Weirdwriter

Firmin by Sam Savage

2007-04-26T11:04:00.000-04:00

"Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn't come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way, shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page -- the next shelf, stack, or box --and that was part of the pleasure of it."

I just finished reading "Firmin," from which this passage was taken.

I first heard about the book thanks to the Lit-Blog Co-op (you can read what they have to say about it here.) I read a couple of the posts about the book and went on to other things. It was only a few weeks ago, when I saw the book at Barnes & Noble in the staff recommendations with a 10% discount sticker on it that I thought: well this might be worth a try.

The book is the story of a rat, Firmin, born in the basement of a used book store in Boston's Scollay Square. The square is only a short time from being bulldozed and covered in concrete. In the short time he has, Firmin discovers books and writes his own in his head (he can't speak or write, so this is the only way he can do it.) He desperately wants to reach out to humans, he wants to communicate. His efforts to cross that gap make up the majority of the book.

The story is all about the love of books and how it can both make one feel more in touch with the world while, at the same time, increasing one's alienation.

I knew I would love the book when I got to the paragraph above. It reflects some of my same feelings about used books stores. (I imagine it's a pretty common feeling among book lovers.)

This was Sam Savage's first novel. He's got to be in his late 40s, at least, which makes me selfishly happy. You can hear an interview with Savage from The Bat Segundo Show. He sounds like an interesting man. You can also check out his Web site, The Old Rat, which includes some poetry and other writings.

Two movies born from Japan

2007-04-26T10:17:00.000-04:00

Trailer for the film All Gods Children Can Dance. It's based on a Haruki Murakami story from "After the Quake."

Trailer for "Paprika," the new anime by Satoshi Kon. Kon is the creator of "Millenium Actress," "Tokyo Godfathers" and the TV anime "Paranoia Agent." From the trailer I have no idea what is going on, but after his other films I have all confidence that it will be worth seeing.

Faust on writing or "Does this novel make me look fat?"

2007-03-30T12:11:00.000-04:00

Back in the comments on an earlier post, I asked Joe Clifford Faust whether he started out writing shorter works or novels when he was getting started writing. He turned this into an interesting blog post and I promptly forgot to mention it here. So I'm correcting that now. Check out Faust's post called Size Matters. He talks not only about his start in writing, but also the advantages and disadvantages to the different sizes of story. Here's a quote:

I know this belies all of our notions of bigger is better, but bigger is also harder, but that's the way it works with writing. Bigger is easier because the smaller you get, the more important each word becomes. It has to bear a greater weight, a greater burden, and must be sufficiently powerful to contribute in the most efficient way possible.

Therefore, at one end of the spectrum you have the novel, which allows you to stretch out with words, with story, with subplots and characters and place and theme. It's a leisurely walk in the park. Wordwise, then, a novel is easier to write than a play, which is easier than a short story, which is easier than poetry, which I suppose is easier to write than something like a tombstone epitaph. And note that by the time you get down to writing poems, you're the watchmaker, sweating over every word with a pair of tweezers and a jeweler's loupe, praying that what you're assembling will keep time and have the desired impact.

As for me, I'm still trying to work on short stories, though maybe I should go back and read my three Nanowrimo "novels" and see if there's anything salvageable from any of them. I'm thinking probably not, but it never hurts to look.

The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux

2007-03-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

I hadn't heard of Louis Theroux when I was sent this book. Subtitled "Travels in American Subcultures," the book is actually a followup to Theroux's work on documentaries and TV series like "Louis' Weird Weekends" and "When Louis Met..." I've since found a few things on YouTube. Theroux is charismatic and funny. In his shows, he seems to let the people he meets just be their odd selves without trying to force funny into the situation.

And apparently, Theroux likes a lot of the people he meets. That is the inspiration behind the book. He decides to take a "Reunion Tour" of people he met on his documentaries. He travels around the country trying to find the people he once talked to and see where they are now. He looks for Thor Templar, the UFO believer who claims he's killed 20 aliens. He looks for porn star J.J. Michaels. He talks to Ike Turner and pimp/rapper Mello T.

In many cases, these people have moved on. J.J. Michaels is working for Boeing and no longer does movies, though he still keeps a box of his films in the basement and says he'd like to do it again. Thor Templar has changed his name, dropped UFO business and is now selling items for "technoshamans." Theroux reunites with an Aryan Nations member he had bonded with over "Are You Being Served." The racist had been kicked out of the club for some obscure reasons. He meets with a former prostitute who's now found god, but still considers going back to the business.

In all his stories, there seems to be a theme of fantasy meeting reality. People seek out a fantasy, or follow the fantasies in their head, and later find out that the world is not always accepting or tolerant of their views. Many of these people find their worldviews don't hold up to the test, yet they blithely continue believing.

In the foreword to the American edition, Theroux says his aim is different from those authors who seek to follow, in Garrison Keillor's words, "the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists." He hopes to go more in depth, to see how people's lives turned out. I'm afraid he didn't entirely succeed. The book still seems like a tourist's view of typical American crazies and loudmouths. But what does save it is Theroux's actual interest in these people. He might think they are funny or crazy, but from his words you can see that he actually feels for them. He wants them to do well, to make a little corner of the world for themselves.

The book is a charming travelogue of unusual people encountering a more bland world. It doesn't offer profound insights, but it does offer a good time.

Houdini's greatest escape!

2007-03-23T12:09:00.000-04:00

The only proper way this news event should end is with an empty casket.

And just to make this worthwhile, this page has pictures of Houdini's water torture chamber, the one everyone thinks he died in.

A great film about fungus

2007-03-22T12:29:00.000-04:00

ScifiJapan takes a close look at Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People). As they point out, the film can be looked at as an allegory for drugs or capitalism, but it's much more than that. It's a good movie that cares about its characters, even though most of them are unlikeable, and makes the situation feel real, despite the rubber mushroom suits.

It's one of my favorite movies. With this film and Gojira, one can see that Ishiro Honda is a great, and criminally underrated, director.

Also at the link is the full text of William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night," which was the inspiration for the film. I would also recommend picking up the Matango DVD, which has some great extras including a story read by the screenwriter.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

2007-03-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

I wish I hadn't waited so long to read this book. Professor Hex pointed it out to me way back in April of last year. Just from the description alone it has all kinds of things I like: pulp writers, Chinatown, rip-roaring adventure and fun. Now that I've read it, I can say it lives up to the hype.

The book concerns a moment during the pulp era -- the late 1930s, I believe -- when Walter Gibson had shown the Shadow not to be Lamont Cranston, when Lester Dent and his wife were desperately trying to have a child, when L. Ron Hubbard was head of a New York pulp writer's association, when H.P. Lovecraft was on his deathbed and when Chester Himes, Louis L'Amour and Robert Heinlein were working odd jobs and travelling the country. Slowly, all these pulp writers, and many more, are brought together to face the peril of the title.

I think I love pulp writers as much as I do their characters and stories. I've read a biography of Dent, a collection of essays on the "Pulp Masters," and Gruber's "The Pulp Jungle." It's all exciting stuff. From reading all these stories and essays (as well as other reading from the time), I think I have a pretty good sense of the era and the characters involved. And Paul Malmont let me feel like I was right there in it. I could smell the cigarette smoke and taste the beer at the White Horse Tavern as Emile Tepperman and E.E. "Doc" Smith talked in one corner and Hubbard harangued Gibson for advice. He hits the spots that are legendary in pulp history: the Automat, the Street & Smith offices, Astounding magazine and John Campbell.

In capturing the time period, the book reminded me of Jeffrey Ford's "The Girl in The Glass," which is set in in the 1930s, though it is mainly focused on Long Island. It also reminded me of the pulps themselves, especially in the later "episodes" when Dent and Gibson subtly take on the characteristics of their famed characters, the Shadow and Doc Savage.

And it's not just the feel of the era. Malmont uses history throughout the story both as background for the events and as plot points. The beginnings of the Japanese invasion of China affect both the story and Chinatown. A huge unity parade plays an integral role, and though I haven't looked it up, I'm sure that parade happened almost exactly as Malmont describes it.

I can't wait to see what Malmont does in the future. For now, I think I'll go read some Doc Savage.

Black Gate and Sword-and-Sorcery

2007-03-20T08:45:00.000-04:00

Black Gate magazine now has a blog and Howard Andrew Jones opens it up with a post on Sword-and-Sorcery. Of course, the genre interests me. I wrote up an entry about it at Encyclopedia Fantastica recently. In that entry I said:

Too often, the term Sword and Sorcery is used to describe epic or high fantasy,
those stories more influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien's work. Sword and Sorcery's root
texts are the work of Robert E. Howard, especially those stories about the
characters Conan and Kull. (In fact, some consider the Kull story "The Shadow
Kingdoms" as the first example of true Sword and Sorcery.) Unlike Tolkien's
work, Howard's stories are tied to single characters and rarely feature a
clear-cut morality. In fact, Conan's tales stem from Howard's belief that
barbarism will triumph over civilization, which is inherently decadent. Conan,
himself, often does things that are less than heroic (see The Tao of Conan for
more details on that.)
It could be argued that the gray morality of much
Sword and Sorcery is a defining feature of the subgenre. It also puts the lie to
the phrase "heroic fantasy," often used as a synonym for Sword and Sorcery.

Jones offers a different view on how S&S differs from epic fantasy. He puts it down to pace. He sees epic fantasy as fantastical travelogues, while S&S is more about a "somber, headlong drive."
It's an interesting take and I think pace is certainly among the defining characteristics of S&S. I think, however, it's only one aspect of what makes up S&S. But Jones isn't advocating a one-note genre either. His whole post -- which also talks about the influence of role-playing games and offers some recommendations of S&S authors -- is a thoughtful take on the genre. I'm looking forward to what else he has to say. (Jones has also had a few things to say in the past at swordandsorcery.org, where he used to be editor.)

A new Weird Tales

2007-03-14T13:09:00.000-04:00

Weird Tales is getting a redesign and has a new editor. They're making an effort to buy fiction more on the cutting edge, more truly weird stuff. They want to be in the spirit of the original magazine, not a rehash. To get people to try it out, they making a special subscription offer of 6 issues for $12.

I've had a subscription to "The Unique Magazine" for several years now. I've enjoyed it, but I can't say any of the criticisms of it are wrong. Its pages have been filled with stories meant to duplicate the original magazine rather than follow its spirit. Even its covers were most often reprints of pulp covers. There's nothing wrong with this, necessarily. They often got some good stories and in some cases managed to get more surreal writers like Thomas Ligotti. But it wasn't the first magazine I looked to if I wanted to find something truly "unique." I'd be more likely to look online or read the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I've never read the Silver Web, the magazine the new editor, Ann Vandermeer, published. From what I know of it, it focused on horrific and surreal stories. Should be interesting to see how that outlook translates to Weird Tales. I'm already interested in some of the stories in this next issue, stuff by Caitlin Kiernan, Richard Parks, and apparently seven new writers. I can't wait to get the new issue and see where it leads.

Escape from Remakes

2007-03-13T12:02:00.000-04:00

Why in the hell does anyone need to remake Escape from New York? (Link found at Gamera_Spinning) The movie still works great on DVD, it has a sequel made, what?, 10 years ago. For god sakes, Kurt Russell could still play Snake Plissken if they wanted to make a third one. Just check out the clips from Grindhouse and tell me it's not true. When will Hollywood give up all these remakes? Original ideas are good, use them!

Encyclopedia Fantastica and Sword and Sorcery

2007-03-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

Paul Jessup has started a new wiki, Encyclopedia Fantastica. Here's what he says about it on the homepage:

A literary resource for Fantastic Literature in all its guises. This wiki-based Encyclopedia is meant to create discussion and arguments of intellectual merit within the fantasy community. Inside you will see ideas explode, terms implode, and criticisms argued and debated.

The purpose is debate and knowledge. Consider this a community resource, a scholarly adventure.

Inspired, I went over and created an entry on Sword and Sorcery. I've been reading a lot of S&S lately and thinking about what makes it work. I'm sure I've written something in there that will make me groan later, but I'm hoping it can get some people talking about the genre and thinking about what makes it work. I'd love to see a revival of S&S that created more interesting settings and characters.

Gruesome legends read in my childhood

2007-03-07T12:29:00.000-05:00

I'm so excited. I think I've just found something from my childhood that I've been seeking for years. When I was in my early teens (maybe 13), I went to a Polish festival and picked up a book filled with the folk tales of Poland. I remembered they were a little gruesome, but fascinating. I have no idea what happened to the book over the years.

In one of my Google searches for this book, I finally think I've stumbled on one of the tales from it. In fact, I may have found the book. It's called "Legends of Poland: The Legend of Popiel and the Mice." The book is part of a series of "Legends of Poland." The art looks somewhat similar to my memories and the tale was definitely one I read. I remember the book being a collection of stories, but it's quite possible my memories are faulty and it was a series of books instead.

The story is about King Popiel, a Polish king who is incompetent. His own family tries to have him killed. Afterward, Popiel is convinced by his German wife to kill his uncles and dump their bodies in a lake. It was done, but the people revolted and Popiel and his wife escaped to their tower on a lake. But Popiel couldn't escape. Rats and mice rose up from the lake and ate through the tower to devour the royal couple.

You can find out about the legend at the Wikipedia entry. Here's a Czeslaw Milosz poem called "King Popiel." There's a film from Poland called "When the Sun Was God" that features Popiel as a main character.

Apparently, there is an old ruin in Poland that is called the Mouse Tower and is supposed to be the very tower Popiel was killed in (though historians doubt it.) For more on that structure see The World According to Google and here's a Polish flicker photo of the tower.

During my searches I found this other tale of a Mouse Tower. This time it's a Bishop Hatto on the Rhine who is devoured by rats and mice. Here's the horrible climax to this version:

They were in at last, and sprang at him fiercely.... He beat them off by the score; he trampled them under his feet; he tore at them savagely with his hands–all to no purpose; he might just as well have tried to beat back the ocean. The rats surged against him like waves breaking on a cliff, and very soon the Bishop was overwhelmed in the horrid flood. Little was left to tell of the tragedy when his servants plucked up courage to enter the building some days later.

Here's a Wikipedia entry on that version of the legend.

I tell you, I love this stuff. Half-remembered things from childhood lead down interesting pathways.

Enter the Groovy Age

2007-03-02T14:06:00.000-05:00

The Groovy Age of Horror is a fun blog I found a while back and have been enjoying immensely ever since. Curt is reading through tons of trashy paperbacks from the late '60s and early '70s that are helping him create his own aesthetic. He's using that knowledge to write a novel (potentially a series of novels in the best trashy paperback tradition) and has blogged a draft of it at Night Falls on a Fairy Tale.

Anyway, this week Curt started his first contest. He wants people to write a Nazisploitation nanofiction. This sounded like a ton of fun, so I submitted a story that has been posted as Entry 9. My little scene isn't nearly as lurid (or NSFW) as some of the entries, but I hope it's fun. It was to write! Give it a try. Curt's also looking for fan art entries. Chip in and do your best nasty, sleazy Nazi fiction (or art) for the Groovy Age.

Bigfoot vs. Steve Austin!

2007-03-01T15:20:00.000-05:00

No Fear of the Future has posted a YouTube video of the Six Million Dollar Man vs. Bigfoot! It's brilliant and everything I remembered from childhood. Sasquatch is a big hairy, fanged monster! Bigfoot pulls a tree out of the ground to fight Steve Austin! Steve pulls Bigfoot's arm off! And, while it's not explained in the video, Bigfoot is controlled by aliens! Go watch it, it's great!

Clueless reviewers, plus Girl in the Glass

2007-03-01T09:43:00.000-05:00

I'm rather astounded. This reviewer at 3AM magazine seems to believe that Jeff Lint was a real person. That's just hilarious. I mean, the cover of the book at the site says "Steve Aylett's newest novel" right on the cover. Even if it didn't, how would anyone believe half this stuff really happened? A series of books about a belly? Later rewritten as about jelly? A man who delivers all his manuscripts in a dress? I mean, yeah, I suppose they could happen. But you might think to question it if you kept getting so implausible no?

It got to a point where I thought the reviewer was playing her own metafictional game. Then she says: "The life and times of Lint are communicated, in a round about sort of way, and the book is educational and, in parts, mildly funny." Educational?

Lint is a good book, by the way. I laughed out loud through most of it, though I must admit it does get a little tiresome before the end. The chapters on Star Trek, comics and animation are all classics.

I found the link on Jeffrey Ford's blog. Which reminds me, the Nebula awards have been announced and Ford's "The Girl in the Glass" is among the novel nominees. Now, I love the book, absolutely, and I would like to see it win all the awards it can (it's already won an Edgar Award for best paperback original), however, doesn't it slip past the Nebula awards' reason for being? The rules state: "Works must be in either the Science Fiction or the Fantasy genres. The Nebula Awards® Report (NAR) Editor will decide the eligibility of a questionable work, subject to appeal to the SFWA Awards Rules Committee." I don't think you can really say this book is science fiction or fantasy. Well, maybe a little fantasy, if read in a certain light. But having said that, I love the book, it deserves awards and attention, so go "Girl in the Glass"!

Colossal squid! It's big.

2007-02-22T12:10:00.000-05:00

I haven't written about giant squid in a while, so here's a link to a newly caught colossal squid, which is apparently like a giant squid, just heavier. (via Boing Boing)

Nostalgia central

2007-02-22T10:46:00.000-05:00

Chris Roberson and I are having an interesting conversation in the comments here about TV shows and cartoons of the late '70s and early '80s. If you remember shows like Thundarr, Blackstar, Jason of Star Command, Isis and Greatest American Hero, please join in. In the meantime, here's a little inspiration:

Fantastic Voyage cartoon

2007-02-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

Here's the opening to one of my favorite cartoons I watched as a kid. I love the groovy music and oddball cast (Guru!) and I remember the show was very tense because their clock was always counting down.

My other favorite was "Journey to the Center of the Earth," but I can't find anything on YouTube about that.

Jason of Star Command

2007-02-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

Jason of Star Command is coming to DVD in May. This is kind of exciting, if a little weird. I watched the show religiously when I was really young. I used to wake up at ungodly hours of the morning on Saturday to see it. Now, I remember almost nothing about it. There were two little robots and there was some kind of rock-covered spaceship, or something. And there was a bad guy. That's about it.

So now, the show will become available again and I'm faced with a dilemma: Do I watch it again and risk losing my good feelings about the show? Anytime I see a show from my childhood that I've completely forgotten, I wonder if it will hold up to the pleasant memories I have for it. For instance, years ago I bought a VCR tape of "Battle of the Planets," an animated show I loved as a child. Even now, I can think of the show I thought I watched when I was a kid and how cool it was. There were superhero-type characters, an evil villain with secrets, and cool science fictiony vehicles, especially the Phoenix. But then I saw it. So much time was spent on an R2-D2 clone with tiny wings that narrated the whole show. And Casey Kasem's voice was all over it (not bad in itself, but it's hard to make a character come alive when it sounds just like that top 40 guy.) The animation was poor. And it was just generally horrible.

I don't expect Jason of Star Command to be very good. It's going to have poor TV special effects. It's not going to take many risks and it's sure to have a moral at the end of every episode. And I'm sure those two little robots I liked so much as a kid will be annoyingly cutesy.

But there's always a chance I will like it anyway. Like Land of the Lost. It's totally cheesy, but it still maintains charm. And its general weirdness keeps it entertaining. But it's got dinosaurs and sleestacks. I don't think Jason of Star Command has anything so cool (and no, James Doohan is not cool enough.)

So, maybe when May rolls around I'll try and rent the DVDs. Give it a chance and see what I was poisoning my mind with at 9 years old.

Now, if only someone would put out Thundarr on DVD. That's a show I would pick up without hesitation.

The Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson

2007-02-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

I was one of 20 lucky people to get advanced reader copies of this book, the first of a new series. Pettersson says the book belongs to the dark urban fantasy genre on her Web site. I didn't know much about that genre by name, but it seems to be linked with writers like Kim Harrison, Laurel Hamilton, Charlaine Harris and others (none of whom have I read or know much about). It's a blending of horror, fantasy and romance elements. "The Scent of Shadows" has a little of all of that, as well as mystery, but I don't think the book would be misplaced if you called it simply fantasy or horror.

The book is the story of Joanna Archer, a young heiress of a casino fortune living in Las Vegas. She has a past marred by extreme violence. The book begins with probably the worst blind date in history. From there, the book moves at a rapid pace, introducing the reader to Joanna's life and then quickly destroying it as Joanna finds out who she really is.

She's a superhero, of sorts. She belongs to a group known as the Zodiac that participates in a war between Light and Shadow. She falls in with the Light side, but in the process loses much that is important to her. (I'm trying to stay vague here, because there are plenty of plot twists and turns that I would rather not spoil.) The new life she is faced with, after the one she has known for 25 years is destroyed, is a great choice on Pettersson's part. Trapped in another lifestyle outside her own experience causes Joanna to know herself better, and the reader right along with her.

The book is at its best when navigating the twists and turns of the plot. Pettersson writes action scenes that could be transcribed directly into a movie with martial arts choreography by Yuen Wo Ping (though Joanna's fighting style of choice is Krav Maga). She keeps those scenes moving quickly without ever losing the reader.

But Pettersson also takes plenty of time to explore Joanna's psyche. In particular, she explores the nature of violence, how it changed Joanna's life and how Joanna has used it since. In fact, for a book about superheros who can't be hurt, the book delves deeply into the effects of violence. Almost every main character in the book has been traumatized by violence in their past, and each of them reacts in their own way.

Pettersson's prose is typical commercial fiction. It hits high points when Joanna unleashes her sharp tongue:

Ajax's reptilian features had rearranged themselves as I spoke, and he now looked like a glowering python. "Thanks for the psychoanalysis, babe," he spat, "but all I really wanted from this weekend were a couple of easy lays."
This, I assumed was where I was supposed to throw my wine in his face. I didn't, though. I like Chateau Le Pin, and took a long, considering slip of the vintage '82 I'd made him buy. "And what? Your mother wasn't available?"

The prose hits low points when Pettersson gives into cliches such as "the hunter becomes the hunted" and probably the most sappy two paragraphs I've read in a long long time:

I stared past him and outside the window, where dawn waited impatiently. "I guess that's how you knew to leave the door open for me."
"Oh, Jo-Jo," he said, sighing sleepily as he gathered me tight to his body. "It was never closed."

Those low points, though, are few and much of the time I was too caught up in the plot to care.

Despite this being the first part of a series (the second book "The Taste of Night" will be out in April), the book manages to come to a satisfying conclusion, while leaving many mysteries and plot threads waiting to be resolved in future books.

If you're looking for a smart, action-packed novel that's not afraid of emotion, you won't go wrong with "The Scent of Shadows."

New pulp reprints

2007-01-31T13:27:00.000-05:00

Has anyone seen these in stores, repackaged Shadow and Doc Savage novels by Nostalgia Ventures? (Link found at gamera_spinning) I've collected many of the old Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage novels and I have a couple of the Shadow reprint novels (although I've only read "The Romanoff Jewels"), but this is the first time in years that I think they have been in print. (I also have some The Spider reprints, but Nostalgia Ventures doesn't seem to be doing anything with that series.)

What's interesting about these reprints, according to the Web site, is that they include historical information by Anthony Tollin and Will Murray. I know Murray's name as both the writer of many of the Destroyer (Remo Williams!) novels and as a pulp expert. Apparently, Tollin and Murray have also written Doc Savage novels "in collaboration" with original writer Lester Dent. The reprints also have the original illustrations and covers. I'm sorely tempted to pick these up. They are apparently available at Barnes & Noble and Borders.

If all these names (Shadow, Doc Savage, Operator #5) are unknown or confusing to you, get educated at: PulpWiki, The Hero Pulps!, Wikipedia entry, and The Pulp Gallery. For more on The Destroyer see Sinanju.com. Here's more on the movie Remo Williams.

Most of my pulp reprint needs, though, are usually served by Adventure House and High Adventure magazine. That's how I collected almost the entire "Purple Invasion" stories from Operator #5.

Joe Gill, 1919-2006

2007-01-20T12:35:00.000-05:00

Joe Gill, writer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Charlton Comics died last month, Dec. 17, at his nursing home in Seymour, Conn.

Mark Evanier first reported Gill's death on his blog. The Connecticut Post did Saturday. Evanier's blog talks mostly about his career at Charlton, while the newspaper article gives more information about his life since retirement. I find it touching that the senior center will be mounting his pool cues. The Post had previously done an article on Gill's friendship with Mickey Spillane; unfortunately I can't find it now. Also, I highly recommend Charlton Spotlight's interview with Gill.

Loads of links and more

2007-01-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

Arrested Development's Michael Cera gives you his tips to success.

Chris Roberson points out that Avatar is coming to the screen. I've only seen a couple of episodes, but I share Roberson's worries.

Paul Jessup skips the manifesto and creates a subgenre.

Two interviews with Nick Mamatas: Bookslut and Disinformation

Iwao Takamoto has died. I had never heard of him until I read the Boing Boing post, but now I realize he's the creator behind some of the best cartoons of my childhood.

Professor Hex points out this wonderful eBay sale that includes thousands of pulp magazines. Just check out the gallery of images from the sale of Weird Tales, terrific stuff.

And to round out this linkfest, a meme from a while ago. I found it at Myth Happens.

"Listed below are the fifty most significant science fiction / fantasy novels, 1953—2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club: bold the ones you have read, italicize the ones you started but never finished, underline the ones you own but never started, strike out the ones you hated, and put an asterisk beside the ones you love. "

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson*
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury*
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe*
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison*
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (I assume this is for the whole trilogy, I only read the first book.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon*
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith*
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester*
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

In the case of some of these books, the line between liking and loving is very thin. It's interesting that I don't hate any of these books. Though I imagine I wouldn't like it today, "Sword of Shannara" was a pleasant reading experience for me in my early teen years. I'm also pleased to see that I've read the great majority (31) of these books. It gives me a few ideas for rereads later.

2007: My year of writing, no really

2007-01-03T13:08:00.000-05:00

So, about this time last year, I wrote this:

This year, I resolve to write, send out and see a story published. At least one, but hopefully more.

Well, I failed miserably. For the better part of the year, I wrote regularly and even finished one whole short story (and yes, I know that's pretty pathetic.) I did manage to send it out to a friend, who gave me some good advice on what was wrong with it. Shortly thereafter, I was inundated with wedding planning and real estate issues. I'm making no attempt to say those things should have stopped me, only that they did.

My other writing, blogging and journaling, was pretty miserable as well. I was strong blogging at the beginning of the year and faded away. By May, I had completely stopped. Journaling, on the other hand, I kept up regularly up until October. Even then, I'd find the occasional time to slip in a paragraph in a notebook here or there.

This year, I'm making a resolution again. It's not much different from last year, just more specific:

I resolve to write every day with an aim to creating good fiction.

The main difference here is the resolution is all focused on doing the work. Forget anything else until I'm writing regularly and getting better. Besides, I have no control over whether something will be published. I can only work on my own craft until I write things that are publishable.

Hello there, remember me?

2006-12-29T14:07:00.000-05:00

Any of you who still have me on your news aggregators and RSS feed readers, thank you. And thank you even more for those who haven't deleted this blog from your bookmarks. It's very easy for a blog to drop off the map when it hasn't had a serious update in more than six months. Thanks for sticking with me.

Anyway, I plan on coming back to blogging with the New Year. I'm now newly married with a new house. I still have many things to do around here, but it's about time I rededicated myself to writing (which has faltered badly in the last three months) and blogging will be part of that. I won't make any commitments to the amount of blogging I'll do -- I'd like to blog every day, but it seems like a little much right now. So this blog will probably be best read from a feed, where you won't get annoyed looking back every day to see if I've finally updated.

Well, to make this post worth something, here's a few links:

Jeffery Ford has posted a short story on his blog that I believe is previously unpublished.

A giant squid was captured alive and caught on film; unfortunately, it died soon after.

Movie trailers: Harry Potter, Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, Hot Fuzz, and The Host.

Check out Eddie Campbell's blog, well, just because he's good, but also becaues he discusses photo references and how they were used in making From Hell.

I would also like to highly recommend Chris Roberson's blog, he's got loads of good stuff. He's an interesting guy anyway: He's the author of Paragea and Here, There & Everywhere as well as the brains behind Monkeybrain Books.

What I read in 2006

2006-12-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

You can see all of the books I read this year and their publishing information at LibraryThing. But here is the basic list. I've put them in order of enjoyment, though I could easily change around the order of the books in the middle. The list doesn't include short stories unless I read an entire collection (which is unusual for me, I tend to dip in and out of anthologies.)

Fiction
The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vanitas by Jeffrey Ford
Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw
The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock
Lint by Steve Aylett
Homeland by Sam Lipsyte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Imaro by Charles Saunders
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer
The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene
She by H. Rider Haggard
The Shadow: The Romanoff Jewels by Maxwell Grant
Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
The Rising by Brian Keene
The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
Cowslip by Kirk Sigurdson

Graphic novels
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
Y: The Last Man, Volume 1 Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan
Barefoot Gen: The Day After by Keiji Nakazawa
The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal

Nonfiction
Sixpence House: Lost in a town of books by Paul Collins
Haiku Handbook by William Higginson
With Respect to the Japanese by John C. Condon

It's about 32 books. While this was a busy year, I thought I usually read more books than that. I'll track this year, as well, and see how many I read.

New review added

2006-09-01T15:00:00.000-04:00

I've just added a review of the new "Gojira" DVD coming out from Classic Media. Go over to my Giant Monster Blog and check it out.

A short note to say I miss you all

2006-07-06T23:57:00.000-04:00

I haven't written since May? Geez, I've really let this thing go. Unfortunately, that's going to continue. Right now, I face an upcoming wedding, a house sale, a house purchase and general chaos besides. Of course, this is no excuse. If I wanted to, I could squeak in a few minutes every day for the blog, but right now, I'm just not feeling up to it. Sorry. Also, I really want to focus on fiction writing and getting myself away from the Internet can only help that.

Expect me to return sometime after the beginning of 2007, I think. I may pop in occasionally before that, but no promises.

Strange, terrible crime case

2006-05-10T15:55:00.000-04:00

Do you remember the case of the man who had a bomb strapped around his neck who said he was being forced to rob a bank or it would go off? And then it did? It sounds like a movie plot (and has become episodes of Law & Order and other shows), but it actually happened. What really happened, whether the man set up the whole thing himself to go out with a spectacular suicide or whether he was actually kidnapped and bombstrapped, remains an open question.

Of course, the family knows where they stand and they're pissed. They've posted a Web site, www.brianwells.net, offering the details of the case and asking for any help. It's a tragic and amazing story. Also check out the Wikipedia entry on the case and this story from CourtTV's Crime Library.

(Link found via Professor Hex.)

"Hallucigenia," by Laird Barron

2006-05-10T15:35:00.000-04:00

I just finished this story in the June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It's absolutely terrific. I've enjoyed most of Barron's stories (you can read Bulldozer, and Parallax online, and you should) but the concluding pages of this story knocked me out.

When I started the story, I didn't have such high hopes for it. The story is told from the perspective of a tough guy rich boy who has travelled the world, mastered hunting and faced down many a problem. He is surrounded by other tough guys. This is so much like Barron's other stories -- all of them feature some kind of hard boiled protagonist -- that I figured I was in for a repeat. And to some extent, I was. The story includes many of the same horrific and pulp ideas as his others, and even includes some references to his last F&SF story, "The Imago Sequence."

But this one tops the others.

I'm not sure I can explain why, either. There's a wealth of detail about the horrific background of the story, but you never quite see the whole picture. There's terrific scenes of horror -- including the one illustrated on the magazine's front cover. And in the climax, Barron brings it all together in one spectacular fright scene. Then, he goes one step better with a coda that adds just a touch of humor.

I'm just rambling on here, but I really enjoyed this story and wanted to share that with others. If you aren't already subscribed to F&SF, go out and pick up this issue. This one novella is easily worth the $3.99 cover price.

You can read a review of the issue at Tangent Online. And you can discuss the story at the magazine's message board.

Still out there writing

2006-05-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

For a while, I was posting updates on my writing. The last one was in March. Nobody's asked me to post about it again, but despite the silence I venture once again into navel gazing.

I've been busy since March. That story that I was hashing over for weeks and weeks I finally finished. I ended up going to my notebooks and writing it longhand to get it done. It helps me to get away from easy access to the Internet. The next step for that story is typing it into the computer, making a few changes, and sending it out to friends and at least one more objective reader. (If anyone is interested in reading what may be a horrible waste of your time, or possibly my first genius work, feel free to e-mail me.)

So now, where to go from here? I've played with some flash pieces. I'm trying to take Jay Lake's advice (PDF) and write a story of some kind each week. This isn't the way I've worked up to now. I seem to be a slow writer, I work in fits and starts. I'm attempting to do more to see if that's just how I write, or if that's me being lazy.

My big problem at the moment is I've created this great fantasy setting. It's unusual and, with any luck, it's a fun place to read about. But I'm finding that I don't know what story to tell there. I keep starting things and then backing off. These false starts add new information and descriptions to the world, but don't get me any closer to having a story about it. I need a character who springs from this place and has a tale to tell. For now, I'll keep playing with the idea and I will hope to bump into a character along the way.

So, how's your writing going?

S&S and cover art

2006-05-08T11:49:00.000-04:00

Paul M. Jessup has expanded on my sword & sorcery post with some additional links. He also has a post full of science fiction and fantasy covers from the '60s and '70s. There's some beautiful artwork there.

Sword & Sorcery linkage

2006-05-05T12:03:00.000-04:00

I've had sword & sorcery on the mind lately, so let me clear out a few links.

First off, read Paul Jessup's s&s story The Gods Have Left Us at Flashing Swords e-zine. If you like that, follow it up with the excerpt of a new story in the same setting he posted at his blog.

My post the other day about Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser elicited a little talk about sword & sorcery in comics. Professor Hex posted this link about the Thongor comics. Thongor was the character created by Lin Carter. Like most of Carter's characters, it's a tribute to older writers, in this case Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can buy Carter's books from Wildside Press, if you were so inclined. Here are some other Carter links: In Memoriam, personal data, bibliography, an article on H. Rider Haggard by Carter (unfortunately, I had to find it on a Google cache, the original seeming to have disappeared), and Carter's introduction to The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen. By the way, Carter will be better remembered for his editing, especially the Adult Fantasy series that reprinted fantasy classics.

The Gor series by John Norman is probably one of the most (rightly) derided series in all of sword & sorcery. But that's not to say there weren't good moments. Fortunately for us, Sonya Taaffe gives us a look at Assassin of Gor and what's right about it. LiveJournaler Hans the Bold follows up with more detail on the Gor series and where it all went wrong.

If you'd like to know who some of the famed characters of sword & sorcery are, check out this list called Heroes of Dark Fantasy.

And finally, Night Shade Books has released Imaro by Charles Saunders. Imaro was one of the S&S greats that was little spoken of in recent years. This book reprints the first novel in the Imaro series, and I believe Night Shade will be publishing more Imaro books in the future. My first encounter (and the only one until I can pick up this book) was through Andrew Offutt's Swords Against Darkness series, which are a lot of fun. Sword & Sorcery has reviews of Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. Imaro appeared in Vol. 4.

Hope that fills any sword & sorcery jones you may be feeling.

The Prisoner remade?

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

Oh wow, The Prisoner may get a TV remake in Britain starring Christopher Eccleston (recently of Doctor Who.) This is the kind of thing I get all excited about and really worried about at the same time. The original was such a classic, it doesn't need to be remade. On the other hand, a remake (made well) could be really relevant today. Unfortunately, there's no mention whether Patrick McGoohan (the brains behind the original) will be involved. I'd feel much better if he were.
Here's hoping they do a good job.

We come to praise Ford

2006-05-03T13:31:00.000-04:00

The LitBlog Co-op continues Jeffrey Ford week today with a selection of entries by various non-LBC bloggers praising Ford. I can't account for some of the writers up there, but when Jeff Vandermeer, John Klima, Tim Pratt, Meghan McCarron and John Picacio are among the participants, you know it's good.

And if that's too many nice things said about Ford for you, be sure to check out The Mumpsimus where he reveals the dirty secrets of collaborating with the man.

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser returns to comics

2006-05-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

Fascinating article from SciFi Wire about Dark Horse Comics and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Dark Horse will not only be doing a comic book about Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery heroes, they will also be reprinting all of the novels and short story collections. That's the best part of the whole thing, to me.

The article also mentions they have movie rights. I actually don't want to see a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser movie. I just know a movie wouldn't find the right balance, it would be either too campy or too serious. It wouldn't have Leiber's great sense of humor and action.

Also mentioned at the end of the article, Dark Horse is looking for the rights to other Robert E. Howard characters. (They already do a Conan comic book, which I thought was OK, but didn't keep me reading.) I must admit, I would like to see Solomon Kane in comic form.

Harlan Ellison interviewed

2006-05-02T08:54:00.000-04:00

AZ Central interviews the "Grand master of fabulism" in advance of Saturday's Nebula event when he will be named Grand Master. He has some interesting things to say in the article, so I hope you click the link. But I couldn't help but chuckle over the image this quote provides:

And, of course, I still watch Judge Judy every day. You know, you can watch everything on television night and day and you will not see real people. But Judy, what it is is small-claims court, and you get the cadences of the voices of average people. You can see, sadly, how ignorant most people are these days.

I get a quaint image of the aging Ellison in a comfy chair, eagerly awaiting Judge Judy every afternoon.

I really wish Ellison was writing more these days. I haven't read a new story from him in ages.

Ford at the Litblog Co-op

2006-05-01T11:55:00.000-04:00

Take time this week to visit The LitBlog Co-op where Jeffrey Ford's The Girl in the Glass will be the topic of conversation. Gwenda Bond has already posted some initial thoughts on the book. Also, some time this week, Ed Champion will be posting a podcast interview with Ford.

Jeffrey Ford wins an Edgar award

2006-04-28T10:49:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Ford's novel "The Girl in the Glass" won the Edgar for Best Paperback Original. Congratulation Jeff, it's well deserved. The more attention the book gets, the better.

Also, next week, check out the Lit Blog Co-op for more on the Girl in the Glass. Ford will be blogging at the site and there will be a podcast interview with him as well.

Novel features pulp novelists

2006-04-18T09:48:00.000-04:00

Professor Hex pointed out something to me recently: "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: A Novel." Now, for that name alone, the novel should be interesting. But the fascinating part comes in the description of the novel:

Ravaged by the devastation of the Great Depression, America turned to the pulp novels for relief, for hope, for heroes.

And the pulps delivered in spades.

The science fiction story, the hard-boiled detective, the superhero were all born on these cheap yellow pages, found behind blood-drenched covers dripping with sex and violence. Return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, enter at your own risk into the dark and dank lair known as The White Horse Tavern, and meet Walter Gibson, the mind behind The Shadow, and Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, as they challenge one another to discover what is real and what is pulp.

For Gibson, writing a new novel about The Shadow every month is a way to evade his own dark past. For his rival, Lester Dent, creating Doc Savage is an attempt to bring the light of better days to desperate millions. In their lives and loves Gibson and Dent are as different from one another as the heroes they’ve created. But now the hideous murder of the fringe pulp writer H.P. Lovecraft — victim of a mysterious death that literally makes the skin crawl — will set these two men on a collision course with each other, and face to face with a terrifying and very real evil that could have sprung from the pages of their own pulps.

From the palaces and battlefields of warlord-plagued China to the seedy waterfronts of Providence; from frozen seas and cursed islands to the labyrinthine tunnels and secret temples of New York’s Chinatown, Dent and Gibson will find themselves in a dangerous race to stop a madman destined to create a new empire of pure evil. Together with the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, a mysterious stranger, and a sexy psychic with a chicken, they will finally step out from behind their creations to take part in a heroic journey far greater than any story they have imagined. Their quest will force Gibson to look beyond the shadows and discover the true evil that lurks in the hearts of men, while Dent will learn that the nature of a true hero is not found in a fictional superman, but in the faith of the woman who challenges death itself to love him.

A novel that features pulp writers as heroes. Perfect! This is going on my "to buy soon" list. (The novel comes out in May.) In the meantime, check out PaulMalmont.com, where the author offers a lost chapter (though you'll have to crack a code first) and a nice collection of links about pulps and writers of the time. Also, if you hae a podcast, no matter how small, Malmont would like to be involved. Check out his Web site for details.

This seems to be the latest in a trend that may even become a genre unto itself: Novels featuring authors as characters fighting fictional menaces. Off the top of my head, similar books include Move Underground by Nick Mamatas and The List of 7 by Mark Frost. I know there was also a novel that featured H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith fighting an ancient evil. Can anyone think of any others?

Writing update

2006-03-23T13:03:00.000-05:00

I'm getting back on the horse with my writing. I still haven't rewritten the story I was working on previously. But it's still there waiting to be attacked. In the meantime, I've been writing a spontaneous story in one notebook and putting the pieces of another story together on my computer. I've also been journaling in notebooks and practicing some parts of my writing. So I'm back on track with writing every day, though my output is still not real stories. The writing keeps me happy though, so I'll keep it up.

Fear for 'The Stars My Destination'

2006-03-23T12:56:00.000-05:00

Alfred Bester's classic "The Stars My Destination" is headed for film, kicking and screaming no doubt. This is a great novel, one which I will have to reread before the movie is released. It has plenty of amazing visuals that would be amazing on film with today's technology. But this is Hollywood we're talking about, and no doubt they'll screw up the story so much the visuals won't matter. I hope I'm wrong about that.

Found elsewhere

2006-03-23T12:55:00.001-05:00

At one time, I wrote much about giant squid here. I've since fallen off that wagon, though I still find them intensely interesting. If you're still looking for news about giant squid, or squid in general, check out Squid, a blog with all the latest news, merchandise and general weirdness about squids. Well worth your time.

Jeffrey Ford's new collection going out

2006-03-16T09:13:00.000-05:00

According to Jonathan Strahan, Jeffrey Ford's new collection, The Empire of Ice Cream, has started shipping. He posted the table of contents (also available at the book's site):

Introduction - Jonathan Carroll.

1. The Annals of Eelin-Ok
2. Jupiter’s Skull
3. A Night in the Tropics
4. The Empire of Ice Cream
5. The Beautiful Gelreesh
6. Boatman’s Holiday
7. Botch Town
8. A Man of Light
9. The Green Word
10. Giant Land
11. Coffins on the River
12. Summer Afternoon
13. The Weight of Words
14. The Trentino Kid

I've read all the stories except "Botch Town," which is new to the collection, "Coffins on the River" (from Polyphony #3) and "Summer Afternoon" (apparently from "Say ... Is this a Cat?"). Based on that, I'd say this is a great collection. Getting "Empire of Ice Cream" and "The Weight of Words" alone would be worth the price of the book. So order now! In the meantime, check out Ford's blog at 14theDitch.

Apologies

2006-03-15T14:54:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the absence. I just haven't felt like it lately. Plus, I haven't done much with my writing, so I'm pretty ashamed of that. And besides that, March is absolutely the worst month of the year. It's not quite spring yet, but I'm horribly tired of winter (even a warm winter like this one). It teases you with bits of warmth before taking it away again. Then there's the wedding being planned and worries about my house going up for sale. Too much on my mind. (Not that these are good excuses for the writing failures.)

I've been reading lately, despite the unchanging nature of the box to the left. (Blogger was giving me problems changing the template.) After "Engines of God," I read "Snakes and Earrings" by Hitomi Kanehara, "With Respect to the Japanese" by Bill Condon, and am currently reading "Rashomon and other stories" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. If you're looking for some good reading, check out storySouth's notable short stories of 2005. They've lined up some of the best short fiction found online over the last year. Strange Horizons and SciFiction get special attention for their work. Also, Elizabeth Bear has posted the first chapter of her upcoming book "Blood and Iron" online.

Hopefully, I'll start doing more in the next few days. See you soon.

Write how you need to write

2006-03-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

Meg McCarron takes issue with the writing every day edict. What she has to say is smart and gives an alternative for those who don't like writing every day.

Personally, I think each person needs to try out different methods and find out what works for them. That's what I've been doing. I find that I can keep myself to a "write every day" schedule if I'm working on a story. It's between those stories, or weeks like now when I should be revising a story, that I find I skip days and have a hard time concentrating.

Each writer is different and each one needs to explore how they write. What's important is that you are dedicated to it, whether you write once a day, once a week or for a full month at a time nonstop when you've come up with an idea. Whatever works for you, as long as you are serious, that's the only rule.

Odds and ends

2006-02-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

What a lousy weekend. Don Knotts, Darren McGavin and Octavia Butler died. They were all good at their respective crafts and each was important to me in some way. Unfortunately, I've not read much Butler, although I have at least two of her books on my shelves. I guess it's about time I corrected that oversight. (And if you're interested in Butler, be sure to check out the Bat Segundo Show interview.)

In my writing life, I've actually gotten a little bit done. I've pieced together all the parts of my current short story. It doesn't add up to a first draft. There are holes in the narrative, there are parts that I wrote at least three times and there are plenty of parts that just don't work. The worst thing is that the ending is not earned, either for the character interaction or the supernatural aspect. I need to add foreshadowing and character work. So writing and revisions continue.

This may be the ~~most true~~ truest post on writing ever.

Technorati Tags: writing

Cave chambers of New England

2006-02-23T15:58:00.000-05:00

Professor Hex linked to a fascinating article about the Upton Cave:

"The caves -- ranging from Putnam County in New York’s Hudson River Valley to southern Maine -- bear many similarities to "beehive" chambers built in Ireland by ancient Celtic tribes, said Barbara Toomey, the Massachusetts coordinator for the New England Antiquities Research Association.

Here's another site about "America's Stonehenge." According to that site, there are 62 of these chambers in Connecticut, and yet I've never heard of one of them.

They give the example of the Gungywamp in Groton.
Besides containing beehive chambers and petroglyphs, the Gungywamp site has a double circle of stones near its center, just north of two stone chambers. Two concentric circles of large quarried stonesó21 large slabs laid end to endóare at the center of the site. Extensive fire burning on some of the slabs is apparent which leads many to believe it was an ancient altar. Nearby there are several large pillar stones and one boulder slab that have been carefully positioned along astronomical site lines.

I may have to take a road trip one of these days. Fortunately for me, I can learn more about it through The Gungywamp Society.

iBooks bankrupt

2006-02-23T12:57:00.000-05:00

Publisher iBooks has gone bankrupt, according to Johnathan Strahan, among others. The company has apparently been on the skids since the tragic death of founder Byron Preiss. For Strahan, this means his anthologies, Science Fiction: Best of 2005 and Fantasy: Best of 2005, are left in limbo.

I think it's a tragedy. In the last few years, iBooks has reprinted some of the great works of science fiction. On my bookshelf next to me, I can find Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley and the first two Wild Cards anthologies thanks to iBooks. They are also responsible for republication of Cordwainer Smith's Nostrilia and Robert Silverberg's Nightwings. I'm sorry to see them go.

Masters of Science Fiction

2006-02-23T12:20:00.000-05:00

ABC has given the green light to Masters of Science Fiction, according to Sci Fi Wire. The show, produced by the same people who made Masters of Horror (which I've only heard good things about), will adapt classic science fiction stories into TV movies. They've already named Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury stories among those they adapt. ABC has agreed to four episodes, but the company plans on doing six.

Now I wonder who they'll get for directors. Masters of Horror combined great horror short stories with famed horror directors. Who are the classic science fiction directors?

Not much to say

2006-02-22T16:05:00.000-05:00

I've been writing, getting closer to a finished draft, but I'm not there yet.

A Scanner Darkly trailer

2006-02-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

A full length trailer for "A Scanner Darkly" is up now. [Link found via SFSignal.] Check it out.

The movie uses a drawing technique first pioneered in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" in which real actors are drawn over. In some ways, this is perfect for this movie. However, most people are going to be used to seeing this technique in recent commercials. And it looks pretty stupid in those. Every time I see it, I think to myself, why not just film the people? At least, this movie has a purpose behind using it. In the book, by Philip K. Dick, a central idea is that new technology makes it impossible for people to hide their identities with new identities. Also, it's a major plot point that you don't know how much delusion is going on.

I'm still excited about this film, despite the above worry and Keanu Reeves acting. The other actors -- Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson -- are all people who I've loved in some films and actively hated in others. They all have certain tics they rely on that bug me, but sometimes they get past it. (Reeves rarely ever does. They can just sometimes make the movie around him, like The Matrix.)

On the plus side, the film looks very faithfult to the book, which is one of Dick's novels I highly recommend.

UPDATE: Fascinating article from Wired on the troubles Linklater faced in making this film happen, particularly concerning the animation. The story also makes me feel better about Reeves, who is a big Dick fan (I crack up just writing that) and worked for scale pay to see this film made. If only he were a better actor.

New writing gadget

2006-02-17T16:39:00.000-05:00

I downloaded something new. It's called yWriter and it's a program to help you create writing in a project format. (Link found via Paperback Writer.) It breaks down your stories scene by scene (or chapter by chapter). This was a perfect thing for the work I've been doing on my current story since I approached it exactly that way. Plus, yWriter allows you to add character notes, goals and conflict notes for scenes, and even allows you to keep track of the time elapsed in your narrative.

I must admit, downloading freeware like this is mostly a way for me not to write. I fidget around with the program, get everything sorted in it exactly right. All of which just eats away my writing time. Despite that, the program actually was helpful. I started going through the pieces I've written so far and editing them. They're not as bad as I thought. This will hopefully put me back on track. I've been writing different versions of the same scenes, over and over. And it's not helping. Getting organized with this program helped me get it all in order and figure out what I'm doing. I may even be nearing a finished first draft, just some connective tissue needs to be added. I can hardly believe it.

Actually, maybe that first draft should be amended to say "zeroth draft." When I read writers' blogs, they seem to write a first draft and then send the thing out to their first readers. I don't think my first draft of this story would be ready for anybody. Is this me being too cautious over my drafting? Or is it that writers get better over time and their first drafts are just cleaner and better?

writing

Wrestling squid and octopus!!

2006-02-16T12:07:00.000-05:00

My god I must have this film: The Calamari Wrestler. Read that first link, there is a great description of what this is all about and some pictures. I've added it to my wishlist. I must have it!

Catching up

2006-02-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted anything on my writings in the past week or so. Sorry about that, for those of you who are interested. I haven't stopped writing, however. In fact, I've been writing and writing and writing on this story, though I'm still nowhere near completing a single draft.

I started this story writing out a plot outline, writing character sketches and getting a solid idea behind what happens at the end of it all. And I've found out that those things don't corner you at all. In fact, I've found a million different ways to go with this story and I've already tried hundreds of them. I keep writing the beginning of the story and then start over from a different perspective. I've tried third person omniscient, third person from each character's point of view, first person by one character and first person by the other character. I've also written in different voices, not quite finding the character's voice I'm looking for.

This is both good and bad. The bad is obvious. I've been laboring over the same story for a few weeks now with no real results to show. The good is I'm learning. I'm learning what can be done, I'm learning where I'm weak and I'm learning I don't know all I thought I knew.

That last one is especially important. I've been writing nonfiction for newspapers and blogs for the last 12 years. You'd think that would help me. It doesn't. I'm learning what I've read a million times over the years from writing books and author interviews: You learn to write fiction by writing fiction. That's it. You can study and that will help, you can pick apart other stories. But until you keep at the keyboard and create characters and have them interacting, you don't learn anything.

So I'm struggling. I haven't grown weary of the story. This is a good sign, I think. It means there's something to it, something I'm trying to reach. I have confidence in the rickety plot and ideas I'm working through. I just need to keep working.

I also need to focus. I write every day now. Now I need to spend more time each day. I waste much of my day and only spend about an hour on a day's writing. This is terrible. I get antsy. I'm working on getting control of this.

One day at a time, I'm working to become a better writer.

Technorati Tags: writing

Discovering Cordwainer Smith

2006-02-15T10:31:00.000-05:00

Chris Roberson is having the profound joy of reading Cordwainer Smith for the first time as an adult. I only read Smith's stories about five years ago and it was truly a mind blowing experience. I read "Scanners Live in Vain" from the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume I and was amazed at how good this thing was. So I took a trip to the library and found The Rediscovery of Man, a complete collection of Smith's short stories.

Every science fiction reader should read this book. It's absolutely essential. Smith's stories speak to today, most of them holding up better than the more welll known golden age science fiction. His imagination knows no limits. And most, if not all, of these short stories are tied together in a history of the Instrumentality. Do yourself a favor and read these books. At least check out "Scanners Live in Vain," it is a classic story. (You can read a little bit about the story here.)

Here are some good links about Smith:

Jeff Vandermeer's appreciation of Smith's work. Smith was a big influence on Veniss Underground.
Wikipedia entry
Cordwainer Smith checklist
Walter Jon Williams also loves his books.
Cordwainer Smith appreciation page

Andreas Katsulas, RIP

2006-02-15T08:37:00.000-05:00

Andreas Katsulas has died. He was 59. Katsulas was best known (to me anyway) as G'Kar on Babylon 5. Katsulas and Peter Jurasik's Londo were the best reasons to watch that show. Sad to see him go, especially at such a young age.

"The Bamboo Sword," Shuhei Fujisawa

2006-02-14T11:16:00.000-05:00

Late last year, thanks to the magic of Neflix, I saw a Japanese movie called "The Twilight Samurai." It was excellent and I recommend it highly. It's a drama of a working man disguised as a samurai tale. The samurai of the title is burdened by debt from his wife's funeral and does not make enough money as a clerk to pay it off. But his greatest joy is raising his daughters and watching them grow. Secretly, he's also a masterful swordsman, which will complicate his life further.

The film was a wonderful character study. For those wanting samurai action, it's there, but it's very restrained. It was one of my favorite films of last year. The movie was based off the stories of Shuhei Fujisawa, who wrote stories of samurai that reflected the problems of the lives of modern Japanese working people. He was one of Japan's most popular writers.

Thankfully, this March, Kodansha will be publishing "The Bamboo Sword and Other Samurai Tales." Here's the book description from Amazon:

EVOCATIVE, EXCITING, AND TENDER, THESE CHARMING TALES OPEN A WINDOW ONTO LIFE IN JAPAN AS IT WAS FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO.
This delightful collection of eight stories evokes life in early seventeenth-century Japan, a time when peace finally reigns after centuries of civil war. Tokugawa Ieyasu has defeated his rivals to become shogun, and is busily establishing the regime that ruled the country for the next two and a half centuries.
It is a period of political upheaval full of intrigue, rivalry, and betrayals. The samurai are still valued for their swordsmanship, and are a cut above the peasants, artisans, and merchants in the social hierarchy. Without battles to fight, however, these career warriors struggle to retain their sense of pride and meaning in life as they attempt to settle into mundane jobs and family life. Occasional flashes of the sword are tempered by the sympathies, conspiracies, kindnesses, and enmities arising between people from across the social spectrum.
Fujisawa brings a distant culture richly to life, with characters that modern audiences the world over can relate to presented against a detailed, realistic historical backdrop.

This is one of the books I'm most looking forward to this year. There's an article here about popular literature in Japan and how it relates to this book. Apparently, Fujisawa's work is seen as "reassuring," and the article talks about the use of cliches. The book is reviewed positively here.

Happy Valentine's Day

2006-02-14T10:58:00.000-05:00

I don't usually bother mentioning the holidays here, but I'm feeling full of love today. I hope all of you have someone you love today, whether that's a lover, spouse, friend or family. Spread the love.

Pieces coming together

2006-02-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

So I spent some time listening to Akira Ifukube's fine themes as I wrote. I quickly learned that thundering marches aren't the best listening when writing scenes of two people talking. Too much epic going on in the room. But once I turned it off for a little while, my writing went smoothly.

I now have about seven different pieces of this story in separate Notepad files. I think I need to write a little more before I try to bring them all together. It's almost a certainty now that I will try writing the story from a first person point of view when I get to my first rewrite. It will add a different perspective and might help me get the flow of the story right.

I read a great Ramsey Campbell ghost story in The Dark (for links, see at left under "What I'm reading"), "Feeling Remains." Structurally, it seems to be similar to what I'm working on, except done from the first person perspective. When I started writing, I thought stories like "Canavan's Backyard" by Joseph Payne Brennan and "The Black Gondolier" by Fritz Leiber had similar structures to what I was working on. Those two stories have something supernatural happening to a main character that is viewed from a distance by a second character. That's the way I approached writing this story.

Now, I think the first person perspective, like in Campbell's story, may help me get closer, more emotionally involved in the story. It certainly will bring the fear forward.

Of course, my story isn't going to be half as good as any of those. If you're in the mood for horror, by the way, all three of those stories are great.

But I'm still feeling good about the story and I don't have any urge to back out of it or throw it away. If I can at least continue to tolerate the story through a rewrite or two, I'll have achieved something.

Technorati Tags: writing

RIP Akira Ifukube, 1914-2006

2006-02-09T11:26:00.000-05:00

I've written a long post on the death of Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube at my Giant Monster Blog. Truly a sad day.

Emerging from inactivity

2006-02-08T13:51:00.000-05:00

Today was a day I felt like writing. I wrote a whole section of my short story and I feel the pull to write more. This is good as it comes after four days of inactivity (in writing). Those are always dangerous times for me, when I'm away from a story for that amount of time, the inspiration, the love of the idea, can all float away.

This story though, I have good feelings about it. I intend to finish writing this first draft and then really revise it. This is territory I've not much explored. I'm terrible about a) not finishing stories, b) not doing anything with finished first drafts. So once this story gets past the first draft stage, it will be revised. This may be the first story I feel confident enough in to send out. We'll see.

In the meantime, I have a few more pieces to finish, then I have to assemble them into a semblance of story. I've been writing in the third person. I'm going to read it over when the first draft is finished and see if I think it would be better in first person. I've thought about even just going ahead and doing a second draft in first person.

All that will be decided later though. Right now, I just have to keep my eyes on the prize and get to the end.

Building things out of words

2006-02-02T16:06:00.000-05:00

Some good blog entries about writing (or simply "writer's porn" as I've heard others call it.) Elizabeth Bear writes about writing better than almost anyone else. Read her
journal. This entry on thematic and narrative concerns in fiction is
absolutely terrific. I've been listening to Mur Lafferty's podcast I Should be Writing lately and have been enjoying it. As the title puts it:

A podcast by a wanna-be writer for wanna-be writers. Let my stack of rejection letters and battle scars benefit you.

And so far, it has at least helped me feel better about my writing to know others go through similar things. Author Tim Pratt is pretty great too. I've only read a few of his short stories, but I've loved them. He posts about writing his novel and the pit of despair he hit after rereading some of it. That's the way I feel most days I reread my stuff.

But today, I feel pretty good. I reread what I wrote yesterday and I thought it was quite fine -- for me anyway. I started on another section of the story.

I've been taking an unusual approach to writing this story. I first plotted it out, which I've never tried before. Then I wrote a possible beginning for the story (though, now I think it won't be). Yesterday, I wrote the climax of the story. Today, I started writing an incident that happens half way through the story. Each of these sections of the story have been written on seperate Notepad files. When it's all written, I can combine them all and figure out how they should properly be arranged. In the meantime, I can open up any file on any day and pick up on a different part of the story, or edit a different part of the story.

I don't know if there are any benefits to writing this way, however, it does give me a more tactile sense of the structure of the story. I have all these pieces and then I'm going to build my story from them. It's like I'm building a desk, but it's made of words. Or something. I'm not sure I'm describing this well, but I'm enjoying this method. Your mileage may vary.

More writing tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: writing

A climax and thoughts on genre

2006-02-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

Another day's writing is done. Today, taking a cue from yesterday's thoughts, I wrote out of order. I decided to write the climax of the story, when the narrator is confronted with the transformed protagonist. It came out more soft, less scary than I hoped. I'm wondering if maybe I'm writing a fantasy story rather than a horror story? I won't know until I write more of it. Even if it's purely fantasy, it will have some dark moments.

The question about whether this is a fantasy or horror story brings me to something I've been thinking about. In a podcast of The Agony Column's interview with The Rolling Darkness Review (Glen Hirshberg, Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins), Etchison says that when he sits down to write, he never thinks "I'm going to write a horror story," he just thinks "I'm going to write a story." I've heard this from a lot of professional authors, and with some it shows. (Etchison is one. Many of his stories, always sold as horror, could be published in literary magazines with ease.)

But as a wannabe, new writer, I sit down and actively think "I'm going to write a horror story now, in fact it will be a ghost story and it will be about the transformation of a character." When I'm deciding on a story, that's the starting point. If it strays
off from that genre course, I let it. It doesn't have to end up a
horror story, that's just my initial idea.

John Gardner in his book "The Art of Fiction" tells young writers (I'm trying to remember this off the top of my head) that the easiest way to begin is to pick a genre -- a ghost story, a relationship story, a romance -- then combine it with another genre or an unusual technique.

So, I don't think I'm completely wrongheaded to start out thinking about what genre a story is. I just can't become caged to a genre.

Tomorrow, with some knowledge of what's going to happen, I'm going
to write other sections of the story, whichever parts interest me. I'm
thinking I'll write about the protagonist and his dreams. I'll also go
back and edit what I've written so far. I've been doing a little of
that every day. Maybe I can make better sense of the climax I wrote today.

Technorati Tags: writing, genre

The Dark Crystal returns

2006-02-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

SciFi Wire says that a sequel to The Dark Crystal is in the works and Genndy Tartakovsky (of Samurai Jack and Clone Wars fame) will be directing.

Set hundreds of years after the first movie, the sequel follows a mysterious girl made of fire who steals a shard of the crystal in hopes of reigniting the dying sun.

Dark Horizons reported a bit about the sequel back in May. They include this important tidbit:

"The Dark Crystal created its own world. We are now going to fully explore this universe through the sequel film, which will be followed up with an animated series as well as interactive games and other media," said Lisa Henson. "Knowing the franchise's worldwide appeal, we're thrilled to leverage Odyssey's expertise in family entertainment within the independent film-sales community."

That report also includes a much longer (and somewhat different) description of the new movie.

This is great news. I absolutely adore the original. And most importantly, Brian Froud is returning to help design the new characters for the film. Froud did a lot of work behind the scenes on the look and history of the Dark Crystal. I have a copy of his book "The World of the Dark Crystal" and it's one of the prettiest books I own.

The only thing that concerns me is that the Henson company will go too far. The original film is great in and of itself. There is the potential that the company will take this chance to drain the "franchise" for all its worth. If all the books, movies and cartoons are good that's not a problem. But there's always a fear they will besmirch the memory of the original. (Although, I still have a copy of the original. It's not going anywhere. So I can always ignore sequels if they turn out to be bad.)

Here is a decent (and almost up to date) Dark Crysal fan site: The Book of Habidad.

UPDATE: Chris Roberson writes about his obsession over the movie's novelization when he was younger. I can relate. I loved that book and still have it around here somewhere. I have no idea how it would hold up today. It was written by A.C.H. Smith, who wrote the novelization for Labyrinth as well as a few other books, but I really don't know anything else about him. This page includes a few small excerpts from the book, mostly dialogue. Also, Smith seems to be a playwright.
I'll also note that the original screenwriter, David Odell, appears to be returning for the new film as well.

Small update

2006-01-31T15:25:00.000-05:00

Not much to say today. I wrote a few hundred more words on the story. It's moving along, but I need to spend more time with it -- which won't happen tomorrow, unfortunately. But I'll fit in what I can. So far, I haven't run into any problems with using an outline for my story. But then, the plot hasn't progressed much yet.
I do think that I may be writing this in the wrong order. Currently, the story follows the chronology of events. But I think the story will have to start in media res in order to attract people's interest in the first page. I don't think it's necessary for me to change the order I'm writing it in now. That will be something I can approach in the rewrite stage.

Technorati Tags: writing

Richard Kelly's new film

2006-01-31T14:43:00.000-05:00

Richard Kelly, the director of Donnie Darko, appears to have another movie in the works. It's called Southland Tales. From the brief description at the Internet Movie Database, it sounds like a science fiction version of Magnolia.

Southland Tales is an ensemble piece set in the futuristic landscape of
Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, as it stands on the brink of social,
economic and environmental disaster. Boxer Santaros is an action star
who's stricken with amnesia. His life intertwines with Krysta Now, an
adult film star developing her own reality television project, and
David Clark, a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast
conspiracy.

If you are looking for information on Kelly, check out Richard-Kelly.net, they seem to keep up with all he has and will do.

New story begins

2006-01-30T15:53:00.000-05:00

I've been very inactive online today, but this was for a good reason. One, I needed to build a bookshelf and wash some dishes, but two I managed to get some writing done on the story. It's the first section of the short story and I know what I'm leading to tomorrow. I always feel pretty good with all of the story before me, let's hope I keep feeling good as I go along. Again, right now the goal is to finish the story and edit it. The last story I wrote I've put aside with the potential for editing at a later date -- when I don't hate it so much. I want to make this story a complete process, continuing from creating the outline to writing the story, to editing it and then sending it out somewhere.
Anyway, I've got a bunch of things I want to write about on the blogs (especially Giant Monster Blog, I've watched a slew of giant monster movies latey) but it has to come second to the writing. So expect things to remain slow here for the next few days, with the exception of these writing updates. (Hope I don't bore you too much.)

Technorati Tags: writing

Background set, story to begin

2006-01-27T17:18:00.000-05:00

I didn't do too much writing today, but I think I accomplished something with the background of this story. I have a reason for everything to happen, a history of what's happening to the protagonist. That history won't be revealed, only hinted at in the story.
Starting Monday, I will write the actual first draft of the story. A plot has been built, point by point. The story could veer from that, but it creates a solid skeleton for the story. I also think I have both main characters pretty solidly set in my mind. Now the real work begins!

Technorati Tags: writing

Building character

2006-01-26T15:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I wrote again today. Not very much. In fact, most of it was looking over what I did yesterday to try and determine if I'm creating a distinct character, if Jackie (that's her name) would interest me as a reader. So far, I think I could give a tentative yes. She would be a realistic character, though I think I may need to give her more characteristics, some distinctive quirks, something to make her stand out. But for now, the character sketch gave me a better sense of Jackie. I worked a little on the other main character, Bobby, today as well, though no character sketch yet.

Once I've done that, I plan to hammer out the plot summary a little more thoroughly and then, finally, I will begin on actually writing the story. Again, this feels like it's a lot more prep work than the average writer does for a short story. On the other hand, I'm not other writers. I won't know whether this works for me until I've written the story. Always must remember this.

All right, enough. I'm going to go and try to do some more writing today.

Background writing

2006-01-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

So I'm still writing in preparation for a short story. I'm probably doing way too much prep work for a short story, but I just want to really go overboard with this method and see how it comes out. So today, I wrote 1,570 words of my narrator out on a date. It's just an attempt to get in the character's head. Next, I'll have to more on the protagonist of the story, the one fantastic things will happen to. He's a little more mysterious, so I'm not going to do quite as much prep work on him. The important thing was I did some writing today and I do feel like I'm moving forward.

Moonshine

2006-01-25T11:56:00.000-05:00

All right, I'm interested in this both as a proud Connecticut native and a horror fan. There's a new movie making the rounds at Sundance called "Moonshine." It's a vampire flick directed by a 20-year-old Stafford Springs, Ct. resident that stars local actors. The trailer looks pretty good, at the very least it's pretty. It certainly doesn't look like it cost this little:

ABOUT THE FILM:
Director Roger Ingraham, at 20 years old, shot his first full-length film, Moonshine, for a budget of $9200. His two years prior to the production were spent writing the script and researching how to shoot a quality full-length film with a very limited budget. As a vampire film, one of the essential elements that Moonshine strives for is the feeling of realism: the feeling that it's your town, your home, your family, and that, if something unexpected were to happen, you might react the same way.

At the forum on the site, the director talks a little about the production and the tough things he faced to get the movie made.

Anyway, I hope the movie is good and I'm looking forward to seeing it in theaters.

And while I'm thinking about horror and Connecticut, at Flickr a set of photos from the 1975 World Fantasty Convention (the first one) has been posted. Among the people pictured is Joseph Payne Brennan, one of the last famed Weird Tales writers and a librarian in New Haven.
Lots of other good people there as well, including a fascinating picture of a young Ramsey Campbell with long hair.

Moving on

2006-01-24T15:01:00.000-05:00

I took "Airjack!" (formerly "Zeppelin Hijack") out to pasture. I brought it to an ending and I'm putting it away. Once I've forgotten about it, maybe I'll give it another look. Right now I hate it.

Today, I started on another story, and with this one I'm taking a detailed approach to planning it. I've created a summary, an outline and character sketches. I think I'm going to do more work with the character sketches next and then, when I feel like I've got all the pieces planned out, I'll start writing the actual story. It's another attempt on my part to find out what method would work best for me. This way will start out slower, but I'm hoping it keeps me from petering out on it before the end.

This new story is a horror story and concerns two main characters and a terrible transformation. It's a fairly traditional type of horror story, which I hope helps me with the structuring of it. I usually have good luck with horror stories, I think its a form I gravitate towards.

And while I'm thinking about writing, have you checked out Glen Hirshberg's blog yet? Besides being an interesting blog by an interest writer, he offers some good advice for writers. His most recent entry was about dialogue and how it's written. He's also written two entries on his Platitudes (Part 1 and Part 2). And one of his first entries was about getting your writing engine started. It's all good stuff and be sure to check out Hirshberg's fiction if you haven't yet.

Relax, books are here to stay

2006-01-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

Some of the arguments for and against ereaders (like the SonyReader, which I originally talked about here) seem to turn on the idea that its either new technology or books, not both. I find that the most frustrating part of the argument. Even if ereaders do mean the end of the book, it's a long way down the line. People will have to be very used to ereaders before that ever happens. And I'm not sure it will ever happen.

Books have proven to be great technology. People still own books going back centuries. As Nick Mamatas once pointed out, how many 5 1/4" floppy disks are you still using? Books will always (at least, as far as I can imagine) have that leg up on other technologies: it doesn't become obsolete. If everyone is using an ereader a hundred years from now, they can still pick up a real book and read it.

As I see it, ereaders will be a choice, something we can use to read with if we so choose. It's for reading on the go. It's for reading things in the public domain that corporations don't want to publish. It's for reading manuals and technical stuff that you need to keep with you. With any luck, it will inspire new ways of reading short stories published on the Internet. (Wouldn't it be great to download the latest issue of The Fortean Bureau, for example, and read it on the road?)

Now, can we stop the hyperbole about the future of books and just talk about the possibilities ereaders can open to those of us who enjoy reading?

Winchester rifles and Gary Lucas

2006-01-24T08:47:00.000-05:00

The end of the classic Winchester rifle and the closing of a factory here in Connecticut has sent guitarist Gary Lucas off into a fine reminiscince of his days as a sharp shooter at Yale. Fun post, check it out.

Robert E. Howard, 100 years old (if he weren't dead)

2006-01-23T13:14:00.000-05:00

So Sunday was the 100th birthday of Robert E. Howard, famed creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn among others. Howard was probably my second most important author when I was a child, the first being Tolkien. But my entryway to Howard came through The Savage Sword of Conan comic book magazine (here's one which may even be one of the one's I read back then).
My neighbor, a man in his 30s, gave me a copy of his Savage Sword comics because he thought I'd like them. And I did. They are perfect young male teen reading: lots of strange places, bizarre creatures and tough guys who knew exactly what to do. After a few issues, I started talking about them to my neighbor and he started saying things like, "well, if you liked that you should see what he did in the original story when..." That was it, I was hooked. I grabbed the first two books in the paperback series that was available in those days, the one's with the Frank Frazetta artwork and additional stories by Lin Carter and L. Sprague DeCamp. The stories were second only to "Lord of the Rings" in my world.
I've loved them ever since and have reread many of the stories over the years. My favorite of what I've read was "Red Nails." How could I not love a story that begins with Conan and a woman being chased by a dinosaur and only gets weirder from there?
Over the last few years, I've been buying the new Conan collections as they come out and I look forward to reading the stories I never had a chance to read in the past: "The Hour of the Dragon" and most of the King Conan stuff. The books get the recommendation of Michael Dirda at the Washington Post, which makes me happy. Apparently, there was a big celebration of Howard's birthday in Texas, wish I could have been there.
Here's a few Web sites about the man:
REHoward.com
Cross Plains Howard page
The Robert E. Howard United Press Association
Wikipedia entry
Conan official Web site
Robert E. Howard archive
The Cimmerian journal
The Hour of the Dragon online
Howard ebooks

There is also a movie about Robert E. Howard called "The Whole Wide World" starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger. The packaging of the DVD makes it look like a romance movie (which, I guess it is, a bit) but it's mainly a character study of Howard and Novalyne Price. D'Onofrio does a great job. I recommend it.

I want to read them

2006-01-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

I must admit that the pictures of Beauty and the Book are pretty cool, as is this Book Bar. Nevertheless, the whole idea bugs me. Can you pull a book out of these structures to read it? If not, what's the point?

A fun day

2006-01-19T15:26:00.000-05:00

Words came easy and I was happy with today as I followed "Zeppelin Hijack" (or "Airjack!) through its twisty path to nowhere. This pleasant feeling came despite starting writing later than I wanted to. I'm still a terrible procrastinator who avoids writing until the last second. And there's no good reason for it, because I feel so good after I've done it (or at least I feel that way today.)

At the same time, I'm thinking about my next story. I'm really going to do some prep work on this one, have characters and a plot worked out before I put a pen to the page (or fingers to the keyboard). It already appears to have a good structure and the beginnings of characters with real personalities. Now, I need to spend some time in a notebook scribbling down these basics. I do worry that doing that will kill the inspiration for the story, but we'll see.

There's a really thoughtful essay by Paul Graham called How to Do What You Love. It really makes you think about whether you really love what you think you love and what you should do about getting there. It has given me a lot to mull over, and I really think I should take some time and more seriously contemplate the questions. Anyway, it will be well worth your time. (Link found at But Wouldn't It Be Cool?)

Check out "Healing Hands"

2006-01-19T12:00:00.000-05:00

Derek Kirk Kim has unleashed the first part of his new comic series, Healing Hands. I read his story Same Difference back when it was coming out as a serial and loved it. (It's now out in book form.) He does great work with characters, his visuals are pretty and, best of all, he can be very funny. I think you'll enjoy Healing Hands, I'm certainly looking forward to more of it.

Meandering

2006-01-18T15:20:00.000-05:00

For the story I'm working on, I had no ending in mind when I started it. I just liked the concepts I was playing around with. But now I'm finding the story squirming out of my control. Things keep happening with no sense or purpose to them. There's no larger sense of things. Plus, I'm despairing that all my characters are either uninteresting blobs or parodies of characters.

Again, this is my problem once I start a story, nothing is ever right. Eventually I think the whole thing is crap and I should just give it up. After all, it's just a big waste of my time, right? I've managed to keep pushing through, but now I'm just looking for an ending, somewhere to get off this crazy ship.

Which gets me thinking about future stories. Maybe part of my problem is a lack of advance planning. Maybe I'm the type who needs to write outlines and character sketches and have detailed endings in mind. The reason I've avoided that is it doesn't feel like writing. I feel like I'm wasting time. Or, it just causes my doubts all that much earlier. Nevertheless, I think that's what I'm going to try next.

I also wonder if I'm more suited to writing novel length stories. I've completed Nanowrimo novels. I rarely complete first drafts of short stories (although, I would note that the short stories I do complete are almost always horror stories.) Maybe I'm just better at meandering.

Anyway, I wrote for another hour or so after I posted last night. This morning I wrote another page of story. I've put my characters into deep trouble and have no idea how I'm going to get them out, or how it will all end. We'll see what I can do by tomorrow.

Good times, bad times, you know I've had my share

2006-01-17T18:31:00.000-05:00

Pissed away most of a sick day without writing. I settled down about 4 p.m and started writing until 6 p.m. when my fiancee came home. Unlikely I'll get to more of it. I'm amazed how long it takes me to finish a story. How long have I been working on this? Two weeks? Most writers talk about writing a short story in a few hours. Maybe this isn't a short story? It's over 2,500 words in on file right now (and it's spread across several files), so it certainly fits short story length.

Just like after last weekend, I'm now wondering if this story is worth continuing with. I doubt its worth anything. But I keep reminding myself that I just don't know that's the case until I finish it. I also don't know if the words I put down today are worth anything. They advanced the plot, but are they in the same league as stuff I wrote last week. And is that stuff worth anything at all? Self doubt, after lack of discipline, is my worst failing. I just give up on my ideas too soon. I just keep beating away at this trying to get past it.

I came up with a few other story ideas over the weekend. I managed to scribble them down before I forget them. In the meantime, I need to concentrate on one story at a time, not get worried about the ideas I haven't dealt with yet.

Jeff Vandermeer had a great post last week on inspiration and the enjoyment of writing:

I'm not suggesting that what one produces during blind inspiration/infatuation is superior to what you produce during the slow slog, but my god, why do you write if not for that moment when the world opens up before you and yet narrows to that singular point of pen against paper, that sensual drag of fingers across keys? Why do you write if not for that moment when you’re opened up to the point where there’s nothing of you left but the story and the characters and the words? Why?

That is one of the great reasons to write. I absolutely adore those moments when it all feels right, or even when it doesn't feel right, but it feels good. Unfortunately, right now I'm working through the slow slog. I just have to remember those good times though. Remember, remember... remember ...

Eric Red and a horrible accident

2006-01-17T11:59:00.000-05:00

There's a fascinating story about screenwriter and director Eric Red at LA Weekly. Red, the writer of "The Hitcher" and "Near Dark" (for the record, I think both those films are great, though I haven't seen "The Hitcher" in ages), was involved in a horrible traffic accident in 2000 that left two people dead. Red tried to cut his own throat after the accident. In the months that followed, Red escaped prosecution. But the families of the victims wouldn't give up and eventually won a civil case against him. Meanwhile, it looks like Red is making a comeback in Hollywood.

The story is very detailed and if Red did all the things implied in this story, he's a pretty awful guy. The only thing that bothers me with the story is the attempt to link Red's films to his accident. It's the idea that if you think up all these awful things, you must be a horrible person. You must want to do this stuff. While Red may indeed be a horrible person, this really has nothing to do with the type of films he makes. You can't look at his career and say, boy there sure are a lot of crashes and slit throats in your films. Look at any screenwriter and you'll find that, not just horror writers.

Meanwhile, the films he is trying to get made now can show something about the guy, I think.

But one script appears
striking in the context of his car wreck and ensuing civil trial. Fenderbent,
written by Eric Red and Meredith Casey, in a draft dated May 1, 2003, is the
story of a group of high school students on their way to a concert who run out
of gas in a small town in central Texas. There, they encounter not just the
anticipated killer trucks and car-related mayhem of Red’s signature oeuvre —
“the SOUND of the DEAFENING REVVING ROARS of the ENGINES and the SMASHING of
METAL against FLESH and BONE,” as the screenplay imperatively puts it — but
an actual society of miscreants who target and run down pedestrians for fun,
as part of an elaborate sport. Driving souped-up GTOs, dragsters and funny cars,
featuring Ed “Big Daddy” Roth-style cartoon murals and tricked out with chainsaws,
harpoons and razor-sharp rotor blades, these chicken-fried road warriors refer
to themselves as the Fenderbents and collect points for every unsuspecting victim
they can tally.

This is reminiscent of the plot of Death Race 2000, Paul Bartel’s mid-’70s
drive-in opus starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone, crossed with
the inbred remoteness of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It also carries
with it a kind of gallows-humor defiance. Despite its absence from Red’s list
of active properties in the Creative Directory, Scott Penney, his agent, continued
to shop the project through at least 2004. What exactly are we to make of this?

What are we to make of this? That a guy uses the experiences of his life in his films. It doesn't show that he did it, or even takes any glee in what happened, but it does show a remarkable lack of sympathy for the victims.

Anyway, it's a good piece of journalism on an accident and its repercussions.

Awards meme

2006-01-13T12:07:00.000-05:00

Found this interesting meme (you know, I'm never comfortable with that word, but it seems to be accepted and I've used it enough) about science fiction/fantasy/horror awards at Notes from the Labyrinth. Looks like fun, so I wanted to play.

Those I have read are in bold. Those I have started but not finished are underlined.

1953
HUGO: Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

1955
HUGO: Mark Clifton, They'd Rather Be Right

1956
HUGO: Robert Heinlein, Double Star

1958
HUGO: Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

1959
HUGO: James Blish, A Case of Conscience

1960
HUGO: Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

1961
HUGO: Walter Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

1962
HUGO: Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

1963
HUGO: Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

1964
HUGO: Clifford Simak, Way Station

1965
HUGO: Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer
NEBULA: Frank Herbert, Dune

1966
HUGO: Roger Zelazny, ...And Call Me Conrad
HUGO: Frank Herbert, Dune
NEBULA: Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
(I did read the novella when it was reprinted in F a while back. Does that count?)
NEBULA: Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

1967
HUGO: Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
NEBULA: Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection

1968
HUGO: Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
NEBULA: Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

1969
HUGO: John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
NEBULA: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

1970
HUGO: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
NEBULA: Larry Niven, Ringworld

1971
HUGO: Larry Niven, Ringworld
NEBULA: Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes

1972
HUGO: Philip Jose Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go
NEBULA: Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

1973
HUGO: Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
NEBULA: Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama

1974
HUGO: Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama
NEBULA: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

1975
HUGO: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
NEBULA: Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
WFA: Patricia McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

1976
HUGO: Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
NEBULA: Frederik Pohl, Man Plus
WFA: Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return

1977
HUGO: Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
NEBULA: Frederik Pohl, Gateway
WFA: William Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat

1978
HUGO: Frederik Pohl, Gateway
NEBULA: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
WFA: Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

1979
HUGO: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
NEBULA: Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
WFA: Michael Moorcock, Gloriana

1980
HUGO: Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
NEBULA: Gregory Benford, Timescape
WFA: Elizabeth A. Lynn, Watchtower

1981
HUGO: Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen
NEBULA: Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
WFA: Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

1982
DICK: Rudy Rucker, Software
HUGO: C. J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
NEBULA: Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time
WFA: John Crowley, Little Big

1983
DICK: Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates
HUGO: Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
NEBULA: David Brin, Startide Rising
WFA: Michael Shea, Nifft the Lean

1984
DICK: William Gibson, Neuromancer
HUGO: David Brin, Startide Rising
NEBULA: William Gibson, Neuromancer
WFA: John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting

1985
DICK: Tim Powers, Dinner at Deviant's Palace
HUGO: William Gibson, Neuromancer
NEBULA: Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
WFA: Barry Hughart, The Bridge of Birds
WFA: Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood

1986
DICK: James P. Blaylock, Homunculus
HUGO: Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
NEBULA: Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
WFA: Dan Simmons, Song of Kali

1987
CLARKE: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
DICK: Patricia Geary, Strange Toys
HUGO: Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
NEBULA: Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman
STOKER: Stephen King, Misery
STOKER: Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song
WFA: Patrick Suskind, Perfume

1988
CLARKE: George Turner, The Sea and Summer
DICK: Rudy Rucker, Wetware
HUGO: David Brin, The Uplift War
NEBULA: Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free
STOKER: Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
WFA: Ken Grimwood, Replay

1989
CLARKE: Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire
DICK: Richard Paul Russo, Subterranean Gallery
HUGO: C. J. Cherryh, Cyteen
NEBULA: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Healer's War
STOKER: Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort
WFA: Peter Straub, Koko

1990
CLARKE: Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
DICK: Pat Murphy, Points of Departure
HUGO: Dan Simmons, Hyperion
NEBULA: Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu
STOKER: Robert R. McCammon, Mine
WFA: Jack Vance, Madouc

1991
CLARKE: Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty
DICK: Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day
HUGO: Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
NEBULA: Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide
STOKER: Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life
TIPTREE: Eleanor Arnason, A Woman of the Iron People
TIPTREE: Gwyneth Jones, The White Queen
WFA: James Morrow, Only Begotten Daughter
WFA: Ellen Kushner, Thomas the Rhymer

1992
CLARKE: Pat Cadigan, Synners
DICK: Richard Grant, Through the Heart
HUGO: Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar
NEBULA: Connie Willis, Domesday Book
STOKER: Thomas F. Monteleone, Blood of the Lamb
TIPTREE: Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
WFA: Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life

1993
CLARKE: Marge Piercy, Body of Glass
DICK: Jack Womack, Elvissey
DICK: John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless
HUGO: Connie Willis, Domesday Book
HUGO: Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
NEBULA: Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
STOKER: Peter Straub, The Throat
TIPTREE: Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
WFA: Tim Powers, Last Call

1994
CLARKE: Jeff Noon, Vurt
DICK: Robert Charles Wilson, Mysterium
HUGO: Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
NEBULA: Greg Bear, Moving Mars
STOKER: Nancy Holder, Dead in the Water
TIPTREE: Nancy Springer, Larque on the Wing
WFA: Lewis Shiner, Glimpses

1995
CLARKE: Pat Cadigan, Fools
DICK: Bruce Bethke, Headcrash
HUGO: Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
NEBULA: Robert J. Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment
STOKER: Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie
TIPTREE: Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon
TIPTREE: Theodore Roszak, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
WFA: James Morrow, Towing Jehovah

1996
CLARKE: Paul J. McAuley, Fairyland
DICK: Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships
HUGO: Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
NEBULA: Nicola Griffith, Slow River
STOKER: Stephen King, The Green Mile
TIPTREE: Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
WFA: Christopher Priest, The Prestige

1997
CLARKE: Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
DICK: Stepan Chapman, The Troika
HUGO: Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars
NEBULA: Vonda N. McIntyre, The Moon and the Sun
STOKER: Janet Berliner and George Guthridge, Children of the Dusk
TIPTREE: Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine
WFA: Rachel Pollack, Godmother Night

1998
CLARKE: Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
DICK: Geoff Ryman, 253: The Print Remix
(I read the original, online.)
HUGO: Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
NEBULA: Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
STOKER: Stephen King, Bag of Bones
TIPTREE: [a short story by Raphael Carter]
WFA: Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy

1999
CLARKE: Tricia Sullivan, Dreaming in Smoke
DICK: Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence
HUGO: Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
NEBULA: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
STOKER: Peter Straub, Mr. X
TIPTREE: Suzy McKee Charnas, The Conqueror's Child
WFA: Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

2000
CLARKE: Bruce Sterling, Distraction
DICK: Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
HUGO: Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
NEBULA: Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
STOKER: Richard Laymon, The Traveling Vampire Show
TIPTREE: Molly Gloss, Wild Life
WFA: Martin Scott, Thraxas

2001
CLARKE: China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
DICK: Richard Paul Russo, Ship of Fools
HUGO: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
NEBULA: Catherine Asaro, The Quantum Rose
STOKER: Neil Gaiman, American Gods
TIPTREE: Hiromi Goto, The Kappa Child
WFA: Tim Powers, Declare
WFA: Sean Stewart, Galveston

2002
CLARKE: Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love
DICK: Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
HUGO: Neil Gaiman, American Gods
NEBULA: Neil Gaiman, American Gods
STOKER: Thomas Piccirilli, The Night Class
TIPTREE: M. John Harrison, Light
WFA: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

2003
CLARKE: Christopher Priest, The Separation
DICK: Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon
HUGO: Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids
NEBULA: Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark
STOKER: Peter Straub, lost boy lost girl
TIPTREE: Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order
WFA: Graham Joyce, The Facts of Life
WFA: Patricia A. McKillip, Ombria in Shadow

2004
CLARKE: Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
DICK: Gwyneth Jones, Life
HUGO: Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls
NEBULA: Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls
STOKER: Peter Straub, In the Night Room
TIPTREE: Joe Haldeman, Camouflage
TIPTREE: Johanna Sinisalo, Not Before Sundown (US title, Troll: A Love Story)
WFA: Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw

2005
CLARKE: China Miéville, Iron Council
HUGO: Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
WFA: Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Wow, I didn't do anywhere near as well as I hoped. There are quite a few here that I own but haven't read yet (I know that doesn't count for anything.) Also, I seem to have read a lot of authors' other books. I read Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides, I've read a few of Vonda McIntyre's short stories from Fireflood, I read the first three books of Asimov's Foundation and I read Samuel Delany's Nova and Neveryon. Ah well, you can't read everything, though I try.

Scary videos

2006-01-13T11:11:00.000-05:00

Two fascinating, frightening videos I'd like to pass along. The first is a powerful bit of Greenpeace propaganda. It appears they've taken the Lyndon Johnson approach to fighting nuclear power. As JeremyT says, it takes sheer balls to make a video like this.

The second video is "nonfiction." It's a video of an alien encounter. To me, it clearly seems fake, what with the cut and the horrible film quality. But nonetheless, it's fun stuff. Professor Hex calls it scarier than the scene in Signs. I don't think it's that good. On the other hand, if it was real, it would be scary as all get out. Here's the video. I was able to download it and play it RealPlayer, but I hear it can be played on Quicktime as well. You can read a thread about it here.

An excellent Firefox add on

2006-01-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you've noticed, but I've been writing longer posts lately. This is due to two things: the Performancing Firefox extension and writing at work. The second thing is self-explanatory, you get bored for a while, you start typing into email, clean it up the next day and have a post all set to go.

Performancing is an extension for Firefox that allows you to write blog posts in your browsing window. So I can be writing this post, but surfing the net on the top half of the page. This makes it much easier to find links while I'm writing. It also allows me to save my post drafts as notes. That way I can write something, put it away, read it later and make changes. (Technically, I could have done this with Blogger's draft function, but I've found that ocassionaly it would post my drafts. This way it's guaranteed not to do that.)

Also, Performancing gives you the option of adding Technorati tags to your posts, which I've been doing. I don't if that helps anybody, but I like it.

So anybody who has a blog and the Firefox browser, I strongly suggest you check out Performancing. I love it.

***

By the way, in other tech news, I may change my template again. I like this three column design, but I'm finding that I'm having problems with some Blogger functions. Nothing serious, but annoying enough that I may want to change back. We'll see.
Is there anybody out there who truly loves this design and would be sad to see me go back to the two column templates? Any suggestions as to which template I should choose?

Technorati Tags: firefox, performancing, blogging

Writing tips from Westerfeld and Chandler

2006-01-12T15:22:00.000-05:00

Scott Westerfeld has some good advice at this blog posting:

The letter below reminds me of something Kingsley Amis said: “Sometimes the hardest part of writing is getting the characters out of the pub and into the cab.” Writers don’t just get stuck at the earth-shattering, life-changing decisions that our characters make; the little details of reality management are actually quite tricky and frustrating. Never assume you’re a crap writer just because you can’t get someone across a room—it happens to all of us.

This is exactly what I was saying the other day. You get characters into a place and time, and it's not yet to the action, but you just can't seem to move them out of there. It's very nice to hear that I'm not alone in this obnoxious problem.

The rest of Westerfeld's post is well worth reading. He's quoting the letters of Raymond Chandler on writing. All of them are interesting. One of them is the four-hour rule for writing. You set aside four hours every day. During those four hours, you can do nothing except write. If you don't feel like writing, you don't have to, but you can't do anything else either.

This seems like a perfect rule, something that would really make me work. But of course, I come up with excuses. "I don't have four hours a day to do this." Bullshit. I waste four hours every morning just looking at blogs. (For the record, I don't actually consider it a waste, but in comparison to my own writing growth, it certainly is.)

The second excuse is, "well does blog writing and e-mail writing count?" It does if I want to waste my time. I love blogging, and enjoy e-mailing, but they're not going to move me forward on writing and I know it.

Well, I did try this today, but only for an hour. Still, it was effective. I wrote more than 800 words and moved the story right along. I need to get more serious about it and use the full four hours. Although, on a daily basis maybe I'll only use 2 hours a day, and four on Friday (my day off). Either way, I think it's good advice.

Technorati Tags: writing, RaymondChandler, ScottWesterfeld

Sony Reader

2006-01-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

So Sony has unveiled it's new e-book reader. It's new technology that is easy on the eyes and holds hundreds of hours of battery life. And, unlike the Japanese incarnation, they're allowing more than just the DRM protected files they offer. You can upload PDFs to the machine.

The price tag will be steep: $349.99. But then, the iPod I got for Christmas cost over $300. And I love reading, a lot. Wouldn't it be worth that much to me?

Now obviously, I don't want to jump at this thing with out getting some more information. I want user reviews and details on its use and exactly how I can get those PDFs to work. Also, I want to see what the competition is. There are a couple of other ereaders on the way that sound very exciting. I don't want to jump on Sony's bandwagon without hearing about the others. One of them is the Iliad from iRex. The iRex also notes it will support multiple formats and allow you to "write comments, mark or underline sections, for a true two-way paper experience." The third reader is from Jinke, called the Hanlin. It also claims to support multiple formats, including TXT, HTML and PDF.

The fact that probably the biggest name in electronics is getting behind a good ereader is good news to me. It means more to come. People are trying to make this thing work.

I want an ereader so I can then go to Project Gutenberg or Black Mask Online and pick out all kinds of public domain and out of print works and read them at work, waiting in line, or laying in bed. Whatever. I want it and I want it bad.

This makes me think about the portability of books. This is what makes mass market paperbacks and small hardcovers great, you can throw them in a jacket pocket or a bag and read them anywhere. But nowadays, most books I want to read come out in massive trade paperbacks and normal sized hardcovers. I want small books to carry around!

But the ereader solves that problem, by allowing you to put numerous books (and even better, short
stories! Imagine having all of SciFiction on a single device.) in one place in an easily portable package.

Ed Champion had a post about the Sony Reader in which he complains that the ereader will try to "supplant the reading experience." He says:

To me, reading involves stopping, perhaps writing key passages in a notebook, or rereading a particular paragraph or two, and sometimes skipping around. An academic or a student, for example, couldn’t compile information without this technique. Now that the sensation of flipping between, say, page 6 and page 125 has been lost, I’m wondering if the Sony Reader will cause the retention of information to dwindle. Assuming it succeeds, will the Sony Reader create a new generation of otiose readers?

I don't think so. First of all, why would an ereader limit you from stopping and rereading? Or even skipping around? I'm pretty sure these things would operate with page numbers, so you could flip from page 6 to page 125. Even if it doesn't I would be surprised if there wasn't some bookmarking program involved to let you jump back to key paragraphs. (It's certainly something that should be looked at when the product is released.)

And similarly why couldn't you write key paragraphs in a notebook? You couldn't write anything on the page, but I don't do that anyway. To me, I can't see Champion's complaints actually being a problem.

Anyway, I'm going to try and keep up with the news about these products. By spring, maybe I can have my own ereader.

Brain flexing, zeppelin stats and not reading

2006-01-11T15:37:00.000-05:00

In yesterday's comments, caMoore said:

My editor tells me to not worry about what I am putting down just put the words down and look at it later. The exercise is to flex your brain.
Have you flexed your brain today?
:)

I like that attitude and it's one shared by a lot of self-help writing books: Bird by Bird, Writing Down the Bones, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop. You let it all come splatting out of your head and then you go back and fix it later. Reading interviews of Jeffrey Ford (like this one at his Live Journal) it appears he writes much this way and later "beats" a story into shape.

And yet, it's not the only way to write. Caitlin Kiernan often talks about how she writes. She keeps
working over the words she does on a given day until she's sure they are the right ones. She ends up doing
1,000 words a day, maybe, but when she is done with the book she only has to copyedit and fix any
logical or factual errors. (Apparently, this has changed for her in the last year.)

It's one of the many things I consider while I'm trying to figure out how I write, or rather how I should write. I do like just letting it all out on the page and then coming back to fix it up later. In fact, I don't think I could use Kiernan's method. I think it would drive me crazy.

I do want to try something differnt though. I want to try and write using a really detailed outline. I want to create a plot structure and all and follow it through. I think this would work best on a novel, so the next one I write (the next one I actually want to become something more than a dust collector) I will try this out.

In the meantime, I need to follow the current process through. I have to stop writing things and just letting them fall away, never to be looked at again. After I finish "Zeppelin Hijack," I'm going to pull out one of my older stories and figure out what is good about it and if the characters are worth something and then I'm going to rewrite it and form something better. That's my next step: true editing.

***
In the meantime, I'm still working on "Zeppelin Hijack." I wrote a couple of paragraphs today, I was much too easily distracted. I had a couple of important phone calls to make, but I still could have done more than I did. I really think I need to stop myself from reading blogs first thing. I think I need to write first and then start checking in. It's OK, if all those blogs remain unread in Bloglines, they aren't going anywhere.

I'm thinking in a revision of this story, a zeppelin can't work. How high can a zeppelin fly? There's a certain amount of realism I need to add to this story and maybe this first basic idea needs to be dropped. But I'm not worried about it now, it can be changed later. Right now, the plot and characters are of prime importance, I have to "discover" both of them.

***

At Views from Medina Road the editor of Locus Online talks about the many writers who are desperate to be published despite having no interest in what is happening in the field, or reading the best the field has had to offer. I can't understand a writer like that. Why would you want to write when you aren't interested in reading? Or, more fairly, why would you want to write in a field you are not interested in keeping up with.

If I wasn't constantly reading, I'd have no interest in writing. I want to write because I want to create these wonderful works that make me think and feel. If you don't read this stuff, why don't you make a TV show or a movie or a video game? There's nothing wrong with any of those and they pay a whole lot more. And if you just want to be creative, there are so many other ways.

On the other hand, if you're fascinated by words, stories and reading, please write. How can that enjoyment not show up in what you do? The more you care about it, the better it has to be.

Let me hear you say yeah!

2006-01-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

Did you know it's DeLurking Week? So it's time you say hi! (Actually, so do I at a few blogs I've been visiting.) But I wouldn't be so cruel as to not give you a subject to talk about. Try this meme out: If you're someone who doesn't know me very well or at all, ask me a question. Anything you want to know, don't be afraid. And in return, you have to follow the Jay Lake variation and in the same comment you ask me a question, you have to tell me something about yourself.
I'll try to follow comments intermittently through the day. Enjoy.

Zeppelin Hijack

2006-01-10T15:09:00.000-05:00

Today, I relearned the joy of writing. After yesterday's angst, today I jumped ahead and starting moving into the action of the story. And lo and behold! It became fun again. I wrote almost 600 words today. (So far, there's a chance I'll get back into it before the day is over.)
I actually wrote on the computer today as well. For the last week, I've been standing up in my kitchen writing on my Alphasmart. I don't know why I decided to write this way. Partially, I wanted to step away from the computer and the distractions from e-mail, blogs and the other things on my computer. I chose to stand up because I read that's how Hemingway used to write. (Yes, I know that's an idiot reason to do something, but it actually wasn't uncomfortable. Also, I haven't come to any decisions on the "right way" for me to write every day, so I'm trying different things.) I don't think writing this way hurt me, after all the first parts of the story were done that way too. Still, maybe it doesn't allow me to get totally into the story.
On the other hand, while I did that much writing today, I could have done more. I kept a writing file open on the computer and wrote for a while. Then I read blogs for a while. Then I wrote a little more. Then I sent out some e-mails. Then I wrote again. I do think I write in spurts, so I'm not sure this was bad, and it certainly was better than simply not writing at all. And like I said above, it was fun. So we'll see if I need to force myself to get more serious to it. I certainly think in a second draft I have put more concentration at one time on the job at hand.
I came up with a working title for the story. I just wrote for a name for the computer file, but I kind of like it. It's called "Zeppelin Hijack." It's probably too literal. Yes, the story does concern a zeppelin, at least for now it does. I keep thinking that's a bad idea since plenty of writers must now have left-over stories from their submissions to "All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories" being sent around. But I can't worry about that end of things yet. Right now, I just have to keep my thoughts on writing whatever story comes to me and completing it, making it worth something, regardless if anyone will buy it.
Anyway, I'm just overjoyed I've kept at this story and it feels like it's back on the tracks again.

Internet Review of Science Fiction

2006-01-10T11:21:00.000-05:00

I haven't written much about the Internet Review of Science Fiction, and that's really too bad because it's a great Web site. They are beginning a new year with a new issue and it's got lots of great stuff. There's an interview with the publishers of Night Shade Books, Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold's "Notes to an Aspiring Writer," an article about Peter Jackson's films and much more great stuff.
And that's only this issue, they've had great interviews, essays and articles in the past two years that you should check out. You'll need to sign up with them. Fortunately, a subscription is free right now (it was only supposed to be free during the first year, but they haven't managed to start the pay thing up). Sign up now, it's well worth it.

Technorati Tags: sciencefiction, fantasy, webzines

Sticking with it

2006-01-09T15:43:00.000-05:00

In a post yesterday, Caitlin Kiernan offered up an image of a page of her writing going through her editing process. This kind of thing doesn't teach me much -- I know how to edit, I know copyeditor marks and I have no idea what she's trying to achieve -- but I just love looking at the author's markings. I love seeing the raw text and the little notes for improvement. It gives some kind of insight into another person's writing, a process that is usually so solitary.

But as for my own process, I continue to struggle. What is happening to me now is exactly why I need to blog about it. I get to a point in any story where I just don't want to continue. I lose faith in it, I stumble as to where it's going and I feel like every word is tough pushing. And this is for the first draft! What's revision going to be like?
I need to get past these points. I need to keep pursuing the story, make it work, or at least finish it whether it works or not. Then I can look back and figure out what I need to do next time so a story does work.
Over the weekend, I wrote on Saturday but skipped it on Sunday. Today I wrote a couple of paragraphs. If I were keeping tracks of words, I'm sure I'd have done less words in the past four days than I did in the first two days of writing this.
On the other hand, I work on the story in my head all the time. Any spare second, I'm turning over the plot and the characters in my head, trying to figure out how to make it work, trying to figure out where it all goes and how it all fits together.
I've never written much out of order. I probably should. Transitioning from this opening of the story into the action is slowing me up, but I find it hard to just jump ahead. In fact, I feel like the reason I get tied up in a story and frustrated with it is linked to some kind of avoidance of the action. Like, I'm afraid of the main part of the story. I keep vamping where I am. The characters worry things over in their heads and look at scenery a lot.
Maybe I should just jump ahead, put my characters into the Super Sargasso Sea and see where that leads and then fill in the blank spots between.

Technorati Tags: writing

Quick update

2006-01-06T16:20:00.000-05:00

I wrote today, a couple hundred words maybe. I still like the story and I think it's progressing, so there's a chance I can make it through this. I just hope I can dig up a little time to write over the weekend.

Beefheart history in pictures

2006-01-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting comic book history of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band at Is This Tomorrow? The first six panels are here and the second six are here. (Links found at Up Sifter.)

House of Freaks singer and family killed

2006-01-06T10:18:00.000-05:00

There's some sad news today that Bryan Harvey, singer and guitarist for the band of House of Freaks, and his whole family were killed in their Richmond, Va. home over the weekend. House of Freaks was a good, smart blues-country-rock band. They never had that one break-out song to take them over the top, but you could do a lot worse than listen to their albums.
Check out the Web site Invisible Jewel, there's many interesting things about the band and their music, including a section called "Ask Bryan" in which Harvey answers listeners' questions. If you're interested in the band, I own two albums and would recommend them both: Cakewalk and Tantilla.

Writing up to a wall and resolutions

2006-01-05T15:16:00.000-05:00

So, again I wrote, and I hit a wall in this story. Not a tall wall, something I should be able to get over fairly easily. But with the way I am, any wall is a danger. I just get to points in stories where I don't know where to go, how to make the characters go on to the next part of the action. Maybe that's the problem, maybe I'm forcing them into some action they don't want to do. But I feel that if I don't move them along, the story will just die on the vine, get soaked up in characters doing nothing. Tomorrow I'll try to write more and see if I can't get beyond this.
There's been a couple of interesting posts lately about writing. Livia Llewellyn blogs about writing longhand and trusting the body to lead. Chris Roberson, meanwhile, writes about New Year's resolutions and how an epiphany led him to a resolution that helped him create his writing career. It's an inspirational piece.
Which makes me think about resolutions and think that I should make one. I never have made it a habit to take up New Year's resolutions, but there is always a good time to start.
This year, I resolve to write, send out and see a story published. At least one, but hopefully more.
Certainly, the first two parts of this resolution shouldn't be difficult. I'm already writing, now I just have to follow it through to finishing, editing and sending it out. Then it's out of my control, but if I work at it over a whole year, how could I not publish a story? Right?

RIP Infinite Matrix

2006-01-05T13:20:00.000-05:00

I'm way late on this, but The Infinite Matrix is coming to an end. It was one of the great Web zines and it has posted some really interesting final stories. There's a lot of good Web zines for fiction out there, I hope this and SciFiction's end are just temporary glitches for online fiction.

Page 123 meme

2006-01-05T13:05:00.000-05:00

Saw this meme at The Slush God Speaketh and decided to play along. Here's the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

All right, I'll reach over to my right and pick a book off the shelf without looking.

"I switched on the flashlight, hurried down the stairs and lifted one of the sabers from the wall."

I counted the first sentence on the page, which actually started on the page before it. The next sentence, which depending on how you interpret the rules may be the correct sentence, was "It was a heavy but well balanced weapon."
The Slush God sees the fun in people guessing who wrote the sentence, so guess in the comments. If no one comments, no one will know what the book is.

Pan's Labyrinth

2006-01-04T14:15:00.000-05:00

Here is the Spanish trailer for Guillermo Del Toro's new film "Pan's Labyrinth." You won't find out much about the plot from it, but it certainly looks spooky and cool. You can find some information and links about the film at Counting Down. If this is anywhere near as good as "The Devil's Backbone," I'm going to be very happy.

Writing work

2006-01-04T13:48:00.000-05:00

I'm trying out the Performancing extension on Firefox. It seems like a pretty cool blogging feature. We'll see how well it works after this post.
Anyway, I wrote again today. I'll probably do some more before I go to work as well. So far, I've written almost 400 words. It was a reboot of the story I started yesterday. I felt like I didn't know where to go with the plot. Now, the story has a stronger plot element and I have a better sense of the characters (the main character has completely changed, with a whole new voice that I'm enjoying.)
At the Den of Ego and Iniquity, Richard Parks has an interesting post about writing regularly and the benefits thereof. He mentions Jay Lake's writing plan, the idea that you should write at least one story a week, even if it's a piece of flash fiction. I would love to do that. Right now, I'm trying just to reach completing a story, sticking with a story until it's done.
Again, that's why I'm blogging about writing. I'm trying to analyze my process a little and make it better. One of the things I need to do is stick with a story, don't get bored with it. Keep writing it, no matter what. Today, as I said, I started the story over and it's now something completely different -- though the background and central idea remain much the same. As I continue writing, I have to develop the story and see if it works. It's important to remember that I can't know how well something works until I finish it.
Often, I stall on my stories because I spend some time away from it. I don't write over a weekend, or I just procrastinate. When I go back, I'm just not in the mindset of the story anymore and it's put away. (I don't throw anything away, but I've rarely gone back to those things either.) So, I really need to finish a first draft by Friday. That would be the best thing. Alternately, if I could fit in writing time over the weekend, I could keep going. But that could be hard to accomplish.
So my goal for the next two days is to finish a draft of this story. I need to write more today, so I'm going to get to that right now.