March 2009 Archives

Mary Robinette Kowal has snagged a Hugo nomination for her short story, Evil Robot Monkey.

Great. Just great.

You remember the first draft of that story I was so happy about finishing? The one I mentioned here, here, here, and here?

It's got a monkey in it.

A bioengineered, nanotechnologically-enhanced, talking monkey.

Way back in 1994, I was working on a little book about a freelance journalist with a camera in her eyeball, who sold snippets of newsworthy footage on an open online market sort of like a stock exchange. In late 2008, filmmaker Rob Spence set about having an actual camera implanted in his actual eyeball. Which, on the one hand, suggests to my apparently delicate ego that I was 14 years ahead of my time (not that it's the most original idea in the cosmos, but you get what I mean). On the other hand, it makes it less likely that I'll ever revisit and finish that story, because it's "been done."

So you can understand why I'm a bit deflated at the moment, and somewhat less than sanguine about finishing my robot monkey story and sending it anywhere.

Of course, they're not the same story at all, even though they both deal with the issues surrounding artificially created non-human intelligence. Hers is better: subtle! Mine's got guns and riots and schizoaffective poets in it.

Go read Evil Robot Monkey here, it's not long.

Each person has some one addiction,
my addiction is to writing:
All worldly attachments have melted away,
I am left with this sole affliction.
Whenever I chance on a lovely scene,
or face some dear friend or family,
I sing a poem out in a loud voice,
in a daze as if touched by some god.
Since I sojourned here by the River,
I spend half my time in the hills.
There are times when a new poem is finished,
and I go alone up the east cliff road,
I lean against the scarps of white stone,
with my hand I pull the green cassia.
Mad chanting alarms the wooded ravines,
birds and gibbons turn all eyes on me.
I'm afraid I'll be mocked by the times,
so I come to this place where no man is.

Bai Juyi,¹
Chanting Poems Alone in the Mountains
Translation: Stephen Owen

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¹This isn't the fellow I made up.

So far neither the odd little multiple-choice test that had something to do with religion, Armageddon, and medication nor the brief tale about nearly blowing up a vending machine has managed to entice the good folks at McSweeney's. It's like they're daring me. Watch out! I could just crack and obsess and send out a new Thing every time I get another one of those pleasant and brief rejection notes from Chris Monks. I'll keep at it until I'm in or told to fuck off (or maybe both: "Fine! We'll put this up. Now go away and leave us alone, always.")

I had something else to say, I really did, but you know the synapses have been stuffed with Pop Rocks and cumin for a couple of weeks now, and while that's entertaining to watch and tasty in a Hannibal Lecter Goes To A Rave kind of way, it isn't especially conducive¹ to the putting down of words one after another so that they'll makes sense to your average bloggish passerby.

What was it?

I think it might have something to do with the obscure Chinese poet I invented and his translator, who was recently killed in a blimp accident on Santa Barbara's East Beach...which might just be what's on my mind, rather than what I was thinking about telling you. But now I've gone and mentioned it, haven't I, so here it is as a subject all cartoon wide-eyed: please tell the people about me, I am ever so interesting as a topic, and I do try so hard. Very well, but don't blame me if they stop reading and kick you in the head on their way to Fark.

Now it's all built up. All I was going to say is that I acquired a monograph on The Late Tang period (Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century, doncha know) under the mistaken impression that a monograph was something that shouldn't be more than, say, 120 pages or so. But apparently there's no such restriction, as this tome is 570 pages. The only reason I got it was to do a bit of research and lend a certain flavor of realism to a send-up of an academic paper that's probably going to be 1,500 words at most, and now I have to read the whole thing, yes I do.

I can't decide if that's overkill or not.

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¹Movable Type's spell checker wants me to know that "bloggish" is misspelled, but did not catch "condusive," thus forcing me to look it up myself. I am irritated and wish to speak to the manager.

wack·y (wk) also whack·y (hwk, wk)

adj. wack·i·er, wack·i·est Slang

1. Eccentric or irrational: a wacky person.

2. Crazy; silly: a wacky outfit.

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[Variant of whacky, probably from the phrase out of whack; see whack.]

---

wacki·ly adv.

wacki·ness n.

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¹I intend to work "wabble" into conversation as soon as possible.

²I have provided three definitions of "wacky," and in the best Savagian tradition, I have rejected them in favor of my own.

³Which is not to say that wackiness cannot be obtained while playing Resident Evil 5. However, the chances of it being the kind of wacky that involves random strangers crashing through your front door with guns, a suitcase of methamphetamine, and really clever dialogue, who then mistake you for someone else, force you into an El Camino at gunpoint, and take you on a 48-hour road trip through a bizarre series of scenes involving memorable fringe members of West Coast society to the accompaniment of a hip indie soundtrack, are greatly increased. All of which is, in fact, quite inspirational as far as wackiness qua wackiness goes, but the point is that you didn't really have anything to do with it, did you? You were just sitting on your couch being fat and playing video games and the wackiness found you by pure happenstance. It's not like you deserved the wackiness. You just lucked into it. You bastard.

0 for 2! Zing! Swing and a miss! Ah well.Good response time, though. Rejections from Eyeshot and McSweeney's in four days. This presents an opportunity for churn. Speaking of which (or not, but it's a transition innit) check out Darby Larson's Mel on Eyeshot, which has stuck with me for the past several days.

I don't have anything else for Eyeshot at the moment. I was rather hoping for one of Lee Klein's more legendary rejections ("Hi - thanks for sending this. I'm a big fan of breasts, of course -- who isn't? For the first part of this I was into it. I really liked the bit about raw cabbage...") but the brief and apologetic "readable, visual, and good-natured" will do. I did have a forehead-smacking I coulda submitted my Chinese poetry bit! moment about McSweeney's, so I'll go ahead and send that off to them. It's got that real world off-kilter veneer they're fond of: a fake thing pretending to be a real thing, like Dave Frye's From My Unfinished Dissertation on Breakfast Cereals.

It's heartening to realize that I've got a small stock of pieces that are actually worth buffing on my sleeve and sending off. So, in the absence of new words, I'll press-gang the old ones into service.

Come in with Krup or else. A Krup takeover of the crew and the ship, or so it seemed. He changed the name of the ship from The Enterprise to The Billy Celeste, after a nineteenth-century English man-of-war. Now all Krup had to worry about were his own men, who had used him to get rid of the old C.O., and the old navy with its loathsome pinups and pro stations.

But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We'd seen this character operate, how smoothly he'd hoaxed us into his hanging universe...Tamaghis...the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have deactivated Sirens just to give you the sex trill.

The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-knot ties.

"Might pop myself a month's pay tonight."

"More likely you'll swing the other way."

The having-handed kidding--it's all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise--he's from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror...

"Look at the dong on that kid," says the boy from East Texas.

The kraut kids hardly ever go ashore, because they like to save money. Off duty they loll around in their bunks jacking off and making airplane noises.

William S. Burroughs
Cities of the Red Night

All the good writing I've done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room.

Ron Carlson,

interviewed by Susan McInnis

For me, that thing that writers call writer's block, that's part of writing; I don't think one ought to be writing all the time. You have a dry spot and that's very productive, as productive as the actual writing itself. It's like sowing seeds or something, and it's a while before things sprout, and the ground is bare. It's all barren. I think you need a bare time when you just read and think and walk around, and are even depressed and insane about it, but I consider all that time of not writing a part of writing.

Jamaica Kincaid,
interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies
[Read Dwight Garner's entirely different interview
with Jamaica Kincaid here]

I like the bit about "depressed and insane about it." I could really do with somewhat less of that, but it's somewhat comforting to be able to rationalize it as All Part Of The Process.

Then again, you have to, don't you? Otherwise it's more of a You're A Lunatic Who Should Just Take His Official Medication And Keep Quiet kind of situation. So this particular rationalization, like most rationalizations, is self-serving, something to keep you in the game when you'd really rather be off in a corner somewhere eating the roach you've found.

But as usual I overstate and dramatize. I've had several large portions of Real Life thrust my way over the past two or three weeks, the sort of thing I used to write about when I had a blog that was about nothing in particular, but which I resolved to leave off the pages here. The experiment here has to do with focus. So the Real Life stuff gets mentioned only insofar as it impacts the writing stuff, and that's the end of it.

Searching about for something to make me feel somewhat productive I tweaked and then sent off two pieces, one each to McSweeney's and Eyeshot. I've got no great hopes for either of them, which is a mixture of realism and that strange thing that happens to most writers I know, where all sense of perspective vanishes along with the ability to say "Yes, this is done." At some point I'd like to figure out how to get a better handle on the doneness of a thing. I suppose that comes with practice and experience, or death.

I'm also messing about with a miserable-looking shoot that's sprouted from one of the seeds Jamaica Kincaid talked about. It's a random thing that I scribbled some time in 2002, and now I'm trying to turn it into a more formal short story thing. It's a little shy of 2,500 words right now and I just...don't...care about it. In it, weird things happen to strange people. The writing's competent enough. If I'd written it ten or fifteen years ago I'd've sent it off and it probably would've eventually found a home with an editor who published stories of under 3,000 words in which weird things happen to weird people, written by writers who can make their verbs and subjects agree more often than not.

For whatever reason, that's not enough for me these days, so the challenge is figuring out how to make anyone, including me, give a shit about the weird people to whom weird things are happening .

That's harder to do if you're in one of those barren, depressed and insane periods, however long or brief it is. So I came here to write about that instead of working on redeeming the tale of Blunderbuss Halagala and Doctor Voodoo.

Don't you feel fortunate?

Anon!

Via Sullivan, who got it from Kottke:

I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline - trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you've nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you're in the zone, spinning words like plates, there's a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment...

Hari Kunzru

Read what eight other writers have to say: "Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?"

Mr. Ellis says:

Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant sf novel RED MARS is now available as a free PDF download from its US publisher.  Direct link to PDF, and their Free Library page listing it and other available free downloads.  Be warned: RED MARS is first of a trilogy, and there's a good chance you'll find yourself craving the others (GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS).

They've also got Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts: Return Engagements. It's part of a series, and like the man said, you'll probably want more. Which is exactly the point! It's called the "Suvudu Free First Book Library," so they are, with the malice aforethought typical of heroin dealers and purveyors of fine chocolate, giving you your first one free.

The nominations for the 2009 Hugo awards closed on February 28. This year's eventual winners will be announced at WorldCon in August.

If you're looking for something to read, check out last year's Best Short Story winner: "Tideline" by Elizabeth Bear.

If you're looking for even more things to read, here are the other Best Short Story nominees from 2008:

• "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter

• "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?" by Ken MacLeod

• "Distant Replay" by Mike Resnick

• "A Small Room in Koboldtown" by Michael Swanwick

Back in Junior High I discovered that the school library had volumes of Hugo Award-winning short stories going back to the 50s, and I tore through them all in a matter of weeks, spending my free periods tucked away on the upper level next to the shelf that held them.

It's always good to read the nominees and winners, both for the tales themselves, and because I often learn how much Suck I still have left to excise, or (more rarely) get encouraged with a bit of "almost there!"

Chosen by flipping open my 1988 Penguin Classics paperback edition of The Annals of Imperial Rome and typing the first thing I saw:

The-fig-tree called "Ruminalis," in the Place of Assembly, which 830 years earlier had sheltered the babies Romulus and Remus, suffered in this year. Its shoots died and its trunk withered. This was regarded as a portent. However, it revived, with fresh shoots.

And there you have it.

"Oh, there are plenty of people," the Duc used to observe, "who never misbehave save when passion stirs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way that there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before."

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
The 120 Days of Sodom