101 Dalmatians

Okay, for our 101st post here, I thought I'd show 101 pictures of Dalmatian dogs...

Yeah, okay, I'm lying. I'm not that mean. Okay, yeah, I am that mean, but simply far too lazy to do that much work. Heck, that 100 books post almost killed me.

But after my guest post over on Nathan Bransford's blog I started thinking about something. Sort of connected, really, to what I wrote about there, but a little different. Expectations, but expectations of a different sort.

I enjoyed doing that blog post, and enjoyed the wondrously kind comments. But it got me thinking about the expectations we have for an audience. Do any of you think about audience while writing? It's sort of a complex question for me, and one I'm not sure I have an answer for. Or perhaps the problem is that I have many answers for it, or one that's always shifting...

In one sense I sort of knew the audience at Nathan's, as I'm a regualr reader and commenter there. I have a feel for the tone, for some of the people. And yet you never really know what people are going to say. And for unpublished novelists it's even more so. Who's your audience? I think that holds for the reality of a possible future publication, but also for the abstract mental frameworks we hold while putting words on the page.

I know some writers think of particular people when they work, a very particular audience. Husband or wife or friend or parent. I don't think I do... and yet sometimes I'll think "What will so and so think of this?" Mostly I write for myself, for the reader in me, trying to find the story that I want to hear, that I want to read, something I couldn't find on the shelves. And yet there's certainly an awareness of other possible readers. Writing, at its heart, is an act of communication. A sharing, a bridge of ideas formed out of words and cabled sentences. So I'm aware of that potential audience, and sometimes hypothesize their reaction. To good effect... and ill. Sometimes it moves me to a clarity and simplicity that is advantageous, and sometimes it reins me in short, holds me back, makes me more conservative than I want to be... or should be.

And yet these expectations of an audience are just that... expectations. Dreams, whimsies, hypotheses. If a book comes to fruition there will be an actual audience. Real people. And the neat thing about publishing a book is finding that audience, and perhaps finding fans. Fans! People totally into and in love with what you wrote! I think most writers have some expectation of this. It's only natural.

And yet I'm guessing that this is one of those things (like my Plan, capital P) where the reality is something different than expected. I look at published writers interacting with the public and, yes, there are fans. But there are all sorts of other reactions, too. Oh yes, many strange reactions. People who hate the writing, or find it boring, or go on racist rants, or accuse the writer of racist rants, or psychoanalyze the story to make declarations about the writer's relationship with parental figures...

It's a dizzying mix of things. So it got me thinking about what my expectations of audience were, and how divorced from reality they might be.

What about you? Do you have an audience in mind while you write? What does it do for you? And do you ever picture what the real audience might say? If you've had something widely read, what was the reaction like and how was it different (or similar) to what you imagined?

I'm thinking that while I understand in an abstract sense what a really large audience will be like, it would probably be a rude awakening in reality. A bit of a chasm, perhaps, between those expectations and the actual experience of an audience of readers.

Wondrous Hundredousness

So, remarkably, this is the 100th post here at our little alchemical workshop. Who would've thunk it? I figured my contribution to the blog would sort of be like my diary attempts. Which went something like:

"Hey there, just checking in. I, well, yeah, I did some, ah, stuff today. Okay, check in again later."

Followed by lots of blank pages.

But lo! I actually wrote things in this little collaborative blog. So, to celebrate (and since this is a bookish sort of blog), I decided to do a list of 100 fabulous books! And no cheating by using series to take up multiple spaces! Yes, I'm crazy. But that's okay. It's a secret. Shhh.

Fabulosity Rounded to One Hundred

Strange Piece of Paradise - a fabulous memoir of crime and survival. My favourite book.
The Edge of Sadness - a brilliant novel about an Irish American priest struggling with his vocation. Genius, and a winner of the Pullitzer Prize. A sin that no one remembers it now.
The Lord of the Rings - need I say anything?
In Cold Blood - Capote inventing a genre.
The Executioner's Song - Mailer taking that genre to the next level. His writing at its very best, and what he should have tried to do more often.
Money from Hitler - Just read this. You know that old saying, "You have to be mean to your characters"? This writer, Denemarkova, heard this and laughed and laughed and laughed...
The Lazarus Project - Hemon is building a great reputation, and rightfully so. This book is brilliant, particularly the latter half. Striking, slightly off-kilter prose. Oh yes.
The Road - Post-apocalyptic genius. And surprisingly more hopeful than a lot of McCarthy's other books. Despite, you know, the death of the whole world.
Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West - The Road was, for example, more hopeful than this one. But the prose in this book will melt your brain.
The Sunset Limited - Soon to be a movie! Thank you, Tommy Lee Jones.

The Outer Dark - Okay, I know, there's a lot of McCarthy books here.
Child of God - Last McCarthy book, swearsies.
The Prydain Chronicles - Totally not McCarthy! Loved this series as a child, and love it still. Crunchings and munchings. Okay, insider joke. Sorry.
Infinite Jest - Read it when I was 18. Blew my mind. "You can do that in a book? Why the hell didn't anyone tell me?"
The Hobbit - Lord of the Rings, Jr. I've read this book more than any other. Pass the pipeweed.
Murder on the Orient Express - Oh, Agatha, if only you weren't old. And dead.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - So classically perfect.
The Screwtape Letters - You can keep your lion, Narnia. I want these letters.
The Man Who Was Thursday - How can you not like Chesterton? He was so nice he probably wasn't human. But I like him anyway. Sort of like a fat, jolly angel perched on my shoulder.
Harry Potter et al. - Hey, what the hell.

102 Minutes - Puts you inside the Twin Towers, minute by minute. Riveting.
Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me - My man, Javier Marias. Spanish genius.
A Heart So White - Marias again.
All Souls - Okay, I love him.
Dark Back of Time - Even though he stopped returning my calls.
When I was Mortal - Why, Javier, why?
Written Lives - Okay, I'm over him.
Your Face Tomorrow - Okay, I'm not. Sod off.
Catch-22 - Funniest book about death ever.
The Belgariad - I'm a fan. I admit it.

The Things They Carried - One of the greatest books ever written.
In the Lake of the Woods - Also one of the greatest books ever written.
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home - Okay, I kinda love Tim O'brien, too.
Going After Cacciato - See?
Dispatches - One of the great war memoirs ever. Doesn't hurt that Michael Herr cowrote Apocalypse Now, either.
They Marched Into Sunlight - A brilliant history of one day during the Vietnam War, covering a platoon in the bush, the policy makers in Washington, and a peace protest gone wild in Wisconsin.
The Cat from Hue - Just to continue the Vietnam kick.
Chickenhawk - Okay, I've read a lot of books about Vietnam. But they're all really good.
Dubliners - I learned more about writing from reading this book than any other.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Masterwork.

A Song of Ice and Fire - Gets a bit bloated on the backside, but hey, podody's nerfect.
Dreamland - A modern Dickensian covers old New York. Good stuff.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - A book that will haunt you.
Carpenter's Gothic - my favourite of Gaddis's books. Maybe because it's short?
Cat and Mouse - Oh I loved this little novel by Gunter Grass.
Half of a Yellow Sun - A truly stunning novel about civil war in Africa. A must read.
Gun, With Occasional Music - The title alone is worth the price.
The Fortress of Solitude - I think Lethem pulled this book directly out of my brain. I want him to give it back. Mine, mine, mine.
Oh, the Glory of it All - A fabulous memoir of San Francisco and the ridiculousness of money replacing love.
The Tender Bar - A young guy gets raised by a barful of drinkers. No shit. Really.

Reading Lolita in Tehran - a great book about literature, and, more importantly, about the people reading it.
Lolita - I didn't read it in Tehran, but hey...
An Invitation to a Beheading - I love this book, my favourite of Nabokov's.
Don Quixote - Sancho Panza is my hero.
A Christmas Carol - Redeemed Dickens for me. (Oliver Twist... your definition of realism must be a little different than mine)
Children of the Ghetto - A great, and mostly overlooked, classic about Jewish life in Victorian London.
Sanctuary - Faulkner. Oh yes.
As I Lay Dying - Further yesness.
The Sound and the Fury - How many times do I have to say it?
The Old Man and the Sea - I put Faulkner and Hemingway together just to annoy them.

The Good Soldier - Should have called it by the name that Ford Madox Ford wanted, "The Saddest Story".
Clara Callan - My favourite epistolary novel. (Sorry, Dracula)
The Last Samurai - Why am I drawn to boy genius stories? But this one is actually good. Fantastic, intelligent, moving, and funny.
Fall on Your Knees - Wouldn't normally have read this book, but I trusted the author.
The Way the Crow Flies - I trusted her because of this book. Brilliant. Not sure I liked the denouement, but brilliant anyway.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen - Crazy. But great fantasy writing. This man is full of imagination.
Tigana - One of the best fantasy novels out there. And the greatest villain who is not a villain.
A Song for Arbonne - After reading Tigana you can read this.
The Lions of Al Rassan - And this.
Fahrenheit 451 - Burning books! Maybe I'll have to get an e-reader after all.

Run - Oh the writerly crush I have on Ann Patchett. It's quite possible that this book has my all-time favourite scene in it. Quite possible, indeed.
Truth and Beauty - More Patchett. A memoir about friendship, loss, and writing.
Bel Canto - The crush started here.
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Loved this fantastical look at Los Alamos and the creators of the Atom Bomb.
Pride and Prejudice - Yes, I read it. And still have lots of testosterone.
The Life of Insects - Russian writer of the fabulous and strange.
Metamorphosis - Pelevin picked up a few ideas from this Kafka fellow.
Stranger Things Happen - Odd and wonderful short stories.
Lipstick Jihad - I should have put this up by Reading Lolita in Tehran, but I forgot. A wonderful memoir of a young woman returning to live in her family's homeland of Iran.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - good ol' Murakami.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - No jokes here. This book is brilliant. Zap your brain sort of brilliant.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - This book is about running, obviously. But it's also about writing. I like both. Go figure.
After Dark - Another Murakami. Why not?
The Baron in the Trees - How can you go wrong with Calvino?
If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - More of the Italian Gentleman.
The Path to the Spiders' Nests - Oddly, my favourite of Calvino's. Odd because it was his first novel and the only one written in the realist style.
The Cloven Viscount - Sounds like a metaphorical title... but it's not. Which makes me happy. :)
Night - Does it need anything said about it?
Survival in Auschwitz - Same goes for this one.
A Writer At War - Here's the Eastern Front in all its madness.

A Woman in Berlin - This memoir of the Fall of Berlin by an anonymous woman will sear your eyes and tear out your heart. But that's a good thing.
Europe Central - Despite the fact that The Rejectionist discovered that Vollman is an asshat, I still love this book.
The Known World - Beautiful and yet hard to read. Former slaves owning slaves of their own... truth and light shimmer on these pages.
Shadow Country - A modern masterpiece decades in the making.
The Year of Magical Thinking - So perfectly sad and beautiful
Duncton Wood - Moles have never been so fascinating. Yes, moles. The ones that dig in the ground.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - A gem of a little memoir full of loss and hope. A stillborn child, a second chance... in the hands of a masterful writer.
Into the Wild - You know it ends badly. I mean, he tells you at the beginning of the book. But you keep hoping.
Into Thin Air - Okay, I love this book. I have like 8 copies on my shelves. I'm like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, where he's compelled to buy every copy of Catcher in the Rye that he sees. That's me with Into Thin Air. But it gives me lots of copies to lend out. If you come to my house you WILL be leaving with a copy of this book. And leftovers. I ain't eating them.
The Hundred Brothers - A hilarious story about one hundred brothers. Yes, one hundred. How could I end the Fabulosity One Hundred any other way?

Book Lust

I must admit, I'm uselessly addicted to the book as object. I mean, I'm obviously addicted to the book as provider of content. That's a given. But I realize, more and more, that I'm totally bonzo for actual books. For specific books. Not just any old Sunday afternoon tome lying around. But certain... ideal books. The books that simply call to me.

The most current object of my affection is The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins. Not the hardcover, mind you. Trade paperback. It's specific, this book lust. Yes, I really want to read the book for its contents (which are supposed to be brilliant). But I love this book. Trade paperback. The dusty, orangeish glow of the cover. The gloss of it, the texture of it, the weight of it. The perfect feel of the pages, the paper so perfectly chosen. The font, the design. Just the way it feels in my hand. Just the balance of it, the perfect amount of give and bend to the pages. It invites me in. Calls me in.

I think this is what I'll miss when the Ebook Overlords take over. The content will be there. But where the book lust? How do I glory in the pages if there are no pages?

The Forever War. Yes. Okay, yes, I can get it at the library. And probably will. (Got no money) But... but... but... I want the book. I want it as a thing for my shelf. I want it as a piece of my house, a piece of myself. I'm greedy for it. Unashamedly so! A proud greed. Mine, mine, mine!

So who's with me? Book lust, anyone? What's a book you had to have? Reading wasn't enough. Had to slip that book under your coat and make a bolt for the door...

The Big 4 - 0

The Big 4 - 0... 40... XL... Forty... No matter how you say it--you still end up with the same amount.



40



Wow...



And in six short months, I'll be there. Is that so bad? There are a lot more numbers after forty than before it, right?



The problem is, unlike my two amigos, I have yet to produce a tome. A chunk-o-pages. A pile-0-leaves.



A novel.

Short stories I have aplenty--and some of them published, even. But nary a novel.



Ink has three or four sitting in drawers. I'm sure he'd loan me one but it wouldn't be the same. And there it is...40...staring me down.



You read about how (insert famous author's name) wrote five novels by the age of (insert insanely low number) and it's easy to get discouraged. But they didn't have daughters eleven and nine years old, and a rabid Jack Russell terrier gnawing on their toes whilst they wrote... Or did they?



Oh well. Forget about losing a few pounds. Forget about volunteering at the local food bank. Forget about helping a few more ole ladies cross the street this upcoming year. You know what my resolution is. June 30 is highlighted on my calendar and I sit poised amongst a pile of index cards, notepads and sundry other instruments of fiction creation.



I wonder though... Am I the only one who feels the press of TIME and AGE in my writing? Or am I just being a little neurotic?

Link by Link

A good ol' fashioned topic here: inspiration.

I just finished reading a collection of stories, Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link, and it was a collection to love. Odd and strange and original and quirky and just a little bit haunting, the sort of stories that stick with you after you've finished them. Like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth, you're gonna have to pick at them for awhile. A lick here and there, a prod with your tongue, a few thoughts of how chocolate would go so nice with this...

But what I found most interesting about my response to these stories was that element of inspiration, of that sudden need to write. Not to emulate, per se, but to make something, to fashion something new and wholly unique out of all those old verbs, adjectives and nouns. Dust off those familiar words and make them shiny again.

It makes me think of stories as links in a chain, bound together, all individual and yet all connected. Stories reaching out, sparking and starting new stories in new minds. It's like that image of Michelangelo's on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the hand of God touching the hand of man, the spark of life and creation transferred onward. And yet here we have the image repeated again and again and again, a chain of stories from a hundred thousand minds, playing off each other, sparking and sparkling, an interwoven fabric of links tunneling backward through time, from mind to mind, charting the long and ecstatic course of inspiration.

And I wonder what it is that makes for that inspiration. Not all stories do it, not even all stories I love. I might find a story great as a reader without it touching me as a writer. But certain writers, certain stories, are bright with that current, as if storing up an electrostatic charge just for me. Waiting... waiting for me to touch the doorknob (the little currents all alive), waiting for me to open the door on that particular world.

The strangeness of Stranger Things Happen is part of it. Stories, and realities, bent a little askew. Different. I want to capture that difference in turn. Or, rather, I want to capture not Kelly Link's differences but my own. I want to swallow up the energy of these creations and use it, an electric boy plugging himself into a new world. See my fingers glow as I type...

So I'd like to turn this idea back on you. Are you inspired by other stories or writers, and, if so, what are the particular qualities that inspire you? Is there some recurring quality that you find charges your writing batteries?

The Thingyness of Books: An Ode to Paper

I've been thinking about something bookish the last few days, and so I thought I'd give it a whirl here on the blog. It started when I read this article, by Alan Kaufman, last Friday (linked by the irrepresible ebooknocrat Nathan Bransford).

Now, I'd have to agree with everyone who said the article was alarmist and overdone - and perhaps rather insensitive, considering some of the comparisons made. And I found this unfortunate because underneath the hyperbolic rhetoric there were some interesting ideas.

I should say, first, that I'm not exactly anti-ebook. It's obvious that it's going to be a major growth market over the next few years, and if it makes some (or many) readers happy, then I'm glad. I saw my first live Kindle the other day. It's a very neat gadget, and I can see why some people like them. My neighbours were certainly thrilled with it. And this shows both its potential (so seductive)... and that the timeline may be a little slower than some people think. I'd never seen one until a few days ago. Never. There's a long way to go, it seems, before we reach market saturation.

But that saturation point may be somewhere around the corner. If and when... that seems pretty uncertain to me. But since the possibility is on the horizon it does make me think about that article. Certainly it would not be the end of culture, of literature and all things human, as Kaufman suggested. That's utterly alarmist. But there is a loss. And perhaps it's an acceptable loss, but loss it still is.

What I think is lost is the particularity and uniqueness of a book. And I don't mean "books", plural and in the abstract. I mean book, singular and concrete. A book is an object. It's something real that you hold in your hands, something unique that exists outside all other things.

This is what we lose with ebooks. Now, yes, there is something egalitarian about ebooks, about everything being reduced to digital coding, a sort of democratic darwinism at play in the shuffle of digital texts as they jockey for the limelight. Stripped down and sleek, reduced only to the essentials, the strings of words that form the backbone of their meaning.

And this is the essential part. The words, the sentences, the stories. And this is why the Kaufman article is so alarmist. The stories will be saved, will still be savoured and shared.

Yet a book is something a little more than its essentials. Perhaps these little trimmings are only of passing interest and shedding them will come at little cost... but I, for one, will miss them. And perhaps we all will, too, when we have a chance to look back from the digital future to a paper-filled past.

A book is a thing. A particular thing. And not just in the sense that Stephen King's Under the Dome is different from Marilynne Robinson's Home, but in the sense that one Home is different from another Home. Hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback... yes, yes, but even between one trade paperback and another. Each book is its own entity with its own history. Some fresh out of box or wrapper, others that have been read, that have been handled and dropped and picked up again. Some have been shared, passed from person to person, each new reader leaving a few traces of themselves behind. A few crumbs, or lines underlined, or signatures offered. A pretty boy or girl's phone number scrawled on the inside of a cover in a script loopy with hope and alive with the electricity of the moment's connection.

A little story: I found, once and long ago, a copy of a book in a used bookstore, a book called If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino, one of my favourite writers. It's a postmodern sort of book, self-aware and self-referential, knowing itself as a story and sharing that knowingness with its readers. And one of these previous readers had written comments on these intertextual comments, a sort of conversation, inter and outer at the same time. And yet another reader (with yet another penmanship) offered comments on these comments.

And what I had in my hands was a book utterly unique in the world. There was nothing else like it. The meaning of the text had bled outside the words, outside the sentences set on the page.

I regret this loss in ebooks, where stories are reduced to encoded text, a book pared to its essential minimum. Lost is this conversation, the uniqueness of the book as object. I can see ebooks blurring a little at the edges. The unchanging device, the eye that can no longer differentiate between one story and the next. A vagueness creeps in along the borders, like photographs slightly out of focus. Liminal spaces grow, a No Man's Land that swallows a few lines here, a few lines there.

And the thingyness of books is lost. The choice, for a book, between using one kind of paper and the next. The texture of it, the faint pebbling of it against the fingertips, the richness of the colour, the revels of whiteness in a thousand shades. Smooth edge, or rough? I like those rough-edged pages, sort of feathered and soft, the little peaks and valleys running along the edge of the books. (With ebooks there are no edges at all.) The cover art, and the cover itself. The weight of it, the way the pages turn. The binding, loose or tight. It's not a perfect world, I admit. Water damage, spines breaking, bindings loosening until pages drop like leaves in the cold of autumn. Not a perfect world, but a real and particular one. Each leaf, living and dying, unlike the rest.

I think of a future where each leaf is really just a dream, a dream of a leaf in a treeless world, and in this future I find myself a little wistful, a little sad, a little cold. There is just the ether, the wind whistling through, unobstructed, across a grey and featureless plain.

As the Lights Dim to Nothing

A dream in passing. A little world folded down. Boxed. Shipped. Like a Lego scene built and deconstructed and built again. Only this time smaller, growing up strangely amidst my own home, two worlds superimposed, one over the other. I keep thinking of origami - a page folded into a large paper crane, and then folded into a box, and when unfolded and there again is the crane... only not quite. A little smaller, a little more wrinkled. A dove, perhaps, with grimy wings.

And in that space where once a world flourished (a book world) there is an echo. The room seems larger and all the more paltry for that largeness. The carpet, unadorned by shelves, looks more frayed, shabbier, a suddenly bereft parent after the children have left. Why keep up appearances any longer?

It looks a little dirty. The walls, so long covered, are really quite ugly. The light through the windows seems a little flat, uninteresting, or perhaps merely uninterested. Colour has been stripped away, and the dazzle of light lives only in reflection, in the deflected vividness of blues and greens and reds and the deep deep browns of wooden shelves. Bits of tape on the window, where SALE! signs have been stripped hastily away. A few screws on the ground, here and there, bits of powdered drywall clinging to the threads. A little forlorn... they hold nothing now, and all is air and space and ceaseless echo.

The front step, broken and repaired by The City of Windsor, is broken again. It took a day. Craftsmanship like this is lauded only in the Land of Broken Things, where everything costs a dollar. An empty rectangle. I have boxed up the memories, too, and carted them away. Already the rectangle has forgotten everything, everything but a few words, the tattered corners of pages that have torn away (the books having already emmmigrated) and now flutter in the breeze from the door. Collect them all together and perhaps there's a meaning... a puzzle to be deciphered. A mouse, perhaps, late at night, will discover the wisdom, will hoard it away with cheese and lint and dabs of butter stolen from local restaurants.

And beyond that door, beyond that breeze, there is a new world, or a world made new by opportunity and necessity. Only a moment to look back at the sign, white lettering on black background. The font is Book Antiqua. of course. And the sign... a name. A name chosen for a beginning, for a mother who started me reading with the literary gift of an Oxford Professor, for one beginning that led to another, to an inkling of an idea, an idea of a place filled with books.

Inklings Bookshop.

I'll leave it there, the sign, a last memory for the street to cling to even as the lettering fades. It was, too briefly, a symbol, an arrow, a guide. But time will wash over it, surely. It will fade to the relevance of graffiti, detritus cast up by the old paved sea of Windsor. Until someone paints over it, hangs out a new shingle bright with hope.

Inklings Bookshop.

An arrow that now points only to a place inside my head, adorned with sights and smells and rich with the texture of pages. A place where the shelves are endless and stretch on through the slanted light. Motes of dust in the air, aglow in that light and floating, floating, floating...