System of a Braun

Now Blogging On TomNoir.com

2009-12-18T10:18:00.002-05:00

As much as it surprises me, Google Analytics tells me that this blog still gets the occasional hit, which is very flattering. Old friends with RSS feed readers, I'm guessing. As much as I appreciate the continued interest, systemofabraun is no longer a going concern and I don't anticipate resurrecting it in the future.

Its not because I've lost interest in blogging. Far from it. It's just that I've decided to focus my efforts elsewhere. Exhibit A: TomNoir.com.

Not so much a writing blog, but I flatter myself that writers, especially SF writers, will still find a lot of interesting stuff there. I ponder at length linguistics, neurology, psychology, history and technology; generally it's all about exploring our relationship to the increasingly complex society we live in.

By most reasonable metrics, we now live in the future, at least as it was envisioned by SF writers of the last century. Technology is leaping ahead. Our social fabric and culture is transforming in ways that few people could have anticipated. And yet, we're still learning that there's a lot we don't know about ourselves.

That's where my interest lies these days. If it sounds interesting to you, come check it out.

Topics so far include

Come say hi!

the future started yesterday

2008-12-31T23:08:00.002-05:00

I know you probably hadn't noticed, but there's not so much going on around here. We had a few good times, sure. I annoyed a bunch of aspiring writers on Evil Editor's blog, started a flame war with a major science fiction author, and, most importantly, got published. Kind of a lot for a humble blog. I guess this writing this is serious business.

Sadly, for reasons too tedious to relate, it's become difficult-to-impossible for me to post using Blogger. So I think it's time to officially retire this blog.

I now hang my shingle up over at Tom Noir, which is the reincarnation of my original LiveJournal. There I tackle weighty subjects like culture, economics and technology. I'm not saying I have a lot of deep insights, but I do like to point at them and laugh.

I also do the occasional science fiction book or film review, which might be of more interest to some here.

And, yes, I'm still writing. Working on a longer project now. It's a slow process, but I'm gonna keep at it.

Anyhow, drop on by, say Hi. The water's warm and folks is friendly. I live in Florida, after all!

about me or, my Slim Shady

2007-12-31T03:00:00.000-05:00

I suppose I should tell you a little about myself. Where to start?

Well, I was only thirteen when mom took me away from the commune. It was the middle of the night and she was shaking. We hitched rides from truckers all the way to Knoxville. Mom worked two jobs there, one as an IHOP waitress and one as a meter maid. I got a job running moonshine in a golf cart for a guy named Bill until Mom got run over by a lady trying to parallel park a Hummer. I was so mad that I covered the lady's lawn in moonshine and torched it. First the cops came after me, and then Bill, for taking his booze, so I hightailed it to California. There I got involved in a startup in Silicon Valley, ScrapHappy.com. We were gonna be the Amazon.com of plywood. Our shares split twice before the end.

I had been skimming money off the top until one of the partners caught me at it. Fortunately Bill showed up right at that moment and shot the guy, mistaking him for me. I escaped and spent a year wandering the country as a freelance sign painter - I hung a blank one round my neck and told folks I'd paint it for food. Eventually my restless feet took me back to the commune of my youth - but I found it had been taken over by a group of agri-terrorists who were growing stinky organic crops to overthrow the farming proletariat. After some small misunderstandings, I helped them setup a website and sell the stuff online, mostly to the French. Eventually we incorporated and then were bought out by a rival company. As one of V.P.'s I was paid millions to go quietly. I have since settled in Oregon and now am trying to breed an exciting new strain of red oranges.

FYI I've been MIA but I'll BRB ASAP

2007-08-06T18:12:00.000-05:00

Guys, I'm sorry I haven't been around much, I really am!

Rather tragically, I do most of my blogging from work anymore. I've been MIA pretty much since they blocked Blogger on our network. At home I of course have a connection, but some health issues have been insuring that I don't leave my desk job and go straight home to get on yet another computer.

In spite of all that, I am trying to write. Go check out The Ghosts of Blackmoon Rift, my ongoing serial space opera, and let me know what you think. I've had a lot of fun working on it and in the future I plan to post some lessons I've learned from this process.

The number one great thing about it, I think, is that it's such a loose and unserious enterprise that I feel like I have a great deal of freedom to just try stuff and not worry about whether or not it's Art for the Ages (hint: no).

adventures in fiction

2007-06-19T16:01:00.000-05:00

So I've been working on a little side projects, just for fun. I thought I'd share it with you.

This blog is the temporary home of the serial space-western, The Ghosts of Blackmoon Rift. That’s a little yarn I’m spinning in my spare time about a gang of misfits searching for an alien spacecraft in the uncharted badlands of a universe on the verge of destruction.

*deep breath*

My original idea was that I would have readers of my LiveJournal determine by vote the setting and plot of a short story, which I would then write. When the dust had settled, space opera was left standing. Specifically, a space opera set at the end of the universe. With free teleportation and a wild frontier that would do Davey Crockett proud. Oh, and there were multiple lead characters.

It was clear to me that this was not one single short story.

What started as an exercise in storytelling has since turned into an exercise in genre-bending. It’s science fiction, it’s a space opera, it’s a western. There may also be some romance, tragedy, gothic horror, you name it. I’m making it up as I go along, weaving a tale in short, serialized installments. The plan is to keep posting as long as people keep reading. Your feedback is appreciated!

agent orange

2007-06-04T22:10:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm pretty sure everybody already knows about it at this point, but I have been really enjoying Nathan Bransford's blog. He's an agent who uses his real name, which is refreshing, but he's also as sharp and un-pretentious a peddler of literary fiction as you are ever likely to find. I'll own it, I guess, I tend to have literary aspirations even when I write genre (which is often). I mean, I love a good pulpy plot just as much as anyone but when I write just want to go deeper, you know?

At the same time, I find myself bored to tears by 90% of literary fiction and/or the authors of said fiction. I'm glad to learn from Bransford's blog that I'm not the only one. I had always worried that it was some deficiency of character that kept me from enjoying those tales of repressed individuals undergoing mid-life crises, all rendered in ornate prose. Mix in tedious familial relationships and vaguely opressive religion and you've got yourself a literary blockbuster, but not one I can stay awake through.

Anyways, Bransford did a great job of articulating what's missing from these stories - a plot. As he points out, even Lit Fic needs a plot. It just needs a different kind of plot. He divides plots into internal and external categories. Genre fiction, romance and thrillers of every stripe rely primarily on external plots - the characters are responding to pressures or forces in the physical world. The novel ends when the lovers are reconciled or the bomb is defused (or both, ideally!).

But Lit Fic needs a different kind of plot, an internal one. Note that an internal plot still has a conflict, a rising action and some ultimate resolution, but these happen within the hearts and minds of the main character or characters. There may be external events as well, in fact there almost certainly will be, but these only indirectly impact the plot. Actually, all the external events are ideally orchestrated to reveal the internal state of the character(s). The so called "pathetic fallacy" is the most obvious method of doing this - if Jack is depressed, make it rain. Hey, it's crude but effective.

There are lots of more subtle ways of working these things, though. It's easy to see how this kind of approach could go off the rails - a disconnect on either the author's end or the reader's could leave the latter totally in the dark about what's going on or wondering why the book ended before the hero made it home, or whatever. And of course if the reader simply doesn't care enough about the character to make the effort, the author's valiant efforts to communicate their dire and complicated inner turmoil will be stymied from the get-go.

In spite of all the ways that the internal plot or so called "literary" approach can go wrong, it's amazingly satisfying when it works. For that reason alone I think that one should always strive to have an interesting internal plot, even when a strong external plot is already the focus of the story. I believe it enriches the experience for the reader, elevating your gee-whiz-cool twist into something more meaningful and memorable. And sometimes, if you've got the right character, in the right story, you might not need the bells and whistles of that external plot at all. You might be able to directly open a window to another life, whether it be beautiful or terrible or sad, or all of the above. And that, my friends, is Literary Fiction.

am I the only one

2007-05-31T21:04:00.000-05:00

Am I the only one who writes with Thesaurus.com open in another window? Actually my vocabulary is not too shabby, thanks to a love of reading that I've had from a very young age. Somehow, though, I'm always searching for that perfect word...

neglect

2007-04-08T16:14:00.000-05:00

I've been neglecting you guys rather badly lately and I apologize! Blogger.com continues to be blocked at work, which makes commenting (and reading comments) on blogspot blogs impossible. Which is really half the fun, you know? But alas!

I've been debating for a while whether to link to my other blog - a LiveJournal that I've maintained for sometime. I think that some people have already found it, though, so why not? So there you go, a blog that I update more than once a month. I don't post about writing over there very much, though, since I don't think many of my readers/friends are interested.

The most recent thing I've read (besides a couple of non-fiction books on the Roman Empire, which I am slightly obsessed with) is Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes. In it, the author does something that has recently come to annoy me: throw me headlong into his kooky SF world without bothering to explain anything.

Maybe it's just getting older but I have less patience for puzzling out what the author is talking about anymore. It also seems a bit lazy to me to make the reader do ALL the work.

That being said, Lady of Mazes is a book where the effort is worth it. I think the author leaves us behind at first because the ideas in the book are so left-field that you really have to engage your entire right brain to catch up with him. Once you do, though, it's like "Ahhhhhhh!"

Anyways, like most Big Idea books this one gets a little silly and muddled towards the end. Still totally worth it, though, one of the best pure SF books I've read in a while.

the voice of reason

2007-02-08T23:46:00.000-05:00

Before I get into it, it appears that Blogger is partially blocked at work. That is, I can read blogspots but I can't post or comment. This is very annoying. It may be temporary, as sometimes stuff gets blocked and then unblocked, but in the meantime, don't think I'm ignoring you.

Somewhat on impulse tonight I purchased the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Well, my cousin Jo and I wanted to watch something funny and I had recently remembered how much I liked that movie. Very, very funny film.

Key quote:

Perry: If you look up 'idiot' in the dictionary, do you know what you'll find?
Harry: A picture of myself?
Perry: NO. The definition of the word 'idiot'. Which you ARE!

Anyways, apart from the witty repartee, the film is funny because it is narrated by slap-happy thief Harry, who in addition to his more ordinary duties as narrator interjects color commentary, rewinds, pauses, talks to the audience and offers criticism of the film itself. I love it.

And I realized that many of my favorite films feature a narrator, often one who is also the protagonist:

In Fight Club the narrator is our guide through his own strange fall from yuppy-dom and increasingly complicated relationship with the super-heated chunk of id that is Tyler Durden.

Last week I watched Thank You For Smoking, and sure enough, this brilliantly witty and sardonic film strings together its fabulous satire on smoking with the voice of the main character, the head lobbyist for Big Tobacco.

Amelie has a narrator, too, though it's not our heroine in this case. But since Amelie herself is quiet and shy, we need someone to walk us through her marvellous journey out of the shell she lives in.

Intrusive narrators have been out of vogue this century for novels and this is even more true for film. The theory is that hearing a helpful narrative voice takes the reader or viewer out of the moment. But like most things, this is only true when it's done badly. Good narration that really adds something besides a simple catalog of the events on screen feels very natural.

After all, there was a day not many millenia ago when a narrator was all one had, when that helpful voice WAS the story. I think that oral tradition of storytelling is still wired into our brains somehow: the voice speaking directly to us, sharing with us this fantastic thing that happened to them quite recently, and oh if only we were there. The power of this voice to amuse, to move and to engage us should not be underestimated.

paging Dr. Archer

2007-02-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

Betsy over @ Sex Scenes at Starbucks keeps saying nice things about my story and making me blush. I especially like the idea of The Comfort of Mirrors as a "requested story". It makes me sound so professional. Actually, I just happened to have the idea for concurrently with her suggestion that I submit something. Things worked out happily, as you can see.

As noted below, please read it and let me know what you think. I like to think I can take just about any criticism since a) it's actually published and b) there's no possibility of changing it at this point.

You should read the rest of Electric Spec's current issue, too. It's a nice mix of sci-fi, fantasy with a little humor mixed in. I understand that big 'zines like F&SF get more Fantasy than they can handle and prefer SF. I wonder if that's true at ES.

I certainly find that my stories trend towards the fantastic rather than SF. Mirrors is easily the hardest SF I've ever written (I mean that in the "hard SF" kind of way, not as in "the most difficult") and it's not very. Really I just like writing stories that take reality as we know it and tweak one aspect of it slightly. Sometimes that lends itself to the SF metaphor, sometimes not.

the future isn't what it used to be

2007-01-31T11:00:00.001-05:00

I should let you know that the new issue of Electric Spec is now available. It includes a story called "The Comfort of Mirrors" by some Thomas Braun guy. It has lots of other stories in it too. And it's free. So you should check it out.

If you're one of those people who likes to print stuff out to read it, you can get a Adobe Acrobat PDF version right here. Actually, you're going to have to view the stories in PDF for PRC format to see the full versions. For most people's computers, this should be no problem. Just click the links provided.

I haven't had a chance to read the other stories yet, but if they're up to the standards of Electric Spec's usual fare, they should definitely be interesting! There's also an interview with grizzled SF veteran James E. Gunn that should amuse the geeks in the crowd.

A word of warning if you are one of the people that read Best Day: this is completely unlike it.

Comments and criticisms welcome. Enjoy!

nano schmano

2007-01-30T13:20:00.000-05:00

Anyone can write a novel in a month. NaNoWriMo - pfft! Writing a novel in a weekend, now that's where it's at!

Incidentally, while I applaud those brave an no doubt highly caffeinated souls, I don't think I shall be joining them! I find just 5,000 words a day to be pretty exhausting. And I don't think I have that kind of time this weekend anyway.

writer in peril

2007-01-30T08:30:00.000-05:00

My buddy Joel and I have been playing computer games online together about as long as such a thing has been possible. Starcraft is a favorite of ours, but we've also played several more action-oriented games including First Person Shooters. We've even attempted the D&D-based RPG "Neverwinter Nights" together, although we didn't get far.

In November, Joel bought World of Warcraft.

I'm sure you know it, but if you don't, it's a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (MMO for short) which involves paying a monthly fee to participate in an online world with thousands of other players. In WoW's case the world is Tolkien-lite, with elves and orcs and dragons and the like.

Joel has spent dozens of hours in that world as an elven archer, slaying monsters, completing quests and honing his trade of choice (which I believe is fishing). He puts in quite a bit of time each weekend, and probably an hour or two most weeknights. He's not addicted, but it keeps him busy.

He keeps trying to get me to join.

I've been resisting. In my misspent youth I burned the midnight oil on far too many projects and papers because I couldn't resist working my way up one more level on whatever computer role playing game was at hand. I spent days as a conflicted Jedi when Knights of the Old Republic came out. I was totally immersed in my wide-eyed super-soldier in the futuristic political thriller Deus Ex. When Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines came out I prowled the streets of noir Los Angeles for dozens of hours.

Those were single player games, games with finite endings - you put in thirty or forty hours and you're done. I can assure you that know writing (and not much of anything else) got done while they were in progress.

World of Warcraft has no end, at least, if there is a point at which one has seen and done everything, it is hundreds of hours in. And there's always the endless game of social interaction and conflict with entire nations of other players. That never stops. I worry that if I got started it would be six months before I put digital pen to digital paper. Sigh.

I've refused to buy the game, but that may not help. Joel is threatening to get me a copy for my birthday, a couple of months away.

Gulp.

who watches the watchers?

2007-01-16T12:17:00.000-05:00

I'm back! You're thrilled, I know. My tour of the West Coast has no doubt left me inspired and eager to get to work on my novel!

Well, not actually. I like travel but I find it a little draining over time. For me creativity begins at home. I have to go into this very focused head space, and that's where the magic happens.

Anyways, I'm one of those people that plans their writing in advance pretty thoroughly so that's what I need to do here. If I have a good blue-print for what I'm writing and I'm excited about it, the actual story will come relatively quickly. This phase is where I try to overcome all those little hurdles of laying out a plot.

Hurdle #1: how do you make someone being watched exciting? Let me explain: the phrase "I am being watched" has sort of a thrilling dread to it, and I could easily begin this novel that way (I won't). OK, but where do you go from there? Being watched is a very passive activity. A vague sense of dread won't carry you for very many pages. And how does the character even KNOW they're being watched? What clues them in? If they're not a counter-intelligence expert or a computer hacker but instead a teenage girl, how do they uncover evidence of constant, high-tech surveillance?

This is the question I must immediately answer.

Anyways, I need to get back into the habit of writing. I haven't done much of it for a the last month and a half. This will help me above all get into that creative head-space. Trouble is I can't write The Novel if it isn't mapped out yet, but that's what writing exercises are for. If I come up with any that aren't completely embarrassing or totally boring perhaps I will post them.

notes on a mirror

2007-01-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

Electric Spec sent me the edits to my short story, The Comfort of Mirrors, and I was relieved to find that they were fairly minor. I was a little worried because the editors over there make a big deal about trimming the fat, the idea being that people don't want to read as much on a computer screen. I secretly wonder how true that is; I know that I read massive amounts of stuff online every day. In fact, I recently read a complete novel, Blindsight. It may be a generational thing.

At any rate, I was concerned because Mirrors is actually a fairly efficient piece of storytelling, by my standards. I eschewed stylistic flourishes for the most part; the story is told in the voice of a mathematician and is laid out in a terse, matter-of-factual manner. It's not so long, either, so I was worried about what and how much they would cut. It turns out my concerns were unwarranted. I don't miss what they took out and in several places they enhanced the clarity of what was being said, which is I think exactly what a good editor should do.

Now it's just a matter of waiting for January 31st, the very witching hour.

I'm a little nervous about how people who know me will react to this story, my official first. I joke about it being about suicidal clones, but it really is about clones who are killing themselves. It's not a happy story, you know? There are some dark patches before the end.

I know some people look at a story as a window into the writer's soul, and certainly any story reflects on its author, but often not in ways that you would expect. I'm not someone given to suicidal impulses, I promise. Or someone who revels in suffering and misery. To me the attraction of the story is the way in which it concisely and clinically explores one facet of the human condition.

At any rate, I'm very proud of the story and I stand by it. I hope people will take it in the spirit that it was written. One of my passions is for a deeper understanding of who we are and that's something I've always been able to explore through writing.

gone fishing

2007-01-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Well I spent the New Year being sick: fevers, nasty cough, the whole nine yards. Now that that's done I am off to the West Coast for a week or two of weddings, funerals, etc. (yes I am in fact attending both). So things will continue to be quiet around here. I have packed the new Lois McMaster Bujold book for the long flights cross country. Any other suggestions? I'd really like some good SF as well.

When I get back, I start in (hopefully) on my New Year's Resolution: the writing of a novel!

fallow

2006-12-21T11:22:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the lack of posting around here. I really haven't done any writing in December (I know, I know, that's bad) so I don't have much to say about that. Haven't done that much reading, either, although I'm now working my way step-by-step through The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

You don't see books like The Historian much anymore. It's a thick book and not at all 'fast-paced'*. Instead it takes its time, unfolding its tale in an epistolary fashion, through the written and oral accounts of some of the characters. It takes lots of time to soak in the ancient European countryside and build up a foreshadowing. One can already tell that this book is about the journey, not the destination.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite curious to see where it's going. Are we building up to some breathtaking revelation? Or are we just in for a taste of horror of the old-fashioned kind, the kind that is all shadows and hints and whispers and yet somehow still manages to send a thrill down the spine? One has to suspect the latter, though I do enjoy a clever paradigm shift. But everything in this book is so Old World that I reckon the plot might well follow suit.

It's possible that the story is a little bit too parceled out: it's a bit frustrating to get a whiff of the plot and then have to wait for the next chapter to set up its inevitable trip to antediluvian monastery or dusty library so that the tale can continue. On the other hand, I feel like if ever there was a book that could make Vlad Drakul a real character in history this is the one. Beneath this world of dry academia lurks one of Gothic horror, and every glimpse of it thrills.

* Ooh, I've got a rant saved up on that topic.

when clones attack

2006-12-13T09:19:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like not one but two of my babies are making their way out into the world this week. I have sold my sf short story "The Comfort of Mirrors", about suicidal clones and the people who love them, to Electric Spec, an up-and-coming online 'zine.

This will be the first time in my life I have been paid to write. Not a lot, mind you, but it's the principle that counts! Anyways, it will appear in their winter issue which as I understand it should be available online (and free!) on January 31st. To sum up: très cool.

these twins are different

2006-12-12T23:29:00.000-05:00

Creativity is a funny thing. It manifests itself in some unexpected forms. For example, sometimes I express my creativity through writing. Other times, I want to express my creativity by producing a comedy video webcast.

Enter, The Lauren and Kristen Show.

So this is not me in front of the camera, I am not hilarious twin girls. These ladies are my long-time friends. Comedy is their second language - they have a gift for leaving everyone in the room in stitches. I'm sure that more than once through the years someone has echoed the sentiment "You two should be on TV." Well, thanks to the inexorable march of progress we're making that a reailty. At least, if the internet counts as TV.

Basically, the show is the girls ranting hilariously on all things pop culture - movies, tv, video games, anime, music, whatever. This is what they naturally do anyways, we just decided to film it. There's a handful of teasers up so you can get a flavor for it. Much more to come soon. Check out the website and let me know what you think!

a question of trust

2006-12-05T13:38:00.000-05:00

Currently reading: The Dark Mirror by Juliet Marillier.

I actually found it when I walked into Barnes & Noble to kill some time on a Sunday afternoon before meeting someone for coffee. I had no intent, none whatsoever, to buy a book. Yet I walked out with one.

Well first of all the cover art is actually good.

Look how rich and evocative that is. The overall packaging of the book was very attractive, and this was a trade paperback. Anyways, that made me grab it off the shelf and read the opening lines:

The druid stood in the doorway, as still as a figure carven in dark stone, watching the riders come up the hill under the oaks. Dusk had fallen. Beyond the screening trees, Serpent Lake was a dim shining, and rooks winged to their roosts in the last light, calling in their secret, harsh language. It was autumn: past the feast of Measure. The air was full of crisp, blue cold that halted the breath in the chest.

Lush, beautiful prose that avoids descending into purple goo. How could I resist?

Yeah, I don't usually do Celtic fantasy. I just don't have much interest in druids and painted warriors and the like. But the druids in this book feel more real somehow, more primal. It also helps that the focus of the book is almost entirely on character. There is some action but mostly we're watching Marillier's two main characters grow, fall apart, and hopefully come together.

Bridei is the son of a king, being raised in the household of a powerful druid for some secret destiny. At the age of six he finds an infant child on the doorstep of the house and takes her in. It is obvious that she is a child of the fair folk, a prospect which disturbs his druid mentor Broichan. The girl they name Tuala, and sure enough she grows up to be a beautiful creature that men either fear or desire. Naturally she and Bridei are secretly in love with each other, and just as naturally forces of fate and prejudice conspire to keep them apart.

In a sense, it's all very predictable: we know they'll eventually fall for each other, even if they can't admit it to themselves. And though I haven't yet finished the book, I'm pretty sure that they'll get together, if not in this book than in one of the inevitable sequels. But, as they say, it's not the destination, it's the journey. These people and this world are beautifully drawn, pulling me into a time where men feared the wolves in the forest and the fey folk in the trees almost as much as they did each other.

My only real complaint about the book (and you knew their had to be one!) is perhaps one of personal taste: I don't like it when authors suddenly bring in 'outside perspective'. Marillier primarily alternates between Bridei's perspective and Tuala's, which you would expect. Very occasionally, however, the reader gets to 'overhear' a conversation between two mysterious representatives of the Good Folk who then discuss their plans for the boy and the girl's future.

I've always loathed the plot device of suddenly cutting to the lair of the enemy to learn of his nefarious plans. The only place I can ever recall enjoying this was in the original Star Wars films. While these creatures seem to ultimately be on the side of our heroes, this is essentially the same device and the effect is equally jarring. It's also not clear what the author hopes her readers will gain from these little interludes. As a device for foreshadowing, it's rather clumsy and obvious. If the intent was to keep us interested, well, I'm already quite invested in the characters and don't need all this talk of high and mighty destinies to keep turning the pages. The only useful effect might be to comfort the reader, like a narrator before an act break, promising the audience that everything is going to be alright. But I'm a tough-skinned, experienced reader. I can handle it!

Again, you could chalk this up to personal taste. I simply don't like it when the author suddenly injects a new and unheralded perspective into the book. Another author who has recently annoyed me with this is Barry Eisler in his John Rain thrillers. From the beginning of the series, the camera has been firmly in lethal assassin John Rain's head. We go with him as he plans and executes his kills and deals with the consequences. Then in the last couple of novels, Eisler has started 'cutting' to third person perspectives featuring other characters. I understand that he's trying to build tension and give a wider perspective on increasingly complex narratives, but the effect is jarring an unwelcome all the same. We like it in John Rain's head. It's a pretty exciting place. I don't need a narrator reminding me that "Trouble was brewing. DUN DUN DUUUUUN!!!"

I want the author to give me some credit for being intelligent enough to keep up, and also to give their own characters some respect. Trust your characters! If they're good ones, we will follow them to whatever end.

ready to wear

2006-11-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

Intriguing phrase of the day: sacred geometry

Popped up during a Google search and I was like, man, that's gotta go in a story somewhere. We'll see.

So last week I wrote a new short in record time... the idea hit me Monday and by the time Thanksgiving rolled around it had a beginning, a middle and an end. I like to call that a rough draft. It's a twisted little piece of sci-fi, but I kinda like it.

I polished it over the weekend and sent it to some friends to run their eyeballs over. It's under 5,000 words which is YAY! saleable. My short stories tend to run long. Well, that's not exactly true. I would vocally defend the lengths of even my longest efforts. There are some stories that just need a certain amount of space to breathe. I'm not going to cut them off at the knees because of editorial requirements.

Still, it's nice to have one that is a very comfortable size for selling. Ready-to-wear, ya know what I mean? Electric Spec will get the first crack at it.

zestfully clean

2006-11-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person who gets their best story ideas in the shower?

rabble rouser

2006-11-15T14:44:00.000-05:00

Dayum! Jenny Cruisie takes Miss Snark to the cleaners! Anyone up for an interweb cat-fight?

I've honestly been over Miss Snark for a while, for many of the reasons Cruisie outlines. At some point she stopped giving helpful advice and started being "Gee, look how clever and right I am!" Also, I don't have a lot of respect for anonymous bloggers who regularly rip on their commenters.

Two reasons I respect le Editor de Eville*: he doesn't pretend to be dishing out anything other than entertainment (and maybe, occasionally, accidentally, advice), and he doesn't bag on his commenters, even the stupid ones.

I'm not saying Snark doesn't occasionally dispense useful advice. She does. But I can tell you that she would never be my agent.

* I did not take high school French. Can you tell?

here's the new plan

2006-11-13T08:56:00.000-05:00

It's funny that Sex Scenes commented about 'flexibility' on my last entry because I have recently decided to be very flexible and attempt a project where I'm writing for a specific audience and away from my usual style.

I'm probably an exception to most of the authors around here in that I don't have a couple finished novels kicking around in the back of my desk. Up 'til now I've written only short stories. I have some really cool ideas for longer stuff, but they're of course all very elaborate, stylized, tightly-structured things. I like to write this kind of thing, but it takes a long time. And not everybody likes it.

Realizing that my career in Information Technology is less than fulfilling and wanting more than ever to make a break for it, I've decided to try and quickly crank out a novel. To make it fast to write and attractive to publishers, I've decided that it should be fun, pulpy and... that it should appeal to teenagers. Sorry, 'young adults'. I honestly had in my idea that I would really like to do something that would make a great comic book, like 'Runaways', with an ensemble cast of kids who have special powers.

So I kind of let that stew in my head for a while. Of course teenager superheroes have been done. So have teenager werewolves and teenage vampires. I wasn't sure if there was anything new I could bring to the table.

And then...

I had a great idea.

Seriously, this is cool. I wish I could tell you about it. But maybe you'll see it for yourself before very long.

Anyways, I'm very excited. Right now I'm trying to sketch out the cast of characters. I think that knowing who your main characters are going into the novel is important. I'll be doing a plot outline too. I don't really "write from the hip" or whatever, I like to know where I'm going. Hopefully that will go quickly though, because I think plot twists for this concept practically write themselves.

So that's the plan at the moment. I'll let you know how it progresses. Stay tuned.

something blue

2006-10-31T16:49:00.000-05:00

Trying a new blog template. Hoping it will be easier to read/more inviting. What do you think?

what readers want

2006-10-30T10:54:00.000-05:00

The great thing about a blog like Evil Editor's is that it drives home the point that people read for a lot of different reasons. I mean, I'm sure most folks pick up a novel in hopes of getting a crackin' good yarn and being entertained for a few hours. Sure. But what I'm talking about is when you pick a book off the shelf and read those fabled first 150 words. What are you looking for then? What will make you keep turning the pages? This seems to vary wildly from person to person.

It seems that some folks want to be plunged directly into the action. These people I believe are most concerned with plot. They want an immediate hook into it and they don't want any extraneous prose getting in the way of that. They're here for the plot dagnabbit, and they don't want any fancy-schmancy writing coming between them and the next twist or cliffhanger.

There's another group that wants not plot but story, and yes there's a difference. They want all the particulars laid out nice and neatly right up front. Even though they're very concerned with what's going on, they do not like being dropped right into the action like the plot folks. They're willing to take some time to get all the necessary background. Introducing your main character and maybe giving a little background information won't hurt with these readers.

I think there's also a POV group although I really don't understand exactly what they're after. And there are probably other groups as well - maybe someone wants to meet a really memorable character as soon as they pick up a book or someone who wants to see a gorgeous piece of prose (these are people who smell their books instead of reading them). Of course, science fiction has a whole subset of readers who'd like a really clever idea right up front. The truth is there's probably a type of reader out there for almost anything.

For myself, being exposed to all these different tastes and comparing them with my own preferences, I've realized that what really catches my attention is voice. I want to hear the author's voice right up front, and I want it to be unique and different and interesting. "Voice" is one of those slightly intangible things, but a good part of it is style and another part is POV. Tone is in there too. Essentially voice is how the author approaches the reader.

Is the author telling me an old story, a fable, something that happened to them yesterday? Do they speak directly to me with sarcastic asides? Do they frequently wander off into amusing tangents? Are the margins of the book filled with footnotes? Are they long-winded and verbose, filling up their sentences with large and unusual words? Or are they terse and short and sharp, writing short and direct sentences, sometimes even sentence fragments? Stylistic choices aside, what unique perspective do they bring to the table?

To me, these are the most interesting questions when I'm picking up a book. If I immediately sense that the author has something different to say, I keep reading. The establishment of style and voice take priority over the establishment of plot. I don't like a poor plot anymore than anyone else, but I'm willing to take it on credit, at least for a little while, if the voice is good.

But hey, that's just me!

blog post

2006-10-19T15:42:00.000-05:00

I have to confess, I still sneak a peak at Evil Editor's blog every now and then. But I've cut back! Way back. Really.

One of the things that really gets me is the titles people come up with. A recent example was "Dragon Sword". Dragon Sword?!? How do you not look at that and immediately say "this is the most generic title ever created"? I am picking on this recent author but a quick glance through the archives reveals plenty of others. "The Dark Legacy". "Dressed to Kill". My favorite are the obvious fantasy titles. "Forging the Soul Blade" may have sounded like a good idea at the time but the truth is that it was clearly assembled from The Big List of Generic Fantasy Words.

So many books, even published fantasy novels, suffer from this problem. It may be a good book. The title may scream the genre, which I guess is helpful if the maiden carrying a sword and wearing drapery on the cover doesn't sufficiently convey it. But the title is just instantly forgettable.

I recently picked up a SF book entitled "The Wreck of The River of Stars" which is a wonderful, memorable title. And I'm glad I did, because that book introduced me to an excellent new author. And I would have never have noticed or bought any of this author's excellent, earlier books otherwise because they all have incredibly generic sci-fi names like "Rogue Star".

In my mind, the title is a great place to have some fun and come up with something memorable. Even if it doesn't wind up being the published title, at least in the meantime you're not the dozenth manuscript in the slush pile entitled "Blood of the Dragon" or "Dark Sword". R. Scott Bakker's first novel is called "The Darkness that Comes Before". I saw that and I was like "Ohmygosh, I don't care how bad it is I have to have it." That's the reaction you want.

what not to study

2006-10-18T10:51:00.000-05:00

I've known that I wanted to be a writer since I was a little boy, younger even than ten. By the time I was eleven I was writing elaborate fictions set in fantastic universes for friends and family. When I was about seventeen I started in on my epic fantasy novel, but didn't make much progress. Fortunately, all copies of this early effort have now been lost. At nineteen I decided to bite off something I could chew, a short story, and wound up penning a twenty-thousand word sci-fi novella. I have not lost the copies... yet.

So of course, when it came time for the great Life Event that is college, I majored in... Computer Science. Oh I know, an English or Lit major would have made so much sense, and I might have had a crack at being summa cum laude or some other silly Latin title, but no, I took comp-sci and got C's and slogged through several levels of Calculus and University Physics.

My rationale for not focusing on the language arts, even though that's technically what I want to "do", may have seemed hubristic: I didn't think that they had anything to teach me about writing. It would have been wonderful to really study the classics and read all those authors you know you should but never will and have valid opinions about Irish Poets and things like that. But it wouldn't have helped me write fiction. Critical essays, yes. Nuanced analyses, yes. Incandescent storytelling, not so much. Anyways, that was my opinion at the time and the years really haven't shaken it. As far as I can tell the only way to learn writing is to write, a lot, and that's what I've tried to do. My left brain recieved invaluable discipline in college, my right brain is ticking along as relentlessly as it ever did.

Anyways, it's not as if I've ever been wracked with doubt on the topic, but it is nice to see one's opinions validated occasionally: Author Crawford Kilian ruminates on what aspiring writers should NOT major in.

POP! BOOM! POW!

2006-10-16T09:39:00.000-05:00

I love good storytelling in any medium. I may never write for TV or film, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate and even learn from writers working in those mediums.

Everything I need to know about suspense can be found in director M. Night Shyamalan's films. The TV show Lost is a study in how to keep the plot twists coming and the audience guessing. I picked up the trick of parallelism from Watchmen, one of Alan Moore's graphic novels. (NB: a great TV writer's blog is Jane Esperson's - she's written for Buffy, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and countless others)

I guess most fiction writers already know that TV and film are great sources for storytelling inspiration, but you may not be tuned into my third example, graphic novels. If you're not, you should be. They're not just for superheroes anymore, in fact they haven't been for about two decades. If you have never read or even heard of Alan Moore's Watchmen, Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Kurt Busiek's Astro City, you need to hit the bookstore (your chain stores should have ALL of these authors). There is a lot of cool stuff being done in "comics" (or "sequential art", for the pretentious) these days. Even those that still focus on the superhero tropes, like "Astro City", are doing so in ground-breaking ways. Kurt Busiek uses his superhuman characters as metaphors for everything from teenage disaffection to accepting old age to 70's malaise. These are stories with a lot less BOOM! POW! and a lot more heart and character.

Fans of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or the 'teens with special powers' genre in general) should enjoy a series I recently picked up, Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways. This is the story of a group of teens that discover that their parents are part of secretive cult of supervillains and run away from home. Of course they all have undeveloped super-powers which they will be exploring even as they evade the authorities and attempt to right their evil parents' wrongs. More importantly, they will also be navigating the treacherous terrain of relationships, teenage emotions and newfound independence. The premise of the series is killer, and the writing lives up to it. It actually impressed Joss Whedon so much that he is going to take over writing for it in the future. In the meantime, less than $25 will net you the hardcover of Volume 1, Pride and Joy, which you definitely want, since it contains 18 issues of the comic and hundreds of pages of glossy, full-color art. Superpowers as a metaphor for coming of age have never looked so good.

I know that some people worry that immersing themselves in writing that is too good will cause that author's voice to creep into their own. I find, however, that exposure to great storytelling inspires me, even in seemily unrelated ways. And if the inspiration comes in a medium other than fictional prose, it'll be that much harder to subconsciously crib from, hey?

read it and weep

2006-10-11T13:40:00.000-05:00

Author John Scalzi explains why Star Wars is not entertainment. Don't freak out too much when you read it, Scalzi delights in tweaking his readers by taking up absurdly inflammatory positions. Actually, when he turns the snark on full force, as he does here, he reminds me why I read his blog in the first place (sometimes he comes off as a bit smug and smarmy, as he himself has on occasion admitted).

At any rate, I mainly take issue on three points - 1) that building mythologies is 'necrophilic storytelling' (a flammable opinion if I ever heard one, and ridiculously absurd to boot - I'm not going to get into it), 2) that the Star Wars prequels are not entertaining (they left me cold but I have lots of friends who genuinely liked them, especially the third) and 3) that whether or not something counts as entertainment is dependent on authorial intent.

This last seems like a lot of splitting hairs over semantics, and anyways I feel that it's wrong. So what if the storyteller has principles that they're adhering too above and beyond "entertainment"? By this argument nothing is ever pure entertainment - no author or scriptwriter or director or storyteller since the world began has ever come to a creative work totally unburdened of their personal values, agendas and interests, interested purely in entertaining some hypothetical audience.

As many of Scalzi's commentors pointed out, J.R.R. Tolkien made no bones about the fact that he was inventing mythology, essentially for himself. He created languages with derivations and relationships between each other, he wrote a massive unpublished backstory, he filled his story with irrelevant details. From the metric of entertainment, does any of this make sense? Yet surely he's very entertaining - he spawned a genre almost singlehandedly (and whether or not you appreciate fantasy books peopled with half-elven warriors is another conversation entirely), sold hundreds of millions of books over fifty years, and the inevitrable films were resounding successes. Tolkien was out mostly to entertain himself, but in doing so he entertained millions.

Most storytellers are out to entertain themselves first, and that's as it should be. When they happen to scratch us where we itch, we call them brilliant. When they fail to connect, we call them self-indulgent.

No self-respecting critic judges something by some objective paragon of entertainment. Well, I hope not. I can just imagine this person watching Scorcese's The Departed and going "Ninjas! Where are the ninjas? It is objectively verifiable that ninjas are entertaining! Also, sex." Rather, they judge the work by what the creator was apparently attempting to achieve. If that was a mythological space-opera, did it work for me as a mythological space-opera? If the aim was for a quiet, family drama, they judge it on those terms. Why? Because who can say what, if anything, will entertain all your readers, or your watchers, or your listeners. The best you can do is come up with something YOU would enjoy, and hope there are people who agree with you. The old adage that you should write what you know is off, but it's close to the truth: write what you love.

I'm afraid that the entertainment value of anything rests solely with the consumer, not the creator. And people are certainly entertained by some very strange things, much of it unintentional. It may be cool to hate Star Wars right now; I can hardly blame anyone who does, it is one of the most over-exposed media properties of the last three decades. At the same time, to chalk up the original trilogy's success to the fact that they came after a decade of dreary, dystopian sci-fi or that their entertainment value was imparted by people besides George Lucas is ridiculous. I'm young enough to have fallen in love with the movies as a kid without seeing all that other dreck and I can tell you that Lucas did, and probably still does, tap into something kids love. In my book, that's entertainment.

errata

2006-10-10T13:13:00.000-05:00

First of all, whatever happened to my right-hand page navigation? Where did it go? Is it coming back? Did it step out for groceries or is it visiting relatives for the weekend? Did it run out of gas outside Atlanta? Life is full of such uncertainties.

Secondly, I am becoming annoyed by Amazon.com's book recommendations. Just because I once purchased a book by an author or on a topic does not mean I wish to purchase EVERY book that author has ever written, nor would I enjoy every book ever penned on said topic. So I once bought an "Anguished English" book. That certainly doesn't mean I want to purchase Richard Lederer's entire oeuvre. And yes, Amazon, I like Ursula LeGuin. But you would serve me better by recommending similar authors instead of all umpteen million of her short story collections.

in which I am 'in the market'

2006-10-10T10:43:00.000-05:00

A small update:

First of all, what a difference an edit makes! After a weekend of tweaking and molding the rough draft I have something I am quite satisfied with and unashamed to show my beta readers. In fact, I'm very excited about this story once again, as I should be. It's amazing how much of it really came together in editing, in spite of the fact that the overall changes were comparatively minor.

Now a few close friends and relatives will get to take a whack at it. In the meantime, I sit here and wonder - what am I going to do with you, little story? This is often the question after I finish writing, and so often I don't have an answer. I don't write for markets. Sorry, I know, but it's a personal thing. I won't write for anyone but myself. If other people like it, that's great.

The question before me is simple - is there a market out there for a talky, slightly literary short story of just under 10,000 words set in a fictional coastal Georgia town? Your suggestions are welcome.

in praise of insecurity

2006-10-04T12:01:00.000-05:00

Written Wyrdd has some excellent thoughts on the writing process on her blog, specifically the difference bewteen a "rough draft" and a "first draft." She says that the "rough draft" is something you don't show to anyone, because it represents a Work in Progress and won't make sense to anyone outside the author. I really feel this, at an emotional level right now. I've just completed the rough draft for a short story (the "character-driven" one, referred to in earlier posts). And my first reaction as I started editing last night was "Oh my gosh, this sucks!"

I would probably despair and burn the manuscript if I didn't know from experience that this is always my first reaction to something I've written, even if in retrospect I feel it's brilliant (subjective call, people!). But that first glance - when I have no distance from the WiP and it's still exists in all its raw, unedited splendour - virtually always plunges me into a miasma of despair. Later on, when the thing is polished and gleaming I'll feel quite the proud papa, if history is any guide. Right now my thoughts are more along the lines of "can it be saved? or should I just bury it?"

I left off editing earlier than I should last night because I couldn't figure out why it just wasn't working for me. As I lay in bed, I thought about what exactly it was that wasn't working for me and also what things I did like. I came up with a little mental list, something like this:

Don't like:
-The dialogue is too smugly clever
-The narrative is too syrupy and maudlin
-The whole thing comes off as navel-gazingly romanticized

Like:
-Quiet character 'moments'
-Spare, disinterested descriptive bits
-Places where their lead characters antagonism feels real and not cutesy

After some thought, these points resolved themselves into a clear editorial direction to take: I need to step back. Pull the camera away from the characters, out of their heads. This is possibly at the risk of confusing the reader, which is always my big issue when writing (I under-write in the sense that I try to communicate as little information as possible to get the job done, and often that's too little.), so I try to avoid it. This time, though, I think it might be better to go with my first instincts - let the characters be a little ambiguous, at first, and allow them to reveal themselves very gradually. Stick to spare, descriptive passages. Don't inject any more narratorial insight than is strictly necessary.

At the inception of a story, when I have that first germ of an idea, I usually have some sort of 'feel' that is part of my vision for the story. Often, between idea and execution, this idea can get lost in translation, or at least trampled underfoot a little bit. Now that I've got plot and setting and character all happily meshing in my sloppy little draft, it's time to make sure the whole thing is on track with the original idea, the one that got me excited about the story in the first place. I won't be happy with the story until it is.

What is it supposed to be? Just a day in the life, a window into about twelve hours of the lives of two people meeting for the first time who do not know that they are already deeply connected. A day that goes completely wrong in the sense of their plans for it, and completely right in a larger sense.

If I can capture that in a draft, I'll be very happy.

criticism in fan fic?

2006-09-27T08:39:00.000-05:00

I'm not really into the fan fiction scene. My only brush with it was when I was much younger, reading fan-fic and parodies based on Star Trek: The Next Generation on various electronic bulleting boards. (I don't think slash existed back then, or if it did, people didn't admit to writing it - I'm pretty sure I would remember stumbling across any spicy scenes involving Klingon rituals and Picard's shiny dome.) Possibly I'm missing out. Regardless, self-described "academic/fan" Henry Jenkins has a lengthy and excellent article on his blog.

Jenkins looks on fan-produced works as criticism, not simply 'brand extension'. He argues that just as if the fan had written a critical essay on Harry Potter, which would be legally protected as 'Fair Use', so a fictional account set in the Harry Potter universe can also serve as criticism, and this should also be protected. And once you realize that the only legitimate arbitrator of whether or not a piece of fan fiction is intended in a critical light is the author, you have to admit that fan fiction should probably enjoy far greater legal protection than it currently does.

I have to admit, I find the idea of writing a piece of fan fiction that is critical of the "official, canonical work" pretty fascinating. Take the Boy Wizard for instance. Love the books, sure. But my major complaint about them is that Harry is the very worst kind of fictional hero, a hero who is heroic and noble apparently just because they were "born" that way, rather than because of their strength of character or moral choices. Discussions of morality in conjunction with HP can get a little dicey - people assume you want to go witch-burning or something. No, but if you flip through the books they are a catalogue of Harry doing things just because his friends were doing it, or because his emotions overwhelmed him, or even because he just stumbled into it by accident. Lenora Rose points out that in The Half-blood Prince Harry attempts to use the so-called "unforgiveable curse" and the only reason he does not succeed is because he's magically blocked. That is, as she puts it, a pretty shoddy moral lesson.

I think it would be pretty intriguing to do a piece of fan-fic where Harry's lack of a moral compass "lead him to the dark side", so to speak. That would be some cool criticism. Or perhaps such a thing already exists, and I'm just late to the party.

confessions of a tense shifter

2006-09-25T13:47:00.000-05:00

I'm a tense shifter, always have been.

I don't know why this is the case, but if I do not carefully monitor my own writing I will shift almost arbitrarily from past tense to present and back, even in mid-paragraph. This is even odder considering that most of my reading material is genre fiction, which generally does not indulge in the present tense. Indeed, the presence of this tense is virtually shorthand for "this book is arty and literary." I don't particularly like arty and literary. So why do I do it?

You're right! Schizophrenia. And I'm taking pills for that. But there's another reason too, I think, and that is that deep in my subconscience is lodged the idea that present tense is a powerful tool for doing certain sorts of things in writing. And my subconscious is right, too, although if I could stop it from whipping out this particular tool any old time it feels like it, that would be grand. But I digress. Present tense! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing? No.

If you are going to buy a book on writing I recommend you make it Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin. LeGuin has some thought-provoking things to say about present tense. Specifically, she thinks that 'present tense' is an unhelpful misnomer and recommends replacing it with 'immediate tense'. Because that's what present tense does - it makes the the action, the scene, the moment immediate. A descriptive passage rendered in present tense is somehow more vivid, more real. Present tense places the reader very directly into the moment. Rather than letting the audience watch the show from the back row in a leisurely manner, looking at the curtains or getting up for bathroom breaks, present tense jacks them up against the stage and pries their eyelids open. Which is great.

Of course, present tense is a limited tool; it can't do everything. It's terribly awkward, for instance, to show the passage of time in present tense. Also, because present tense represents the worms-eye view of the action, it's a lot harder to convey background information without adopting Mr. Narrator Voice. These failings don't hurt literary novels much, what with their plotless existential angstiness, so perhaps that's why they favor it. On the other hand, genre authors have a story to tell and don't have time to sit around feeling the dirt under their fingernails, so past tense it is.

I've tried before, am currently trying, and will try again to use both tenses within a single story. Both tenses represent powerful tools in a writer's toolbox. Surely there must be a way to use them both and not be forced into an either/or decision. Obviously, if you're shooting for novel-length you can just use present tense for a few, select chapters and stick to the past for the rest of it. It's a bit trickier within the confines of a short story.

Here's what I'm currently doing - I'm working on a dialogue heavy short about two characters who are basically wandering around and talking. I know, it sounds like a blast. I'm trying very hard to keep it interesting; we'll see if I pull it off. But anyways, I'm writing the narrative in present tense which allows me to detail the feel of the air and the cracks in the sidewalk and little bits like that that I love, but the characters naturally speak and tell their stories in past tense, thus communicating the neccessary information.

I have no idea if it will work. It's possible that the effect will be too jarring. I'll run it by some beta readers and find out. If it is, out it goes. You can bet I'm going to keep trying to sneak it into my writing, though. My subconscious demands it.

a fire upon the deep

2006-09-24T20:18:00.000-05:00

All hail the awesome power of teh interweb, where things you write may be read by people who care. Elizabeth Bear found my 'half review' of Blood and Iron, linked too it and - well hell, I'm bad at math. I think we're dealing with a power-log function, though. "Quintupled my traffic" doesn't even begin to cover it. So, thanks Ms. Bear!

We at Braun Industries are nothing if not fair and balanced, so you can check out her rebuttal (primarily in the comments) right here. She suggests that the clues are there if I would but look for them, and that's a fair enough argument. But I don't like to take notes while I read, and to persuade me to do so is going to take a very compelling book. I now await the inevitable criticism that I am not a deep reader. But I think there's a difference between challenging writing and writing that is simply a little more opaque than it needs to be.

I think that's all I'm going to say on this note, I am not interested in starting a flame war (or whatever they call it in the blogoshere) with an author whose book I am still reading! I should say something on the matter of kelpies, though - I've read a lot of fantasy as well as some folklore and swear upon the bald heads of my forefathers that I'd never heard of one before. Well, I shall know them better hereafter.

You know what, I have resolved to write a particularly inflammatory review of The Children of Hurin. Maybe we can get the ghost of Tolkien on the line.

fairy enchantment and other authorial hazards

2006-09-22T14:01:00.000-05:00

A review of sorts: Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age.

The things we delight in the most have the greatest capacity to frustrate us. Do you know that feeling? You feel it when one of the protagonists of the TV show you're so attached to suddenly starts acting way out of character. When that band you love releases an album that just doesn't quite get there. If you had no interest in this thing and it suddenly took a turn for the worse, you reaction would be a shrug. But you are invested in it and so it's painful to see this new, wrong direction, and so there's the sensation of being simultaneously pulled toward it and pushed away.

That's the long-winded version of how I feel about Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. It's not that I'm already a huge fan of Ms. Bear (I've only read one other book by her, a sci-fi novel called Hammered. It was 'aight.) The attraction here is the whole idea of the book: the intersection of the mythical world of the fairy and our modern century, a place where goblins and imps live in the shadows of Times Square, where Merlin is the lead singer of a band, where creatures of myth prey on unsuspecting souls near the waterfront, where a clan of werewolves live in a village in Scotland. That's the attraction, the pulling, the thing that made me plunk down twelve bucks for this thing at the cash register. And all these things are certainly in there between the covers, and more, done with style and imagination.

The pushing, aye, there's the rub. You see, in fiction, the magical and the fantastic must be given boundaries. If the reader is not clear on what the limits are, or more specifically, what actions are within the scope of the characters' abilities, the plot is drained of tension and its events become, to the reader, random and arbitrary. If the world of the novel, however fantastic, does not have well-defined rules it loses its concreteness, its density and degenerates into a series of overwrought descriptive passages. The need for concrete boundaries is all the more real when your fantastic world intersects with the reality that the reader is already familiar with. How does your reality square with my reality? Play fast and loose with something the reader knows well, and you'll lose them.

Blood and Iron suffers from these kinds of problems. Most of the main characters appear able, just for starters, to magically teleport almost anywhere. Yet occasionally someone has to swim a river of blood or chase a quarry down a dark alley and we don't know why this person could simply be there before but can't now. Not only that, but without a sense of movement scenes become senseless, lacking context. It's cool to meet characters like Morgan the witch queen or the mother of all dragons, but the author seems to simply float into the tiny cottage or the subterranean lair and then leave again on a whim. There is no tension and no logic to it.

Where the rules are defined, fascinating things happen. There is a character called Whiskey, a magical being of great power, who is bound to our protagonist, Seeker, at the beginning of the novel. We quickly learn three rules about the relationship between Seeker and Whiskey: 1) Whiskey is extremely powerful and dangerous and would kill Seeker given the chance, 2) If one person is bound to another they get three chances to kill their new master and break the binding and 3) if the master is killed by someone else, the bound servant also dies. These rules, clearly understood, concretely define their relationship and keep it very interesting. On the one hand, Whiskey is compelled to be a loyal servant to Seeker and might even willingly serve her in hopes of being voluntarily set free. On the other, he's definitely going to take advantage of his three chances.

The Whiskey/Seeker axis also nicely illustrates the problem with the book - it's never made explicit exactly what Whiskey even is, let alone what the lmits of his power are. Vague and flowery prose make it sound as though he's a horse made out of water that can also transform into a humanoid form. Whiskey's powers also seem to grow stronger with proximity to water. What, exactly, this entails is unclear. In one early scene he summons up a storm to drown Seeker, but she defeats him by casting a magical net at him. Um, OK, magical net beats storm? Noted.

Bear's characters spend a lot of time walking around, having cryptic conversations with powerful magical beings and shifting between the real world and the fairy world with great abandon. But again, the delineations of these physical and political geographies are always left quite vague, and so the reader is left to flounder in a sea of lovely prose.

I want so much for Blood and Iron (and whatever subsequent books follow) to be wonderful. But the more the author draws me into her magical world, the more she pushes me away.

I'm still reading, not even half way, and I certainly plan to push on through. Hopefully over the subsequent pages the author will communicate a firmer idea of her brave new world. On one aspect we are already quite clear - the world of the fairy is a dangerous place for mortals, and for authors.

sharing is fun

2006-09-16T19:21:00.000-05:00

I occasionally do writing exercises to 'limber up' before working on... whatever it is I'm currently working on. I was rereading a couple of old exercises and came across one I'd completely forgotten. The exercise is to create a character portrait: start small, with the basic details, then flesh the person out, fill in some back-story. This is what I came up with, or I should say, the person that I met:

Isaiah is a soft-spoken man with large, gentle hands. He is always doing things with those hands: helping people. I’ve seen him cradle infants in them as tenderly as any mother. I’ve seen him lift a happy child into a tree with them, or pluck a frantic cat from the same tree. And he builds things with them of course, as you knew he would. He works wonders with wood, building chairs and tennis tables and beds and planters and anything else the people around him might find useful, for he gives it all away.
You read about people like Isaiah in books or literary magazines, but when you meet the real thing, an angel with human eyes and sloppy hair and a slight limp, you wonder how he came to be. They say that selfless souls are usually born out of great adversity. Now I don’t know all of Isaiah’s story, but I know that he was in the army once, and that he owned his own business, and that he was married. I also know that there’s a quiet anger in him that burns against the injustices of the world. He hides it, most of the time.
One day, when I asked him where he got his limp, he snapped at me. I was so shocked by this uncharacteristic behavior that I said nothing for a moment, and then he apologized, and told me a little bit of the story. Isaiah grew up in the back country, and he got his skill in woodworking from his father. That’s about all he got from him – his father was an angry man, frequently drunk, and he had a great distaste for work. Young Isaiah shouldered the burden of responsibility on the farm, looking after the many chores his father seldom got around too, lending his poor, beleaguered mother a hand, and keeping an eye on his little brother.
Isaiah’s little brother, whose name I didn’t catch, was much more like his father. He delighted in mischief and lacked any sort of a sense of responsibility. Naturally, he was the apple of his father’s eye. Where Isaiah’s efforts brought only criticism, his brother’s antics and even the dangerous and thoughtless stunts he sometimes pulled only made his father laugh. Isaiah got his limp from when his brother shot him in the leg with a hunting rifle. His father insisted he would heal up on his own for three days until he was near death with fever and infection. At last he allowed Isaiah’s mother to drive Isaiah to the hospital in the middle of the night. He says he’s lucky that he can walk at all.
Years later, maybe out of guilt for that and other things, his father loaned him the money to start his own company. Isaiah wanted to get into electronics and had developed some interesting prototypes just by tinkering. With the capital he had from his father, he rented a warehouse, hired a handful of employees and went to work. When the first payroll rolled around his checks started bouncing. It transpired that his father had given his brother access to the money under the theory that what he gave to one son he shouldn’t withhold from the other. Of course his brother took all the money and wasted it in the usual ways. Isaiah was greatly shamed by this.
His father has long passed on and his brother died a few years ago: drug overdose. Isaiah works quietly as an electrician for a large company now. He is content to live out his days without ambition, doing what he can for others. When you look into his eyes you can see a peace that isn’t present in the eyes of other men. Maybe he simply saw too many lives ripped apart by selfish ambition to follow that path himself. But if you ask him about it he’ll just shrug and smile. “I just like to help folks,” he’ll say.

you're an obsession

2006-09-11T15:42:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to feel that I've gotten about all I'm going to get out of Evil Editor. It has been instructive and constructive to observe both EE and his 'minions' hold forth on the topic of writing. I really do think I'm a better writer for it. Too often I write in a total vacuum, showing my writing only to a few close friends who are not writers. So exposure to other writers and even a real live editor - invaluable.

But. Where a certain amount of criticism is freeing, too much can be paralyzing. My own inner critic is quite harsh enough, so often stopping my writing in its tracks to suggest that I not quit my day job. He doesn't need to be augmented with the suggestions of others. What I need to do is buckle down seriously to the business of writing.

So I'm going to try and cut down on hitting EE's blog every ten minutes. It will be hard, mostly because I have a slow job with an internet connection and I generally need some site to keep my occupied. But I think it's definitely time to find something else, as far as that goes.

I don't know if I will stick around here or not. Not sure that there are enough readers to justify it, although I've certainly enjoyed meeting everyone who has dropped by! That's been a real highlight of EE's blog, meeting some cool people who are also writers. But do more than three people read this? That's the real question. I know it's a lot to ask, but if you've been 'lurking' and you enjoy reading this - do me a favor? comment and let me know?

I do like writing about writing. I suspect it's the ultimate device for avoiding actual writing, but still. And it's not like I'm going to get any actual writing done at work. They might frown on that.

the easy part

2006-09-03T22:41:00.000-05:00

I admit that I haven't done much actual lately. Most of the reasons are personal - there are times in life when you just can't write, ya know? But then early last week I sat down at my computer one night and it just flowed out of me. I had to make myself stop so I could have some hope of getting to work on time the following morning. OK, excellent, I'm back, I can finally get some writing done.

No such luck. Just two days later I came down with a lousy cold and haven't had a stick of creative energy in my since. Or any other type of energy, for that matter.

BUT. I was lying abed with aching head this afternoon, staring at the ceiling, thinking of whatever, when the usual flotsam and jetsam of random thoughts coagulated into something that sounded suspiciously like a story. Or at least the seed of one. I thought it over for a minute - yes, that could work, ok, that's pretty intriguing, wow!

I dashed over to the computer and opened up the trusty Story Idea file. I don't know if other writers have one of these, but you probably should consider it if you don't. It's a big list of ideas for short stories, for novels, or for elements of other stories. Now, my list has dozens of entries in it already. Some of them are pretty good and I really want to get around to them one of these days. Others need fleshing out. Still others would work in the context of some larger narrative. And there are some that no longer hold my interest at all.

Today's idea was pretty intriguing - but it would need a lot of fleshing out, and it's definitely not genre, so it would be more difficult to write. I don't always give names to my ideas, but after a moment's reflection I named this one Athena: it's about a woman who's almost perfect, and the idea came to me while I was having a headache. Heh.

For me, coming up with ideas for stories is the easy part. Planning them, nurturing them, writing them, bringing them to fruition - that's where I come up short. In addition to my poor attention span it just seems like there's never enough time and I never have enough energy. Alas!

So what about everyone else? What's the easiest part of writing fiction? What's the hardest part?

a quote

2006-09-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

"There was never a golden age. It was always only iron."
- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt

I'll take 'Fantasy that Doesn't Suck' for $1000, Alex

2006-09-01T14:35:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Paladin of Souls. Spotted it on the shelf at the library and placed the title after a moment - the book won a Hugo award a couple years back. It's actually a little unusual for a pure fantasy novel to win the big award. And that's perhaps not surprising - for all that it's everybody's favorite genre, fantasy seems difficult to actually do right, at least if the amount of unreadable tripe that is published every year is any indication.

I'm not sure why that is. I love fantasy, many of my all-time favorite books are fantasy. Fantasy has an unparalleled ability to transport the reader to another time and another place. There are very few boundaries on what can be fantasy - a fantasy novel can be set in the everyday world with a twist, a lost corner of history or a universe that is entirely other. So why is it so often done so badly?

Paladin of Souls is fantasy done right. I read it in two days flat. So that's good. And the writing most definitely is - Ms. McMasters Bujold avoids the overwrought style that often afflicts fantasy, but leaves the reader in no doubt that they are in the hands of a competent stylist. So that's a huge plus. Another is the characterization. The characters are not cutouts but interesting and unique - our protag is a bitter, lonely middle-aged noblewoman who feels trapped by her life and abandoned by the gods.

Oh, the gods. This is the central conceit of Ms. McMaster Bujold's fantasy world - that there are five gods (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall and The Bastard), they are real, and that they interact with humans and the physical world in very specific ways. In a way, this is just the author's particular system of magic, a la Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea system. But it works very well, and more importantly, it ties directly to plot and character. Our embittered heroine becomes an unwilling vessel of the gods when a dark evil invades a castle on the frontier of the five kingdoms. Whether or not she will put her life on the line to become the fulfillment of desperate prayers is a driving narrative force.

One little note on the plot - it is not particularly 'epic' or 'sweeping', and for this I applaud it. Not every fantasy novel needs to contain the ultimate showdown between good and evil within its covers. Sometimes the redemption of a character that resonates with us will do just as well. I don't mean to imply that the book doesn't have a grand sweep to it, but it doesn't feel the need to constantly impress upon us the Dire Import of events.

I'm not going to break the whole down for 'criticism'; instead I'll just say this book has a lot going for it - good writing, interesting characters, believable fantasy, and an engaging plot. I've already started in on the sequel.

tooting my own horn

2006-08-30T12:25:00.000-05:00

Sweet, this is my third continuation for a New Beginning to have been accepted so far! Having my continuation picked is more exciting to me than having a "Guess the Plot" suggestion make the cut (I've had several) since there can only be one continuation. Don't worry, I'm not 3/0 - I've seen several suggestions disappear into continuation oblivion so far.

Gee, maybe I should try my hand at getting some real writing accepted by real editors.

rule #1

2006-08-30T11:31:00.000-05:00

And now ladies and gentlemen, my golden rule of writing fiction:

Don't write anything you don't absolutely love.

Writing, for me, represents a serious investment of time and energy, especially emotional energy. Life is short and writing is hard and I have decided that if a story idea doesn't make me as giddy as a schoolgirl just thinking about it then it's not worth wasting another second on.

Aside from such lofty philosophical considerations, I find that rule #1 is invaluable when it comes to the actual process of writing. Stuck on a scene? Not sure where to go next? Ask yourself the question: what don't I love about this scene? Maybe the scene seems like a necessary evil which you just have to paste a grin on your face and slog through.

Well let me tell you my friend, your readers will know instinctively which bits you slogged through and which bits you loved. You don't want that section that you phoned in to be the section where they put the book down. So maybe it's time to go back to the story, figure out what you do love about it, and approach the scene that way. Maybe you'll find that that scene doesn't belong at all and you need another approach entirely.

I find that writing only what you love is a great filter for unecessary fluff. It's a great indicator for what direction to go next. And I hope, in the long run, that it is going to make the stories that I write, whether short or long, meaningful to people.

Sometimes I think that maybe I should just bite the bullet and write a military sci-fi novel or some YA involving kids with magical powers, just so I can get published and make some money off my writing. But I wouldn't love it, and I think that that would come through in the writing. Even if such a book made it past agents and editors and was published, it wouldn't be memorable. I few people would pick it up as part of the year's latest book fad, then they'd put it down and forget about it.

I want to write memorable stories, books that move people in some way. How can I expect someone else to be passionate about my story if I'm not? So, I'm not going to write for anyone else but myself. Because if I don't love it, no one will.

And hey, at the very least I'll have one fan.

it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission

2006-08-29T07:45:00.000-05:00

I've been enjoying the blogs of a handful of frequent commenters over at Evil Editor's. So I've taken the liberty of linking to you crazy kids, over there on the right. If nothing else, this is very convenient for me. And my convenience is paramount.

If this is problematic for anyone, just shoot me an email or comment and I'll take you off the list, no harm no foul.

a haiku for Pluto

2006-08-28T08:28:00.000-05:00

I do not feel that
I have lost a planet but
Gained a planetoid

All Pluto haikus welcome here.

rattling the bars of the cage

2006-08-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

Why am I here at work? Why am I not at home writing?

Oh, right. Money.

Sigh.

a matter of taste

2006-08-23T07:47:00.000-05:00

Everybody has genres and styles of fiction that do and don't interest them. I'll tell you what kind of novel makes me yawn just hearing about the plot - the one about middle-aged women who meet some guy and after slowly, painfully working through their baggage and personal issues, fall in love. And I started thinking to myself, "Why is that?" Surely the best stories in any genre flow out of relationships between vivid characters. Why should a novel where that is the focus bore me to tears? "Hang on there," I said to myself, "Go back to that last sentence."

relationships between vivid characters.

Aye, there's the crux. If your entire story revolves around two characters and their developing relationship, I had better enjoy hearing about those characters. They should be interesting, no, fascinating people, people who I want to get to know. If they're not, why should I even begin to care about whether or not they're going to find true love with The Man With The Mysterious Past? I don't know you, I don't want to know you, your personal issues are a big yawn to me. The tricky thing is, that characters who are like you are automatically somewhat interesting. So, a middle-aged woman is by default somewhat interesting to other middle-aged women (and dogs butts are interesting to other dogs). But who doesn't want their writing to have broader appeal? Characters should be intrinsically interesting, without having to rely on bare self-identification.

Okay, so this seems fairly obvious. Make the characters interesting. But it seems that too many would-be writers think that "interesting" means "make a character just like me, but better looking, and with more intense personal baggage." But this is flat out wrong. A character is not just a name with a list of personal tragedies attached. Real people have personalities. The interesting thing about them is not the things that happen to them, but how they deal with those things in their own unique way. A good character is much the same.

If I am interested in the characters, if they feel as though they are living and breathing and I have an emotional investment in them, I'll gladly read about them arguing over their shopping list. By the same token, if the characters are flat, lifeless or cliched they can get in car wrecks, watch their house burn down, or get abducted by aliens and I'd just yawn.

It's a cliche to say it, but it's true: go read Jane Austen. Pay close attention to what makes her characters tick. She writes all kinds: feisty, bashful, arrogant, mouse-quiet, talkative, withdrawn, interfering, self-deluded, lovesick, home-sick, innocent, mature and more. They're all vividly drawn and engaging so that we'll gladly read an entire chapter about a conversation they had at dinner.

The acid test of a character: do I care enough about them that I'd enjoy sitting their and watching them chew?

new endings

2006-08-17T11:49:00.000-05:00

I may be the only person who does this. Does anybody else do this? Actually, even I don't do it anymore. But when I was younger, when I picked up a book to find out if I thought I would like to read it or not I would of course read the beginning paragraph - but then I would flip to the back and read the ending one as well.

I'm not sure why I did it. I think I wanted to know not only if the book seemed interesting but if it ended up in a good place. I found that the last couple of paragraphs seldom gave away any specific information about the plot, but would give you a good idea of whether or not the good guys won or somebody died or if the ending was just generally a downer.

I really don't do that anymore. I've written a downer ending or two myself so I think I can face up to them at this point. But what I do like to do now, after perusing the shiny, engaging opening paragraph, is flip to a couple of places in media res and see how it's holding up. The idea being, the author naturally puts her best foot forward on the first page, but do we then settle into a by-the-numbers thriller? A cheesy romance? Is the dialogue clunky and awkward? Descriptive prose, especially, while much in evidence at the beginning may be all but vanished a couple chapters on.

Also, I think a lot of books tend to have one Big Idea that sets them apart, but once you get past that they're pretty much the same as every other book in their genre. The best authors, though, keep the ideas coming and you can flip to any part of the book and find something interesting. Or at least that's what I'd like.

the classics

2006-08-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

So, ACD did me one better - she's posting classic openings, old and new, on her blog. Eat It Up. The entries so far really only have on thing in common - they're all brilliant.

There are so many ways to hook a reader. And maybe you can't hook every reader. But I think a good opening should more or less indicate what the reader is getting themselves into and why they should care. It's sort of like starting a relationship. If you misrepresent what you're all about, you may get more dates - but things will fall apart quickly after the first couple. If you let the real you shine through, though, you may find that the fact that you have fewer takers is made up for by the fact that the relationship goes a lot farther.

This metaphor brought to you by eHarmony. For true compatability!

stimulating and surprisingly amicable

2006-08-16T08:23:00.000-05:00

One of the novel openings submitted to Evil Editor's blog has provoked some excellent discussion on the nature of openings, specifically whether or not tension should be immediately established in them. So far the discussion has been quite calm and thoughtful.

One of the posters brought up the idea of having people critique some openings of literary classics. I must admit, I've been tempted before now to submit one without telling anyone and see how people react. So far I've resisted the urge, though...

cracking the code

2006-08-15T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've submitted several "continuations" for Evil Editor's "New Beginnings" recently but only one has made it through so far. I knew that one was a winner though, and sure enough, almost immediately after I posted it that entry was removed from the list.

How did I know I had a winner on my hands? Because it involved zombies.

Anyways, it's been interesting trying to crack the code as far as what EE is looking for in a continuation. It's pretty clear that he's looking for ones that are stylistically consistent with what came before. And I don't think just tacking "And then aliens attacked!" onto the end of an opening works either. I've tried that, no luck. Continuations that take the opening and then tweak it in an unexpected direction are obviously preferred, but I like to think I've sent in a few of those.

A little sex seems to sell it a lot of times, the more outrageous the implications the better. Likewise, a little bit of violence never hurt either. If both of those fail, imply that the protagonist of the opening is bat crazy.

I kind of wish we could see the runners-up for the continuations, on not just because I like to see my stuff in print (although there is that). You gotta figure a lot of stuff is submitted, and much like the Guess the Plots, is likely that more than one is funny.

the revised excerpt

2006-08-11T12:34:00.000-05:00

I have revised the opening to my short story, The Shepherdess and the General. You can read the original version here. This is the new and improved version, plus several subsequent paragraphs for 'flavah'.

The only man the General killed during the course of the battle was one of his own. First he mounted the soldier's horse and tucked the man's gold-bound knife into his belt. Then he rode the soldier down as he fled, trampled him beneath iron-shod hooves, and thundered from the battlefield with the arrows of the enemy shrieking past. He rode east, driving the horse harder than any arrow it feared.

The General's forces had met the enemy in the gray shadows of the morning after marching all night. The invaders were not engaged as expected in taking the fortified town of Brindy. Instead they were entrenched and waiting in the hills south of town. There was a false dawn in the north and a smoldering stench in the air. Brindy was burning.

With quiet urgency the General marshaled his forces on the opposite hill and prepared for battle. He arrayed the archers on the flanks of the hill and his men-at-arms at the foot of the smooth face. Then he assembled his mounted knights on the crest to order their attack. Their mounts twitched nervously as he spoke. He tasted ash in his mouth.

The cavalry roared away down the hill in an avalanche of pebbles and loose shingle and passed between the ranks of the footmen at full gallop. Thundering, hammering, they swept across the little valley and broke in a gold-crested wave against the ranks of the enemy. But the enemy waited patiently behind their defenses with their shields and pikes like a fence and did not expose themselves, and the charge was thwarted. Then the General had the horns blown and there was another charge, and another, until he looked down on a field choked with the broken and flailing bodies of toy horses, often with their riders beneath them, dimpled armor winking in the sun.

So the General sent out the men-at-arms and arrows from both sides covered them like locusts, and the real, bloody and brutish business of battle commenced. As the sun climbed high in the sky, war ebbed and flowed in the little valley and around its hills, a sea of blood, mud and metal. Ash fell in a slow, silent rain, dimming bright mail.

When the day had worn itself out, spent in long lines of fire on the face of the hill; when the General's armies had exhausted themselves against the fence of shields and arms; when the enemy forces had finally surged out from behind their bulwarks and run through them like a spear; then the General called for a retreat. Those that could would run. The rest would surrender. The General sent his page and his heralds away to gather his remaining captains and set off down far side of the hill for his horse.

The first paragraph recieved the most substantial revisions. I wanted it to be clear that the horse and the knife belonged to the soldier, not the General. I also wanted to clarify how he killed the soldier. This could easily be accomplished by breaking things up, but I really liked the flow of the original - the act of killing the man, taking his knife and riding away from the battlefield was like a single fluid motion in the original second sentence and I wanted to keep that feeling. That proved harder to do. But this version, I think, mostly accomplishes these goals: clarity and flow.

The rhythm and flow of writing is very important to me. I'll sometimes read things I've written aloud, to see how they sound. It's always very instructive.

Anyways, let me know what you think.

the best defense

2006-08-11T07:38:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure where the meme came from that I was 'offended' by the criticism of my story opening on Evil Editor's blog. Apparently I am egotistical and thin-skinned as well, or at least so the anonymous commentor who has been following me around over there tells me. In actual fact I think that if you read my responses to what were some pretty inane criticisms you'll be hard pressed to find anything offensive about them besides the point than that I did not immediately embrace all the commentors' suggestions.

In a later thread, and this seemed to raise even more hackles, I encouraged another writer to "ignore the inevitable nitpickers" and keep writing because I had enjoyed what this person had written and would like to see more. Well, it appears that "the inevitable nitpickers" do not like to be ignored. So, now I am thin-skinned, egotistical, easily-offended, etc. OK, fine.

But if I am to be easily offended, here's what really offends me: "writers" who, in lieu of success in their own writing, find pleasure in putting down the work of others, ignoring good writing and instead fretting about comma placement and preposition. Not only are these people missing the forest for the trees, they are doing so out of an attitude of immense condescension. Does that irritate me, does that get under my skin?

Hell yeah.

That's why I suggested Orson Scott Card's "wise reader" approach. It avoids the pitfalls of having Joe Writer try to play editor. It focuses on whether or not a story is clear and engaging and doesn't get hung up on grammar.

Grammar is easy. My word-processor automatically corrects gross grammar errors. For the more subtle stuff, I can run my manuscript by one of a couple of friends who are skilled at editing, or get out the trusty Chicago Manual of Style. Editors don't expect perfect manuscripts - that's why they're editors. What they expect is what I always harp on, competent writing and a good story. Sure, if your incompetence with the written word is glaring and eggregrious they will read no further, but this really hasn't been an issue on the large majority of the "New Beginnings" that have been submitted to Evil Editor. Like me, most of these writers passed high school English.

The funny thing is, even after saying all this I actually did make some substantial revisions to my own opening. Again, I didn't rewrite the entire thing so that it now takes place in first person or research horses and what scares them (news flash: arrows can make noise and scare horses). But I realized that I was trying to convey a lot of information in a couple sentences and that it might (and did) confuse readers. Clarity is something I always try to work towards in my writing. And yes, BuffySquirrel, you finally convinced me that there were to many had's in the second paragraph and I took steps to eliminate those.

Anyways, once I'm completely satisfied with my revisions I'm going to post them up (along with a lengthier excerpt) and you can decide for yourself if I'm on the right track here.

Peace.

on openings

2006-08-08T15:06:00.000-05:00

Quite possibly my favorite opening to a novel:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

I'm not alone in my opinion of this opening, it is of course the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and is arguably one of the most famous first paragraphs in English literature.

I don't have The Hobbit here at my fingertips (I'm at work), but if memory serves, after describing the Hobbit hole in some detail, the author then starts to give the hobbit's geneology, interrupts himself, describes hobbits themselves in great detail, returns to the geneology, and finally gets to the initial scene of the plot some three pages on (the scene is a conversation about saying 'good morning' and an invitation to tea).

Without being sardonic or unnecessarily tongue-in-cheek, Tolkien was a poster-child for how not to write a novel. Both The Hobbit and its even more famous sequel trilogy feature an unwieldy amount of characters, all with odd names. As a narrator, he is not at all above breaking the fourth wall and editorializing. There are frequent (if subtle) changes in tone and style throughout the books. And Tolkien played fast and loose with his POVs, at one point famously slipping into the head of a fox who passes by the main characters in the night. And yet it worked - the man has been voted Author of the Century many times over, his books are bestsellers twenty-five years after his death, and the films based on them were blockbusters.

In my opinion, this casts "the rules" about writing fiction in a suspicious light.

Obviously, part of the reason Tolkien could "get away with it" was because he was a damn good storyteller. And that's a very important point - how good your story is ultimately trumps any stylistic considerations.

But while Tolkien was a brilliant storyteller, he was no novelist. He was an Oxford don, steeped in the traditions of ancient legendary cycles such as Beowulf. When he wrote in that casual, interfering narrative POV he was just going with what he knew. He had no preconceptions about what a novel was supposed to be like, and so he was able to move beyond them. He told his stories in the way that he felt they needed to be told. He certainly didn't worry about whether or not his work was publishable or whether any agent would take a second glance at it.

This approach to storytelling and writing fiction is definitely not for everyone. But it's one that I admire and would like to emulate. It offers a certain freedom too - to try new things without worrying about how it will be recieved. Success, fame and hardcover will come in time. Maybe. But for now, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to just do my best to keep writing, constantly, and learning and growing. I'm going to tell all kinds of stories and tell them the way I think they need to be told.

A good story and good writing. Those are the keys. Those are what I want to focus on. As far as I'm concerned, everything else is secondary.

looking for evil wise readers

2006-08-06T17:12:00.000-05:00

You're probably here from Evil Editor's blog, right? Great, well sit down and let's talk for a moment.

Devoted readers of EE's blog (and what aspiring writer wouldn't be?) will quickly notice two things - one, that underneath EE's snide wit there's an editor that knows what he's doing, and two, that the same is not necessarily true of his "minions". Get your query or opening paragraphs posted and you'll find out that there's more than one editor at this house as your text is dissembled atom by atom by these busy little worker bees. Unfortunately, few to none of them are professional editors and their "advice" is as haphazard as it is destructive.

During the critique of a recent submission I was told, for example, that I should shy away from passive voice when there was no passive voice anywhere in my150 words. My use of possessives and capitalization were corrected - incorrectly. I was told I needed to hit the library to research horses - based on a throwaway line about one being scared of arrows. And I was informed in no uncertain terms that I Could Not Use certain styles and tenses.

This is not "critiquing" so much as it is buzzards circling the carcass. Do you know what I really wanted to hear? Well, yes, OMG that was awesome I want more more MORE! would be very nice, but more realistically a simple "That was interesting, I'd keep reading" or "That confused me" or "It didn't get my attention" would be helpful and informative.

If you've never read Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy you really should, whether or not you intend to do so, if only to read what Card has to say about a "wise reader". Card recommends that every writer have a Wise Reader. For one thing, they're much easier to come by than editors, professional, evil or otherwise. For another, they're much more likely to be able to see the big picture of your story.

What is a Wise Reader? Just someone who likes to read and knows what s/he does or doesn't like. What you want from your Wise Reader is not a backstop check on your punctuation or a second opinion on your stylistic choices. Per Card:

For this job, it's better if your Wise Reader is not trained in literature -- he'll be less likely to try to give you diagnoses ("The characterization was thin") or, heaven help us, prescriptions ("You need to cut out all this description"). The Wise Reader doesn't imagine for a moment that he can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it.

Someday, if you are very lucky and your story is very interesting, you will have an editor who will give your manuscript the grammatical spit and polish it needs to shine. But to get to that point what you need, first and foremost, is interesting and readable prose. A Wise Reader can tell you if you have that. They can't tell you why, they can't tell you how, but they can point you in the right direction, and you the other stuff you can figure work out yourself. Editors do detail work - Wise Readers see the view at 20,000 ft.

Anyone who likes to read is qualified to be a Wise Reader. All it takes is knowing what you like, knowing when you're lost or bored, and being willing to say so. On the other hand, very few people are qualified to be editors.

Evil or otherwise.