The Alchemy of Writing

Four Short Walls #29 - Escalators

2012-01-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

Four Short Walls #28 - Revenge of the Rhinovirus

2012-01-26T08:10:00.000-05:00

Burning Bright - Under the Microscope

2012-01-23T07:30:00.002-05:00

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As much as I love short stories, I don't tend to read a lot of short story collections, but I made an exception for this book by Ron Rash. His stories would probably fit into what's called country noir, which is good because I've been getting into country noir lately. Now, I'm not entirely sure what country noir is, but I like it. The basic idea is that it takes crime noir and pulls it out of the cities, rooting it in the (often southern) back country, in the bars and meth labs of a decaying rural landscape.

What's a little different about this collection is its breadth and scope. The time span seems to cover the last hundred and fifty years, from the Civil War to the present, and while each story is unique and different, each also holds a fierce depth of character, a gritty sympathy for the people who walk its pages, but a sympathy that does not accept excuses. Burning Bright is an apt title, as these stories are about casting a bright light on shadowed corners. There's gritty realism here, and many of the stories are dark, but each is also feathered with a strange beauty, a crackle of truth lit by the harsh light of the fire burning from page to page.

Rarely do I read a book by an author and then rush out to get something else by them. Almost never, in fact. But I did that here, snapping up Rash's award-winning Serena at the earliest opportunity. Count me a fan.

Richard Price calls Rash "a gorgeous, brutal writer."

Yes. And yes.

Far Horizons

2012-01-19T08:28:00.003-05:00

This is a photgraph of mine, and it's always been one of my favourites. There's just something about the green deck, and the white prow pointing out to an endless blue horizon. An arrow of possibility; a dream of new places.

It helps, too, that I took this on my honeymoon, which is itself a celebration of a new beginning, a shared journey.

I wanted to put this photo up today because this is a little how I am feeling this year. It's an odd feeling, as it's a sense of hope, of adventure, of possibility, and yet it comes at a time when my life is, to some extent, a little more settled and sorted out than it has ever been (at least as an adult). Perhaps they do go together, though - when you have a safe harbour to return to, perhaps you're more willing to venture out in search of new places.

Perhaps it's a normal feeling at this time of year. The calendar ticks over, and the relentless march of the year's numbers starts anew.

I'll admit, I've never really been a New Year's person, in terms of the Eve celebrations, or the day itself. I have bizarrely weird luck on New Year's (bizarrely weird and of the bad variety, that is). And I think this touch of misfortune has always rather soured me on the rest of it, and made me push aside thoughts of new beginnings, new changes, and new resolutions. Onward, as before, was more my calling card.

And my luck wasn't really much better this year, as a sinus infection coincided with my daughter accidentally breaking my nose (she was very sorry - I think). Apparently sinus infections and broken noses don't go very well together; they're sort of like the opposite of apple and cinnamon, and nothing delicious is ever made from the pairing.

And yet... I feel strangely untroubled by it this year, and the sense of new beginnings is strong. Or perhaps it's not a sense of a new beginning, but of a new and exciting stage on a journey that is already well under way. But, this year, the journey is taking us somewhere we've never been before. How long before we get there? I don't know, but the horizon is blue and we are flooding west across the waters, carving the waves and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming...

Working into the Future

2012-01-13T08:19:00.000-05:00

This is much like my Work in Progress:

Or perhaps this is what I want to do to my Work in Progress. Ever feel like that? Just nail the damn thing shut, tie it up, and throw it off the bridge to join a few old friends of the Gambino family at the River Bottom Tea Party and Social Mixer?

But I feel good. It's a new year. And I want to do in words what this artist does with scissors:

Wishing you all treasure chests of words to open in 2012.

Artists:
Barton Lidice Benes
Su Blackwell

Hearing Myself Talk About Writing

2012-01-06T07:00:00.003-05:00

A new year! And a treat for you! Or possibly a punishment. Either/or. You'll have to tell me. Give me a second here for a little backgrounding.

See... I don't talk about my day job much here, but for those who don't know I'm the Senior Editor (well, one of two) at a large editorial company. The job is part editing (of pretty much anything and everything) and part management. It's a great place, full of great people (the awesomeness of our editors is mighty). We are also a sponsor of Nanowrimo, and this year, as part of our participation in the Nanowrimocrazymo, I conducted a live online webinar on writing a novel. And we recorded it! For the devious machinations of our marketing department. Or to embarass me. Probably the latter.

Anyway, my present (or punishment) for you is a link to me blathering about novel writing for a long time. Possibly this is like being hit up with coal by Santa. But here it is anyway:

How to Write a Novel

Admittedly, I've only heard a bit of it, as my son just turned it on out of curiosity (and didn't seem to want to believe it was me - though whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know). NO GUARANTEES. But that makes life interesting.

And I'm looking forward to this year. Hopefully there will be some new novel writing in it. What about you? What's the forecast for 2012?

Happy Holidays Plus The Future of Publishing

2011-12-22T08:32:00.000-05:00

A Christmas video for you... followed by what I think this video means for the future of publishing.

Kind of awesome, yes?

The drummer here is Sean Quigley, a sixteen-year-old from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). And what's remarkable here is not just that he can sing and drum, but that he rewrote all the music himself, played all the instruments, and directed and filmed and edited it (using a simple SLR digital camera). This is a true micro-production. It was made with talent, a standard digital camera, and a home computer.

A) this says something about the kid's talent. 1.3 million views and counting... I don't know how many downloads he's had, but probably a lot. In fact, he probably won't need a paper route or a job at McD's any time soon.

And B), I think this says something about the future of publishing and the digital revolution. I was going to say e-book, but why be limiting? Why think that ebooks are any sort of end point?

We've seen the rise of ebooks over the last few years, and we're still trying to figure out this new world. What is it, and how exactly do we use it? And this video really struck home to me the fact that I probably won't be the one to figure it out, to find a way to fully maximize the digital frontier in the process of making art.

But it might be my children.

I have a feeling that the Ebook (Digital) Overlords will not fully rise until the next generation, from children who grew up in a digital world, who have lived and breathed it and know only this. This video is, yes, a product of talent, but it also strikes me that this is someone utterly familiar with this new world. The technology of creation and editing and streaming and the omnipresence of Youtube's global market.

If I wanted to make a video, I would likely have to Google a bunch of How To explanations. Now, talent (if I happened to have any) and perseverence might, in the end, allow me to create something fine, depending on how well I teach myself the knowledge I need. But I don't think it will ever be the same as someone who has grown up in this, someone for whom these processes are as common as putting bread in the toaster. Toast! Wow! I'm sure, in my parent's generation, there were millions who were offput by computers and microwave ovens. Certainly, many adopted these things, and started to figure out how to use them. But for my generation these things have become second nature.

And now our children have a new digital age to grow up in. It strikes me that, in publishing, we are building something. Something for them. We're exploring the boundaries of this new world, charting and mapping, and settling here and there, trying to carve out a home, a living, a future. But the real future, the phantasmal cities of the imagination, may come from the children of these settlers and explorers.

People who know me will know that I love paper books. Everything about them: their individuality, their distinctness, their feel, their smell, the purity of how they operate in the imagination. And I hope they live in the world forever. But I can't deny that the future will be shared with (and perhaps dominated by) digital books and intertextual digital art. And I'm curious to see what this will look like. I'm curious to see what my children will make of this new world, and what strange new cityscapes will arise from the tapping of their fingertips.

Four Short Walls #27 - Deck the Halls (cont. [again])

2011-12-20T07:30:00.002-05:00

Four Short Walls #26 - Deck the Halls (cont.)

2011-12-16T07:30:00.001-05:00

Four Short Walls #25 - Deck the Halls

2011-12-15T08:31:00.000-05:00

White Christmas (aka book snow)

2011-12-13T06:37:00.000-05:00

Book snow... my favourite kind of white Christmas. Are you hoping for book snow?

The Descending Plague, in D Minor

2011-12-08T15:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, it may not be in D Minor. Not that I could tell one way or the other.

But, yes, I'm sick again. And trying not to spread the plague. Sorry, zombie kissing will only be allowed through e-mail.

That is all.

Bringing a Legend to Life - A Guest Post by Rick Daley

2011-12-06T07:30:00.002-05:00

I like a challenge, but when I started writing a Christmas book that tells the origins of Santa Claus I didn’t know what I was in for. My agent at the time, a 20+year former Big Six Editor, told me with great confidence that no publisher wanted to see such a story; if no publisher wanted it, that must mean no readers wanted it. There’s little point in writing a book nobody will read, except maybe personal therapy.

But I had an idea for a story, and I wasn’t willing to drop it. I wanted to bring the legend to life; to make Santa real, and present him in a way that modern readers young and old can relate to. Someone you want to believe in. Kind of like Batman Begins, but with Santa.

The challenge was to preserve all the key items that make the legend what it is, but they could be thrown in haphazard. I had to bring these familiar characters and images together through the story. And if I did it right I could maybe succeed where others thought the efforts to be futile. They only surefire way to fail is to not try, so I had to do something.

First things first—a plausible premise. A young boy and his scientist father find an ancient book in an ice core taken from the arctic. There’s a sense of reality to the find, but it is no ordinary book; it tells the story of Kris Kringle and how he came to be known as Santa Claus. Now Jason and his dad have to make a tough decision: keep the book and get rich, or find a way to return the book to its rightful owner, i.e. Santa.

Next step—Kris Kringle’s story. Born human but orphaned as an infant and raised by elves, Kris doesn’t fit in and goes on a quest to find his real family. He has an emotional drive propelling him forward, and it’s something we can connect to: the longing to fit in. Now it’s a story-within-a-story.

But there’s another layer…a story-within-a story (within a story)—two kids just lost their parents, and their uncle is trying to rob them of their inheritance. His actions put his niece and nephew in mortal danger, and now Kris Kringle has a rescue operation on his hands. Unfortunately, Kris has complications of his own and with only days before Christmas he struggles to save the kids, deliver his presents, and find his family…

Within these three layers grow the beginnings of our most familiar Christmas traditions. Here’s one example: a sleigh with jingle bells.

Kris has two-dozen elves who agree to help him find his family. They leave their woodland home to set up camp in the Great Northern Glen, a legendary forest sequestered away among the ice and snow. They load a large wagon and set off. When they reach the arctic, they need to convert the wagon into a sleigh, and then continue on. They make their way north, the pots and pans hanging from the side of the wagon-turned-sleigh jingling as they cover the rough terrain...

The story pulls in other Christmas traditions in a similar manner: by revealing them through the actions of the characters and the flow of the story. Writing the story was like working a Sudoku puzzle…one wrong placement and the whole puzzle fails. Thanks to an awesome group of critique partners, I was able to weed out my initial mistakes in plot and characterization and revise and revise and revise until the puzzle was complete.

I hope you have the chance to meet The Man in the Cinder Clouds this Christmas. He’ll show you a history of Santa Claus you never knew…and will never forget.

The Man in the Cinder Clouds

By Rick Daley

A young boy and his scientist father made an incredible discovery at the North Pole—an ancient book embedded deep within an ice core. Even more incredible is the story the book tells: the long-lost history of Santa Claus you never knew…and will never forget.

This origins-of-Santa story is a great holiday read for the whole family. Its mix of action, humor, and Christmas spirit keeps younger readers turning the pages, but The Man in the Cinder Clouds is not just a kids’ book.

As one Amazon.com reviewer puts it, “THE MAN IN THE CINDER CLOUDS is one of those middle grade books that the grown-ups get sucked into along with their kids. You think you bought if for your young reader but after you browse chapter one you just sort of... can't stop.”

This story-within-a-story reveals the origins of our most familiar Christmas traditions: from Christmas trees, stockings, and lumps of coal to jingle bells, the North Pole, and flying reindeer. Highly original and thoroughly entertaining, The Man in the Cinder Clouds will show you how Kris Kringle came to be known as Santa Claus. It wasn’t easy.

About the Author

Rick Daley has been writing professionally for over 15 years. His experience includes marketing copy for print and web, press releases, business proposals, training and technical manuals, and whitepapers. His essays, ranging from family life during the holidays to his first skydiving experience, have been featured in The Columbus Dispatch.

Rick lives in Lewis Center, Ohio, with his wife and two sons (and a neurotic schnauzer).

Four Short Walls #24 - Revenge

2011-12-02T07:26:00.000-05:00

Four Short Walls #23 - The Rejection Letter

2011-12-01T08:22:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving Death Match

2011-11-25T07:55:00.002-05:00

Thanksgiving Death Match: Snoopy vs. Chair

BEWARE

2011-11-24T07:45:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all my southish friends.

But...

Watch out for this guy.

And, whatever you do, don't mention stuffing.

Red Shift - Under the Guest Microscope

2011-11-23T07:30:00.002-05:00

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A review by Maine Character

Red Shift

I wish everyone could discover this novel the way I did: finding it completely by chance in a used book store and going to it with no expectations other than the quote from Ursula Le Guin on the cover: “A bitter, complex, brilliant book.” But since the purpose of a review is to connect books with their best readers, here’s all you need to know to see if it’s for you.

There’s three interwoven stories, each in the same location. The first and central story is a romance between two teenagers in 1973 England, with one going off to college. The kids are wistful, honest, confused, very intelligent, and trying to hold onto the one thing they know is sure in the world.

They stood in the shelter of the tower, holding each other, rocking with gentleness.

“I love you,” said Jan.

“I’m coming to terms with it.”

“ – love you.”

“But there’s a gap.”

“Where?”

“I know things, and feeling things, but the wrong way round. That’s me: all the right answers at none of the right times. I see and can’t understand. I need to adjust my spectrum, pull myself away from the blue end. I could do with a red shift.”

The second story focuses on a small band of the lost Roman Ninth Legion trying to blend in with the first century tribes of Britain. Religion, subversion, and revelation rise among the brutality of war. One of them, Macey, is prone to berserker-like fits. Anyone who likes military fiction, or gritty fantasy, will appreciate the realistic depictions of their battles, all laced in Vietnam-like delirium.

“You and Magoo stand sentry,” said Logan, “but listen. All of you get this, and get it good. The guards have been taken out, maybe not by Cats. The Mothers have come south. They’ll raid the Cats wherever they find them, and both sides will whip our ass if we let them. Solutions.”

“The usual,” said Face. “Divide and rule. Hit the infrastructure.”

“Correct. All right? We retreat until we’re clear of the Mothers, then we go tribal.”

The third story takes us to St. Bertoline’s church, in Barthomley, 1643, when the Irish are invading the countryside. It’s much like “The Crucible” in terms of a love triangle mixed with religious fervor, and it ties in with the other stories with a stone artifact that appears throughout the novel.

A single bell began to ring over the parish.

“Is it church time already?” said Margery.

“No. My father. He thinks we’ll be up against reasonable men.”

“Have you seen them?”

“Nearly. I rode down through Crewe by Oak Farm. They’d not left any alive. I must go and stop that bell. They’ll find us soon enough.”

There’s profound connections between these characters I won’t reveal here, but the novel weaves questions of identity, time, and the bond between the three couples to the point where the book doesn’t always mark where one scene ends and another begins. And important events might pass between two lines of dialogue. Early editions were marketed young adult, and yet it’s as adult and dense as a Salinger story or Shakespeare.

The novel ends on a heartbreaking note, leaving you in wonder as to what exactly happened, and yet that’s exactly the charm and strength of the work – like rich poetry, you need to read it more than once to get all the meaning, and even then there’s much beyond your reach. It’s a challenging work, and yet completely involving, and at a scant 120 pages, maintains the tension all the way through.

On first reading it, I wished there were footnotes explaining the British slang and history, but the web helped with much of that. For some pointers, a caravan is a military trailer, nesh is being very sensitive to cold weather or simply lacking courage, a folly is a castle built for decoration, cans are headphones, and M6 can be both a highway and a star cluster. “Tom’s a-cold” is a line from “King Lear,” M33 is a spiral galaxy, and the song “Cross Track” must’ve been made up by the author, but it sounds like he’s describing Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic.” (Garner is said to write to Hendrix.)

Image searches of Crewe, Barthlomey, and Mow Cop would give an idea of the setting, but don’t read the history of the church or the meaning of the coded message until you’ve finished the book. Also, the New York Review Books Classics edition, just released, has an introduction in which Garner explains how he came to write it, but don’t read that until afterwards, either, for it gives too much away.

To sum up, captivating and cryptic, with realistic, unique characters and situations, all presented with a masterful use of mystery and suspense. Add to that spell-binding dialogue, rich with layer on layer, and it’s a work that resonates with you long after.

Sjowall and Wahloo - Under the Microscope

2011-11-22T07:30:00.001-05:00

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A double dose!

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are not well known, at least over here, but therir influence, I think, is pervasive in the genre of crime fiction. Sjowall and Wahloo were a husband and wife writing team in Sweden; Per was a journalist and novelist, Sjowall a poet. But they came together to write a mystery series that was not quite like other mystery series. They started the series with Roseanna, in the 1960s, followed by The Man Who Went Up in Smoke. They wrote ten novels over a period of a decade, and what's interesting is that they intended the series not just as a series of clever mysteries, but as a decade long attempt to chart and explore their culture. These are realist novels, and yet somehow satire winds through them, somehow capturing both the grimness and humour of the various scenarios they look to chart and explore.

Before Sjowall and Wahloo, crime novels were clever puzzles, or black and white stories of good and evil. A lone and courageous detective, through force of wit, overcomes the villain. Sjowall and Wahloo, however, saw in the crime novel something else: an opportunity to shine a light on the dark crevices that wind between people.

Gone is the black and white, the lone detective. Their main character, Martin Beck, is certainly a smart and capable detective, but he's a man on the job. And it is just a job, though sometimes an obsessive one. He has kids he has trouble relating to, a crumbling marriage. And the cast around him is rich, and real. He's friends with some, and with others, not so much. And together they have to solve crimes. It's a group effort; these stories are not about the startling genius of a Holmes or a Poirot, but rather about the dogged intelligence of a group of people who are trying simply to do their jobs well, at least when life does not intrude.

The stories mirror real investigations. They are not linear, following a wonderful track of clues. They are happenstantial, jagged; sometimes cases stall; sometimes there are dead ends, and months of waiting, and frustration. And yet, in mirroring this fracturing, these doldrums, these moments of boredom, the novels somehow have pace; these moments almost heighten the drama, delay mechanisms that ratchet up the tension, while also allowing a moment to look closely at the people, the officers at the point of intersection with the world around them.

In Roseanna, the body of a young woman is dredged from Lake Vattern. Unnamed and unknown. Where is she from? A tourist unclaimed. After three months, all Martin Beck knows is that her name was Roseanna and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people on a cruise boat.

In The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, Martin Beck is sent to Budapest to find a Swedish journalist who has disappeared. How does one conduct an investigation in a city that one does not know, in a place where no one speaks your language? Beck stumbles upon an international racket while following traces of his countryman. But is the man hiding, on the run, or dead? Clearly, something has happened, but what? The key, though, lies not in Budapest, but back home in Sweden.

This is a great series (I've read The Abominable Man and The Locked Room as well). Stark and sharply written. Dark and yet funny. Grim and yet not without whimsy. Clever without really needing the cleverness. You see shadows of these books everywhere. The cop dramas on television, in the movies, on the bookshelves; many of these, perhaps without knowing it, trace their roots back to a husband and wife writing team from Sweden. And yet, for all this grandfatherly influence, what always strikes me about them is how fresh they seem, how current and alive. It's the sharpness of the perception in the words, in how they peel apart the lives of people; it feels current not because its new, but because its true. Or perhaps Sjowall and Wahloo simply do it better than anyone else.

Winter's Bone - Under the Microscope

2011-11-18T08:26:00.001-05:00

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There are good books, there are great books, and then there are those brilliant books that set your hair on fire. And Winter's Bone is a remarkable achievement in human combustion.

How to describe this book? It's a bit like what would happen if Cormac McCarthy decided to write a modern version of True Grit. Cormac didn't, but (luckily) Daniel Woodrell did.

Woodrell calls this a Country Noir - and I love this. Is it entirely accurate? Who knows. But it's an evocative description for a little niche genre of literature. I think you could fit a fair bit of McCarthy's writing in this genre, as well as writers like Ron Rash and Matthew F. Jones. What happens if you take literary crime out of urban cities and chart its progress across the rural poor of backwater towns and deep country? Country Noir.

And Winter's Bone hits every right button possible. A young, complex, and true heroine in search of her father... so that he can turn himself in to the law, so that their house isn't taken from them? Check. A dark and gritty story of crime and drugs and the odd loyalties of family? Check. And searing prose? Check check check. As a lover of pitchperfect sentences, let me tell you that this novel has more than a few. There's something truly perfect about the writing in this book. A few examples:

1. "Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone."

2. "He ran his eyes into her like a serpent down a hole, made her feel his slither in her heart and guts, made her tremble."

3. "Coyotes howled past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the county blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow. The morning was clear but bone-cracking cold, and maybe the weather had kept those coyotes from doing what had to be done in the night so they carried on into the day. Wild crooning yips and moans beneath a sun that warmed nothing."

There are books you read and love, and there are books that haunt you, that seep into your head and won't leave you alone. Winter's Bone is one of these.

The Judges of the Secret Court - Under the Microscope

2011-11-17T07:26:00.000-05:00

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The Judges of the Secret Court, one of those interesting rediscovered books published by the New York Review of Books, is a book about the assassination of President Lincoln. It's a strange, polyphonic sort of novel. It centers on John Wilkes Booth himself, but it spends almost as much time following Edwin Booth, JWB's brother and one of the nation's finest actors. Yet, at the same time, it whirls like a kaleidoscope through the stories and minds of numerous other characters, creating a strange babble of voices that pull the reader first to the death of Lincoln (though only after we have seen some of Lincoln's own personal meditations, as he rides toward the theatre) and then spreading out after the assassination, tracking the ripples of this event and what it means.

This is a slightly odd book. The technique, I think, has some costs, as it can occasionally be difficult to stay engaged with the central characters and the main events of the assassination, the hunt, and the trial that follows. Yet the scattered whirl of voices and images somehow sculpts the event out of the silence of history. The scope widens, the themes multiply, and there is a greater sense of the event and what it means, not just to the Booth brothers, but to the entire country - and to history itself.

It's worth a read if you're interested in American history at all (and I am, oddly enough, a Canadian who was the son of a professor of American history, so sometimes I simply can't resist), or if you're interested in different narrative techniques.

Plus, you know, that's a really kickass cover. Just sayin'. NYRB really know how to put a book together. It even smells good.

Hemingway and Herbert - Under the Guest Microscope

2011-11-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

Guest post by DG Hudson

DG Hudson - Rainforest Writing

DG Hudson - 21st Century Women

From the Islands in the Stream of the Caribbean to the spice deserts of DUNE, these two books will take you to another world.

Islands in the Stream, by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1970; trade paperback edition published 2004, by Simon and Schuster (Scribner trademark). Compiled after the author’s death by Charles Scribner, Jr. and Mary Hemingway using original manuscript. Literary fiction

This story is about Thomas Hudson, an artist and a man who seems uncannily similar to the author, Hemingway. The book starts with Thomas and his visiting sons living on Bimini, an island in the Gulf Stream, as part of a temporary arrangement with the estranged mothers. As the father tries to connect with his sons, they fish, swim, and talk about a Mr. Joyce, a Mr. Ford and a Mr. Pound -- all members of the lost generation in Paris.

At the beginning of part two, we understand the loss that’s driving Thomas to his exploits in Cuba. He thinks he has nothing to lose. In part three, it’s WWII and he’s tracking enemy submarines hiding between the Gulf Stream islands and the Cuban coast. It’s a story about a father coping with extreme loss, and how that loss affects his choices afterward. As the dialogue is current with the times in which the story is set (the 1930s and ‘40s), be aware that some may find offense at certain words. The original manuscript was written by Hemingway at a time when social mores were different and the American government still had a presence in Cuba.

I liked the first part of the book better, and that kept me reading through the second and third parts of the book, although I had a hard time not ‘imagining’ Ernest in this character. Thomas Hudson is a man who learns how fleeting the good things in life can be.

The other book is epic science fiction, set in Frank Herbert’s DUNE universe and sequel to DUNE: the Butlerian Jihad. It seems some robots can’t help going from bad to worse. . .

DUNE: The Machine Crusade, by Brian Herbert (son of Frank) and Kevin J. Anderson; published in 2003 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, a TOR book. Science fiction

Set two decades after the events of the Butlerian Jihad, this story prequels the events in the Frank Herbert DUNE stories. Names like Erasmus, Omnius, Harkonnen, Atreides and Serena Butler will be familiar to DUNE enthusiasts. The human worlds are tiring of war against the Cymeks, while the Army of the Jihad battles the Thinking machines. It’s an ongoing battle, from which the machines recover faster than the humans. On old Arrakis, the Fremen warriors are starting to emerge, and the Ginaz fighters begin to build their reputation as independent soldiers.

This story gives the background on the machine jihad, and tells how the Harkonnen and the Atreides families served the governing regime before the feud between them. Robots and all their derivatives interest me, so I read this quickly. If you’re a fan of the DUNE universe, you’ll like this intensive look at how politics and war become entangled when a huge threat (the thinking machines) is posed. Understanding what occurred before the time when the Atreides landed on Arrakis (aka Dune), gives a deeper world view of the complex causes that engender clashes between factions or civilizations. It’s Them against Us. Sound familiar?

Thanks, Bryan, for the opportunity to guest post.

Has anyone else read these two books? Are you a fan of either of these authors?

Open Wounds - Under the Microscope

2011-11-14T07:00:00.002-05:00

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Open Wounds is a YA novel. Yes, I know, I read a YA novel. Miracles never cease.

This one, though, is a little different than most of the ones I see on the bookstore shelves. This is a gritty historical novel set in WWII-era New York, about a boy, Cid Wyman, scrapping for life in a harsh neighbourhood of Queens. His mother is dead, his father abandons him, and he's left with his grandmother - his only release is the occasional chance to watch a movie on the silver screen, the sort of swashbuckling adventure that pulls him into a life utterly unlike his own. When his grandmother dies, he lives in an orphanage until, years later, a distant relative takes him in. This is Lefty, a crippled veteran of WWI who had once loved Cid's mother. Lefty teaches Cid how to fence, and how to teach fencing for the stage. Cid feels he has found a place for himself doing just this, but even a boy can have dangerous enemies.

This is a story of growing up, of old parents lost and new ones found. It's beautifully written, gritty, and not fo the YA-faint-of-heart. From childhood battles on the streets to fencing duels as a young man, this story has action and beautiful pacing - but what makes it great is its unsentimental poignancy, the truth of Cid's struggles, and his complex relationship with Lefty - savior, of a sort, though a difficult one (and a wonderfully realized character). This story is also about class and the clash of worlds, about how the stories of the grand world beyond have an impact on even the most distant lives.

I think great historical novels have this wonderful nested quality. It's not that they're simply about a historical event, but rather they are about lives that have been carefully nested within a series of historical events. These events are simply a part of the world the characters live in, like the weather or the daily traffic. The story reveals, and is revealed by, these events, and always, beyond that, there is the value of a life truly lived.

Attack of the Killer Microscope! Review Week Arrives...

2011-11-12T09:43:00.000-05:00

Hey all, I'm going to be having a Review Week! Possibly a Review Two Weeks! Exciting!

So I'm going to be shoving a lot of the great books I've read under the microscope. Lots of fun! Because I love talking about good books. And so! I was thinking some of my fellow sophisticates may also like talking about good books! Yes? Yes! If you, perchance, are one of these fellow sophisticates, and if you would like to do a guest post review of some book you think deserves attention (any kind of book! Even your own, if it's out in the wide world!), let me know! Drop me a line, and you can have a spot in the wonderful Review Week/Two-weeks/Month Extravaganza! Picture of microscope optional.

String Bridge Chart Rush

2011-11-11T07:30:00.002-05:00

Today is THE day to help Jessica Bell's debut, STRING BRIDGE, hit
the bestseller list on Amazon, and receive the all-original soundtrack, Melody Hill: On the Other Side, written and performed by the author herself, for free!

All you have to do is
purchase the book today (paperback, or eBook), November 11th, and then email the receipt to:

jessica.carmen.bell(at)gmail(dot)com

She will
then email you a link to download the album at no extra cost!

To purchase the paperback:

Amazon USA

To purchase the eBook:

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

To listen to samples of the soundtrack, visit iTunes.

If you are
not familiar with String Bridge,
check out the book trailer:

Rave Reviews for String Bridge:

“Jessica Bell’s STRING BRIDGE strummed the fret of my
veins, thrummed my blood into a mad rush, played me taut until the final page,
yet with echoes still reverberating. A rhythmic debut with metrical tones of
heavied dark, fleeting prisms of light, and finally, a burst of joy—just as
with any good song, my hopeful heartbeat kept tempo with Bell’s narrative.” ~ Kathryn Magendie, author of Sweetie and Publishing Editor of Rose & Thorn Journal

“Poet and
musician Jessica Bell's debut novel String Bridge is a rich exploration of desire, guilt, and the
difficult balancing act of the modern woman. The writing is lyrical throughout,
seamlessly integrating setting, character and plot in a musical structure that
allows the reader to identify with Melody's growing insecurity as her world
begins to unravel … String Bridge is
a powerful debut from a promising writer, full of music, metaphor, and just a
hint of magic.” ~ Magdalena Ball, author of Repulsion
Thrust and Sleep Before Evening

“Jessica Bell is a brilliant writer
of great skill and depth. She doesn't pull back from the difficult
scenes, from conflict, pain, intensity. She puts it all out there, no holds
barred, no holding back. She knows how to craft a scene, how to develop
character, how to create suspense. This is an absolutely brilliant debut novel.
I look forward to reading her
next novel, and next and next.” ~ Karen Jones
Gowen, author of Farm Girl, Uncut Diamonds and House of Diamonds

Connect with Jessica:

String Bridge: http://www.stringbridge.com/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/jessica_bell

Website: http://www.jessicacbell.com/

Blog: http://thealliterativeallomorph.blogspot.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/author.jessica.bell

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MsBessieBell

Publisher: http://www.luckypress.com/

Please TWEET and/or FACEBOOK this post using #StringBridge!

How to Write a Person

2011-11-10T09:25:00.002-05:00

Literature is a vast and salty plain. And by salty I mean, you know, white. And often very male, too. Can a salty plain be male? Well, it sure as hell is, at least in terms of the hiercharchical access to power and legitimacy.

Part of this, sadly, is conscious. Some writers will simply choose to perpetuate these false (though often culturally reinforced) tropes. Conscious denial, conscious positionings of power, are out there.

Other times it will occur out of ignorance. The surrounding culture inevitably finds its way into the headspace of writers, sometimes with a fanfare of trumpets and sometimes with soft cat-like feet (but clawed, oh yes). And I don't entirely blame people for their ignorance. I mean, it's my ignorance, too. How much of what we know comes in on the backs of assumptions that we forget to question and interrogate? I have a few bucketfuls myself, I'm sure. Eyes wide shut. Sometimes, though, I can blink, and when I open my eyes I realize I'm an idiot and I get a little smarter.

And then there are the people who would like to do something, but are scared. And this fear is normal. They would like to write minority characters, complex female heroines, and the disenfranchised. But what if they do it wrong? I think our culture emits an almost overwhelming vibe that it's better not to try than to try and do it wrong, or do it badly. Especially for topics like this.

It comes down to decency, I think. A lot of writers are simply decent people who don't want to offend. They would like to write a black or brown character, or a complex and real female heroine, but it seems risky: what if they offend black people or brown people or women? The thought of having people consider them a racist or misogyinist is almost unbearable (even though this fear often helps propagate these very things). Deletion, then, becomes easier than risking offense. Forgetfulness is safer and more comfortable than accidental cruelty. "Black people? Oh yeah, there's some black people in this country over here somewhere. But they don't have any dragons."

The task seems too large. How do I write a Black Person?

I think, in a lot of people's minds, it's capitalized just like this. It gets big. How do I encompass Blackness? Or Brownness? Or Being a Woman?

The thing is, of course, that this is impossible. You can't encompass these things in a single character. If you try, the characters will likely feel sort of unformed and hollow, silhouettes ghosting across a stage. They might have a familiar shape, but they'll be empty and unreal.

It helps to take the capitals away. It helps to remember that you're not trying to encapsulate anything, except this particular person.

And that's the key, in my opinion. First, think of them as people, think of all the other things that influence them. Characters will be influenced by their race, and by their ethnic and gender identities, but they'll be influenced by a million other things, too, the same as everyone else, the same as the people you "know" (whether from real life or the familiarity born from cultural consumption) and feel you can write about. Family, loss, work, reality television, cancerous cell phone emissions - they're all in the mix.

It helps to start with the other things. It helps to start with the little things that help make them the people they are, rather than overwhelm yourself with the big capitalized words from the get go. Once you have a person, once you have some sense of a history, of an emotional logic, then you can reintroduce important concepts like race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and otherness.

Now they are no longer abstracts you're trying to encapsulate in the form of a walking symbol. Now you have some sense of a person. Now you can ask how these things will influence the character. How do they change, knowing the facts of their gender identity? Of their ethnic identification? These ideas are now fulcrum points between the characters and the culture around them. How do they exert pressure on each other, seeking or preventing change? accomodation? legitimacy? power?

Better to try, and then try again, than to forget that other people may wish to hold dragons in the palms of their hands.

Beware the Blob

2011-11-07T06:30:00.002-05:00

This came out of my daughter's mouth last night...

Blogging temporarily on hold.

It would be great if you could spare a pitchfork. And some napalm.

Simply for the Love (of Halloween) (Belated)

2011-11-04T08:23:00.000-04:00

Four Short Walls #22 - Leadership

2011-11-03T08:37:00.000-04:00

Birthday Nostalgia and Official Lameness

2011-10-28T08:41:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday I was at work and was called into the kitchen/lounge. My first thought was why is everybody here? My second thought was hey, there's a cake. My last thought was Hey, it's my birthday this week!

So, yes, I forgot it was my birthday this week. I have reached the gloriously wise age of 34! Which is a lot like 33, only bigger. And better. Everybody knows 34 is where it's happenin'.

But, yeah... I sort of forgot my birthday. It's possible this qualifies me for Official Lamenss and Old Fogeydom. Old Fogeydom strikes everyone at a different time, and never strikes some people. But apparently it has struck me at the keen age of 34.

Which makes me sort of nostalgic for childhood, for the sheer joy of birthdays. My daughter was so excited, and gave me a huge hug, and said she loved me, and then went and made me a car out of cardboard and paper for a present. Which is probably as close as I'll get to my birthday request of a Mini Cooper. And her excitement made me excited, but... sort of vicariously. It's odd, in that I now look forward to my kids' birthdays, but forget my own.

It makes me wonder where that birthday joy goes. I suppose it just gets transmuted and transferred. I remember, though, as a kid, the excitement of it, an excitement that was sometimes grander than the event itself. I remember going with my best friend, Tyler, to rent some movies for my birthday. Actually, we were going to rent a VCR (or was it a Beta?), because this would have been 1983 or 1984, and in those days that's what you did. Only aliens and officially lucky folk had video players in their own homes.

I was six or seven, Tyler a year older. We were excited. My friends were gonna come over. Games, sports, food, cake. And movies! Rock on. We wanted something exciting, a blast of action that would match the excitement and adrenaline of a birthday, that greatest of things. Sci-fi, we thought! Like Return of the Jedi! Oh yeah!

We selected Tron.

Yes, the original Tron.

Let us say that this did not turn out to be the movie that these young boys were hoping for, or expected. Let us also say that the lightsaber action was somewhat limited. Let us also say, in conclusion, that this particular room full of puzzled six- and seven-year-olds did not finish watching the glory that was Tron.

There was disappointment.

And yet there was still that birthday joy. We went outside, and it was one of those glorious fall days. Blue sky, piles of coloured leaves on the ground, that crisp, musky scent of autumn lingering everywhere. You could almost taste Halloween, like a touch of pumpkin on the tongue.

We played sports. We screwed around, bugged each other, laughed. My different groups of friends came together and everyone got along (in fact, years later, some of these guys from different groups would meet in high school, recognize each other from those long ago birthday parties, and become best friends themselves). And, of course, there was a gluttony of G.I. Joe figures, Transformers, pizza, and cake.

There was something irrepressible about a birthday back then. Now I'm not even certain what I want to do on my birthday. Favourite meal? Who knows. All I know is that I would like to see my kids, to see a bit of that irrepressible joy reflected from their eyes. Even though "34 years old" probably seems like a description of the age of mountains or oceans. "When I was young, there was no summer, and winter reigned all year, and we lived in tunnels beneath the ice, and then God made North America and invented the donut..."

I find myself nostalgic for the past. Yet, when I woke up this morning, I came downstairs with my kids. I made myself a coffee. My daughter hugged me. (I changed a diaper, but we'll ignore that part.) Beautiful reds and oranges littered the eastern horizon, limned with a sharp and slanted morning yellow. Tufts of fog lingered, woven through the greenery and haunting the hollows between the fields. The grass was white and sharp with frost.

And watching this, sipping coffee, my kids at my side, I realized that life was pretty damn good.

Tron or no Tron.

Four Short Walls #21 - The Return

2011-10-27T07:18:00.000-04:00

Four Short Walls #20 - Missing in Action

2011-10-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

Four Short Walls #19 - Motivation

2011-10-21T07:37:00.001-04:00

Four Short Walls #18

2011-10-20T07:30:00.002-04:00

Promotions, Pneumonia, Charity, and the Blogging Experience

2011-10-13T09:06:00.000-04:00

Perhaps you noticed the static on my blog the last few days? That silence is indicative of an interesting week. For one, I was promoted at work, and I am now the Senior Editor at the wonderful editorial company where I spend so many hours of my week. It's a very pleasing promotion, but it does mean more responsibility and more work. Also, a shift change, with my work days switching from Thursday-Sunday to Sunday-Wednesday, which means I actually have a weekend day off. Break out the potato chips and Manchester United football. But... more work. More hours.

How will this affect the blog? I have no idea! But I'm not too worried. Nathan Bransford and Natalie Whipple started a trend of posts discussing blogging burnout over the last week, as well as discussions on how and why people blog. Apparently: Full-time blogging is hard work! And not always so profitable! Scaling back is okay!

Which is great. Because I scaled back the day I started. Three cheers for a lack of blogging ambition!

Seriously, though, I think it's kind of interesting to see a swing toward doing what you want, in terms of the ol' blog, and doing it when you want it. I've always been selfish like that, and when you throw in my laziness, as well, it's just a great mix.

I think part of the reason the shift seems to be happening is because blogs don't work quite the way that people thought they worked. I think the assumption a lot of writers had was that they were supposed to do this, and it was going to be networking, and building a big platform, and in a few months they'd have a huge following and agents and editors would want to snap up their work when they queried.

But I think there's a sort of fishbowl effect in the writing-blog world. It's self-contained. And, even in this fishy little world, it's hard to build followers. Even the most fabulous blogs, by people who are really good at social networking, usually only have about a thousand followers or so. And this isn't going to sell a publisher a lot of books (though they might like the proactive stance). And this problem is accentuated by the fact that blogging writers are mostly writing to blogging writers. In other words, people just like themselves, who are trying to do just the same thing - not exactly the target audience. The problem is that, in general, the blogs don't actually reach the readers who would be buying the books (at least pre-publication).

So: vast amounts of networking work; little direct payoff; and a slow growth of followers. It's a bit like self-publishing: if you want to take this route, you really need to embrace it. Embrace all of it, even the icky parts, and be willing to invest time and copious amounts of blood. Sweat and tears will be there, but invisible beneath all the blood. Lots of blood.

A lot of writers, however, simply don't have that sort of time. I don't. Busy work schedule, three small kids, my own writing - endless platform building and selling is out. If I get a book published, there would be time for targeted promotion, likely, but endless pre-publication platform building? No time. And, frankly, no inclination.

And blogs really aren't all that great for this, anyway. But what they are good for is making connections within that fishbowl writing community. It's not a platform network, but a social network.

I think blogs are relevant in the connections you can make with people. Because, yes, it is a fishbowl, but we're not the only fish swimming around in there. It's nice to find little schools of fellow writers to swim around with, and occasionally bum a critique off.

There's an organic quality about this, a sense of shared experience that I like, which is so much better than the vast babelish tower of a mechanical platform used for shouting mercantile propaganda. I think, if it's organic and true, blogs can become connected with your life; they become part of you.

Part of the reason I haven't blogged the last few days is because my daughter has pneumonia. Life intrudes. It always does, and perhaps it always should. On Friday, my daughter went to the hospital to have some dental work done under anesthesia. First, she didn't react well to the Versed (mazilopam). Pliable and happy! No! Anxious and hysterical! Yes! And then, apparently, when under full anesthesia, my six-year-old girl aspirated.

This led us back to the Emergency Room on Sunday night, with a little girl who had delusional fevers, continuous vomiting, headache, body aches, nausea, and dizziness. We carried a bucket, and people shrank away from us in the waiting room. But, because of the fever and the possible anesthetic complications, they emergency staff got us in quickly. Chest x-rays showed pneumonia.

Better to discover this sooner than later, however, and the antibiotics have worked wonders. But no blogging was to be had.

And this is a good thing. I think when you force things on a blog it simply becomes a weight. You're in that fishbowl, and it seems that you're being dragged to the bottom, down to that sparkly gravel where the rotten bits of food and fishcrap are lying around. Not so good.

Better to write what you want, and write it when you want it - write in when you need it. Find what works. I think the blog will then reflect you better, and the writing will be more beneficial. Because that's what I truly like about the blog: the writing. Because writing something is not the same as thinking it. There's a clarity and completeness that comes with writing something; the writing demands it. What was a vague thought, something felt or intuited, becomes something concrete and real, something worked-out and solid. In the end, I suppose, I write the blog for me, as a way to work out my own thoughts on the page, to find that moment of clarity.

My blog is useful, first and foremost, to me. But if I'm writing what's useful to me, hopefully this can translate, and others might find it useful for them, too. Because blogs can work wonders. Help yourself and you'll help others; help others and you help yourself. Make a few connections. Who knows what might happen? You might help another writer in writing something great. Or you might help fund a health clinic on the far side of the world. Sometime today there will be a critique by me up for sale over at the Rejectionist's. Please check it out, if you have the time. Sometimes blogs can do good.

Simply for the Love (of Jazz)

2011-10-12T07:30:00.002-04:00

Words: Spend Them or Hoard Them?

2011-10-07T07:30:00.002-04:00

I think there's a tendency for writers to be miserly with their words. A good sentence is like found gold; it should be locked away in the vault, and used only at the right time.

It seems like a lot of writers feel they only have a certain number of good words coming to them. This is only natural, perhaps. Good lines seem to fall from heaven, at times, appearing mysteriously on dove-like wings. Here! A gift! Just for you! It's normal to squirrel it away. Save it up. To write only when the really good words come.

Except this can be damaging sometimes. We tiptoe around the precious words, scared to upset them, scared to bring them out in the open where we might lose them. I can't spend this great line in a blog comment, can I? Hardly anyone will see it, and then it will be gone with barely a ripple left behind! No, I shall write something simple in the comment box, and I'll save up this little beauty for some time when I can really use it, sometime when it will really shine.

But I don't think good words work like that. Writing is more like exercise. The more you do, the stronger you get. Your prose is going to get leaner and better. And the more energy you expend, the more energy you'll have. Sort of a paradox. But the more good words you use, the more good words will come to you. Indeed, better words might even come to you. But only if you spend the good words first.

I think this is partly a matter of simple confidence, or rather the balance of confidence against fear. Perhaps it's normal to think "What if the good words stop coming? What if this is it? I shall save this precious sentence..." Writers fear the well running dry.

And I think this depends partly on how we see the words coming to us. Does a muse send in singing telegrams? Well, what if the muse stops? What if we offend that muse, and the muse decides to send down sweet words to your neighbor, Chuck? What if Chuck gets the publishing contract?

I think it can help if you see the writing as work, and the words as a little heavy lifting. Work hard, lift a few more... and each time you'll get a little stronger. Each word you put out there will make you a better writer. Perhaps the change is infinitesmal and invisible. But it's there. It's been worked into the writing muscles. And the effort is cumulative.

No one gets up in the morning one day, without ever training, and goes out to run a marathon. They won't get far. But if the miles have been tracked into the legs every day, every day for months and years, then a marathon might be within reach. The feet have come to know the cement of the road.

So spend your words freely. The road is long, and you need to build up your strength.

Keyhole to the Future

2011-10-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

Sometimes you just need to find that one key to fit in the keyhole of the future and unlock possibility. Sometimes you trip over that key, and sometimes you have to search for it. Sometimes it's been there the whole time and you never realized it. Part of the weirdness of life is that the key is almost always a surprise.

And, luckily for me, that's my wife in the picture.

Simply for the Love (of Classical) (Sort of)

2011-10-04T10:03:00.000-04:00

Four Short Walls #17

2011-10-03T08:15:00.000-04:00

The Road (but not that one)

2011-09-28T08:57:00.001-04:00

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Vasily Grossman is one of the world's great unrecognized writers. A Soviet writer during the time of Stalin, he had to write within a world of propaganda and censorship. Even within that small box, however, he was able to put forth some great fiction and journalism, though his two late masterpieces, Life and Fate and Everything Flows, were held from publication by the Powers That Be. Indeed, the Stalinists tried to expunge every copy of Life and Fate from the world; luckily, they failed, and copies were smuggled to the West, where the book was eventually published. It's often called "the Soviet War and Peace," and its portrayal of the horrors of the siege of Stalingrad led it to become the book most feared by Communist leadership (along with Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

The Road, however, is a collection of Grossman's stories and journalism, often written from inside that box, a box walled with propaganda, censorship, and fear. Within that cage, however, Grossman finds his way by seeing and recording the details - the telling details, the small and hidden things that cast a sudden and fierce light on the dark shadows of suffering. There are interesting tensions at work within his writing, with the clear-sighted realist wriggling against the restraints of the facade of Communist idealism.

Whether indicating the lot of a common soldier, from the viewpoint of a donkey hauling a piece of artillery in "The Road", or painting a brutal landscape of evil, in his reportage from The Hell of Treblinka, Grossman has an eye for human truth, for the felt experience of a diverse number of people, across a diverse range of situations. I think what I love most is his sense of empathy, his ability to put himself in the place of others. This comes, perhaps, from his own sufferings. His mother, a Jew living in the city of Berdichev, was marched out to an airfield by the Nazis, along with hundreds of other Jews from the city, and murdered. There is, in his writing, a need to be there, to be with his mother, perhaps, to see what she saw, and to be with all the others who suffered; to see and feel what they felt.

This is writing as an act of memory; as an act of imaginative remembrance; as an attempt to paint in the empty spaces that will be forgotten, or white-washed, by history, by those who see history as an act of political prognostication.

Simply for the Love

2011-09-27T07:30:00.002-04:00

Four Short Walls #16

2011-09-23T07:30:00.001-04:00

Simply for the Love (of Grunge)

2011-09-21T08:40:00.002-04:00

Four Short Walls #15

2011-09-20T07:35:00.000-04:00

Why? Theme? Why theme?

2011-09-19T08:14:00.000-04:00

I found the following video through my friend Susan the other day (not the first time I've found something awesome at her blog). It's one of the TED talks, which I love and find only mildly addictive (mildly, I tell you, mildly!). It's not really about writing, but I think it applies. It's about business and people and success - what leads to success, and why people will follow that success. The question is simple. Why are you doing what you do? People will respond to what you believe, and not just to what you have, however great that might be.

The video is worth a watch, if you have the time.

The way it applies to writing, however, is theme, or so I've been thinking. Why are you doing what you do? What do you believe? It's not that you can't find a powerful theme while writing a story (it's been done, and will be done again), but there's something powerful about knowing what you're doing. Knowing your theme. To me, the theme is the hot emotional core of the novel. What is the feeling it's trying to explore, and trying to evoke in the reader? And in what way?

Knowing the emotional center of your story means you know what drives the story. And answering that question (Why?) allows you to use that theme. This is an opportunity. If you know the why, you can shape the story itself around what you are trying to do, around what you are feeling (and what you hope your reader is going to feel). The conflicts will be designed to specifically set these feelings into motion.

This is definitely something I want to work on more. I think a lot of writers hit the keys, get the story out, and then realize what they're writing about. But they're not using that theme; it's a sideline. And it's not always easy to edit that theme into a complex and powerful vision. It can be done, but it's hard; we're talking about the structure of the story itself.

Theme = why?

A simple little equation.

What about you? How do you approach theme, Fellow Sophisticates?

Four Short Walls #14

2011-09-14T07:30:00.001-04:00

Brain Implosion and Unforgiving Years

2011-09-13T09:05:00.000-04:00

My daughter started grade one at a new school last week. And today my oldest son started junior kindergarten. My little guy's off to school. And I think my brain imploded a little. Possibly a lot. It's only me and the ferocious Vampire Infant here for the morning. Though he's in a time out (for biting, of course).

That's the weird, unforgiving nature of time. Sometimes the last few years have seemed like a lifetime, and at other times it feels as if it were the merest blink of an eye. I remember my older son being born, the little shock of copper hair. And today he was in a backpack, climbing up on the school bus with his sister.

Hopefully, the years won't be as unforgiving as those of the characters in this book:

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This is sort of a brutal and sad book, but quite wonderful. And quite strange, though not in an overt way. It's a subtle sort of strangeness, arising out of how the style meshes with the structure. In some ways, this is a rambling, interior novel about politics - or, perhaps more accurately, about how politics interacts with the individual in terms of political faith and belief, and how that faith affects personal action.

The book is largely set inside the character's heads, and yet there are sudden flashes of the world around, sudden and almost hallucinatory images of the world as it impinges on the thoughts of the characters. This creates a wonderful dream-like (or perhaps nightmare-like) quality, arising from the strange telescoping motion between the interior and exterior - the way the outside world swims suddenly into focus. The winter landscape of a besieged Leningrad, the ruins of a German city under Allied bombing, an isolated house deep in the Mexican interior...

A fascinating look at the psychology of political belief, and the most interesting book on Communism I've ever read.

Somehow, thinking about it, school buses don't seem so bad. At least for a while...

Simply for the Love

2011-09-09T07:21:00.002-04:00

Shared Worlds: History and the Imagined Fantastical

2011-09-07T08:17:00.000-04:00

I love taking pictures of old buildings. And, as mentioned before, old and secret doors and windows in old buildings. Part of this is the simple beauty of these things. Part of it is the mystery. Part of it, though, is the sense of lived history in these places. These are connections to the lives of actual people. They are not simply monuments of the present, but actual pieces of lives in the past.

As a writer of fantasy, nothing seems more magical. The realness of these buildings is a departure point (an inspiration point) for me as a writer. It's not just that I can imagine a soldier looking over a battlement at an invading army, but that I can see him on an empty night, the cold wind blowing up over the stone. Thinking of a fire, of a girl he loves, of something to eat, even as the light fades in the west and the great eastern darkness boils up off the horizon. Does he notice? Or has he seen it so many times that he's blind to it, living by touch, living from shiver to shiver?

This is the magic of physical history on the mind of a writer.

So! I had a shot yesterday of a cannon in Belem Tower looking out over the water to the Vasco da Gama Bridge, outside Lisbon, Portugal. I loved this tower, and took a bunch of pictures of it. It's an important building, too, both for its beauty and its age. And the age is important, because it was one of the few great buildings in Lisbon to survive the horrendous 1755 earthquake that shattered the city.

Here are a few shots of the Belem Tower. It's worth seeing, if you ever get the chance.

We hope you've enjoyed the tour. Please exit to the left.

Windows Between Worlds

2011-09-06T07:00:00.001-04:00

Yes, that is a cannon. DO NOT MESS WITH ME.

The Book Splurge That Ate The World

2011-09-01T07:30:00.000-04:00

The NYRB Splurge has grown. Please stop me! Okay, don't.

More titles for The Splurge:

Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

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Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter

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and The Judges of the Secret Court, by David Stacton, on account of the recommendations by Steve found here.

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Four Short Walls #13

2011-08-31T09:21:00.000-04:00

Why, James Bond, Why?

2011-08-29T08:39:00.002-04:00

So, the other day I read my first James Bond novel. I'd been wanting to try one for ages, as I like the movie version of Bond (sometimes, and with reservations), particularly the Daniel Craig and Connery interpretations, and for years I'd heard good things about the original Ian Fleming novels. And so, this:

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And Fleming can write. He has some pretty sharp lines, though there were a few clunky easy-way-out lines as well.

But that wasn't really the problem.

And the problem wasn't even the somewhat silly approach to women. I mean, it's a Bond novel, and I sort of entered the experience with the idea I'd have to forgive Fleming on this count.

And it wasn't even the novel's more problematic implications in terms of race (I mean, the endless use of animal descriptives for black people? The overbearing condescension even when trying to say something nice? And the fact that the beautiful female lead from Haiti, who has second sight and is rooted in Haitian culture and mysticism, is, of course, seemingly white?). It couldn't have been entirely easy for a British writer, in that time period (50s, I think), to write about African American characters in a realistic way (and some of the dialogue from the black characters was, um, not good). Now, that's not necessarily an excuse, but considering the cultural context of the writer does make it easier to forgive.

What I couldn't get over was that James Bond was sort of stupid.

So, the bad guys know who Bond is, what he looks like, and that he's after them.

So, Bond knows that they know.

So, he and his American partner, Felix, decide to go looking for Mr. Big, the greatest black crime boss in Harlem (and the world), who's Bad Guy #1.

So, they take a cab into Harlem.

So, they blithely go around from black club to black club, where there basically aren't any other white people, having a bunch of drinks. (And after watching black people drink and dance for a couple hours, Bond decides that he knows everything there is to know about the culture, everything that he might need to understand and take down Mr. Big and his crime ring. Apparently they were very informative dances. And cocktails.)

So, they sort of stand out in these locales.

So, their big plan for finding this all-powerful and secretive Mr. Big is to randomly stop waiters at clubs and ask "Hey, do you know where we can find Harlem's biggest crime boss?"

So, surprisingly, this plan doesn't work too well.

So, they go to Mr. Big's own club (he won't pick out the white folk there!).

So, then they get caught, like, really easily.

So, they're really surprised they got caught (how could it have happened?).

So, Mr. Big has his men bash Bond around, break a finger (this was actually well done), etc.

So, Mr. Big figures his warning has been heard and decides not to kill Bond and let him go, and tells one of his men to escort Bond out and drop him off somewhere.

So, as the man is walking Bond out to release him, this is when Bond decides it's a good time to risk his life and attempt escape, which is followed by violent derring do, gun battles, and chases.

So, okay, yeah. While he was being released. Like a convict being walked to the gate of San Quentin, to be released after twenty years of hard time, only to suddenly attack and kill the guards, and then scale the wall as the sirens go off.

James, James, James... is this really the best you can do with your superslick and superdeadly 007 spy skills?

"Do you want to point me in the direction of Harlem's most dangerous crime lord? What? What do you mean? Don't all waiters know this stuff?"

Whither This Way or That

2011-08-26T07:30:00.002-04:00

The feet whisper this way or that, but only the bees know the way, and only the birds are smart enough not to care. The prison is pretty and green and full of flowers, but the thorns are like cruel shepherds at the end of the day; home, home to the fences, dear feet. Tomorrow you can dream of wide green fields...

Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette

2011-08-23T09:12:00.001-04:00

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This is an odd, disturbing little book, a noirish crime novel that hunts out small and bitter truths. It's written in a sparse, cold style, but one that hides a lot of heat. Aimee (or so she calls herself in this town, at least) is a killer, and, when she arrives in town, the sins and ambitions of the wealthy seem to bubble to the surface and leak down the walls. All so that Aimee can be paid for what she does best...

And yet what I liked best about this book was that the twists were not what I expected, not just in terms of plot, but in terms of what this story is, and what it's trying to do. With every twist, the story became a different kind of story than I expected. The mystery, here, is not in the plot, but in the thematic construction of the novel.

A strange and worthy little novel.

Four Short Walls #12

2011-08-22T07:57:00.000-04:00

Gluttony and the New York Review of Books

2011-08-17T08:40:00.002-04:00

It's funny, as writers and readers, that we don't talk about publishers more, at least in terms of the books we like. We might wail on the SOBs a lot, but we don't talk about publishers much in terms of our favourites, in terms of the books we love to read. Maybe this is because most publishers don't have much of a throughline of taste, and the selection is sometimes haphazard.

But there are publishers I like. Maybe it's the former bookstore owner in me, but I'm always curious about who publishes a book. And there are always publishers who seem to publish interesting books. The Dalkey Archive, Vintage International, etc. One of my favourites, though, is the New York Review of Books. They tend to publish great works of fiction and non-fiction, and they tend to publish either books in translation or great books that weren't recognized the way they should have been when they were first published (or, at least, have since been forgotten).

Looking through the nyrb lists is a little like going on a literary excavation, finding the voices that I should have heard, but never did.

And, as it happens, I have recently picked up a bushel of books by the nyrb, and I'm going to splurge on them. A massive reading fest! I have 12 in my little pile as we speak (though this could always rise, due to compulsive purchasing). They are beautiful books, and that's one reason I like the nyrb - they make fine books, in the sense of books as objects. I like the covers, the series design, the paper, the softe matte finish. Paper junkie heaven.

Okay, so here they are! I may not get through all of them in a row. In fact, the chance of failure is like 99.93578%. But I shall have a wonderful splurge, regardless.

The Road, Vasily Grossman

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Troubles, J.G. Farrell

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Warlock, Oakley Hall

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Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

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Chess Story, Stefan Zweig

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Clandestine in Chile, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Fatale, Jean-Patrick Manchette

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Butcher's Crossing, John Williams

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Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge

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The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons

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Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber

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A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne

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What about you? Do you pay attention to publishers? Do you have favourites? Does it mean more to have certain publishers on the spine?

Secret Garden

2011-08-16T09:10:00.000-04:00

I'd have this in my backyard, if I could.

A walled plateau maze garden at El Escorial, outside Madrid. Photo by me.

Secret Doors

2011-08-15T08:42:00.000-04:00

I'm listening to Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden on audiobook with my daughter right now, a book I've wanted to read for a while. And one of the things I realize that I'm fascinated with (much like many with my bent of thinking, I'd guess) is secret places. I have a love of secret doors, secrete passageways, secret gardens - secret worlds.

It's a large reason why I have this picture as my avatar pic:

This is one of my photographs, something I took on my honeymoon. It's from the gardens of the Alhambra palace, outside Granada, Spain. A secret door in a secret garden...

My love of photography and my love of writing are connected, I think, through this idea - secrets. A secret way to view something, a new way to see it, a twisted angle - a secret window on something new.

I think a lot of people have a strong urge in this regard. Portal fantasies are a sort of symbol of this, a representation of the desire to see through the mundane to the secret mysteries beyond, to peel back the plain and find the strange, the wondrous, the surreal.

This crops up in my stories, I think, and it definitely crops up in my photos. I'm hoping to show a few of these in the next while. A chance to step through a wardrobe or fall down a rabbit hole...

I'll be back. Okay, I already am.

2011-08-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

Back from vacation! Apparently the Internet didn't even notice I was gone. Not so monogamous, is the ol' Internet. Anyway, I took the family to Niagara Falls for watery fun on the Maid of the Mist and in Marine Land. No pictures, as I forgot my digital camera. Which is maybe good; I tend to get overly focused on pursuing interesting angles for interesting pictures and, you know, lose all my children.

"Oh, you know, it's not that big a city. I'm sure we'll find them. I mean, they're on foot. I'm sure they couldn't have made it more than three or four miles."

So! We all returned alive! And I survived almost a week entirely unplugged! I didn't have a cellphone! No computer or laptop or other multi-brained electronic devices! This was sort of nice. Now, I wouldn't want to do it forever, as I'd miss my online friends. But for a little while?

There's something nice about avoiding the digital world, about not having to check something all the time, get constant updates. There may have to be more of this in the future.

What say you? Do you like the unplugging? Or, if the Apocalypse comes, is a world without iPhones a strong inducement for suicide?

Yes, this just could be what the world is like after the Apocalypse and the ruin of technology...

Four Short Walls #11

2011-08-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

Dread

2011-08-03T07:47:00.000-04:00

There are times when the very air seems to tingle with fear. A denseness, an emotional humidity - a hot sense of weight, a feeling of smothering.

A moment of existential dread that permeates the air.

This isn't an acute fear: Oh no, a rabid dog! This is a subtler feeling, worse for its invisibility.

I've never been much prone to it, but I feel it more now as a parent. It's easier to handle the risks of the world for yourself, but for small children?

The news, lately, has been full of triggers. Anders Behring Breivik. A man sets off a bomb, and then, as if killing a bunch of people with a bomb wasn't enough, he walked into a camp of young people, mostly teens, and started a massacre. What struck me about this (aside from the fact that, when online, Mr. Breivik used emoticons - :P - after making jokes about exterminating people, which, if nothing else, is a flashing sign of the coming Internet Apocalypse) was just the faces of the victims. It's interesting to see pictures. A brief news account will have numbers, with whole lives lost between digits. How many memories might be hiding between 7 and 6?

Most of them were very young. One was 14, just a boy. They went off to camp, full of excitement. They walked out their front doors, same as always, and yet they would never come back. Their parents will be waiting forever.

The parents hadn't done anything wrong. And there was nothing they could do. Helpless hands; part of their lives stripped away.

Dread.

And then there's the Berry story, about a family in a car accident. There's a beautiful part to this story, with the internet campaign that suddenly flashed everywhere to raise money for support of the children (Internet Redemption). But this was only needed because of the sheer suddenness of an accident. A car, an impact, and the parents were dead. The girl, the youngest of the three children, had a number of broken bones. The two boys were both paralyzed. Paralyzed and orphaned.

Dread.

The parents have left, though not by choice. And yet there's a terrible fear in this for me. That somehow, just when my kids need me most, I won't be there for them. So strange. As a child, I probably had moments of fear: What if I become lost? What if Mommy and Daddy leave? But now I fear that somehow I will be the one to leave, I will be the one who's not there, swallowed by life or death.

Dread.

My littlest is eighteen months. He's also a handful. Oh, he's a jolly, friendly little guy. But he's hell on wheels, running and climbing everywhere. I call him Evel Knievel for his escape tendencies. And the other day, while heads were briefly turned, he climbed into our car after a door was left open. He happily sat and played while a search went on around him.

But there is, in that moment, a dread. The looming up of the unknown, of chance, of the simple unknowingness of life. With my son it was nothing. Little Evel playing a trick, unknowing himself of what that trick might mean. But life can turn on a moment. The sudden impact of a car; a man walking onto an island with a rifle.

Random and merciless events of the indecipherable present.

And yet we have no choice but to live, to face that unknowingness. There's no way to hide. You need to gather yourself, to tell yourself a story of faith--to convince yourself. We hold to something: a faith in God, a faith in fate, a faith in ourselves, or a faith in the simple probability of hope. We hold to something. A faith in the mathematics of life, that hope divided by despair and dread will somehow equal a positive number.

Little Evel is climbing everywhere these days. I found him the other day, sitting calmly in the middle of the kitchen table, playing, having monkeyed his way up there (rappeling gear, perhaps?). You worry about a fall, you stay alert, you do everything you can - yet sometimes you simply have to trust in their balance.

Four Short Walls #10

2011-08-01T07:53:00.000-04:00

Life's Work

2011-07-28T08:00:00.001-04:00

by M.A. Leslie
http://maleslie1.blogspot.com/

Life's Work

The cool air flowed through the window screens and tickled his cheeks as he tapped away at the keyboard. There was stress-induced sweat building on his brow as the words finally began to flow from synapse to nerve end, and eventually onto the screen. He had finally cut through the creative snare in his brain that had plagued him.

The streets below were quiet, and, aside from the light flicker of a streetlamp, there was no movement at all. In the distance there were a few sounds of moving vehicles and distant conversation, but it didn’t matter. All senses were tuned to the white canvas filling with consonants and vowels, watching as they bled onto the page and became words, sentences, art.

Satisfied with the breakthrough, he allowed the blinders to form and the only thing that could be seen was the glare of the laptop screen. The world around him went blank and bleak as he fell into his imagination. It was genius, it was perfect, and it was what he had waited for.

Somewhere distant in his mind, he heard sounds of life and movement. There were voices around, and quiet breaks in concentration, but not enough to pull the blinders from his eyes. He sat, and still the flow of words poured like water from an open faucet, from the tips of his fingers. They continued to come and he continued to write. There was only him and his work, what he assumed was his bliss.

The world and room around him had changed, and night had become day, and then changed again. A forest was growing on his face, but he didn’t feel it or care to notice. Nothing would break his focus. There was just his work and the tapping of the keys, a pianist playing a sonnet. That is, until he was finished.

The man leaned back and heard a slight crack as he stretched. The room came back into focus, but it was much different than he remembered. All that remained was the bed and the dresser. The pictures on the walls were gone. Slowly he stood, unhooking the laptop and walking out to show his family the amazing work he had completed. They were gone.

The rooms of the house were as nude as birth. With a puzzled melancholy the man sat down at the kitchen table, his life’s work next to him. He had no one to share it with; all that was left sat on the screen.

With a sigh he opened the screen again to see it, but like all other things in his life, the laptop slipped. With a crash the computer bounced open against the floor. The screen was blank, except for a reflection he no longer recognized.

Simply for the Love

2011-07-27T12:11:00.000-04:00

Band of Horses covering Cee Lo Green's Georgia. Just... awesome.

Four Short Walls #9

2011-07-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

2011-07-21T08:00:00.002-04:00

Four Short Walls #8

2011-07-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

Guest Posting in Mordor

2011-07-18T15:27:00.000-04:00

Hey folks, just wanted to say that I have a guest post up at the Rejectionist's bloghouse.

Really, she's much more friendly than she looks. Come join the fun. There are free cookies!

Okay, I lied about the cookies.

2011-07-14T08:00:00.002-04:00

Some days you feel like a tarantula...

2011-07-13T07:15:00.000-04:00

Some days you feel like a tarantula... and some days you feel like a giant centipede.

Which are you?

Four Short Walls #7

2011-07-11T08:12:00.000-04:00

Charity Hot Dogs

2011-07-09T08:34:00.000-04:00

We're doing a charity barbecue today. What's not to love? Supporting nature conservation. Eating hot dogs. Enjoyig sunshine.

Note to self: This thing called "the outdoors" is interesting. It may be worth experiencing again sometime in the future. Strangely, there are no computers there. Or, you know, fewer.

Simply for the Love

2011-07-07T08:00:00.001-04:00

Four Short Walls #6

2011-07-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Limits of Napkins

2011-07-01T08:00:00.001-04:00

by Paul Michael Murphy
Murphblog

The Limits of Napkins

I was just about to shovel in a forkful of fettucini when the guy at the table next to us horked up his entire lung. You can’t not look when you hear something like that, so both Terri and I eased our eyes over to their table, the way you do when you don’t want to be obvious about it.
He was with a girl. She was young. I pegged her at twenty-three but my pegging’s not what it used to be. The way they go about now, she could have been seventeen or thirty. I expected her to be embarrassed. She wasn’t. “What the hell?” she said.

“I’m sick,” the guy groaned into his napkin. He wouldn’t take it away from his face and I imagined a Ghostbusters-like slime behind it. The napkins were of decent quality, but the things are meant to wipe away a bit of food from the corner of a mouth, not absorb the entire contents of some guy’s respiratory system.

Some of the stuff was leaking-- no, oozing, out. It hung there at the bottom edge of the napkin, swaying back and forth like Poe’s pendulum. “Oh, my god. You are so gross,” the girl said. I half-expected her to abandon the poor schmuck, but she didn’t. “Really?” she said. “You’re gonna do this tonight?”

“I can’t help it,” the guy said, his voice stuffy with whatever was miraculously still in his nose.

“Unbelievable. It’s always about you, isn’t it? I get a promotion and instead of just sitting there and--”

The guy pulled the napkin away from his face. It would have stopped you mid-sentence, too. Snot was covering his face, coating his lips, dribbling into the little patch of hair on his chin.

“Give him your napkin,” Terri told me.

“What?”

“Your napkin. Give it to him.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll know we were watching.”

“So?”

“It’s rude.”

“So is hacking up a quart of mucus in a restaurant. Give him your napkin.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s disgusting,” I whispered.

“It’s a napkin.”

“Then give him yours.”

Terri looked down at her napkin like it was a cherished family heirloom. She shook her head.

The guy cleared his throat. He coughed. I knew what was coming and couldn’t help myself. Right as the guy was about to unleash another torrent, I hopped up and thrust my napkin to his face. It was just in time.

“Thanks,” the guy said.

His date looked at me with piercing eyes. “What the hell?” she accused.

I apologized and sheepishly returned to my seat. The girl’s eyes followed me the entire way.

“My hero,” Terri said.

I grunted and looked down at my dinner. Fettucini. All that white sauce.

And as I stood to go to the bathroom the girl said, “Next time, mind your own damn business.” Then she dabbed at the corners of her mouth and carefully laid her napkin back over her thighs.

Four Short Walls #5

2011-06-30T08:00:00.001-04:00

In Memoriam: Peter Falk

2011-06-29T17:53:00.001-04:00

Falk was one of my favourites. Not only was he my all-time favourite sleuth, Columbo, he was in one of my favourite movies, The Princess Bride.

Double Genius.

He will be missed.

Peter Falk, September 16, 1927 - June 23, 2011

"As you wish."

Craig Rimmel: A Tear in the Fabric of the Fathomable

2011-06-28T10:03:00.005-04:00

The world is a story we tell to ourself, and stories must make sense. If our stories didn't make sense the world would be chaos, random and unlivable. And so we shape our lives, creating structures and order. We stitch beginnings and endings, triumphs and losses, into the fabric of what we know, of what we have experienced.

And we read this story into the future. Our life is as much about prediction as it is about this moment. Because the chaos brims beyond the line of our sight. The future is like the ancient belief about the earth: it is flat, and at some point we reach the edge and there is blackness beyond as the waters of the seas pour off the edge of the world into the vast empty of the unknown.

Unless, of course, we weave the story out further. Our lives are constructed not just on what we have seen and known, not just on who we are and what we are living, but on what might be and what we might predict, creating a future woven out of threads of expectation.

And this future we see ahead of us is usually strung together out of certain rules and beliefs. I will be fine. Nothing bad will happen. It will be like this, like this story I see in my head. We do not see the vast empty beyond. We do not let ourselves.

And yet sometimes things happen. It happens to all of us at some point, I think. Something happens, and there's a little tear, the fabric of the fathomable peeling open to reveal the vast seething blackness beyond. The rules, the orders and patterns of our life, of the future we shape for ourselves in our heads, tumble down like matchsticks. Was that all they were? Such tiny, fragile pieces of wood? Little splinters tumbled down. A breeze, just a little breeze, will blow them off the edge of the world.

It is not always the worst thing in the world, though it can be. It happens to some people very young: a parent dies, a matchstick house tumbles. It happens to others only as adults. And the moment may not have arrived yet for some people. They wait in their matchstick houses, smiling at the future, hands flashing as they stitch together bright matchstick quilts of possibility.

My moment came when I was twelve. We got a phone call. My friend, Craig Rimmel, was dead.

He was not the first person I knew to die, but I had already fashioned little rules around death, built little matchstick fences and road signs: One Way Only. Death Goes This Way.

Death was natural. You were born, you grew up, you grew old, you died. This was sad, but this was inevitable. This was the way of things. This was the rule.

(Matchsticks and glue, so much glue... it is harder to weave with sticks than you think)

My grandfather (my father's father) died when I was only one. I remember him and I don't. It is a memory, but not clear--it is more like an impression, a powerful sensory aura, the essential glow of a person. A feeling. My grandfather holding me. Big. I'm sitting on his tummy. I feel the idea of a smile, feel him looking down at me. An impression of warmth.

That is all.

I was too small to understand, but all understanding thereafter was tinted with his lack, with his death, with his absence in the world I knew. This is the possibility.

This is how the rule began.

My other grandfather died when I was five. He'd had a few strokes, and they believed he had another while driving a tractor, and the tractor tipped and he was killed. An accident. But I was small, and he was old, and this was the rule.

When my grandmothers died the rule was cemented. This is the way the world works. I knew, of course, in my head, that it didn't always work this way. I saw it on the news. But I didn't feel it or know it. This wasn't my story. These bits of news, these images on the television, these other posssibilities, these were just the minor backdrops to the story I saw before me, to the story I told myself about the future.

But Craig was different. I was twelve. He was twelve. He died on his paper route.

I had delivered papers, too, the Pennysaver. I remember cutting the plastic ties. Sorting the ads. Ink on my fingers. Having to scrub them, watching the ink swirl down the drain, but never all of it. So hard to get them entirely clean. The ink left a stain.

Craig was on his paper route. He was twelve. It wasn't even an accident. It was an aneurysm. Something inside just broke. A little balloon stretched and popped, as if the colourful balloon animals of his imagination that danced through his future had been too much. The balloon animals of highschool, of college, of marriage and adulthood. They were too much, required too much air, and the balloon popped.

A boy falling down on his paper route.

We had played soccer together. He was our goalie, his father our coach, the best I ever had. He had a round face, curly blond hair. He had a nice smile. He was nice. He was like a cherub in soccer cleats.

Craig would have known, though, that my rule was not true. He knew, I think, that these houses of possibility were built only out of matchsticks and twigs, glued together with hope and faith and necessary naivety.

His mother had died a few years earlier. Heart attack. And now him. A little tube, ballooning. Popping. A boy falling down on his paper route.

Ink on my fingers. So hard to wash off.

I remember the funeral. I remember his father standing, beside the coffin, with Craig's older brother. Just two of them left now, a family cut in half, a punnett square going nowhere.

I remember sunlight through a window. Motes of dust drifting in the light. Hovering. A room full of children crying. All dressed nicely.

I hated dress clothes for a long time. It was the last funeral I attended for a long time. I avoided them, as if this would somehow allow me to ignore the blackness hiding beyond the present moment.

The coffin was dark, solid. All too solid. A dark, burnished wood. Is this why I have a fascination with dark wood?

A rent in the story, in the fabric of all I had predicted, and all I might predict in the days and years to come.

There was a great void in the four corners of that family, and some of that leaked into my own life. A touch of the chaos, of the unknowingness of things.

I was not a teen that took risks, that felt invulnerable. In every story I could think of, could weave of the future, there was that wooden box, the possibility of it.

What was fathomable had changed.

I was quietly haunted by this for years. I was quieter for years, perhaps.

And yet I remembered, too, that light. The light through the window, the motes of dust hovering in the midst of a slow dance. There was chance and randomness there, too, but of another kind. A glimmer of light, a path, however narrow. Something to follow.

I was an adult when my father died. One day, though, in the dark of grief, I went outside. A winter sky of blue, white sun on white snow, a moment of sublimity, amd perhaps, even, of grace. A gift of hope, of the idea that we can see even in the darkness of what is to come. And in that light of a late winter morning I remembered Craig's funeral, the light through the window, the dancing motes of dust, suspended in a moment and holding off the future.

Four Short Walls #4

2011-06-27T07:55:00.000-04:00

Simply For the Love

2011-06-25T20:44:00.000-04:00

Silence

2011-06-23T08:00:00.001-04:00

by Cyndi Pauwels
CP at Large
(Story originally published in Mock Turtle, Fall 2010)

Silence

In the beginning the silence was a welcome relief from the chaotic days and nights spent caring for an angry, ungrateful, invalid husband. He was so healthy and strong when they married. They were blissfully happy, cocooned in a world of their own. The future stretched before them, full of tantalizing possibilities, but then their brief fifteen months of idyllic existence were shattered by the war. When he was medically discharged for vague but debilitating symptoms after repeated deployments and finally returned for good to the tiny bungalow they shared, he was different, physically and emotionally. She spent his last months caring for the bitter, disillusioned man he’d become, never able to pierce the wall he built between them. He remained a sullen stranger in a familiar, yet older face.

Now he was truly gone. The last mourners, after seeking guilt-relieving assurance she would be fine, really, were gone, too. She tossed the wilting flowers, the inane cards, the uneaten casseroles. All the clothes he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – wear had already gone to Goodwill and slowly, over the last few painful weeks, every memento of their life together disappeared from the house, either by way of the trashman after a particularly trying day, or in the possession of a distraught friend or relative seeking a tangible connection to the man they once knew.

Finally she was alone, with the silence blanketing her, comforting her, shielding her from cold reality. All her dreams died with him – their unborn children, their travel plans, the meticulously designed corner bookstore they dreamed of opening. Her strength was gone too, her motivation to begin life over non-existent. The bank account was exhausted, spent on fruitless doctor visits and refused medication. The home they built and decorated together was double-mortgaged, granted on the prospect of his life insurance policy and military benefits. All she had left was the silence.

She turned off the phone and rebuffed efforts to check on her well-being until, gradually, even the best-intentioned gave up and left her alone.

The ticking clock intruded, so she unplugged it. Likewise the humming refrigerator, the noisy furnace, the clanking cistern pump. She guarded the silence jealously, even as it overpowered her.

And in the end, there was silence.

A Bit o' Revision Advice

2011-06-22T07:38:00.001-04:00

So, in my day job, as you may (or may not) know, I work as an editor and writer. The emphasis is usually on the former, but just last week I made a pitch for a new project that will combine the two. It looks like I may get to pursue this project (though there are no guarantees in life, and I'm not sure about the timeline), and I thought my Fellow Sophisticates may have some input.

The idea is to write a book about how to revise a novel, likely to be put out as an ebook. So! Questions for you!

1) Do you have any revision tips that you love and have helped you?

2) Do you have any artistic/philosophical/theoretical approaches to revision that have helped you?

3) What would you expect from a book about novel revision?

4) What would you like to see from such a book? What topics would you want covered?

I'm doing lots of reading and research, as I want to compile a lot of information and firm up some ideas of how I want to cover this (likely a mix of artistic and practical approaches). And I really hoped that asking all of you would provide another angle. What are writers actually doing out there, in terms of revision? What is it they want?

I'd love your thoughts, if you have a moment or two. Or three. Three is also fine. Four is good, but I can't pay you, so stop looking at me like that.

Okay.

(And thanks)

Four Short Walls #3

2011-06-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

Sticklers and the Bliss of Language

2011-06-18T12:20:00.000-04:00

What happens when you're both a pedant and in love with the bubble and froth of language?

Four Short Walls #2

2011-06-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

End of Eden

2011-06-13T10:03:00.002-04:00

One of my friends has a short story out for free. Check it out, if you're interested.

Four Short Walls (Week 1)

2011-06-10T08:00:00.003-04:00

Walking Into a Tornado is Not Like I Thought It Would Be: Also, The Failure of Television and Youtube

2011-06-09T07:00:00.001-04:00

As an escape from teeth, I thought I'd write about a tornado. Plus, it was requested! And I like requests. Seriously, if you would like to pick my brain on some topic or other, drop me a line (or just leave a comment) and ask away.

So! Twisters. Yes. This is the story of how I walked into a tornado. But this story requires some backstory.

Last year was tornado year in Southwestern Ontario. With the extra hot and humid summer, we had an over-abundance of tornadoes swing through the area. And the backstory really starts a couple of weeks before the main story. A large F2 hit a nearby town, coming off Lake Erie and tearing through. It destroyed houses and trees. There was this great park, called Seacliff Park, that was full of huge and ancient trees, these massive oaks and maples. Sixty or eighty feet high, and four to six feet thick in the trunk. The tornado shredded them, uprooting or snapping in half about two-thirds of them. And houses didn't fare much better. My aunt-in-law lived right in the path of it. Her fence was lifted off the ground and tossed down like kindling. The forty foot metal TV tower was torn down and wrapped around the house (symbolism! be warned). Luckily, her house itself didn't take too much damage, but the house twenty feet to the right had its roof ripped off.

We drove through the area, and it was amazing to see the sheer power of the twister, what the winds could do. One small house in the county was tumbled over, as if attempting to spin a cartwheel with wooden limbs and a cape of shingles.

Luckily no one was killed. But the damage itself was both fascinating and horrifying. It lingers in the head, small winds haunting the imagination. And more storms were coming, each one providing a tickle of fear, a touch of awe, and a dash of curiosity.

A couple weeks later a vast storm system was pulling in, coming up out of the States, set to swing across the Detroit River and Lake Erie to scythe over Southwestern Ontario. Tracking in. Targeting.

We could see it coming. It was evening, still and humid, the air seeming too heavy to move. We were putting the kids to bed. Locking the windows. And the huge storm filled the horizon, growing larger. It spread, flushing up across the sky--a green and limpid sky, as if heaven itself was sick, its insides twisting and turning. The humid stillness was touched by a momentary breeze, and there was a sudden rustle of leaves and grass. Stillness. A rustle, again, a little stronger. A wet, clean scent on the air. And it tingled. The wind shivered with what was coming.

The dark grey-green clouds roiling closer, a tangled lashing in the sky, rushing on an invisible wind. And then the wind could be seen, visible now in the fields as it came, bending the crops before it, flattening them as if beneath a vast wave. The trees swung and tilted and the wind roared around us, the storm following on its heels.

I'd had a premonition. Listening to the news reports, watching the storm approach, I'd had a feeling. It was an odd feeling, but quite certain. We were going to be hit by a tornado. I brought the kids down, kept them close. Because I felt like we were going to be hit.

I rationalized, of course. This is what happens when you see the wreckage of a tornado. It haunts your thoughts, and haunts your ideas of the future, a nightmare swimming in the dreams of possibility.

It was coming.

A premonition ignores the rational. It was coming. This was a certainty.

The winds harassed the house. The rain pelted in. The clouds twisted above. And the storm passed over.

I watched the news. There were tornadoes, but none struck us. North and south, but we were safe in the middle.

The feeling faded. The storm missed us. A tease, nothing more. Eventually we went to bed.

The story was done. We settled back into our daily routine.

A week later we were at our in-laws, a few minutes drive away. Another summer storm was rolling in. A tornado warning was mentioned, but now I had another certainty. We were safe. I caught the storm bluffing once, and that was it, that was the way of it. A news report in some other town. Not entirely real.

And then my wife looked at me and said "We left the windows open in the house."

The grey storm was coming in, and already the rain was hitting down. I ran for the car, hopped in, and spun the car in the direction of home. I buzzed into the driveway, parked by the huge tree in the backyard. I ran into the house. No big deal, really, but who wants puddles in their house?

I sprinted between windows, closing and locking them. The computer was still on. I stopped, checked the computer, and then turned it off. I walked down the back stairs. The back door is blind. There are no windows, there's no way to see out.

I opened the door and ran out, as if I could outrace the rain drops. But, outside, there was a lot more than rain in the air. Hail plunked down, denting the ground. And there were branches in the air. Leaves and branches, whipped horizontal in the air, giving the air a quality of greenness, a jungle blur.

I held my arms up over my head. My only thought: Holy shit, this is crazy.

And that was it.

I ran for the car. I was simply moving. I wasn't thinking, beyond anything other than this is strange. Strange. That's what I thought.

I ran into my car. A couple who were visiting my neighbors were sitting in their car, trying to wait it out. (Later, they said it was the most terrifying thing they ever lived through. And, apparently, they thought I was crazy.)

Shredded tree limbs were alive in the air, spinning and grasping and whirling away only to return. My garbage can went airborn, never to be seen again. The neighbor's glass picnic table was picked up and thrown off the deck, shattering on the sidewalk.

Strange.

I turned the car on. Pulled out of my spot, started down the driveway. The car shook. Behind me, one of the main trunks of the huge tree I'd parked beside snapped off, and forty feet of wood crashed down where my car had been.

Strange.

I drove off in my shaking car. Speeding, probably. Outrunning the storm. In a minute it was suddenly better. A bad storm, no more. Had to be careful of hydroplaning, with all the water on the ground. Two minutes away, at my in-laws, it was barely raining.

"Bad?" they asked.

"Strange," I said.

And I never once thought tornado.

This is the oddity of life. I had, in my genius, walked out into a tornado. And yet I had never realized it. It had been too strange, had happened too fast. Just: Crazy. Strange.

When we returned, later, to our house, we were lucky to find the house undamaged, though our yard looked as if God, drunk, had come down with a giant weedwhacker. Limbs, trunks, and branches were everywhere. Green leaves like a carpet, or perhaps like bed covers, pulled up tight and high by the terrified grass. It can't get us under here, the grass said. No windy boogeyman will get us, no sir.

And yet it's the strangeness of the incident that comes back to me now. I remember my premonition, and how it had been right: only, you know, a little bad with dates. Happens to the best of us.

Youtube had failed me. TV movies? A fail. It was always so dramatic on the screen. The empty fields. The sinuous twister pulling down from the sky. The slow advance that can't be escaped. Closer, closer, closer, the black clouds swinging in, the tornado eating a trail along the ground. On the screen you see it coming. You face it. Hide, perhaps, but you face it, watch it come. This is the drama of it. Dorothy always has time to be afraid.

Instead I blithely walked into it. Strange. I ran through the braches, never once thinking "Hey, idiot, this is a tornado. You might want to get somewhere safe."

My own odd and personal idiocy, my own slightly surreal perception of the tornado, inside and unknowing.

It strikes me there is something human about this. It strikes me that this is what I like about great stories. They're not what you see on the typical television show, but rather something a little askew, tilted at an odd angle, and yet for that very reason it seems true, seems somehow real.

Sometimes we don't see the story coming. Sometimes we simply step out into it, unaware. Sometimes idiocy is more profound than courage, or at least more human. And sometimes fools get lucky, thank the Lord and his weedwhacker.

Predicting the Future

2011-06-08T09:33:00.000-04:00

This is me. Tomorrow.

Call me Nostradamus.

(And wish me luck)

And tomorrow! Hopefully! Tornadoes! If I'm still alive, of course.

Before and After

2011-06-07T11:53:00.000-04:00

This was a week ago...

And this is today...

I'm pretty much ready to try this...

2011-06-06T08:11:00.001-04:00

Happy Birthday, Rejectionist

2011-06-03T14:03:00.002-04:00

Lake Argo

2011-06-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

by Matthew MacNish
The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment

Lake Argo

He watched the grey mist fall languidly off the glassflat surface of the cold, dark lake, its twisting vapors the only thing that moved in the silence. Morning stalked still and secret through the trees as dawn approached, nothing more than a subtle, desperate lightening of the far domed firmament.

Ancient. Timeless. Infinite.

The lingering dew awoke every sleeping odor held within an earthen mouth: dirt, worms, decay, fungi, wet leaves, pine, life. The world stirred.
A ripple on the water. A fluttering of leaves in the trees. The whistling warble of a nearby songbird. A gentle waft of warmer air against the skin.

He stood, stiller than a statue, his hand firm around his bow, his toes cold and stiff in the chilled leather of his boots. His breathing was slowed to a pace that rivaled hibernation, but his mind was sharp and focused. He drank the world in through his senses as he stood, and watched, and considered.

It had been a long night, spent in vigil, the threat of danger never far away. This was the frontier, and his people knew of the coming enemy. They were resigned against it.

His duty was to watch, and then to warn. Perhaps to fight one day, if, Mother of the Forest forbid, it came to that.

He shrugged, stretched his neck, and spat. His people were peaceful, but they would defend their land with determination. Damn the horde to the stony depths of the deep black wastes. They could choke, and writhe, and wither into nothing there for all the care he gave them.

Suddenly he heard a cry, a ghostly call so ethereal in the lifting fog of the charging morning that it begged the question: am I still within this life or have I crossed over into some Other World where time and matter are but rumors of their former selves.

And then he knew.

It was the lakebird of the boundary waters, heralding the breaking dawn with a call as clarion as the horn of a rider diving headlong into the great red battle at the end of history.

Yet, for him, it was but the beginning.

Appreciating Genius

2011-06-01T12:18:00.000-04:00

One of the things that most fascinates me in the world is genius. Genius writers, of course, but genius in all other ways, as well. There's something captivating about experiencing the heights of human talent. A chance to see something special, perhaps even profound; a chance to bear witness to the sudden expansion of human potential.

This is part of why I put up the guitar pieces the last few days. Yes, I really like the music. But I appreciate their genius. I appreciate what they've put into learning these skills, and to the expression of them. The complexity, the thought, the endless practice: all of this can be apparent in the moment. All of this can be expressed in action, in expression, in the way fingers tap out endlessly strange rhythms upon strings.

This genius, I think, can take an endless number of forms. There is athletic genius:

This is what it is like to see a giant fly and create magic out of thin air. There is genius in such physical grace.

Or perhaps a mixture of physical grace, art, and storytelling:

This is the weird multiplicity of genius. I appreciate watching experts do what they do best. I don't even have to love the end product. I may know zilch about embroidery, have never tried doing it, and own nothing that is embroidered myself, but I bet if I watched a genius of embroidery at work in creating a picture pattern... there would be something beautiful about it, something captivating.

There is a profound faith, I think, inside a moment of genius. The artist's faith in their own fingers, their own thoughts, their own ideas. A confidence in them moment and the task at hand.

And it's interesting to consider the similarities between people of genius. I think of three keys: talent, creativity, and effort.

I believe in talent. It is not the be all and end all, certainly. I hear arguments that talent is everything: either you have it or you don't. And I hear arguments that it's all about the work: you get what you've paid for (with blood, sweat, and tears). And I believe in work, too. But everyone has different talents. And talent, I think, will always determine the range of your genius in any particular task. My capacity for language is much higher than my capacity for music. This is the way it is. I might practice for a million years and eventually gain musical competence (eventually overcoming my natural musical idiocy), but I will never play the guitar like Kaki King or Michael Hedges. My brain isn't built that way. Talent often determines the effectiveness of effort.

And then there's creativity. I think great geniuses have this in common--a differnce of vision. They see, through the scope of their talent, a slightly different world. Michael Jordan saw, in the clip above, a seam in the wall of defenders, and envisioned, in mid-flight, a strange path to success, to achieving what he wanted. This involves inspiration and physical creativity, and an almost oracular faith in his own ability. I think genius always shares in this creativity. An ability to transcend, to go beyond what has so far been found.

Talent and creativity, however, mean very little without effort. Without work. Talent and creativity sing of potential. Work speaks of possibility.

I have never seen a genius who didn't work harder than everybody else. Why could Michael Jordan stick so many game winning jump shots? Because he hit so many jumpshots in practice, so many shots that must have seemed almost meaningless at the time. But true work is never meaningless. It pushes forward. It advances some inner need to achieve something, to get better.

There's a famous story from the concentration camps in WWII, in which the Germans experimented by forcing prisoners to do meaningless work. Weak and starving prisoners were forced to move heavy stones from one end of the compound to another. And then the next day they were forced to move them back. Again. And again. The work served nothing, no purpose, and it drove many prisoners mad. Such pointless work, perhaps, destroys the soul. True work, on the other hand, pushes people forward.

A fourth aspect grows out of this, I think: habit. Habits have a bad name, these days, because most of the time when we think about habits we're thinking about bad habits. Our smoking habit, our drinking habit, our 94 hour-a-week Facebook habit. But our lives are formed from habits: little ones and big ones. We create them out of the pattern of our lives. Do we brush our teeth, and when? And how? And where do we set the toothpaste down? But there are bigger habits, too. When do we make time for our passions? Our art, our writing, our sports? And greater still. How do we talk to our children? What are the patterns of our human relationships? Our faith?

Our habits shape us, and sometimes control us. But we also shape them. We make them. We can create the patterns of our life. And geniuses do this, at least in regard to their talent and creativity. They funnel their talent and creativity and desire into work, and into habits that support their excellence and genius.

Your habits might revolve around shooting jumpshots, or making story pictures in the sand. But charity can be a habit, too. Mother Teresa made a habit of this. She worked at it. Faith can be a habit. Pope John Paul II made a habit of this. He made constant habits of prayer and confession. Service can be a habit. Nelson Mandela made a habit of this. He worked at serving the needs of his people.

I appreciate genius in all its forms. It makes me wonder about my talent, my creativity, my effort, and the habits I make from these... and what these habits make of me.

Guitar Dreams III

2011-05-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

Guitar Dreams II

2011-05-30T09:25:00.002-04:00

And make sure to check out Guitar Dreams I below... simply for its awesomeness.

Guitar Dreams

2011-05-28T13:21:00.002-04:00

The leap from the lion's head

2011-05-26T13:20:00.000-04:00

When one’s not writing poems — and I’m not at the moment — you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.

May Sarton

Is anyone else like this? I have marching orders in hand (edits on my novel from the King of San Francisco), I've thought them over and know what I want to do... and now I just have to jump back in. But this is always the hardest thing for me. Starting. In terms of story, and also in terms of the simple mechanical process. Opening up a file. Hitting those keys. One, two, three...

It's hard to get back in.

I always look for clues, but sometimes you find yourself at the edge of an abyss, standing on the cliff's edge, the wind pulling at you and singing of the stones far below. And that's when you have to fall back and trust in the wisdom of Indiana Jones. The leap from the lion's head...

Sometimes it's simply a matter of faith. You have to jump. You have to believe there really is a bridge there, even if your eyes deceive you.

Leap from the lion's head. The cup of life lies beyond.

And having a big whip helps, too. Just in case.

The Alchemy of Writing

Four Short Walls #29 - Escalators

Four Short Walls #28 - Revenge of the Rhinovirus

Burning Bright - Under the Microscope

Far Horizons

Working into the Future

Hearing Myself Talk About Writing

Happy Holidays *Plus* The Future of Publishing

Four Short Walls #27 - Deck the Halls (cont. [again])

Four Short Walls #26 - Deck the Halls (cont.)

Four Short Walls #25 - Deck the Halls

White Christmas (aka book snow)

The Descending Plague, in D Minor

Bringing a Legend to Life - A Guest Post by Rick Daley

Four Short Walls #24 - Revenge

Four Short Walls #23 - The Rejection Letter

Thanksgiving Death Match

BEWARE

Red Shift - Under the Guest Microscope

Sjowall and Wahloo - Under the Microscope

Winter's Bone - Under the Microscope

The Judges of the Secret Court - Under the Microscope

Hemingway and Herbert - Under the Guest Microscope

Open Wounds - Under the Microscope

Attack of the Killer Microscope! Review Week Arrives...

String Bridge Chart Rush

How to Write a Person

Beware the Blob

Simply for the Love (of Halloween) (Belated)

Four Short Walls #22 - Leadership

Birthday Nostalgia and Official Lameness

Four Short Walls #21 - The Return

Four Short Walls #20 - Missing in Action

Four Short Walls #19 - Motivation

Four Short Walls #18

Promotions, Pneumonia, Charity, and the Blogging Experience

Simply for the Love (of Jazz)

Words: Spend Them or Hoard Them?

Keyhole to the Future

Simply for the Love (of Classical) (Sort of)

Four Short Walls #17

The Road (but not that one)

Simply for the Love

Four Short Walls #16

Simply for the Love (of Grunge)

Four Short Walls #15

Why? Theme? Why theme?

Four Short Walls #14

Brain Implosion and Unforgiving Years

Simply for the Love

Shared Worlds: History and the Imagined Fantastical

Windows Between Worlds

The Book Splurge That Ate The World

Four Short Walls #13

Why, James Bond, Why?

Whither This Way or That

Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Four Short Walls #12

Gluttony and the New York Review of Books

Secret Garden

Secret Doors

I'll be back. Okay, I already am.

Four Short Walls #11

Dread

Four Short Walls #10

Life's Work

Simply for the Love

Four Short Walls #9

Four Short Walls #8

Guest Posting in Mordor

Some days you feel like a tarantula...

Four Short Walls #7

Charity Hot Dogs

Simply for the Love

Four Short Walls #6

The Limits of Napkins

Four Short Walls #5

In Memoriam: Peter Falk

Craig Rimmel: A Tear in the Fabric of the Fathomable

Four Short Walls #4

Happy Holidays Plus The Future of Publishing