it's something I'm happy with. I view every story that I give to someone to read--even my peers on critique groups--as a chance to gain another loyal James Maxey fan. If I write a story that isn't up to that standard, I spike the story without showing to to people.
2: Every word is important. Without revealing any names, there was a writer at that Odyssey that turned in a story that had a pretty good story idea but was written in a fairly plodding, workmanlike voice that buried the clever premise under banality. In his critique of the story, Harlan broke a cardinal rule of workshopping: He said, "Here's how I would write this story." Then he proceeded to give us five hundred or so words of a new opening. The very same story, the very same premise, even if memory serves, the same opening scene, but this time written in a style where every word popped. I wasn't just drawn in by the premise, I was drawn in by the voice and the energy of the prose. And the style wasn't anything particularly fancy. Harlan made it clear that the keys to his written style was that he wrote with his mouth--one breath, one idea. Every sentence made you want to hear the following sentence. Of course, this is unfair on many, many levels. Harlan is a master of style, so of course he was going to do better than some unpublished writer in a workshop. And, he was reading out loud, and it's hard to know if what was on the page would have translated in my head into that dynamic, enthralling Harlan voice. Still, it was an eye-opening experience, hearing the dull story transformed into a brilliant story just by changing the style in which it was told. Since then, I've always strived to make sure my stories sound good when read out loud.
To put it more succinctly, pre-Harlan, I thought the key to good writing was to tell a good story. Post-Harlan, I realized that a good story isn't going to get a chance at being read unless it's matched with great writing.
I saw people humiliated in the course of Harlan teaching these things. I, personally, reached one of the lowest emotional points of my life due to that week. But, six years on, I'm glad I had the experience. Orson Scott Card asks wanna-be fantasy authors, "What is the price of magic?" In my case, I feel like I sometimes, every now and then, write magic. And the price I paid was that one stressful week. I think it was worth it.
I'm not here to defend Harlan Ellison or condemn him. I can say that my writing changed after a week with him, and can never know if I turned back the clock what my writing would have evolved to without the Ellison encounter. It's possible I would have gone on to write exactly as I write today--or possibly better, or possibly worse.
But I took two things away from that week that forever changed my attitude toward my own writing. To boil those two things down:
1: Only show people your best work. Before Harlan, I used to workshop every thing I wrote. There was no trivial bit of unfinished crap that I didn't consider worthy of other people's eyes. I had a workshop mentality--I would show people my unpolished, unfinished work, get their reactions, then tweak it. I didn't pay much attention to detail on my early drafts, and was lazy about spelling, grammar, etc., because, hey, this was only a dress rehearsal, not the real show. I wasn't giving stories to people so they could read and enjoy them, I was giving them to people so they could tell me what was wrong with them. I was letting other people do part of my creative thinking for me. This works fine in workshop world, where everybody turns in poor work. But in Harlan world, it was asking for grief. I made the mistake of writing a story and turning it in without reading it, due to the time constraints of the workshop. Whether the story was any good or not is irrelevant. Harlan started tearing the story apart in the first sentence, because there was an obvious, easily fixed spelling error. When I defended it as a workshop piece, not something I would send to an editor, he tore into me, and said that if I didn't care enough to make sure that my first sentence was free of mistakes, I didn't care about my readers, period. In retrospect, he was right. I didn't care enough about making my writing look professional, even under a terrible time crunch, even for a workshop story. I told him it wasn't the best I could do, but I'd be glad to mail him a copy of the best story I'd ever written. He wasn't interested. It was too late. I didn't get a chance for Harlan to read another James Maxey story until I published work in a market he read.
I'm not making any kind of claim that I write error free work today, or that everything I write is golden on the first draft. I actually write horrible first drafts. But I no longer workshop a piece until I'm sure that it's something I'm happy with. I view every story that I give to someone to read--even my peers on critique groups--as a chance to gain another loyal James Maxey fan. If I write a story that isn't up to that standard, I spike the story without showing to to people.
2: Every word is important. Without revealing any names, there was a writer at that Odyssey that turned in a story that had a pretty good story idea but was written in a fairly plodding, workmanlike voice that buried the clever premise under banality. In his critique of the story, Harlan broke a cardinal rule of workshopping: He said, "Here's how I would write this story." Then he proceeded to give us five hundred or so words of a new opening. The very same story, the very same premise, even if memory serves, the same opening scene, but this time written in a style where every word popped. I wasn't just drawn in by the premise, I was drawn in by the voice and the energy of the prose. And the style wasn't anything particularly fancy. Harlan made it clear that the keys to his written style was that he wrote with his mouth--one breath, one idea. Every sentence made you want to hear the following sentence. Of course, this is unfair on many, many levels. Harlan is a master of style, so of course he was going to do better than some unpublished writer in a workshop. And, he was reading out loud, and it's hard to know if what was on the page would have translated in my head into that dynamic, enthralling Harlan voice. Still, it was an eye-opening experience, hearing the dull story transformed into a brilliant story just by changing the style in which it was told. Since then, I've always strived to make sure my stories sound good when read out loud.
To put it more succinctly, pre-Harlan, I thought the key to good writing was to tell a good story. Post-Harlan, I realized that a good story isn't going to get a chance at being read unless it's matched with great writing.
I saw people humiliated in the course of Harlan teaching these things. I, personally, reached one of the lowest emotional points of my life due to that week. But, six years on, I'm glad I had the experience. Orson Scott Card asks wanna-be fantasy authors, "What is the price of magic?" In my case, I feel like I sometimes, every now and then, write magic. And the price I paid was that one stressful week. I think it was worth it.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Duds
I recently wrote a big list on the wall next to me of all the stories I've written to date. And, looking over it, I think I've written more duds than gems. The majority of my duds happened early in my writing experience of course, when I was ignorant of many of the best practices of story telling. That's to be expected. I just chalk these up to the growing pains any writer experiences as he learns a difficult craft.
But my later duds are harder to explain. I've been writing fiction for 15 years at this point. Either I should have learned how to tell a story by now, or I should give up. Yet, again and again, I dud out, and put stories on the page that I'm not only not proud of, I'm actually a little ashamed of.
Why? My flops fall into three categories.
1: I try something new. It gets boring telling stories in the same linear sequence, beginning at the beginning, ending at the end, telling the story with a reliable single POV character. So I occasionally get these brilliant ideas to tell the story backwards, or to make the narrator insane, or to attempt some new voice that I've never tackled before (I have a story called "40 Pound Hammer" that I tried to write in the voice of an illiterate 10 year old child that is just cringe-provoking when I read it). In retrospect, I'm usually tempted to try new techniques and approaches when I'm worried the story needs spicing up to make it interesting. So, most of these failed stories come not only from bad writing, but also have, at their centers, ideas I didn't fully believe in.
2: I try something old. Many of my duds result from my trying to mimic my own successes. My first real breakthrough story was "Empire of Dreams and Miracles." This was a story that initially met with nothing but rejections. Critique groups always split down the middle, with people telling me not to change a word and other dismissing it as rambling and wordy. I believed in the story, and still rank it as among my finest work. But, I have two other stories set in the same setting, based on characters introduced in "Empire." I have a story from the POV of the death-poet Makan called "One Plus One Equals One" and a story from the POV of Alandra, the Empire-protagonists ex-lover called "Tuesday Morning By the Sea When We Were Gods." Both are written in the same sensual, poetic voice I used in "Empire." Both are built around characters I found interesting and worth a second look. Both explore interesting aspects of the world of "Empire." And I gave up on both of them long ago. They just didn't pop for me. They are stories I wrote not because I had an idea that I got excited about and had to write, but because I had some success with a story and then went back to it looking for more ideas I could milk out of it.
3: Sow's ears. You really can't make silk purses out of them. Occasionally, the central idea I have for a story just sucks. I'm excited about them when I sit down to write, but in retrospect I shouldn't have been. These are often stories where I use heavily explored premises. I do this because I've sold heavily explored premises many times. Maybe the world didn't need yet another story about a comet that's going to hit the Earth, but, what the hell, I wrote one anyway, and liked it, and sold it to Asimov's. On the other hand, I wrote a time travel story about a guy who goes back into the past to warn his younger self about a mistake to avoid called "The Machine in His Mind." This was a pretty threadbare premise, but I thought I could make it my own with good writing and a character I loved. Today I still like the character, and I think my writing in that story is some of my best--it's tight and focused, funny when it should be funny, moving when it should be moving. But, I look at the story now as a flop and rarely try to market it. It flops because good writing and likable characters still aren't enough to make readers shake off the "been there, done that" feeling they get when they read the story. No amount of further line editing or tweaking is ever going to overcome the hurdle that the idea the story is based on is well past its shelf date. If I'd written the story in 1890, man, I'd have a hit on my hands. But ten-thousand time travel stories later, there just isn't enough new there to justify the stories existance.
The extra special bonus reason #4 why I often write duds: If you want to be a writer, you gotta write. And my best writing, the stuff I'm in love with, usually comes to me from some moment of clarity and inspiration where I realize I have something big to say and have stumbled upon the proper vehicle to say it. But, if I only waited for these moments of clarity and inspiration, I might be lucky to write a story every other year. If you want to make it as a writer, you have to have the discipline to make yourself sit down and write a story even when you don't have clarity and inspiration, even when you haven't got a damn thing to say, even when you hate your characters and you hate the voice of the story and you hate the stupid premise that you've pulled out of your mental hat. You gotta punch those keys and hope that magic happens. Sometimes, it does. You get 1000 words into the worst story you've ever tried to tell and BOOM, the lightning strikes, and suddenly all is right with the universe. But, if the lightning doesn't strike, you haven't wasted your time. The hours you spend slogging through the swamps of your duds help you build up strength and endurance for when the you finally do have the golden idea handed to you.
To change analogies in midstream, if you're not striking out from time to time, you're not swinging for the fences.
But my later duds are harder to explain. I've been writing fiction for 15 years at this point. Either I should have learned how to tell a story by now, or I should give up. Yet, again and again, I dud out, and put stories on the page that I'm not only not proud of, I'm actually a little ashamed of.
Why? My flops fall into three categories.
1: I try something new. It gets boring telling stories in the same linear sequence, beginning at the beginning, ending at the end, telling the story with a reliable single POV character. So I occasionally get these brilliant ideas to tell the story backwards, or to make the narrator insane, or to attempt some new voice that I've never tackled before (I have a story called "40 Pound Hammer" that I tried to write in the voice of an illiterate 10 year old child that is just cringe-provoking when I read it). In retrospect, I'm usually tempted to try new techniques and approaches when I'm worried the story needs spicing up to make it interesting. So, most of these failed stories come not only from bad writing, but also have, at their centers, ideas I didn't fully believe in.
2: I try something old. Many of my duds result from my trying to mimic my own successes. My first real breakthrough story was "Empire of Dreams and Miracles." This was a story that initially met with nothing but rejections. Critique groups always split down the middle, with people telling me not to change a word and other dismissing it as rambling and wordy. I believed in the story, and still rank it as among my finest work. But, I have two other stories set in the same setting, based on characters introduced in "Empire." I have a story from the POV of the death-poet Makan called "One Plus One Equals One" and a story from the POV of Alandra, the Empire-protagonists ex-lover called "Tuesday Morning By the Sea When We Were Gods." Both are written in the same sensual, poetic voice I used in "Empire." Both are built around characters I found interesting and worth a second look. Both explore interesting aspects of the world of "Empire." And I gave up on both of them long ago. They just didn't pop for me. They are stories I wrote not because I had an idea that I got excited about and had to write, but because I had some success with a story and then went back to it looking for more ideas I could milk out of it.
3: Sow's ears. You really can't make silk purses out of them. Occasionally, the central idea I have for a story just sucks. I'm excited about them when I sit down to write, but in retrospect I shouldn't have been. These are often stories where I use heavily explored premises. I do this because I've sold heavily explored premises many times. Maybe the world didn't need yet another story about a comet that's going to hit the Earth, but, what the hell, I wrote one anyway, and liked it, and sold it to Asimov's. On the other hand, I wrote a time travel story about a guy who goes back into the past to warn his younger self about a mistake to avoid called "The Machine in His Mind." This was a pretty threadbare premise, but I thought I could make it my own with good writing and a character I loved. Today I still like the character, and I think my writing in that story is some of my best--it's tight and focused, funny when it should be funny, moving when it should be moving. But, I look at the story now as a flop and rarely try to market it. It flops because good writing and likable characters still aren't enough to make readers shake off the "been there, done that" feeling they get when they read the story. No amount of further line editing or tweaking is ever going to overcome the hurdle that the idea the story is based on is well past its shelf date. If I'd written the story in 1890, man, I'd have a hit on my hands. But ten-thousand time travel stories later, there just isn't enough new there to justify the stories existance.
The extra special bonus reason #4 why I often write duds: If you want to be a writer, you gotta write. And my best writing, the stuff I'm in love with, usually comes to me from some moment of clarity and inspiration where I realize I have something big to say and have stumbled upon the proper vehicle to say it. But, if I only waited for these moments of clarity and inspiration, I might be lucky to write a story every other year. If you want to make it as a writer, you have to have the discipline to make yourself sit down and write a story even when you don't have clarity and inspiration, even when you haven't got a damn thing to say, even when you hate your characters and you hate the voice of the story and you hate the stupid premise that you've pulled out of your mental hat. You gotta punch those keys and hope that magic happens. Sometimes, it does. You get 1000 words into the worst story you've ever tried to tell and BOOM, the lightning strikes, and suddenly all is right with the universe. But, if the lightning doesn't strike, you haven't wasted your time. The hours you spend slogging through the swamps of your duds help you build up strength and endurance for when the you finally do have the golden idea handed to you.
To change analogies in midstream, if you're not striking out from time to time, you're not swinging for the fences.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Well, Cheney just shot a man . . .
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/12/D8FNQDG80.html
Not only did Cheney shoot an innocent man, that man is 78 years old. They say it was an accident. Sure.
Personally, I can't help but think this will really boost Cheney's poll numbers. It's really kind of bad-ass when you think about it.
Not only did Cheney shoot an innocent man, that man is 78 years old. They say it was an accident. Sure.
Personally, I can't help but think this will really boost Cheney's poll numbers. It's really kind of bad-ass when you think about it.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Ghost lyrics
So this morning, I wake up with a song in my head. In my mind's ear, it sounds a bit like Bob Dylan singing. They lyrics I can't recall are:
The things that you want back
are the things you can't get back
And when you get them back
You'll really want to know
But the things you want to know
You know you already know
So, probably, these aren't Bob Dylan lyrics, because, well, they aren't all that good, and he's a genius. Then again, genius or not, when you have a catalogue of a couple of thousand songs, some are going to be clunkers.
Still, I've googled bits and peices of the lyrics this morning, trying to figure out what song I'm hearing, and I can't find any songs that match. The tune, for what it's worth, kind of matches the opening of "Hurricane," and plainly these aren't lyrics from that song.
It's not at all uncommon for me to get a song stuck in my head, so stuck it dislodges all other attempts at thought until I dig out the album and listen to it. But how the hell am I supposed to do that with a song that, apparently, my mind has just made up?
The things that you want back
are the things you can't get back
And when you get them back
You'll really want to know
But the things you want to know
You know you already know
So, probably, these aren't Bob Dylan lyrics, because, well, they aren't all that good, and he's a genius. Then again, genius or not, when you have a catalogue of a couple of thousand songs, some are going to be clunkers.
Still, I've googled bits and peices of the lyrics this morning, trying to figure out what song I'm hearing, and I can't find any songs that match. The tune, for what it's worth, kind of matches the opening of "Hurricane," and plainly these aren't lyrics from that song.
It's not at all uncommon for me to get a song stuck in my head, so stuck it dislodges all other attempts at thought until I dig out the album and listen to it. But how the hell am I supposed to do that with a song that, apparently, my mind has just made up?
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Nothing profound
So, yesterday was a slow day at work... the first truly slow day I've had at work since moving to this location. I spent the morning searching the web for free Mountain Goats MP3s and found over 30 of them. Most of these are live recordings from various concert venues, plus a few demos and outtakes from earlier albums. About half of the material I found was of songs I'd never heard before, the other half was familiar material with a new twist. "Delaudid" performed solo with guitar instead of the orchestrated cellos of the album version was raw and gripping, but the original version of "Coroner's Gambit" was awful--the lyrics are the same, but the music is too driving and uptempo for a song about death. It's interesting to see where the creative process led both these songs from thier original forms.
But the song that stuck with me is one called "Elijah." This is also from the Coroner's Gambit album, and when I've listened to it in the past I've been intriqued by what the lyrics possibly meant. I assumed it was a song about reincarnation, because I've been listening to it without noticing the title. As an MP3, the title is showing now as I'm driving around in the Scion and, duh, the song isn't about reincarnation, it's about Elijah. He was a Biblical prophet taken up into Heaven who supposedly will return to announce the arrival of the messiah. The song refers to setting out an extra plate--I think this is an actual Jewish tradition, to leave a plate out for Elijah during the celebration of one of their holidays. (I don't know which one, alas... all I know about the tradition I learned from the Saturday Night Live where Jerry Seinfield plays Elijah showing up for dinner. He asks the teenage daughter of the family to answer three questions: "First, are you a virgin?" She "Yes." "Then forget my other two questions.") In any case, this got me thinking that people probably do carry on this tradition, after almost 3000 years of Elijah failing to show up, just as Christians still fervently believe Jesus might show up any minute despite his 2000 year delay. And, rather than striking me as silly or absurd, it strikes me as beautiful, this human ability to believe fervently in the impossible (or highly unlikely).
The ability, even the need, to believe in impossible things is, after all, the very thing that makes all fiction possible. I couldn't make up stories, write them, and have people read them and like them without that important bit of wiring in the human brain that allows us to regard the imaginary as being as real as the real. I'm currently reading "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. It's the sort of book that, while I'm reading it, I'm actually drawn into a second reality where the characters seem like living beings and the imagined settings seem quite solid and real to me. When I put the book down, the illusion vanishes, of course, but it's still a pleasurable experience.
So, perhaps religion can be viewed as fiction that people can't put down. Or, perhaps good fiction is a little, temporary religion that makes you believe in a new creation if only for a few hours.
But the song that stuck with me is one called "Elijah." This is also from the Coroner's Gambit album, and when I've listened to it in the past I've been intriqued by what the lyrics possibly meant. I assumed it was a song about reincarnation, because I've been listening to it without noticing the title. As an MP3, the title is showing now as I'm driving around in the Scion and, duh, the song isn't about reincarnation, it's about Elijah. He was a Biblical prophet taken up into Heaven who supposedly will return to announce the arrival of the messiah. The song refers to setting out an extra plate--I think this is an actual Jewish tradition, to leave a plate out for Elijah during the celebration of one of their holidays. (I don't know which one, alas... all I know about the tradition I learned from the Saturday Night Live where Jerry Seinfield plays Elijah showing up for dinner. He asks the teenage daughter of the family to answer three questions: "First, are you a virgin?" She "Yes." "Then forget my other two questions.") In any case, this got me thinking that people probably do carry on this tradition, after almost 3000 years of Elijah failing to show up, just as Christians still fervently believe Jesus might show up any minute despite his 2000 year delay. And, rather than striking me as silly or absurd, it strikes me as beautiful, this human ability to believe fervently in the impossible (or highly unlikely).
The ability, even the need, to believe in impossible things is, after all, the very thing that makes all fiction possible. I couldn't make up stories, write them, and have people read them and like them without that important bit of wiring in the human brain that allows us to regard the imaginary as being as real as the real. I'm currently reading "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. It's the sort of book that, while I'm reading it, I'm actually drawn into a second reality where the characters seem like living beings and the imagined settings seem quite solid and real to me. When I put the book down, the illusion vanishes, of course, but it's still a pleasurable experience.
So, perhaps religion can be viewed as fiction that people can't put down. Or, perhaps good fiction is a little, temporary religion that makes you believe in a new creation if only for a few hours.
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