August 2009 Archives

Ohhh got the slow mooblies today, proper. Think I'll set a spell in the dark and hot room and learn some new chords. Or neurosurgery. Either one is good.

I used to smoke these hanging out in the Grotto. They stopped making them in 1982, after a slew of lawsuits and that unpleasant business with Malcolm McDowell on the set of Blue Thunder. Malcolm lives just up the road, now. Nice fellow.

That's not me in the ad, by the way. I just did the copy.

Blog of Nathan Bransford - Literary Agent. (The opening credits to his television show have awesome music that reminds me of The Bishop!)

This is one of the most excellent things about Tha IntarWebs: expertise, freely given by industry professionals. Have a look.

1. I have a small number of memories that are false. Nothing sinister (nothing too sinister), just things that I now know are impossibilities but which were held to be truths by a much younger me. My grandfather could not, in fact, make a stuffed dog appear in the middle of the floor. However, at one later point I was so persistent in trying to get him to "do it again," that he went up to the attic, got the stuffed dog, and tried to smuggle it into the rec room by hiding it up the back of his sweater. I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't just do the magic.
   
   
2. Via the Dumpster TV, my warranty-serviced Xbox is playing the premier episode of a comedy series made for British television that first aired on October 5, 1969. Almost 40 years ago a small group of stoned people in an intricately wallpapered British flat watched a Pepperpot proudly declare, "I can't tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and this dead crab!" They were inexplicably well-off mod types with fabulous boots and wonderful trousers, and they watched a television designed by Zarach of London. Mounted on a chrome pedestal shaped like the bell of an inverted tuba, it was a sphere made from smoky transparent plastic that displayed the electronic guts of the 14-inch color Sony Trinitron set within.
   
   
3. Almost 40 years from then, an ocean and a continent away from Great Britain, I watch the same thing on a 40-inch, transistor-powered plasma television. I can't see inside it. But it's six inches think. Also? My cellphone flips open like a Star Trek communicator (the proper communicator).
   
   
4. Sitting in my room here, with the low and unseen sun throwing its painterly mountain light against the unflowered jacaranda lining the street outside my window, I mimic an aural and visual background element of swinging London.
   
   
5. Therefore, I ought to be able to step outside my apartment and onto Carnaby Street wearing well-heeled boots and draped with paisley, then stroll past Timothy Whites and Take Six, looking above the shops for the telltale flicker of a spherical television through a window curtained with sheer batik.
   
   
6. This, however, does not happen.
   

Right here. And be sure to stop by the front page to get at all the other goodies inside.

This is another first-person bit. That's not all I write, but that's what's been getting accepted. Still, I think I need to put some more effort into my non-first-person, cyborg-monkey type stuff, just to break the monotony.

---

¹What is the proper nomenclature for that, anyway? You get published "in" a magazine. Stuff gets posted "to" or "on" a website. Sometimes "over at" works as well ("read it over at endlesswharrgarrbl.com"). "'Hypothesis' is all up in tha Thieves Jargon code and whatnot." That'll work.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, that's who.

"Perhaps you know that lady." Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

"She's lovely," said Daisy.

"The man bending over her is her director."

Gorgeous. Scarcely. Human. Orchid. Four words, so loaded with sensual freight that I had to pause there for a brief moment and unpack just the large, obvious portions of it.

The family Orchidaceae is the largest family of flowering plants, but you know immediately that she's not some perennial epiphyte clinging to a bush in a jungle somewhere. No, she's an exotic cultivar, hand-selected, so carefully tended that she couldn't exist outside of the humid, glass-walled enclosure of the studio. Her director-horticulturalist leans over her, reinforcing the image of care. For me, "scarcely human" and "ghostly" work together to conjure a willowy Jazz-age vision, wreathed with beads, a white face framed by a razor-black bob. One of the most exotic orchids, the birdlike kind with strange, luminescent tendrils that trail down across the pot's soil.

There's another one, later on:

"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?"

My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart.

It's that last phrase that gets me. So much packed into that image, and it's just a throwaway portrait of a flitting character: off-duty, at night, asleep, perhaps snoring, with whomever he loves curled up against him...but who cares? It's hot.

I was discussing the recent realization of my profound literary ignorance, and my determination to remedy it, with a jazz writer friend of mine. She said something to the effect that I was seeking something "to model my writing on." There's nothing here to imitate--the attempt would be foolish. For me the lesson is about the density and rich possibilities of language, of what might be accomplished, if only I can pay enough attention and persevere.

That's not to say I think I can write as well as Fitzgerald. The idea is to absorb what he's done, to set a standard that improves my work more by the mere fact of its existence than the possibility of ever meeting it.

Onward, onward, onward.

Newly-anointed Thieves Jargon editor-in-chief Dan Scannell (whom I've mentioned here before) is going to post my story, "Hypothesis," in the upcoming issue. The title is his suggestion. The piece arrived in his inbox with a similar one-word title that wasn't quite right, and when he offered his own it was one of those Yes, of course words that it seems odd to have missed as a possibility.

This is a happy-making thing for me. Thieves Jargon published a lot of Spencer Dew's work (whom I've also mentioned here before), and I'm glad to be under the same banner.

It's also a happy-making thing because I was in need of a boost to arc me up for awhile until the egomentum runs out again, which will hopefully occur immediately prior to my next story acceptance and being showered with bales of cash and sparkly things.

W00t, I say. W00t.

"Where I Write."

My space sucks now. Must convert entire apartment over to writing space suitable for fabulous photos.

And find someone who thinks they should take fabulous photos of me. In my awesome space.

Universe is closing.

I had hoped to send them something about a cyborg monkey. Or at the very least post it in the Universe Slush conference.

On the other hand, I did decide awhile ago that genre fiction wasn't going to be my thing. Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with genre fiction (I do spend a lot of time there, after all), it was just a realization that I wasn't going to be a "Science Fiction Writer."

Still. Sigh. Markets dropping like...like...dead things falling from the sky. Or something. (Gonna be famous, me.)

It's illegal now. Better go pick it up before they burn it. In "The New Book Banning," Walter Olson writes:

It's hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children's products, the federal government has now advised that children's books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing--at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Read the whole thing. And if you want to learn about what else is now illegal, read more here. Hint: no more tacky sparkly shirts for you.

While attending a conference a couple of years ago, I read what was then the first or second draft of a short story I have yet to place. After 750 words or so, the person leading the encounter group (can't really call it a workshop) stopped me and asked, "What is this story about?"

That flustered me. Not because I didn't know what it was about, but because I knew exactly where she was coming from: there was no punch-bang in the face within the first paragraph, that rip-roaring whatever-it-is that's supposed to be the key to getting out of the slush pile and onto the editor's or agent's desk. She'd already talked about it in the prior session, and I kept hearing the same thing elsewhere during the conference--from would-be writers, from published authors of varying quality, from agents.

Trouble was, I though that was a bunch of crap. Still do. Dan Simmons says it better than I can, and with much more authority:

Instructors at these workshops - and even some editors and agents who should know better - talk about things such as "elevator pitches" and "the power of the pitch," while barely published writers just at the beginning of their writing careers, (and who knows if they'll even have a career,) sagely counsel beginners just one step below them that to be published one must have a killer narrative hook and dynamite non-stop-action for the first few pages. The idea is to hook the reader or agent in immediately by slam-bang action, they explain, or your book will go unread.

Well, I understand how some weary - or putridly lazy - agents or slushpile readers might counsel such nonsense to beginners. What they're really saying is "put everything you have on the first page, preferably in the first two paragraphs, to show you're commercially viable because I'm too jaded and lazy to read your whole book." That's hardly a description of narrative power.

Think of all the great and rewarding books from A Portrait of a Lady to In Search of Lost Time to The Grapes of Wrath to Light in August to Joyce's Ulysses that would go unread and unpurchased if this idiot definition of "everything up front and fast" were the real definition of narrative power.

Nor is the Da Vinci Code narrative style of breathless rushing to and fro without allowing time for one's characters to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom what I mean by narrative power. If there's a phrase for that, it might be "bestselleroid attention deficit disordered hyperactivity."

If you've only got time for either what I've written here or the rest of what he wrote, but not both, go read what he wrote.

Now, there's a certain compression that's a consequence of the short story form that demands a bit more, sooner. I've since rearranged that story to bring some more intriguing language and a better setup into the first 250 words or so (it's still not right, and it's still not published). But at the conference I was hearing the same thing about short stories and novels, and the focus was always the same: sell. Get an agent. Get published!

It took me awhile to figure out that getting published! was not my primary goal, and I knew it going in to the conference. It took me longer to figure out that "improving [writers'] craft, primarily through workshops that focus on the reading and critiquing of each writer's work" often means how to get published! Or how to get an agent! And longer still to decide that I don't really have time to attend conferences where the only barrier to entry is the ability to pay the conference fee. Figuring out how to sell it before I've figured out how to write it is pointless

The other thing I've realized is that I've got my sights set too low. I've read the work of a lot of successful authors. But do I want to go a few rounds with Stephen King, or do I want to go a few rounds with Dostoevsky, as Hemingway did?

Not that I'll ever approach any of the three. But: it's either about the craft, or it's about getting into print. It's demonstrably possible to accomplish the latter without much engagement with the former. And I don't want to accomplish that.

This idea led, in turn, to the happy realization that I have a lot of ignorance to remedy: not enough time spent with the masters, too much time spent relying on whatever natural talent I've got with the arrogant assumption that it will all somehow fall into place if I just read what's out there now, what sits in the front bays at Barnes and Noble or gets shuffled around in the shell game that is the New York Times Bestseller List. Not so. Not so at all.

Amazon's a wonderful thing: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Flaubert, and Faulkner are on their way to me. I can't write without reading these and others and accomplish what I want to accomplish, which is to aim towards greatness. That's not to say that I'll achieve it. It's about the striving, and I know damn well that falling short of greatness is much better than falling short of the lesser-thans. It's time I stopped behaving as though I'm owed something that I haven't worked for.