In search of lost marketing opportunities

I finished Proust's In Search of Lost Time! Whoo! I liked it--it gets more and more engaging as it goes on, which is actually kind of a problem because it's so damned long....

Also, looking at my plan for when Trust comes out (assuming it ever does--God, it's tiresome to have to wait on someone else; it makes me all the happier that I don't have to deal with an entire publishing house), there's another thing I want to look into: science-fiction conventions. There's a bunch around here, and you know, part of the challenge with science fiction is that not a hell of a lot of people read it. When a large group of people who do read it gather near me, it seems like the sort of marketing opportunity it would be stupid to miss.

Clearly, advertising in the program doesn't work. I think a potentially more-fruitful approach would be to do a flyer saying, Hey, wow, the Trang series, it's just the thing for you 60s-throwback-loving sci-fi enthusiasts! and then include a Smashwords coupon for a free copy of the first book. I could even give away the copies of the paper book I was going to give away on Goodreads. Of course, the book needs to be on Smashwords for that to work, so the three months of being exclusive on Amazon need to be scheduled in around the cons....

Ack, gag, barf, die

Yeah, that sinus infection is coming along nicely. I was at least able to finish off The Captive last night, but I think I'll be sticking with lighter fare until I feel better. I'm at that really gross stage where [SQUEAMISH PEOPLE: SKIP THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!] I'm finding snot on all kinds of random object. Pick up a mug: snot. Roll over on the pillow: snot. Another reason to stop reading Proust for a bit: It's a library book, and although I've tried my best, I'm not entirely sure I've managed to keep it pristine.

So I'll be lazy and link, like Crabby McSlacker does!

This is a cool interview with Lee Child (via PV), in which he notes that patience pays and that there is no such thing as an overnight success. Not a new idea, but still a true one, and one worth reinforcing and remembering. [ETA: I also really liked Barbara Morgenroth's comment, " The hardest thing to be and the easiest, is to be yourself. If you don’t want to go inward to find out who you are, to find your own path, being a writer is probably going to be one of the worst career moves you can make."] It's also interesting that Child's approach is not that different from Dean Wesley Smith's--just keep crankin' those titles out!

And this Passive Voice post resulted in a comments section that so impressed PG he made it into it's own post (which now has comments...oh my God). Basically if, you feel dismal when you read marketing advice, rest assured that you are not alone. My attitude is, if you like to market, that's great--go for it. If you really don't, remember that plenty of people think that the best way to market a book is to write the next one. If you want to straddle a middle ground, I recommend Lindsay Buroker's advice--she does market, but one of her main priorities is to not let marketing eat up all her writing time. (Of course, I'm neither marketing nor writing at the moment--but I am producing very impressive quantities of nasal mucus!)

I also updated my last post to note that, even if you think you don't notice typos and other small mistakes, you do.

Proustian snark

Yesterday I had the kid, and today I wound up making a lot of progress on Proust instead of starting Trials. (Is this just me being slow to get started and treating everything on my to-do list as if it were all of equal priority? Probably.)

Anyway, Proust is bad with continuity. That makes it difficult to remember who Smith, the red-headed lawyer from Lyons is when the last time he came up (three volumes and 1,350 pages ago), he was Jones, the blond accountant from Calais. The footnotes are both helpful and necessary, and today I came across a pretty funny one.

At a party in The Captive, it is mentioned that a character named Cottard has died. According to the footnote, "Cottard will nevertheless reappear--indeed at this same soirée (see p. 371)--to die during the Great War, in Time Regained."

The wai-ya-ting is the hardest part

So, Trust should come back from the copy editor in a week or so. The taxes are with the accountant with a note saying, Please look over this carefully and try to make sure that nobody goes to jail. The home-improvement project is one industrious afternoon away from being done. I read and liked Lindsay Buroker's Emperor's Edge (fantasy adventure, and it's free!) and M. Louisa Locke's Maids of Misfortune (historical mystery--it's not free, but come on, it's only $2.99).

I also read Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, which unlike the other volumes in the new translation of In Search of Lost Time, just isn't translated very well. It's a little clunky, plus the translator decided to save time and just leave a lot of the French expressions untranslated--you know, because when someone pays you to translate something into English, there's no need to be a completist about it. I once was fluent in French, but that was a couple of decades ago, and I'd rather not have to interrupt the story to look stuff up.

So, because of a licensing issue in the United States, all the volumes after Sodom and Gomorrah are available only as the old translation, which kind of worried me. But I'm reading an omnibus volume of The Captive and The Fugitive, and it's actually going fine--I think the old translation of Swann's Way (which is easily the toughest volume anyway, because it's more abstract and the time frame jumps around a lot) is what just kills people.

But, you know, even Proust doesn't really qualify as a B project. I've done all the production tasks I set for myself, and there's going to be a ton more to do--but not until the layout comes back from the copy editor. So now I'm thinking maybe I should start back on writing Trials--I'd have to start and then just completely stop again once the layout comes back, which is annoying, but it may be the best choice under the circumstances.

Literary culture

One thing Barry Eisler caught about Scott Turow's ignorant and nonsensical little rant is that Turow uses a phrase that was used in that equally ignorant and nonsensical New York Times op-ed piece. The phrase cropped up again (talking point!) in this more-recent anti-Amazon rant.

The phrase? Literary culture.

I am, to put it mildly, a culture vulture--my idea of a good time is to visit a museum or see a show or read a book. One of the things that I miss the most about NYC is all the culture: Despite the fact that it's a very expensive place to live, the advertising and fashion industries are headquartered there, meaning that visual artists who aren't big names can still find paying jobs. Theater, while hardly a normal industry, attracts and employs a lot of talent. The arts are hugely important to the local economy--the museums and shows attract a ton of tourists.

Culture is everywhere: There is street theater and pay-what-you-can museums and public art installations. Even purely commercial operations, like stores, rely on artists: They have beautiful window displays in winter and huge floral exhibits in spring (and people fly across the globe to shop in them).

Where I live now, there's certainly culture, but I feel like it's less accessible. It's shut away. With a few exceptions, you have to go to it, it doesn't come to you--you usually can't stumble upon it serendipitously, which is one of the great joys of public art. 

Not coincidentally, some of the cultural institutions here are incredibly snooty--I never saw anyone grab their pearls and gasp because someone dared bring a child into an art museum!!! in NYC, but I've certainly seen it here. (And yes, I know the Frick doesn't allow children. That is because it is a historical home filled with breakable antiques, OK?)

Just as the snootiness stems from the unavailability of culture, snootiness causes culture to become unavailable: I don't know where the pearl-grabbers think the next generation of art lovers and supporters is going to come from if children aren't allowed to see museum-quality art. This applies to a lot of things--our tax money subsidizes the production of junk food. Make junk food cheap and good food expensive, and whaddya know? You get a lot of unhealthy people who don't know what cheese actually tastes like, because food that tastes good and is good for you is only for rich snobs.

Snootiness is equally pernicious when it comes to literature. To generalize broadly, I feel like Americans have this idea that well-written or classic literature is just snooty--you read Shakespeare because you have to or to prove to other people that you're the type of person who reads Shakespeare, not because he's a really good writer. A friend of mine grew up in Barbados, and she was really surprised to hear that people here often think Shakespeare is something you have to force yourself to read--apparently the way they teach it in Barbados is, "Here's a really awesome story! Yeah, you have to work a little because of the language, but it's totally worth it! Shakespeare rocks!" Which he does: Hamlet, first and foremost, is as entertaining as hell--there's bodies dropping everywhere.

(This perception that fine literature is necessarily snooty can result in hilarity. I know a woman who got into big trouble in high school for writing a paper on homoerotic themes in a story by William Faulkner. Her English teacher was shocked--absolutely shocked!--that someone would suggest that William Faulkner, a man who wrote repeatedly about interracial sex back when that was something really taboo and who once wrote an entire novel about a woman being raped with a corn cob, might touch on deviant sexuality!)

So in my opinion, if you're really interested in creating a literary culture, you have to make it easy for people to read. This is why I like libraries. It is also why I like e-books. You also have to make it easy for people to write, which is another reason why I like e-books.

Literary culture is not you and your buddies being taken care of while the price of books goes ever-higher and the number of people who read them goes ever-lower. It is people reading. They may not read what you like, in which case you could try to influence their opinions by reviewing books, and then other people would disagree with you, and you could have debates over it that degenerate into bitter feuds just like in the good old days of the Algonquin Round Table. But if people aren't reading to begin with, literary culture hasn't a prayer.

Self-knowledge: Good for real people, bad for fictional people

I am of the generation that discovered the television show Beverly Hills 90210: No, Not the New One--Shut Up and Get Off My Lawn. This was back when TV shows were all basically produced by the big networks, and as a result they tended to be very bland and predictable, because they were geared toward not offending anybody.

In contrast, the first season of 90210 was delightfully shocking. For example, you had a character named Kelly, who was super-duper popular. Why was she popular? Because she lost her virginity at the age of 14, when she was a freshman, and the guy she lost it to was a senior. She wielded this fact like a cudgel--you're telling her what to do? Well, honey, are you so hot that you lost your virginity at age 14 to a senior? Guess not!

Trust me, at that time, nooooooobody was suggesting in a teen-oriented show that having sex could make you popular in high school, especially if the guys you were having sex with were a lot older. Of course, out in real life, it certainly could, and everyone knew it, but they weren't supposed to admit that on television.

90210 became very popular, at which point they toned it way down and I stopped watching it.

The episode that made me realize that this show was no longer worth my time was one with Emily Valentine. She was Brendan's psycho stalker ex-girlfriend, who started out as bad news and spiraled down into more and more insane behavior. Finally she doused a homecoming float with gasoline and sat on it with a lighter. Dun-dun-duuuhhh!

And then not only did she decide not to make Emily Flambé, but she proceeded to launch into this lengthy analysis of why she was so unstable. (Her family moved a lot.)

OK. Say, you're emotionally unstable. You've been unstable for quite a while. Your instability is making you screw things up, and which is making you even crazier. Finally you get ready to commit suicide by setting yourself on fire.

You are not in a position to analyze why you are acting this way, OK? You are too unwell. You might understand intellectually that what you are doing is harmful, but you don't understand the forces that drive you to harm yourself, at least not in a helpful way. Maybe after therapy and perhaps medication, and once you get some distance on events, maybe then you can sort out all the whys and wherefores--but not in the red-hot moment.

It's contrivance. In 90210 it was that safe, pedagogical approach to teen fare--you can't have someone do harmful things without turning it into a "The More You Know" moment, otherwise all the parents' groups will accuse you of glorifying bad behavior. I recently read a novel where, despite the fact that it was set in the 19th century, all the characters exposit (constantly) about their family and their interactions exactly the way people who have been through a lot of therapy in the 21st century do. That's also contrivance--historically-inaccurate contrivance.

These kinds of contrivances suck away all the drama. It's not just that having all your characters prattle on about how their father and their brother and their mother and their sister and their cousin and their brother-in-law and their dog all interact now and have interacted at every point in the past is dull--although it's certainly that. It's that Emily Valentine was all better. She was 100% fine--no need to worry about her any more! She's never going to do anything bad again! Please don't care! It's very, very difficult to relate to someone who has a mental-health hotline in their head that will magically call them at any stressful moment in their life and make sure they never, ever do the wrong thing.

Which is not the same as saying a character can't grow and become more stable--but it's a process, and circumstances have to be right. In Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Mark Vorkosigan does this pretty convincingly: He is given a very robust support network, it takes a lot of time, and he's never without his hang-ups. The very fragility and imperfection of his recovery is emotionally engaging. He isn't just bonked on the head by the Contrivance Fairy's wand and magically made all better the way Emily Valentine was.

Loyalty to a monster

(The kids are here today; no work shall be done.....)

My sister and I were discussing vampire romances the other day: Namely, the Twilight/Stackhouse convention that nothing is more erotic, sensual, sexy, and exciting than making love to a cold, hard, stone statue.

I'm just going to get inappropriate for a moment and say: Bullshit. Take a stone phallus, stick it in your freezer for a day or so, and then jam it into your orifice of choice. Having fun yet?

Anyway, the point I made to her is that for some people, the simple presence of vampires is enough. They love themselves some vampires, so a book with vampires in it is a winner for them, no matter what. Likewise there are quite a number of people who seriously object to sci-fi that has no aliens in it. Aliens = quality, period.

I'm not that way, and I get the feeling this is part of my problem with horror. Right now, I'm 184 pages into Dan Simmons' 766-page horror novel The Terror. Now, I LOVED the Hyperion books, so I have hope that Simmons is going to do something interesting. But at the moment, I've got two problems.

Problem #1:

The book is based on Franklin's lost expedition, an arctic expedition that was lost back in the 1840s. It is believed that every person on the expedition died as a result of:

1. Inadequate supplies

2. Disease

3. Inadequate planning

4. Severe cold

5. Exhaustion

6. Poor command decisions

In The Terror, the men are facing:

1. Inadequate supplies

2. Disease

3. Inadequate planning

4. Severe cold

5. Exhaustion

6. Poor command decisions

7. A HORRIBLE MONSTER

See, here's where the fact that I'm not the kind of reader who is just delighted by the mere presence of a HORRIBLE MONSTER works against me. To my way of thinking, that HORRIBLE MONSTER just isn't bringing anything to the party: Factors 1-6 killed off everyone perfectly well all by themselves. The HORRIBLE MONSTER is just superfluous.

And he is really HORRIBLE, which brings me to....

Problem #2:

OK, you're a HORRIBLE MONSTER in the arctic. You are 12-feet tall, massively strong, with claws as big as Bowie knives. In addition, you can materialize and de-materialize into the ice, and bullets don't hurt you. Oh, and you can control the weather.

You come across two ships stuck in the ice, filled with delicious humanity you want to kill for some obscure reason.

Would it take you months and months, because you insist on picking them off one or two at a time?

I'm serious, HORRIBLE ARCTIC MONSTER, let's talk about your time-management skills. They are stuck inside their ships. They are sitting ducks. With a little effort, you could be inside their ships, slaughtering away. I know this has occurred to you, because you tried to break in through a ship's hull. Helpful hint from your bear friends: Don't try to break the windshield, break the back window. In ship terms that means: There are doors on the deck leading down--go in that way, instead of trying the fortified hull of an ice-breaker.

And if you were in a situation where a HORRIBLE MONSTER kills the lookouts on deck, but never goes into the ship, would you ever go on deck? I know characters in scary movies are constantly leaving places of safety to get killed, but it always annoys me. (I liked 28 Day Later in no small part because when the guy roamed off in an apparently stupid manner, it turned out that he had some really interesting reasons, and they resonated thematically with the rest of the film. That thrills me so much more than the presence of zombies.)

Be careful what you wish for

I blew off writing Trials today--this is typical for me, I always take a little time to actually start. Instead I finished reading The Passive Voice archives (I told you I was addicted--now, the withdrawal will have to begin).

There were two good entries about blowing off work, so you know, at least it's all thematically connected. The first provides an actual scientific-sounding name for why I have a blog: The Hawthorne Effect. Basically it's the strategy of forcing yourself to tell people that you're slacking off, in the theory that the humiliation will make you slack off less.

Proof that the Hawthorne Effect doesn't always work? A different post about the Internet controversy over George R.R. Martin's work habits. God help me, I find the whole thing hilarious. My feeling about ANY Internet controversy is that 99% of the people flaming away have absolutely no skin in the game and are just doing it for the fun of it. (For the record, I haven't read Martin, either. These kinds of sprawling fantasy epics are so popular that a lot of writers just churn out 600-page books that are 550 pages of boring filler, followed by a 50-page cliffhanger designed to make you buy the next book, so I'm very skeptical of them.)

But to take that impulse to just force a writer to write seriously for a moment: There's actually a real problem with making writers work on a series or book that they don't want to do anymore. And that happens all the time--when a series gets popular, publishers want only books in that series. Had another idea that excites you? Too damned bad! The only thing you can get paid to do is to crank out volume 230 in the Will This DIE Already? series.

That's the reason most series degenerate over time. To use a television example: I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, and I think season 7 of Buffy should not have happened, because he was clearly done with it before it ended. As it was airing, I was at a party with a bunch of other Buffy fans, and they were all complaining about how awful that season was turning out to be. Yet, they all categorically refused to watch Whedon's new-and-very-good show Firefly, because it was going to be Buffy or it was going to be nothing, and damn that Whedon fellow to hell if he was trying to do something that actually interested him! I was amazed, because they seemed to have no comprehension that there was a person behind all this, and that person might get a little tired of writing the same story for seven freaking years.

But the worst is definitely what happened to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. The early books are great: Bertie Wooster is a young, upper-class British man who, although not unintelligent, always manages to get himself "in the soup" thanks to a certain obtuseness. (For example, he believes that if a woman erroneously believes that you have proposed marriage to her, the gentlemanly thing to do is to marry her, even if you really, really don't want to. Otherwise you might hurt her feelings.) Jeeves saves the day eventually, but it's not easy for him.

The later books are horrible--Wodehouse had clearly come to hate his characters (and I'm sure, his readers) with a fiery passion. Bertie is now simply a moron--barely intelligent enough to breathe. Jeeves disappears for most of the book, only to appear at the end having magically resolved every last little problem. The contempt and resentment are palpable.

I really wish the creative process worked differently. I'm not proud of taking forever to edit Trust: I have a strong work ethic, and it annoys the piss out of me when I can't get going on something. But it's not like making widgets, or even like cranking out X many earnings briefs per day. You just have to respect it, because the results when you don't are never pretty.

Unpleasant characters

(I think I'll start in on Trials tomorrow--I have a couple of left-over production tasks on Trang, but I'm really getting bored with that sort of thing, so it's time to mix it up. In the meantime, I'm going to ramble on about writing and literature!)

I've read books that I've hated, but the character I felt the most violently opposed to, the character I (in all seriousness) wanted to see run over and killed by a garbage truck? That character was Rabbit, from John Updike's Rabbit, Run--the last Updike book I will ever read.

Why did I hate--and I hated this character with a passion--Rabbit so much? Well, part of it was that the book is set in the late 1950s, which was back when it really was a Man's World. Rabbit, being male, has certain prerogatives. For example, he dumps his preganant wife and takes up with a girlfriend. And when he tires of the girlfriend, it's an easy matter for him to get back with his wife, who is expected to be all sweetness and light about everything. Why? Because getting divorced--even when it's not her fault--is going to hurt her far worse than it hurts him, so she'd better toe the line and give him whatever he wants if she knows what's good for her. He knocks up his girlfriend because he refuses to wear a condom--of course she has to go along with that, because the only prospect of respectability she has is to get him to marry her.

Does he feel guilty about occupying such a position of privilege? My stars, why would he? It's a Man's World! Why should he care about what happens to all those silly little gashes around him? It gets worse--there's a silly little gash, his baby daughter, who DIES because Rabbit is such a jackass. How does he feel about that? Guilty? Devastated? Oh, hell no--she's just a girl! Who gives a fuck about some baby gash? He feels...wait for it...sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Poor Rabbit.

And I cannot emphasize this enough, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that the reader should feel anything but sorry for Rabbit. Poor, poor Rabbit, ruining the lives and KILLING the women around him. I think that, instead of writing more Rabbit novels, Updike should have written the heart-wrenching tale of a poor, poor slave owner whose slaves are always so difficult and give him so much trouble. It's awful, the poor guy sprains his shoulder beating them to death--don't you feel sorry for him? Or maybe a serial killer who kills children--and people act like they can judge him, and the kids are so uncooperative about it all, and life is really difficult for him. Your heart bleeds.

OK, deep breath. (God, I hated that book!) Now, some years later, I read Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys. The protagonist of that novel is not so different from Rabbit--an annoying and overprivileged male Baby Boomer with a wife who has left him (for good reason) but who might come back, and a pregnant girlfriend, plus a juicy co-ed.

But--and this makes all the difference in the world--the main character knows he's a dick. I cannot tell you what a difference that makes. It's not like he's devoid of self-pity, or that he's above taking advantage of his position (oh my God, yes on both counts). He is, however, vaguely aware of other people--he knows that they exist, that they have rights, and that his actions may have an effect on them that is maybe not so positive. It's a tiny bit of self-awareness and self-criticism, but it's just enough for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy toward this guy.

Letting characters basically take the fall for their personalities is key, I think. No one is flawless--everyone has their limitations, even if they're not necessarily horrible people. If you let them own that--let them know that they always do X in a situation when they should probably do Y--and allow them to feel frustrated or disappointed with themselves, that's something that anyone who doesn't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder can relate to.

It also saves you from scapegoating, which is simply not that interesting to read. To trot out another famously misogynistic writer, Kingsley Amis has a terrible, terrible attitude toward women--they're all crazy and evil, except for the one designated Madonna. And yet, Lucky Jim is enjoyed by many people (including myself) who think the rest of his books are not worth the time (not so much because they are offensive as that they are very, very predictable). That's because the central problem for Jim is not that all women (except the designated Madonna) are horrible people, the problem is that he will not stand up to the horrible people in his life. The problem is within. And that's something I think anyone with a little life experience can relate to--there's no way to completely avoid bad people or bad things, the only thing you can control is your response to them.

Learning from things you don't like

I had a birthday recently, and a dear relative gave me a considerate gift: a memoir by a famous film critic. I was really excited about reading it, I read it, and I really didn't like it.

Whenever I don't like something, I find it useful to figure out precisely why I don't like it. In part, that's something I just do, but I also hope it helps me to not write something like that myself. (And nothing makes a criticism of my work resonate more to me than seeing someone else do the exact same thing.) Call it mindful reading--I think it's valuable to writers to not simply experience something, but to figure out why they experienced it as they did.

I think the first part of the problem with this book is that the film critic is famous. I can't really think of a truly interesting celebrity memior (with the exception of Candice Bergman's, but she wrote mostly about being the child of a celebrity--now those kinds of memoirs have some meat to them). This book even starts with the standard, "Oh, now, you--I don't think my life is worthy of a memoir! But if you insist...." No celebrity ever seems to harken to that little voice saying, This just isn't that interesting.

The lessons: 1. Listen to that little voice: If you're bored, the reader is really bored. 2. Try not to assume that the reader is automatically going to find your main character interesting just because they are the main character. 3. A striving character (even if they're just striving to be normal) is a lot more interesting than a character who has made it and now sits around, contentedly counting their money, reflecting on how swimmingly it all went and how totally excellent they are.

Another issue is that the book lacks any kind of meaningful organization or theme. There is no main story, and stories even get repeated because the book is basically a wad of stand-alone pieces. This guy writes short pieces well, but this is long, and he's hopeless. You see this a lot with writers: Most have one length that they write well. I would argue that Flannery O'Connor should have stuck with short stories, Carolyn Hax should stick with mini-essays, Neil Gaiman should stick with novels, and Gloria Naylor should do the same thing as Gaiman. In some cases, a writer might not write badly at another length, but they don't write as well as they do at their prime length. In other cases (such as this memoir), they're not just out of their length--they're out of their depth as well.

The lesson: Stay with the length you're good at. I should warn you that from a commercial perspective, this is terrible, terrible advice: No one will publish novellas, and one standard way to get a novel published is to first publish a bunch of short stories in periodicals. Contemporary self-publishing has led to novellas suddenly being much more commercially viable, so maybe it will allow more writers to do what they do best. Fingers crossed!

The final issue was a low signal-to-noise ratio: Not much interesting was going on with the story, so he threw in a bunch of crap to make it interesting! Never works--never ever. When he was a 20-something, he had sex! And then had it some more! And he drank a lot! (Wow, that's original.) He knew a lot of crazy people! People who smoked pot! He traveled places! And he met movie stars! Who generally weren't that interesting, and he mostly didn't know them very well! But they're in there!

The sad thing is, he's got the makings of an interesting story with the drinking--he eventually went into AA. But despite the fact that he mentions the drinking a lot, he doesn't develop it: He doesn't really examine why he drank, he doesn't get much into how the drinking affected his life, and he doesn't tell you why he decided to stop.

The lesson: Pick a story. Tell that story. Everything else goes in the trash.

Book too hard

I was feeling much better this morning, a-leaping out of bed with great ambitions to do things, maybe even to edit Trust! That lasted until I had to do difficult things like stand upright and eat breakfast. But even then I, ever the optimist, was thinking I might be able to engage in a demanding mental task (like editing Trust!). To test this, I picked up Marcel Proust. Five pages later, I acknowledged defeat.

Yes, I am reading Proust--I'm up to the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past (now more accurately translated as In Search for Lost Time). Rargh! I fear no Serious Literature!

I've been on a quest over the past few years to read works of literature that are so well-known that they've affected the culture I live in. Mainly that's led to my reading a lot of pop books that are merely OK (Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest). I've also had to force my way through some real stinkers, like Flowers in the Attic and The Fountainhead. Seriously, if you are tempted to read Ayn Rand, I would suggest you read Starship Troopers first. They're both simple-minded political screeds masquerading as novels (so if you like the one you'll like the other), but Starship Troopers is several hundred pages shorter and somewhat less offensive. (I do not consider Heinlein's enthusiasm for, say, child abuse to be any less offensive than Rand's enthusiasm for rape. However, Heinlein spares the reader lovingly-detailed scenes of violent abuse, followed by the victim falling in love with her abuser, because being beaten and not experiencing any sensual pleasure was the best thing that ever happened to her. Honestly, I feel incredibly sorry for Rand.)

Anyway, after reading all these books that are famous but not very good, I decided to reward myself by reading Proust's massive novel, which is famous for being good. And difficult, although The New York Times makes the case that a good chunk of that difficulty is due to the fact that the first widely-available translation into English was simply not that great.

I'm enjoying it (in the new translation), but it is still a difficult book. It's not difficult the way the High Modernists (Pound, Eliot, Joyce) are difficult--Proust doesn't spend all his time making allusions to other works, and God help you if you haven't read them. The length is massive, and it's all one novel, so Proust will refer to a character you haven't seen for 900 pages (and, since he actually wasn't very good with details, the character's name or some other identifying feature has probably been changed), but that's not the main reason it's difficult. Mainly it's difficult because Proust was so damned smart. The book is largely about things like how we experience art and how we perceive reality, so it's like a million little philosophical and artistic essays crammed into one storyline. The essays are really good, and (unlike Rand and Heinlein) it's not just the same essay over and over, but it's taxing to read and process all those deep thoughts. Even when I'm not sick and dumb, Proust makes me wish I was more intelligent. Still, they are very insightful, and the rest of the book is funny and really well-written.

Speak out with your geek out; or, in defense of science fiction

As I've mentioned, I'm totally sick, and I should probably hold off on attempting any writing until I have the energy to, you know, go outside and that sort of thing. But nay! I foolishly persevere! In particular, I'm going to do a Speak Out With Your Geek Out post about science fiction (I was alerted Speak Out by Sporkchop). I'm doing this because I am generally opposed to bullying, narrow-mindedness, and unethical "journalism."

When it comes to judging the quality of literature, narrow-mindedness is nothing new. My father was extremely defensive about his love for short stories, because when he was growing up, it was believed that short stories were for people who who were too dumb to read all the way through a novel. Eudora Welty is believed to have been robbed of the Nobel Prize for Literature because she wrote about the American South, and at that time it was thought that regional literature was for people who were too dumb to understand universal themes (you know--universal themes like what it's like to live in the Left Bank or Greenwich Village).

There's plenty of bad sci-fi out there, but there's plenty of bad everything out there. Refusing to read something because it's science fiction makes about as much sense as refusing to read short stories or regional writers--you're really, really just hurting yourself.

So, here's what I like about science fiction:

It's about the larger questions. Science fiction tends to be about either 1. society or 2. spirituality.

People often don't realize that. They think science fiction is either about 1. technology or 2. aliens. But at least the stuff I like isn't about technology or aliens in some kind of vacuum--it's about how these things affect humanity. If we had intelligent robots, how would people interact with them? If aliens landed, what would we do to them? How is technology used by governments to control people? If we had some kind of superhuman power, what would it do to us? Do we own our machines or do they own us? What is the purpose of humanity? How does the past affect the present and future? Is reality the here and now, or is it something somewhere else? What will become of us?

Even adventure sci-fi asks these kinds of questions, if it is good. You don't get this claustrophobic focus on the individual that seems to be the mark of Serious Literature these days. That individual focus can be done well, but it can also result in books that are entirely about the author's genitals and/or need for approval. Cracking open a sci-fi book after reading a book like that is like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of fresh, clean air.

Unless you're reading Philip K. Dick, in which case it's like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of hallucinogenic gas. But it's still pretty awesome.

Progress report

I input the edits through chapter 9. I realize that sounds like a lot, but as I thought, these later chapters are requiring less work, so actually I was pretty lazy today. I blame Dorothy Sayers: I started one of her mysteries today, and they are so nice and tight and laden with odd characters and juicy clues that I feel compelled to read them in one sitting, otherwise I forget who everyone and everything is.

Real life and fiction (and some looong footnotes)

So, have you heard of the Battle of Rorke's Drift, which took place in 1879 in South Africa? That's the battle in which about 150 British soldiers hanging out in a "garrison" (read: old trading post with no real defenses) managed to survive a two-day attack by 3,000-4,000 Zulu troops. It's a remarkable story--I mean, yes, the British were pretty much doomed in South Africa and holding onto Rorke's Drift didn't actually help with that, but from a tactical perspective, it was pretty amazing.

And it was made into a pretty amazing movie called Zulu, which among other things made Michael Caine a star.

And yesterday I read the book Zulu: In Space.

OK, it wasn't really called that. But that's what the book was--a retelling of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in space with aliens. The Zulus were played by the really alien aliens, and the British were played by the humans and their allied aliens, and I just know we could have a long discussion about post-colonialism, post-post-colonialism, post-post-post-colonialism, and whether we should still be offended by this sort of thing or if we're all over it now.

But was it a good book? Honestly, I can't say--I didn't enjoy it nearly so much once I figured out it was Zulu: In Space. I have a good memory for stories (to compensate for my terrible memory for names, I guess), and once I realized what I was reading, everything became dull and predictable, especially because the book followed the (extremely memorable) movie very closely. So reading it was like: Oh, here are the two wounded guys who together make one soldier; oh, now the Zulus--I mean, the aliens--have gotten over the wall, that's going to suck; oh, now the British--I mean, the humans--are singing back, it's about time.

There was also the knowledge that surprises weren't going to come from certain sources. When the humans & friends find a pair of weird alien buildings on this weird alien planet to occupy, they wonder why the buildings are there and why they are arranged the way they are arranged. At first I wondered, too, thinking this was a set-up for some delightful or dreadful surprise, but of course the buildings were arranged that way because that's the way they were arranged in South Africa in 1879. What, you were expecting something interesting, or maybe just something germane to the story?

This doesn't just happen with books based on historical events--although I've read quite a number of fantasy/alternative-history/steampunk books that devolve into history textbooks (that I've already read, thanks). It happens with books based on earlier literature--when King Lear shows up, the reader is not exactly shocked when it turns out that Princess Cordelia is a peach but that her sisters are not so nice.

I think it's a matter of letting the tail wag the dog--it's fine to be inspired by true events/other literature, but if you're just retelling someone else's story, why bother? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is respected because it's not Hamlet: In Space or Hamlet: The Musical or Hamlet: The Version More Consistent with Tom Stoppard's Political Beliefs. Even something as fundamentally silly and commercial as the 2007 movie version of Beowulf isn't about a super-duper guy who fights a monster and the monster's mother, and then finally bites it facing a dragon--it's about how that legend came to be. (And now I'm reading the Wikipedia entry about that movie and realizing that it was written by Neil Gaiman. Ex ungue leonem!*)

(* Before you start thinking that's totally unwarranted praise given how noisy and over-the-top the Beowulf movie was, I studied Anglo-Saxon poetry for a year in college, and it's obvious that the movie was written by someone who is both familiar with the poem and with the language--there's a lot of clever transitioning between Modern English and Old English.** Considering that most of the time Hollywood produces laughably ignorant crap like "When you taught Beowulf, did you make the kids read it in the original Middle English or did you use a translation?"--which is not only dumb because Beowulf is Old, not Middle English, but also because unlike Middle English, Old English is incomprehensible to speakers of Modern English, even the alphabet is different, so getting snippy because a high-school teacher teaches Beowulf in translation simply indicates that President Bartlet is an overly-demanding asshole with a gigantic stick up his butt--I was pleasantly surprised.)

(**OK, this is hard-core geekery about the use of Old English in the movie version of Beowulf. Wikipedia says that Grendel (the monster) speaks Old English, but that's not quite true. Grendel speaks Old English words, but he does not speak Old English.

What do I mean? Well, let's look at a Modern English sentence:

Beowulf tore off Grendel's arm with his powerful hands.

You understand that, right? You know who did what to whose arm and with what he did it. And you know that because of the order in which the words appear. Word order is key to Modern English.

Word order is irrelevant to Old English. Instead, they used word endings to tell you what was the subject, what was the object, what was the indirect object, etc. An adjective like "powerful" would have a different ending depending on whether you meant that Beowulf's hands were powerful or that Grendel's arm was powerful or that Beowulf or Grendel were just generally powerful.

Assuming you gave every word the correct ending, you could mix up those words and not change the meaning of the sentence. In other words, in Old English:

Hands with arm his tore Grendel's Beowulf powerful off.

His powerful arm off Grendel's with tore Beowulf hands.

With his off Beowulf hands Grendel's tore arm powerful.

Grendel's tore arm with powerful off hands his Beowulf.

would all make total sense, and they would all mean "Beowulf tore off Grendel's arm with his powerful hands."

That's a big part of the reason Old English is so freaking incomprehensible to Modern English speakers--when a sentence begins "With and what weather with held he hot the that and the though," the speaker of Modern English pretty much throws in the towel. (And the Anglo-Saxons did that sort of thing all the time, because their poetry didn't rhyme, it alliterated. Since word order didn't affect meaning, it made perfect sense to organize their sentences by grouping together words that started with the same letter.)

What they did in the movie version of Beowulf was have Grendel use Old English vocabulary and Modern English syntax. So when Grendel says, "Mother, the man hurt me," it sounds a little weird ("Muther, tha maen hurt mea" or whatever--I'm not looking it up), but you can understand him. Which just goes to show how important word order is to us--if, instead, he said "Man me mother hurt the," you'd have a much harder time understanding him, even though those are Modern English words.

For the record, later in the movie there's a couple of minstrels who are speaking proper Old English (in fact, they're reciting the original Beowulf). It's not even recognizable as English.)

Non-alpha-male heroes

[This is an old post from 2007.]

I am reading Young Miles by Lois Bujold. Because the hero of my book is really not the alpha-male type (and in the current crappy state of traditional sci-fi publishing, that means the book is not a commercial book), I've been getting recommendations for other sci-fi books that don't feature alpha males.

The first book like this I read was Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh. The hero of that book is, like the hero of my book, a diplomat. But while Foreigner is quite good when things are actually happening, I found the hero to be just too damned passive. His life is in danger, he doesn't know why, and he is surrounded by people he can't trust. For roughly 200 pages there isn't a lot of plot action, and all the hero does is meditate on the fact that his life is in danger and wondering why that is, while the people he can't trust pass him around like he was a sack of potatoes. Their doing so only leads him to contemplate the fact that he can't trust them and that they may very well be passing him around like a sack of potatoes for some nefarious end (ya think?)--not that he's going to do anything about it. It's almost as bad as the movie The Pianist, which put me as close as I have ever been to rooting for the Nazis to kill someone, but at least Cherryh’s hero doesn’t take it for granted that everyone else will risk their lives in order to protect his, which is more than I can say for the pathologically self-centered "hero" of that movie.

Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories feature a different kind of non-alpha-male--Miles is seriously physically handicapped. But he’s extremely ambitious, he’s an enormous risk-taker, he uses what advantages he has (a title, some money) to their limit, and so far, Young Miles is a lot of fun. It's also more of a madcap adventure story than Foreigner, so in some sense it's probably not fair to complain that one hero is less enjoyable than the other, but at least I don't find myself thinking that maybe Miles deserves to bite it. Even the famously non-alpha, indecisive, sensitive Hamlet caused trouble in the court, drove his girlfriend to suicide, and left a trail of bodies in his wake. He didn't just sit there, moaning "What can I do?"

Eh, might was well write off another entire genre.....

I haven't read much Stephen King--I read a couple of short stories in college, wasn't impressed, and never went back. I was feeling a little guilty about that (his novels tend to be very long, which always makes it less likely I'll risk a read if I'm not sure I'll enjoy it), so I recently read The Green Mile.

And you know, it was pretty good--definitely good prose--but I feel like it would have been better if it hadn't been written by someone whose name is pretty much synonymous with horror fiction.

I've mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of romance, and I have a similar ambivalence about horror. Some horror is good, but a lot of it is very formulaic.

For example, I had heard that Clive Barker is a top-notch horror writer, so I picked up one of his short story collections. And he is a fantastic prose stylist, but the plots of his stories could pretty much all be summarized thusly:

Story #1: Farmer John Works in the Field
I. Farmer John is working in the field.
II. A HORRIBLE MONSTER comes along.
III. Everybody dies.

Story #2: Dick and Jane Go to School
I. Dick and Jane go to school.
II. A HORRIBLE MONSTER comes along.
III. Everybody dies.

Story #3: Joe and Moe Go on Vacation
I. Joe and Moe go on vacation.
II. A HORRIBLE MONSTER comes along.
III. Everybody dies.

In other words, there was a certain sameness...to the degree that when I came across the occasional story where everybody did not die, it was very exciting. I don't think this is because I am squeamish--I loved Hyperion, and pretty horrible things happen in that book--so much as that I do get bored fairly easily, especially if I know exactly how something is going to end.

Also, if you look at those story summaries, you have two kinds of characters: The HORRIBLE MONSTER, and the cannon fodder. Is there going to be much character development there? Any kind of arc? No--HORRIBLE MONSTERS don't change, and cannon fodder doesn't matter. (Predictability and a lack of character development are also why I don't particularly enjoy plays like Into the Woods or movies like Reservoir Dogs where you just sit and watch the characters get picked off. Add a twist, like Keyser Söze, and things get interesting again.)

Of course, sometimes a noted horror writer like Stephen King produces a book like The Green Mile where everybody doesn't die. What to do then? Well, apparently the answer is to make everybody wish they were dead, because even though this isn't a horror book, for some reason we are still in the horror universe where nothing good can possibly ever happen. So you have a bunch of people murder someone, but it's OK, because the world is such a horrible place that he's better off dead, and then you have someone miraculously given near-perfect health and a long life, but that just makes him miserable, because the world is such a horrible place that he's better off dead. Where's a HORRIBLE MONSTER when you need one?

Seriously? Near-perfect health and he's complaining? What a whiner! Someone is in desperate need of a gratitude journal.....

Anti-progress

[So, I've been feeling guilty about neglecting this blog--less guilty about neglecting Trust, because that home-improvement project is chugging along nicely--and I figured I'd do the lazy thing and repost an old entry from 2007, back when this blog was mostly about working in a place where sexual harassment and exhibitionism were considered good things. (I mentioned that we worked with children? Yes, I did, but I'll mention it again--we worked with children.)]

I subscribe to Netflix, and since my queue is typically maxed out at all times, I'll hit these really weird runs of movies because 500 titles ago, I got curious about a particular director or actor or genre.

So recently I saw two Tupac Shakur movies, first Gridlock'd and then a few weeks later, Juice. In Gridlock'd, I thought Tupac was kind of what you would expect from a whatever-turned-actor--just a little unpolished and unnatural, a little stagy, a little exaggerated with the gestures and expressions, and clearly someone pretending to be a character rather than someone who really gives the impression of being the character. In Juice, though, he's perfect--very smooth, very natural.

The thing is, Gridlock'd was made five years after Juice. I don't know if it had to do with the subject matter or the director or the other actors, but I find it interesting that Tupac became a worse actor over that five years, rather than a better one.

That's a phenomenon that really creeped me out when I read City by Clifford D. Simak. It's a classic sci-fi book that is a collection of interconnected stories. The last story was written many years after the earlier stories--if I recall correctly, it was written by Simak once a decision was made to publish the stories (which had appeared in magazines) together as a book--and in my opinion, it's by far the worst-written of the lot. This terrifies me, because you really are supposed to become a better writer with time--I suppose it's to compensate for you losing your looks or something. With Simak, I think I know the reason--he spent the intervening years working as an editor for some dry-as-dust publication, and it infected his writing so badly the last story has all the verve and excitement of the product warning on the back of a bottle of vitamins. (I still think the book is well worth reading, just don't expect too much from that last one.)

I liked it!

So, I went to my first meeting with a writing group today--I was feeling pretty good about it because the works we were supposed to read and critique were good. And I think it was a good group. Maybe a little biased toward the uncritical "I loved it!" but since I, too, thought the submissions were high quality, I can't really claim that was way off the mark.

Of course, I came to group with the professional's attitude, which can be summed up as: Of course it's good! I don't need to tell you it's good! If it wasn't good you wouldn't work here! Let's focus on what's wrong! I my need to adjust that, because I wound up tossing in the compliments at the end, and people were visibly relieved to hear that I liked what I read. Also, apparently I need to mark up the writing with an eye to giving it back the person, which means that 1. I need to write legible notes, 2. I need to write less random notes, 3. I need to stop using black ink, and 4. I need to not print things out on the backs of bills or other personal financial papers. Maybe I'll use a post-it for the general notes.

Also, I am reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Drop whatever you are doing and go read that book--holy Moses, it is good. (ETA: OK, the ending's a little weak. But overall a VERY strong book.)

Why "fucking romance"?

Thinking about that previous post, you're probably wondering why I dislike romance novels. There's basically two considerations here: The first is that, as a writer, I know I don't have one in me, so there goes that road to publication.

But as a reader, I have to confess that I tend not to like romance novels, or the romance aspects of novels. (It should be noted that many novels classified as romance for sales purposes are actually murder mysteries or historical novels that happen to have a lot of sex in them--keep it between two people, and it's romance. Expand the field, and it's erotica.) There are exceptions: When Mr. Rochester confessed his love to Jane Eyre, I cried. Because it was so romantic. (Yes, yes, he wasn't very nice to his first wife, but God struck him blind for that. Whaddya want, blood?) I liked Pamela quite a lot until Pamela got married and rich and smug and boring. I even bought into the longing of the romance in Little Green Men, despite being reasonably certain that the long-ee was going to kill the long-er.

But mostly, I don't like romance novels. Part of it is the fantasy aspect. While I think the criticism of Twilight is overblown, the book is certainly not the only one to package unhealthy behavior as romantic. I recently read The Hunger Games, which is a great book, but there's this teenage boy with an abusive mom who latches on to a five-year-old girl (after his father indicated to him that she was desirable) and fixates on her. All the time he's "in love" with her--which is over a decade--he never actually speaks to her until circumstances force him to do so. I don't know about you (and I don't know how this is treated in the next two books), but I don't read that and think, "How romantic!" I read that and think, "That kid's going to become a serial killer!" Then there's the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which won its author a Nobel prize and is considered a groundbreaking historical romance: It ends when the woman finally succeeds in berating her husband/love object to death. How romantic! (Seriously, that trilogy was described as "absolutely delightful" to me by the person who recommended it, a person who not coincidentally was going through a violent divorce.)

I also am more likely to dislike romance novels written in the modern era. Look at the basic plotline of romance: Boy and girl fall in love, there are obstacles to that love, the obstacles are surmounted. In days of yore, those obstacles were most often based on class--Jane Eyre is a lowly orphan, Pamela is just a servant. In order to overcome these class barriers, those gals need to have a LOT of spunk--they have to be natural aristocrats, otherwise (especially to the audience for which they were written) they're just gold-diggers.

But nowadays, the class thing doesn't work. I was telling my sister about Pamela, and I had to explain that Mr. B. was actually a decent guy, because even though he kidnaps and terrorizes Pamela, he doesn't rape her, which in that time was what upper-class men did as a matter of course in that kind of situation. Not shockingly, she was not impressed with his character--but in the 18th century, she would have been. Morality has simply changed too much--at best, we look at the upper-class character who won't marry the maid and wonder why he's such a snob.

So instead, even with historical romances like the Lavransdatter trilogy, the barriers have to be internal, and more often than not, they are neuroses. Bella can't believe that someone as perfect as Edward would love someone like her. Kristin Lavransdatter hates her husband and wants him dead because she can't accept his (totally obvious and readily advertised) flaws. These neuroses can get really contrived, with someone running off at some key point because they have some extremely convenient irrational hang-up. I just lose patience with it--I can't root for the woman, and I can't even hope she gets what she wants, because I can't believe a new boyfriend is going to solve anything for someone who is so damaged. That's not the way life works, and I, who have no problem suspending disbelief when it comes to aliens and vampires and demons, cannot suspend my disbelief for that.

Speaking of covers

This has nothing to do with anything, but I'm reading some of the Philipe K. Dick works in this anthology, and the cover cracks me up. It's Dick, holding a cat, which ought to be cute except that 1. he is holding it with its front paws crossed, which is basically a straitjacket hold, and 2. that cat is PISSED. It is PISSED and it is EYEING HIM like it's thinking, BASTARD! The VERY SECOND you let my paws go, I AM CLAWING YOU TO DEATH!!!