Quick update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I wrote today

Whoopee, right? Well, this is the first day I'm trying to combine my blogging and writing with the hope that it will inspire me to keep it up and do it more. If I know I want to blog about it everyday (excluding weekends), than it, with any luck, will give me the kind of structure I need to keep me writing. (As discussed originally, here.)
Anyway, I wrote just over 500 words today on a fantasy story set in some kind of alternate history. I thumbed through Charles Fort's "The Book of the Damned" to get an idea and now I'm trying to form some story around it. The alternate history aspect was really the only way I could make the idea -- related to Fort's concept of a Super Sargasso Sea and the idea of air becoming denser the higher you go (obviously something that wouldn't work with modern day physics, not something Fort would care about) -- part of the story. In a way, I'm trying to explore my own fantasy world in the way Ted Chiang did in "Tower of Babylon" (not that I have any presumption that I could do anything as good.)
The first day's work was just writing into the first paragraphs, getting an idea of what characters I started out with. Tomorrow I will try to think more about plot and how the interior lives of the characters relate to the concept. Or maybe I'll just write on, unguided.

Toynbee tiles rise again

The Indy Star has a new article on the Toynbee Tiles. (Link found at the always interesting Professor Hex.) I wrote briefly about Toynbee Tiles back in Sept. 2003 (scroll down to the end of Sept. 9 entries). I think they are the most compelling modern weird mystery going. Who is putting these things in the ground and how are they doing it? Is it one person? What are they trying to say?
I keep trying to get to www.toynbee.net, probably the best site about the tiles, but the site seems to be down. However, the article does link to Resurrect Dead, another interesting page. Resurrect Dead has its own interesting set of links about the tiles. For concise introduction to the mystery of the tiles, check out the Wikipedia entry.

SciFiction's last

SciFiction's last original story has gone up. It's the end of an era. Celebrate that era at the EDSF Project, then pick a story and join the celebration.

Too cool not to be posted

A whole page devoted to putting SpongeBob SquarePants into Iron Maiden album covers. I especially like how they transform the eyes to look more like Eddie. (Link found at Making Light.)

Companies offer author blogs

Much work is being done to promote books. I did a review of Spin a while back after the book was sent to me from a publicist at Holtzbrinck Publishers, the company that owns book publishers like Tor. Now, Holtzbrinck has decided to create a Web presence. The site includes a blog about literary happenings, the latest books and other news. They plan on offering the first chapters of all their new novels at the site and through RSS feeds. Also, they say they'll be creating author blogs at the site. They could be offering some good stuff, so check it out.
Amazon has now started its own promotional programs as well. Amazon is letting authors blog as part of Amazon Connect. If you visit the page for Meg Wolitzer's novel "The Position", scroll down a bit and you can visit part of Wolitzer's blog. The blog is also published here. I'm not sure how you'd find other author blogs outside of stumbling across them on their pages.
Edward Champion has his doubts on the program and posts about it here.

But I can’t buy into the ethics of a retailer pushing a blog while simultaneously encouarging people to buy things. Whatever the merits of Wolitzer’s posts, however much she feels that “Anything that can get fiction on people’s radar is good,” I get the unsettling aura of Shirley Maclaine talking with the dead during an infomercial.

He certainly is asking the right questions about these ventures. Can the author really be free say what they want when their blog is a part of a huge corporation? I also agree with him that author's would be better off starting their own Web pages and blogs and keeping them updated. It's already proved itself as a marketing model (which is why these companies are pursuing it) and authors are free not to be tied down to any company's demands. Still, I'll keep a watch on them and see what comes up. At the very least, I'm looking forward to Holtzbrinck's first chapter plans.

The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto

I just read the last pages of The Kappa Child. The book is beautiful, heartwarming and enlightening. I loved it.
The book won the James Tiptree Jr. Award in 2001. That's what got me to buy the novel, thinking it would be a fantasy novel. The kappa and the UFO abductions in the story are all used more metaphorically. They are possibly psychological in origin, but all the fantastic happenings have physical manifestations. The book is really more literary fiction, and has its best moments describing the interactions between people.
The book is about a woman trying to come to terms with her family history and her present life. The writing is beautiful, the characters seem so real and the story is great. Find the book and read it. It's terrific.
The Tiptree judges had many good things to say about the novel. Here's one judge:

This captivating magic realist novel is, from start to finish, a pure delight to read. Although clearly fantastic it is written with a "mainstream" sensibility so that emphasis is placed on the protagonists, their growth and their inner worlds rather than on an action-driven plot with which genre readers are more familiar. This book pulls no emotional punches yet remains both a loving and a positive work.

Goto's warm, delicate and humorous touch had me, a straight and sometime conservative male, effortlessly identifying with the alienation felt by four Japanese-Canadian sisters, one of them queer, growing up within the confines of a strict, paternalistic family on the Canadian prairie. Quite a feat, that.

Add an immaculate conception, alien abductions and a kappa to the blend and you have an irresistible charmer of a book. PH

Hiromi Goto has a Web site with a movie clip and some other information. Here's a very short excerpt from the novel.
Here's some reviews: Strange Horizons; Canadian Literature; Herizons; and Emerald City. There's an interview with Goto at BookSense.
UPDATE: The word heartwarming above worries me. I think it gives the wrong impression. The book is very dark in places, much of it is about a family with an abusive father. In fact, some of the most powerful writing in the novel is the way Goto makes you feel the "explosive silences" of the household. The father's punishments were random and out of proportion. This is not simply a feel-good book, nor is it a Lifetime Channel movie. It's tough and it's intelligent. The heartwarming part comes at the end, when you've followed the main character through all her problems and seen her emerge from it.

Blogging about writing

Joe Clifford Faust has an interesting post on writing and blogging. He suggests that blogging can be an aid to a writer, forcing them to sit in front of their computer every day and write. Here are two things he says:

If you blog about your writing experiences, I think it helps you internalize them. This could be a great tool for beginning writers, who don't yet know how they work. It's also good for the readers, who can learn from our experiences and many, many mistakes.

The writer's blog is exactly what you want to make it. A checklist of your daily progress. A log of your struggles as you stare into the screen. A post-it place for excerpts of the day's work. A storehouse for notions, ideas, and projects. A place to air your fears and reveal your aspirations. Or all, some, or none of the above.

The post got me thinking about my blog and how I could use it to help my writing. I worry that blogging about writing would be boring for readers. But I've found in the last few months, if something interests me and I write about it, other people seem to be interested. In November, I blogged every day about Nanowrimo. They weren't all the greatest posts, but they weren't bad. And I noticed other people commenting on it.
So I'm thinking I may start taking Faust's advice and begin noting what I've done each day on my writing. At the very least, I might embarass myself into writing more each day.
As for today, well I haven't done any writing. I've got a story started from a few days back, but I have no idea where I want to go with it.
Tomorrow (the procrastinator's favorite word) will be the day I start this. I'll get writing and I'll start telling you about it. With any luck, I won't bore you away.

Space filler

I've had nothing to say these last couple of days. That's too bad considering my traffic has been picking up with all the people checking out the 15 things about books posts I made. By the way, I've been updating the Other People's 15 Book Facts post. I've found over 80 blogs that have posted that meme and I'm still finding more. Bloggers range from romance writers to homeschoolers to just plain old bloggers (like myself). Do all memes have that kind of reach? I want to thank everybody who has been commenting lately. I love to hear from you.
Anyway, posting might be a little slow this week unless I get inspired. But I really think I should be concentrating on fiction writing and stop wasting so much time online. There's just too much good stuff to be read out there, I can't read it all. I'll try to post before the holidays. Ciao for now.

15 things about me and books

Now that I've kept track of all these people doing the 15 things about books meme (see below, which I've been updating as I find more), I figured I'd do it myself:

1. I can't remember the first books I read. The earliest books I remember were the Encyclopedia Brown stories (I think that was its name. The main character was super smart and he solved crimes with his friends), the Black Stallion series and the Hardy Boys.

2. My writing interests changed with Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" and "A Swiftly Tilting Planet." I started getting into fantasy works. Then my neighbor, a friend of my parents, started talking to me about this great book I should read: The Hobbit.

3. I was a Tolkien obsessive from my preteen years until the end of high school. I had The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales (which had just been released at that time), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (I remember a conversation in middle school with a girl who said it was creepy and wrong to be reading somebody's letters; I disagreed); Farmer Giles of Ham; The Tolkien Companion; Tolkien's translation of Gawain & the Green Knight; The Road Goes Ever On songbook; and every Tolkien bestiary and dictionary. In fact, I remember just after reading part of the Lord of the Rings vowing to become a writer because I wanted to create worlds like Tolkien had.

4. The second big influence on my reading was a tag sale. My grandmother, who was a secretary in a school, took me to the principal's tag sale. The principal was selling off all of her late husband's paperbacks. I looked at one box and was astounded. Here was Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Robert Heinlein, Doc Savage, Samuel Delany and Lin Carter. When the principal saw my interest, she said I should just take the whole box. I was astounded. I have never been so grateful for an act of charity in my life. That box opened whole new worlds to me. I still have most of the books from it today.

5. I think I'm a slow reader. It takes me most of a week to read a 200 or so page book. There have been occasions when I read faster, but they are rare.

6. It disturbs me that there are so many classics I haven't read, especially Moby Dick and Ulysses. I'm determined to finish those in the near future.

7. I have so many books now that I get anxious deciding what to read next. I'm right now reading H.P. Lovecraft's story "Dreams in the Witch-House." When I finish that, I'm prepared to start a novel, but should it be Minister Faust's "The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad" or John Farris's "All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By" or Hiromi Goto "The Kappa Child" or "The Dark Sleeper" by Jeffrey E. Barlough or "Low Red Moon" by Caitlin Kiernan or "Home Land" by Sam Lipsyte or "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" by George Saunders or "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata or "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees and what about Christmas with all the new books I'll be getting. Ack! It's actually a great problem to have, but good god I feel like I'll never be able to finish all these great things.

8. I've tried my hand at reviewing books and I think I'm pretty terrible at it. I reviewed Spin most recently and I'm just never comfortable with what I have to say. What right do I have to tell an author they're wrong or aren't writing up to par or whatever. I'm just a copy editor and wannabe fiction writer, I shouldn't be talking.

9. I've worked in journalism for the last 12 years and yet I hardly ever read nonfiction books. I read plenty of newspaper articles and blogs and magazines, but I just find myself far more interested in stories rather than facts. The last two I remember reading were "The Serenity Prayer," a memoir by Elisabeth Sifton -- which was terrific -- and "Hell Bent for Leather" by Seb Hunter, which was fun.

10. I adore used book stores, especially ones that have books piled up all over the place. It's like a treasure hunt, you can find so many hidden gems. And all those old book covers are beautiful. It's so much different than Barnes & Noble or even independent book stores. A used book store just feels so much more lived in. And besides, I can walk in with a $5 bill and walk out with 8 books.

11. I hate that so few people I know in the real world read and enjoy books. They do occasionally and most of them are very literate, but they just don't have the joy of books that I do. I think that's one of the reasons I started blogging, to write to and hear from other people who liked the same kind of weird books I do.

12. I love short story anthologies, but I hardly ever read them in order. Usually, I read the story or author I've heard something about first. Then once I've read all those, I'll put it aside and occasionally pick it up to take a chance on some other story. Very few anthologies have I read straight through. One of the few I read that way, and probaby my favorite anthology, is Leviathan 3. Single author collections I am much more likely to read straight through. I have no idea why.

13. In high school, if I was given a list of books to choose from for a book report, I usually had read about half of them already. Yet, I always chose a new one to write about. I had a friend who was a troublemaker -- real trouble, he sold illegal guns and took drugs and today is probably either dead or a dangerous man. Anyway, he would ask me to write his book reports for him and he'd give me money in return. I did them, he always paid up. I told him to rewrite them so he wouldn't get caught, I have no idea if he did. Every single time, he would take the report to class and the teacher would know immediately that it wasn't written by him and tear it up. We went through this at least five times. I think I made out the best in the deal.

14. I rarely will read two of the same author's books in a row, no matter how much I enjoyed the first. I don't know why. It's one of the reasons I stay away from trilogies. It took me a long time to read Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series because I read a whole lot of other books between each one (and those books are really long too).

15. I don't get to reread enough. I've read "The Great Gatsby" three times, "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" twice each and "Lolita" twice. Short stories, naturally, I reread much more often. I think this falls under the same category as #7, there's just not enough time to read!

Hope you enjoyed that. Anyone who would like to do this meme, please feel free, but I want to tag three specific people: Cybele, Mike and the Professor.
UPDATE: Mike has taken up the challenge. Check out his list at Morrow Planet.
UPDATE 2: Professor Hex has joined the game.

Other people's 15 book facts

I enjoy memes, though I rarely do them here. But there's a recent one I've enjoyed immensely. It's called the 15 Facts about Me and Books. It's been all over the place and the answers people give are unfailingly interesting. So, I'm going to take it up soon and write my own. But in the meantime, I've been so fascinated by it I've started tracing back through the people who have done it. It started with Book Banter who said:

So you know that meme 100 Things where you list a whole bunch of things about you? I thought it would be fun to do the same thing for books, but 100 was too many. Hell, it was hard to come up with 100 things about me when I had free reign and could talk about anything. Containing it to just books was hard. So I kept lowering my standards until I came up with 15 book things about me.

You can find that original list here. After that, more and more people took it up:

Books, self-centered musings and Chocolatinis!; Blog Happy; Romance Reading Mom; Nocturnal Wonderings; Megan's Writer's Diary; Got It Going On; Words of a Writer; Writer's Domain; Anatomy of a Book Deal; Guilty of Being; Electric Mist; Oracne;Shaken & Stirred (this is where I first saw it); Whatever; Coalescent; Nick Mamatas; Jay Lake; Amanda Page; Marissa Lingen; The Little Professor; Karen's Place; Undefinable Qualities; Selah March; What Was I Thinking?; Kablammo; Elizabeth Bear; The Red Shoes; Jupitah; The Sibyl Queen; Tosy and Cosh; I, the author; emeraldcite; Yes I do mind; Dawno; Freelance Mother; Ronn's Ponderings; Rantings and Ravings of an Insane Writer; Death by Absurdity; The Clarity of Night; Simply Coll; My Bountiful Life; A Typical Life; A Typical Homeschool; Mother Crone's Homeschool; Nobody Knows Anything; Writes Like She Talks; Writing After Dark; Creative Ink; Virtual Lori; Bookends of Existence; Morrow Planet; Slices of Life; The Always Insightful Insights of Trent Hergenrader; Tawny's Web Journal; Kathleen's Blog; Pens and Swords; Mausi;Dreaming on the Edge of a Knife; Abrupt Change of Topic; Who Let the Blogs Out?; Sauscony's Books; Happy Dave; Deborah B; Riemannia; Bookseller Chick; Mark Teppo; Romantic Ramblings; Chapterhouse; An Innocent A-Blog one and two; Byzantium's Shore; Here in Korea; Tea and White Noise; Camy's Loft; Dreaming in Red; Mountaintop Architecture; Either/Or; Professor Hex; Kelli McBride's Web Log; Go Yuhan; MC Estoppel (scroll down to 12/15 entry); Nankin's Wanderings; Words of a Story; Naomi Novik; Cassandre; Brutal Women; yes_anesthesia; Book Geek; Joe Clifford Faust; Ben Peek; Paul M. Jessup; Blog'D; A Wolf Angel is not a Good Angel; Alec Austin; Behind the Stove; Jason Erik Lundberg; Mumble Herder; Liza was here; Life Off Balance; Bookgasm; and Brian Keene. Mark Siegal offers 1.5 things about me and books and writing.

John Scalzi (Whatever) came up with a variant called 15 things about writing. The only people I've seen follow that one are Cherie Priest; Naomi Kritzer; Flickering Flames; Byzantium's Shores; Notes from the Shadows; Joe Clifford Faust; Happy Dave; and Kristine Smith. The two memes are combined at My Invisible Husband and Midnight Writings.

There's lots of interesting in those links so check them out. If you know of others, or have done your own, let me know and I'll try to add it in.

When movies attack books

Catherynne M. Valente has decided not to see the Chronicles of Narnia because of her love for the books and her unwillingness to have the images in her head changed to a mass produced image. She points to Lord of the Rings and what happened to that:

I love my Eowyn, I love my Faramir. I do not love Miranda Otto and David Wenham, pretty as they may be. I do not love that visions of this book are so bottom-lined now, that the wonderfully unique experience of participating with a long-dead author in creating a world which exists for no one else has been replaced by enforced communal experience, that all our worlds are the same. Though it is a different essay entirely, the ultimate and natural destiny of books is not movies, and books have their own power which movies cannot effect. What movies can do is allow us all to experience the same things in approximately the same way, which is amazing, and sometimes horrible.

I basically agree with her. It's tough to read Lord of the Rings without at some point seeing Elijah Wood as Frodo. It's frustrating. You live with it and you try to retain your original vision (even though I do enjoy the films).
But what if I had never watched the movies, never gone to the theaters and bought the DVDs. Would I be free from those images? As far as I can see, if a movie is a hit it is nearly impossible to escape. Movie merchandise is everywhere from Burger King to children's toys.
And then it hits cable. I can't channel surf by HBO without catching part of "Return of the King" right now. How many times would a lover of the books be able to go on turning the channels before they gave in and watched a few minutes?
Even the books, go to your local Barnes & Noble and look at them. There is the trilogy with Viggo Mortensen's face glaring out of it.
I often look forward to movie versions of my favorite books (next up, "A Scanner Darkly"), but I regret the way those images are plastered over everything. I still want to open those pages and read the book without thinking of the movie. Is that even possible anymore?

Promoting underrated writers

At Syntax of Things, lit bloggers have put together a list of underrated writers who deserve more attention:

we decided to ask a wide range of litbloggers to tell us the writers who aren't receiving the attention they should. We allowed the contributors to define "receiving attention" however they preferred, whether it be by the NYTBR, or all of print media, or the litbloggers, or some combination, basically however they chose to define it. We asked each to provide us with up to five names and a short explanation as to why each writer deserves more attention.

You can find the list here. A few writers (most of them nominated by Gwenda Bond) I'm well aware of and glad to see support for them: Jeffrey Ford, Geoff Ryman, Carol Emshwiller and Poppy Z. Brite. There's many more I'm going to have to read up on and see if I can't read some of their stuff. Check it out, it's a very interesting list.