Thursday, May 15, 2008
Weekend Festivities
My college graduation ceremony is this weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. I actually graduated after the Fall '07 semester, thanks to cramming in 20 units and earning 6 more units of competency exams before Xmas, but I wanted to "walk" in the actual ceremony, and that's what's going down Saturday. Dad and mom/stepdad are coming up to see, and Malaya and the IG will be in attendance as well, so that should be interesting. My parents haven't seen Malaya since we broke up 1.5 years ago, and she and the IG have never met, and my mom and dad have been divorced for nearly 30 years and though they're not fighting, they only see each other about twice a year (during my Xmas visits, usually) despite living just a few miles apart. I might be the only student there with 5 guests sitting in 4 different places?
Adding fuel to the fire (almost literally) is the crazy weather. It hadn't been over 80 here more than a few days all year, despite being a very sunny and dry spring. Suddenly, just in time for graduation and this mini-family reunion, El Sol has erupted directly overhead, and it's supposed to be (fucking) 97 today. The
average high for May in San Rafael? 73. The all time record for May is 100, so with some "luck" we might break that this afternoon. I'd be perfectly happy to never feel weather over 70 at any point during the rest of my life, so you can imagine my happiness at this development.
It's supposed to be cooler (as the frying pan is to the fire) over the weekend, with the
mercury plummeting to 92 by Saturday. At least I won't be standing around for hours in the sun in a long black robe and hat. Oh wait...
The last time it was this hot was the summer of 2006, when weeks of a humid heat wave eventually drove Malaya and me to spend
the best $349 ever. (That $349 has been sitting, unused, on her back patio ever since that summer ended, but I still say it was worth it. I'd bring it over here to replace the puny a/c unit in my apt, but the hole in my apt wall is way too small, and I don't plan on living here so much longer that I'm willing to go home carpentry style and thereby entirely give up my $1200 damage deposit.)
It's far from that miserably-hot now, and it's only supposed to be this hot for a few days, but here's the irony. Around the time it was so super hot in 2006 was just before Malaya's graduation. She was getting her PhD then, so she's still a couple of degrees ahead of me, but my parents were impressed enough to want to come see the festivities. So the last time they were up here was 2 years ago, for a college graduation, and it was hella hot. Now they're returning, for a college graduation... and it's hella hot. That's almost enough to put me off of my thoughts of grad school.
Speaking of grad school, that won't be starting any time soon. If at all. Like about 90% of the applicants, I was not accepted to the writing program I applied to. No idea why not, they don't explain their decisions, but since I never seriously expected to be accepted, I wasn't surprised. I was disappointed, but not terribly, and one benefit of them taking so long to notify me is that I've largely forgotten why I wanted to go. When I applied I was just finished with my 18 month return to college, and thought more of it, in a school that was actually challenging, would be fun. I'd improve my writing craft, I'd make connections in the publishing industry, I'd gain education in areas I'm interested in, and I might even meet some intelligent young women who shared my interest in the written word.
I still think that would be kind of cool, but is it worth delaying the start of my real career another two years? At $22k a year? Not so sure. I could, in theory, manage the graduate writing program course load while also working on my novels and outside writing at the same time, but in reality I think it would lead to brain burn out. There's only so much time I can spend reading, writing, and writing about what I'm reading without needing to spend some time and some brain cycles on non-literary pursuits. I could write novels at night while attending business or law school (I'd probably
need to to clear my head of the technical stuff), but I'm not sure the streams wouldn't get hopelessly crossed and snarled if I were trying that while working my way through a "2 novels a week" writing program.
So sure, working on and publishing fantasy novels while doing a writing grad program focused on non-fiction, great books, classics, the publishing industry, etc, is possible, but likely? I've got some time to think it over now, at least, and I'm planning to spend this summer getting really serious about editing my fantasy novel and contacting literary agents while I start working on the sequel. Come the fall, depending on how that's going, I'll decide if I'm still interested in graduate writing programs.
The deadline for applying to most schools is around January 1st. Since I didn't think seriously about grad writing programs until Xmas, I missed the cutoff for several programs that sounded good. If they still appeal to me in 6 months I might try my luck again, but by applying to several this time, instead of just one very selective one in my immediate vicinity. Perhaps I'll have something more impressive to put on my resume by then?
(Though honestly, I have no idea if published mainstream fiction is a good thing on a grad writing program resume. The prestigious grad school writing programs have a reputation as being fiercely and defiantly artsy-fartsy, which is why I never really thought I had a chance. My stated goal was to write high quality work, but high quality commercial fantasy/horror novels -- not nuanced poetry that will never be read by more than fifty people, a dozen of whom might actually understand it. Poetry is a noble goal, but it's not my goal, since 1) I don't get it, and 2) I'd like to do this for a living.)
Labels: college, weather, writing
Friday, May 09, 2008
Tidbits from a lost weekend...
I came down with a sore throat on Friday. A bit of a dry cough, but mostly a tickling sort of sensation I couldn't seem to scratch. (Thoughts of a bottle brush entered my head, it was so itchy.) In seeming response to this, my nose started dripping down the back of my throat, so I constantly felt like I had to clear it, to no avail. I slept uncomfortably all Friday night; felt like I was drowning, and when I woke up Saturday I had to admit I was actually sick. Hadn't been sick for some time; not since I moved into this apt early last year, at least, but there it was.
Sunday I felt worse, dry cough, head all stuffy, and no energy. Constant napping all weekend, and it was odd to be just so happy to lie in bed. Usually I'm very restless when lying down, and if I'm not asleep, or reading, or making out, I can't remain there. I gotta get up and do something. Yet this weekend, just lying there and doing nothing more than petting the Jinxers was the best thing ever. Jinx certainly agreed; she's happiest when I'm in bed, since she loves to lie there, usually using one of my legs or hips for a backrest. She almost never sleeps in the bed otherwise, but if I'm in there, she's beside me before I know it. Pity that trick doesn't work as well on the IG.
As a result of my illness, Jinx had about the best weekend of her life, since I was in bed for most of it, and was still dragging and napping a lot on Monday. Tuesday I felt a bit better, but still had a cough that felt like a fish bone in my throat, and it wasn't until Wednesday that I felt back to normal. In fact, I had that post-sickness burst of energy and felt great. The best feelings in life are not so much about how good you feel then; they're more about how you were previously. It's easy to feel great after you've been laid low, since you notice the change, even if you just went from "awful" to "non-suicidal." To take your normal state up enough that you really notice it, you generally need a lottery win or a beautiful new boy/girlfriend in your bed, but to feel great after a cold it takes nothing more than the surcease of your hacking. Keep that eventual silver lining in mind next time you're on death's door.
As a result of feeling good (better) and eating too much (I hadn't had much of an appetite since Friday), I had a ton of energy and stayed awake all day Thursday, and then all night too. When I finally got to bed early Thursday morning, I'd been up for nearly a full day, when sleep descended upon me, it wasn't fooling around. I woke up after 6 hours, peed and drank some water, and laid back down to get a bit more sleep. Next thing I knew it was after 5 hours later, I spent a minute in confused, closed-eye calculations, trying to add up the hours and figure out if I'd really slept for 11 straight hours.
Far as I can tell, I did. I've not felt all that rested today despite that head start, but I am not feeling sick, so I guess that was the price I had to pay. It was a bit inconvenient for my work schedule, since last week I was behind on the hours I'm indebted to put in, and planned to catch up on the weekend. Then I got sick and wasn't up to working, so I entered this week about 10 hours in the hole, and got very little done Mon-Wed, what with my busy schedule of coughing, blowing my nose, napping, and informing the purring apostrophe on my bed how like shit I felt. I'd planned to get several hours in Thursday afternoon, reward myself (for working and for remaining alive) with a bike ride, and then getting another 6-8 hours in Thursday evening.
Instead I slept all day, had to run errands since I'd not been shopping in a week, and got distracted catching up on surfing and email when I got home. My reward for that was a nice hour-long chat with the IG, and then dinner, and first thing I knew it was (technically) Friday, and I hadn't done a damn bit of work all day. A state of affairs I quickly set to righting by typing out a typically-overlong and pointless blog post.
In other news, I saw this ad today on one of those ubiquitous funny video sites, and found it funnier than the actual videos I was wasting my life by watching. It's one of those "get laid tonight" ads that are just fronts for porn sites. They have a bunch of photos of hot young girls they found somewhere, random names and ages get applied to them, and by coupling that with a simple ap that customizes them to your area by tracing your IP# to find your location, it's almost like a one click singles site. Except that by clicking them you'll never, ever, meet any of the girls pictured, and greatly lower your odds of meeting any girls at all.
I didn't click it, but I did laugh at the one photo appearing twice, with different ages. You'd think they would put something into their random image/name/age generator to prevent duplicate photos. I doubt anyone actually believes those girls are those ages and available through the service running the ads, but it's a lot easier to pretend if you don't need to believe your date for the evening was cloned. Twice. Or perhaps more times than that, at bi-yearly intervals.
I've long lamented my inability to check off very many literary classics on those "100 books you must read" lists, but rather than simply ignoring the pangs of guilt, I've decided to do something about it. That's what libraries are for, after all. In preparation for this long term wrong reading rectification project, I've been looking at various top 100 classics/modern book lists, and assembling an essential list of books from them. It's all weighty stuff, Brothers Karamazov, War and Piece, In the Name of the Rose, Ulysses, etc. I'll write reviews as I go, so you can either wish me luck or delete this bookmark now, depending on your taste for such literature.
One such list I found worthy of comment was on the Random House site. Their
top 100 novels seem a fairly representative selection, though I'd assume they only list ones they publish in their Classics line. Perhaps some authors or titles are exclusively affiliated with other publishers, and are thusly, unjustly, ignored? It matters little, since there are plenty of other lists to compare and contrast with, and I haven't even looked over the RH one that closely.
What I found interesting there was not their official list, but the one compiled from reader votes. It's an odd selection, with quality classics here and there, but the top of the list dominated by trash by Ann Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. Those two have 7 out of the top 10, and I feel fairly confident in saying you will never find a book by either of them in any top 100 list of books ranked by anyone other than acolytes of the religion-esque ideologies those authors created and promulgated.
The very top of the list of the readers' choices for
100 Best Non-Fiction is similarly blighted, and by the same two "authors." In fact, the top of the non-fiction list is pretty revealing of the mindset of the people who voted. It's not a healthy one either, since their book choices reveal them as gun-nut, anarchist, survivalist, libertarian sorts. Makes me wonder how
The Turner Diaries didn't make the best 100 novels, and if there's an overlap between the non-fiction voters and Scientologists?
It's also odd how the Hubbard and Rand books are only in the top 10, or not at all. Hubbard wrote dozens of trashy sci-fi novels, but he's got #3, #9, and #10, and no others. If there had been some general swell of Scientologist voters, you'd expect a bunch of Hubbard's books to be scattered all up and down the top 100. Instead it's just those 3, and no others, so the voting had to have been very targeted. Some site popular with the Xenuvians must have promoted vote flooding, and picked just 3 of the master's books to flog. They got the job done, though their efforts pale beside the work of the Randroids. Better keep leaping on those couches, Tommy boy.
Turning my attention back to the task at hand, I'm not sure how I'll present my classic reviews. I read a number of so-called literary classics during my recent, breakneck, degree-finishing dash through a university of higher learning, but I didn't take many English classes, and didn't have much time to reflect on the works I read, since I had so many other classes and so much else to read and write about. I didn't exactly read them for pleasure or completeness either; more like 150 pages of Plato here and an act of Shakespeare there, with a paper due on each Monday evening.
When I read some classic novels though, I'll be reading the whole books, and reviewing them... but by what criteria? It seems silly to review Faulker or Hemingway on the same point scale I've used for oh...
Christopher Piolini. And yet... books are books, and it's not fair to hold them to different standards, or to be too forgiving, just because something slow, boring, and overwritten is venerable? I also have some measure of pride in my judgments, and try to limit the idiotic comments in reviews to my abandoned Band Names section, where most of the mistakes are intentional. I'm happy to admit that I can not appreciate or tolerate Anne Rice's floridly cheesy prose and soap opera plots/characters, but will I be able to make the same admission after slogging through 500 pages of something taught in every Great Books seminar course in the Western World? I guess we'll find out.
I'll probably have to do some extra, critical reading along with the books. Classics of world literature aren't known for being easily-digested or discussed. The whole point is that such books are deep and weighty; that's why they've been studied for decades. Reviewing them based on one quick read is almost guaranteed to be a superficial exercise. Furthermore, the anointed classics haven't become classics because they're fun reads, or full of suspenseful twisting plots. Books become classics because they make brilliant societal analysis via metaphor, or express deeper truths about the human condition. That sort of thing is invaluable, and can be uplifting and enlightening, but it doesn't fit neatly into my starkly-delineating review categories.
So yeah, reviewing them will be a challenge. I'm almost more eager to write the reviews than I am to read the books, now.
Labels: medical, misc, writing
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Book Review: The Damnation Game
I'm doing a bit more fiction reading of late; trying to get back into the mood and mindset of that form after the many months of non-fiction and essays and articles and reviews and all that came with finishing my degree and comes with blogging, reading about news and politics, building computer game websites, etc. I know I can do fiction and non-fiction at the same time, I've done so many times in the past, but I've been away from fiction and creative writing for a while, and I need to kick start my muse a bit to get into that sort of thought process.
Writing where you can (and must) make stuff up, where your aim may not be clear and cogent prose, where you may want to be artistic, by license or not -- that's a shooting a different potted black kettle of another colored fish. Metaphorically speaking.
In addition to being out or practice at fiction, I've gone years without reading or thinking much about horror, and since I find a level of visceral frisson and intensity in that genre that's seldom found in mainstream fiction, or even in most fantasy, I'm going to get back into it by reading some classics in the genre. I'll probably review them as I go, since writing helps me think about an analyze the work, but not to the point that I'll lose the creative inspiration I'm reading it to acquire. Also, my reviews section is sadly lacking in coverage of the books and authors that have most influenced and pleased me. I've reviewed tons of crap I've read or watched over the past few years, but have never, or seldom, looped back to discourse on some of the more seminal works I consumed again and again during my formative years.
This first one isn't quite a classic, but it's a book I read several times during the late 80s and early 90s when I was a committed horror fiction fan, and today it's an interesting book to analyze in terms of what came before it, and what it led to. The author is Clive Barker, and the book is his first novel,
The Damnation Game. I've mentioned Barker a few times previously, but never in much detail. I'll get to more of
my thoughts on his work in this review and others to come, but first, the scores:
The Damnation Game, by Clive Barker, 1985.
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 9/7
Characters: 9
Horror: 8
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 7
These scores are my current opinion, with the full benefit of hindsight and deliberation. My overall score is in terms of the whole horror genre; not in terms of Clive Barker's novels, or else it would be more like a 4. I don't know what I would have given it in 1986 when I first read it, but it certainly would have been less than a 7. Back then, I found the plot slow and not very exciting, the characters interesting but not very involving, and the whole story far less visceral and exciting than the better stories from the Books of Blood. This novel also pales in comparison to the next half dozen novels Barker wrote, two of which are nearly direct descendants of this novel. I'll discuss those books, and how this book led to them, in a bit. But first...
I hesitate to even mention the plot, since it's not what concerns me about this book, nor where the lasting value lies, nor where the analysis should be targeted. But just to momentarily pretend like I'm a real book reviewer, here goes. I'd copy from Wikipedia, but
the summary there hardly goes deeper than the blurb on the jacket, and the
Amazon.com editorial review is nearly as short, and has some inaccuracies. So:
The book is set in modern day London (circa 1985, when it was written), and while there are four or five main characters, and several important supporting players, the central protagonist (perhaps unjustly) is Martin Strauss. He's in prison when the book opens, and has been for six years, though he's nearing the end of his term. He's 30 years old and wound up in prison after getting deeply into gambling debt and taking part in a failed and unsuccessful robbery to try and pay off those debts. Marty's drawn down deeply into himself in prison, no longer thinking about hope or freedom, but that shell is cracked by the intrusion of Bill Toy, the confidant and bodyguard for Joseph Whitehead, a business mogul. Whitehead is looking to hire a new bodyguard, and has Toy searching the prisons for a likely candidate, figuring a man who owes him his early release, and who will be sent back to prison if he proves unsatisfactory, will work harder and show more loyalty than mere money can buy.
Marty is chosen for the task, and spends a few pleasant months on Whitehead's private estate, getting back into shape and adjusting to his limited freedom. He only gradually comes to know Whitehead and his even more reclusive, heroin-addicted 20 y/o daughter, and also gradually begins to realize that Whitehead fears something more than physical harm, from any common human attackers.
He's got cause to, since as the reader learns through the multiple POV narration, Whitehead's old friend/enemy Mamoulian is hunting him, to repay past injustices. Whitehead and Mamoulian met in the anarchic months after WW2, when Europe was in chaos and Whitehead the thief and gambler sought out Mamoulian, the legendary, magical, and undefeatable card player, in the festering ruins of bombed out Prague. Mamoulian has powers, hypnotic and mind controlling, and can work magic a well, weaving overpowering telepathic illusions, and even raising and compelling the dead. He and Whitehead became friends and Whitehead used what he learned of Mamoulian's powers build a vast empire, an effort he largely completed after a violent break with Mamoulian, some twenty years before the novel's time.
The bulk of
The Damnation Game details Whitehead's fear of his old friend, Mamoulian's efforts towards and plans for revenge, and Marty's struggle to protect his savior and Whitehead's physically frail but psychically-strong junkie daughter. There are a few twists and turns in the plot, but it's not a thriller or a straight out horror story. Barker doesn't write those, at least not very often. His novels and worlds are always far more layered and nuanced and subtle, and The Damnation Game is a good example of this, though in a very early, rough, unpolished way.
The novel really isn't about the plot; if it were I'd find no reason to reread it, or write about it. The take away value here comes from the characters and the themes and the level of intelligence and maturity conveyed by the writing. Barker's imagination is justly famed, largely in a pop culture, movie-friendly, "Pinhead the Cenobite" way, but I think his greatest strength is as a writer. His ability to work words and describe things blends perfectly with the maturity of his fictional worldview and the dynamic characters he crafts. This novel is far from his masterpiece, but it's a good start in the novel form.
LineageLooking retrospectively, there's a direct line between the themes, plot events, and especially the type of characters in this book,
Weaveworld (1987), and
Imajica (1991). Barker did not write those novels back to back, they are not set in the same "world," nor do they feature any of the same characters. Nevertheless, there's a clear progression through these books, with the same plot elements and character types, but growing larger, more complicated, and more inventive in each. I don't think Barker's done anything near the quality of Imajica since then, and I think that's the best novel I've ever read, in any genre.
Just going by dimensions,
The Damnation Game is about 430 pages,
Weaveworld is around 700, and
Imajica is upwards of 1000, depending on the edition. It's commonly sold in two volumes these days, not something you often see for a single, stand-alone novel not featuring filthy hobbitses.
The Damnation Game is a bit soggy too, in places. It could easily be cut down under 350 pages without losing anything essential, an editing option I would not advise for
Weaveworld or
Imajica, since it would do them grave harm.
So,
Weaveworld featured much bigger ideas, bigger plots, more characters, more substance, and
Imajica continued that progression, easily doubling the size of
The Damnation Game, while vastly expanding upon it in scope and gravitas of subject. And in books, as in life, size does matter. What are these themes and concepts that were so expanded and improved through this non-trilogy? Familiar themes to those of you who have read a fair amount of Barker, and themes difficult to succinctly explain to those of you who have not (yet).
In these books and in most everything Barker has written, there's a sense of a magical, mystical, demon-infested world within, or beneath, our world. Most people have no inkling of it, but here amidst us are demons and humans possessed of rare magical powers. No one is ever a simple comic book character, though. Barker's characters are invariably possessed of strong personalities and drives, and usually devoted to some great goal. One reason Barker's never sold as well as King and others in the genre, despite being clearly the best writer of the bunch, is that he doesn't do easy, crowd-pleasing, black and white plots or characters. There aren't good guys or bad guys, or clear struggles where the readers is sure to root for one side. In most of Barker's books the good guys have some bad traits, but most interestingly (and influentially to me) are the bad guys, who are never just "bad." They're often evil, or destructive, but for perfectly valid reasons. And while they usually appear to be horrible demons when initially introduced, as the novels progress they are humanized, and often revealed to be flawed, vulnerable, or entirely justified in their actions.
Mamoulian certainly is in
The Damnation Game, and so are his various minions. Perhaps the most memorable character in the book is Breer, the razor-eater. Breer is a corpulent, psychopathic pedophile, who swallows razors, engages in self-mutilation, and is fond of murdering young children, then posing them like living dolls in carefully-arranged scenarios. He also tends to lovingly butcher them, slicing the tender meat of their bodies into a paper-thin delicacy which he reverently offers to others like the precious gift it is. Perfectly horrible, of course, but Breer is actually a sympathetic character in the book. Filled with self-loathing, disgusted by what he does, desperate for a purpose or goal in life, and always just wanting to be loved. Whitehead's daughter earns his undying devotion upon their first meeting, when she doesn't recoil in horror at the sight of his grotesque, blood-splattered form. Ultimately, Breer becomes a sort of good guy, when he turns against Mamoulian after being betrayed and by the magician. Oh, and did I mention that Breer commits suicide shortly before Mamoulian returns for him at the start of the book, and spends the entire novel slowly rotting and being consumed by flies, while never quite realizing he's already dead? Nice touch there, eh?
As for Mamoulian, he first seems to be a monster, but as we get to know more about him, from his pathetic origin to his empty existence to his desire to simply lie down and die, he becomes one of the most interesting characters in the book. He's never quite sympathetic, but he's clearly a better man than Whitehead, and more honest too. Both work malign deeds and destroy the lives of others, but Mamoulian has the courtesy to do it one on one, face to face, in a very personal fashion. He only destroys what and who he must. Whitehead has less blood on his hands, but through his ruthless business ambitions he has ruined the lives of countless people, both personally and professionally. Mamoulian is the more honest man as well; he doesn't resort to trickery or deception to obtain his ends, at least not very often, unlike the scheming, manipulating, stoop-to-anything Whitehead.
Honestly, neither character is a tenth as interesting as the leads in
Weaveworld,
Imajica, or various other later works by Barker, but the basic character templates; the depth and dynamic nature of them, are repeated and reused through Barker's work. The only other author I've read (besides myself, on a thus far limited nature) who does this sort of work with characters is George R. R. Martin in his ongoing
Song of Ice and Fire series. And that's one of the things I like best about Martin's work, that characters who initially seem like pure villains are eventually revealed to be very human and, (like everyone you meet in real life), the heroes of their own story. Sometimes even of the book's story. It's a clear mark of bad fiction (which is to say, most fiction) when the "bad guys" are simply that. Bad, evil, uncomplicated and one-dimensional. If the enemies in a book or film exist merely to serve as hurdles for the good guys on their victory lap, it's generally a sign of a lazy or uninspired author.
It's possible to have a compelling villain who is just bad, bad, bad, but far more often the most entertaining bad guys are multi-dimensional, even to the point of becoming anti-heroes. Hannibal Lecter, for instance. Even someone like Darth Vader, despite being a principle in the cartoonishly childish
Star Wars saga, is eventually revealed to be layered and complicated, and that makes his actions, and the plot of
Return of the Jedi far more interesting than it would have been if he'd simply remained a horrible murderous villain in black plastic. Barker clearly had the idea for multi-layered bad guys and complicated world mythologies in place early on, since they show up in lots of his early short stories. They are nascent in
The Damnation Game, but fully emerge from their cocoon in his later works.
The good guys in Barker novels have more up their sleeves, too. Marty Strauss in
The Damnation Game isn't a great example of that, since Barker hadn't really come into his inventive prime yet. Marty is just your usual everyman protagonist, swept up in a world of magic and mystery far beyond his ability to comprehend or battle against. The fact that he's only the main character by default, and that he brings very little to the tale, is one of the main reasons I don't score this book higher. The main character in
Weaveworld starts out as an everyman, but soon gains a far more important role in things than merely a pawn in the buffeting winds of chaos, and the main character in
Imajica is an unimportant painter making a living off of forgeries and a parade of beautiful women, who grows to hold almost god-like status as that fantastically complicated book unfolds.
Incidentally, the depth of Barker's characterization is clearly demonstrated in
The Damnation Game by the fact that a good dozen disposable characters are given full 3D profiles, with strengths, weaknesses, ambiguities, and ambitions having nothing to do with those of the main storyline, even if they're only "on screen" for a few minutes. The first and most obvious example is the warden of the prison Marty's in when the book opens. He has two short scenes, but in them he's portrayed as a hard man who is rapidly falling apart after the untimely death of his wife. There's no real reason to give the warden a personality, or to have him be more than a man in a suit during Marty's interview with Whitehead's agent. But the fact that he's a memorable character, despite his irrelevance to the larger novel, adds to the realism and detail of the world. Numerous other such characters are found in
The Damnation Game, from Whitehead's chauffeur, to Marty's cellmate, to a fruit merchant, to Marty's ex-wife's new lover, etc. All seem fully-formed and real, and could easily be the stars of their own stories; that much is clear even if they only appear on half a dozen pages.
For all the great things Barker does, and did even in the early effort that is
The Damnation Game, his weaknesses are displayed as well. I've heard from other horror fans that Barker's work never really involves them. They enjoy his writing talent, and some elements of his work, but on the whole it doesn't engaging them. Malaya always said she found Barker's writing "too cold." Technically brilliant, but to her they were books to read almost as an intellectual exercise, rather than great stories to lose herself in.
That never occurred to me in my teens when I was first devouring his work and horror fiction in general, but reading it now I can see the point. I didn't quite feel that way about Barker's more recent novels, even ones like
Galilee that I disliked, but I get enough enjoyment from the craftsmanship and writing quality and overall excellence that the fact that some of the books are entirely populated by unlikable, largely emotionless characters, engaged in struggles the outcome of which I am indifferent to, doesn't weigh too heavily on me. (This is a further point to George R. R. Martin's credit; that he can do the dynamic characters, make his villains interesting and compelling, de-villainize them as the reader learns more about them, and still keep the overall story churning along.)
In that light,
The Damnation Game is a far better novel than it is a good read. I enjoyed reading it last week, but not in the same way I would have enjoyed a good early Stephen King story. I was pulled along through The Damnation Game since I was analyzing the style and form and approach Barker took, and making notes on how he structured the book. His skills as a novelist were profound, even in this early work, and the way he introduced characters, worked exposition into conversation and events, kept the story moving, relayed information to the reader through multiple POVs, occasional flashbacks, juggled multiple characters and storylines without abandoning any for so long they cooled in the reader's memory, etc, were all very well done.
If the book had a more interesting plot, had more sympathetic characters, more building conflict, was a page turner, bridged the personal struggles to larger societal themes (something Barker does very well in later works), etc, it would be a great novel. As it is it's a very well written book powered by a story that would have been unreadably dull and boring in the hands of a lesser writer. I remember
Weaveworld being somewhat better, and
Imajica being a masterpiece, and since I've got both books sitting out to work my way through in the weeks to come, I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Labels: book review, clive barker, horror, writing
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Memoir-ies
Another author has been busted for falsifying his/her memoir, and in this case it's a big one. Not that the author is a famous person, or has promoted their sob story on Oprah, but in the degree of falsification.
Dig this:
In Love and Consequences, a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
The problem is that none of it is true.
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published Love and Consequences, is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer's book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.
It's amazing to me that the author would try to perpetrate the fantasy to this level, and that the publisher never checked up on any of the details before sinking so much time and resources into the property. She had to know she'd get caught at some point since she was falsifying so many major details of her life (and presumably fictionalizing most of the stuff in the book too, but that stuff's harder to check than where she grew up, went to college, etc) but I guess she saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and so wanted the story to be true that she half-convinced herself it was.
The article includes shocked quotes from the editor who worked with her for more than three years, totally bought into her false bio, and now feels personally as well as professionally betrayed. At least the editor was getting paid for her time, though. Pity they didn't spend a few more bucks to hire a P.I. to see if the woman's story had even minimal basis in fact?
Also linked to in the same post on
Scalzi's blog was this article, about a woman who faked her holocaust memoir. She was in Brussels during that time, and her parents were killed by the Nazis when she was 4, but
she fictionalized things
just a bit in the book.
She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish.
Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
"This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving," Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press.
She got busted by people researching the story and finding that things weren't quite checking out, but she came clean before anyone could definitively prove she'd made it up. I'm almost surprised she did; she's in her seventies and could easily plead old age confusion and ill health now, and hope to die before anyone conclusively debunked her.
I mention her case for two reasons. One is in the article, where her former publisher, whom the author won a lawsuit for $22m over stolen book profits, is saying they shouldn't have to pay the judgment now. What's the logic there? Because she lied, it's okay that they robbed her?
The second point is funny, in a horrible sort of way. The news item is from AOL, and I dare you to read the comments. It reminds me of why Yahoo closed comments on their news articles; they were invariably a scum-covered sewer of racism, sexism, bigotry, hatred, and much, much more. These are the first 4 comments posted. Literally the first 4! I'm not even cherry-picking the worst, and there are over 1300 total now, so dog only knows what fresh hell you could find yourself knee deep in with a few click throughs:
What else is new. What about the 50 million other people who died who don't get hyped by Hollywood! She probably was on the Oprah book club with Oprah crying and...oh please...meanwhile the Palestinians are getting screwed.
There is no definite proof that millions of jews were killed. Some were killed YES, but not 6 million. It was a reason for the US to go there and steal all the gold. 80 % of the 500 trillion dollars worth of gold at Fort Knox is Nazi Gold. In addition to that the US stole all of Hitlers technologies. Hitler actually had Scientists create things like, Time Machines (it was called the bell) and other amazing inventions. Do your research, don't be a sheep and follow others. Look at things from different angles, and you will find the truth.
Jehovah's Witnesses denounced Hitler's treatment of all Germans and published information regarding the camps before anyone spoke up to condemn him. Public opinion did not intimidate them.
want to know the truth through a child's eyes? go to www.gildasattic.com/alexandra.html and see the link about a book called Patchwork Quilt of Memories
To recap: an asshole with an anti-Hollywood knee jerk reaction and a random digression into Middle Eastern politics, a holocaust-denying lunatic who thinks the first Indiana Jones movie was a documentary, some kook trying to promote the Jehovah's Witnesses with a lie that's entirely irrelevant, and some other weirdo plugging a website about an Austrian actress who's been dead for 40 years.
These are all registered AOL members. You know how everyone who actually knows how to use the Internet dropped AOL years ago for cable or DSL? Apparently all of the sane people went with them.
(I had to check. Page 2,
comments 11-20, bring forth raving 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Ron Paul supporters, raving anti-Semites, raving pro-Semites, raving racist anti-Obama kooks, and more. It's quite an achievement, assembling that much crazy in such short order, and it gets better if you realize what brought them together. This isn't an article about the Middle East, or a war, or politics. It's about an elderly author who fudged most of the details of her memoir. It's essentially only of interest to writers and people interested in the business and process of writing, but 1300 comments later... wow. This is the kind of thing people who aren't online full time think the Internet is composed of, and why it's taken so long for bloggers and other online writers to start being taken seriously by the MSM and entertainment industry.
Labels: plagiarism, the media, writing
Sunday, February 17, 2008
News of the Weird
I read the last few weeks of
News of the Weird tonight, and had a few favorites to quote.
Marjorie Kelley, 50, called 9-1-1 in Sarasota, Fla., in January after feeling chest pains, but she requested that no sirens or lights be used by the ambulance. When EMTs arrived using sirens and lights, Kelley reportedly jumped up and chased them down the street, wielding a rolling pin, according to WWSB-TV. [WWSB-TV (Sarasota), 1-4-08]
Serious Substance Abuse: Bill Long, a former member of the county council in Daytona Beach, Fla., was charged with DUI in December after he, allegedly speeding, hit another car. "When officers arrived at the scene," reported WKMG-TV (Orlando), "(Long) was found drinking ... suntan lotion." [WKMG-TV (Orlando), 12-11-07]
Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre makes News of the Weird periodically (the latest in May 2007) because the six Christian denominations that share its management become involved in petty but elaborate disputes. A similar problem arises at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics share space at the site thought to be the birthplace of Jesus, and in December, when some Orthodox faithful wandered into the Armenian section during Christmas season, officials of both faiths squared off and flailed at each other with brooms before being separated by Palestinian police. [BBC News, 12-27-07]
My favorite though, was the lead item from the most recent batch. Like all news from Japan/about Japanese culture it should be taken with a fistful of salt, but it made me laugh.
Five of the 10 best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally composed, and serialized, on cell phones, thumbed out by women who had never written novels, for readers who mostly had never before read one. The genre's dominating plotlines are affairs of the heart, and its characteristics, obviously, are simplicity of plot and character and brevity of expression (lest authors' sore thumbs and readers' tired eyes bring down the industry). Said one successful cell phone writer, for a January dispatch in The New York Times, her audience doesn't read works by "professional writers" because "their sentences are too difficult to understand." [New York Times, 1-20-08]
It's hard to say what the "books" might be like without reading them, and even then I'd be reading translations that might lose the spirit of the originals, but this does sound rather depressing. And I thought that Americans were getting bad about actually reading anything longer than the capsule descriptions of upcoming programing on their Tivo screens?
On the other hand, since the Japanese alphabet, even the simplified version I assume people use when cell phone texting, is made up of hanzi symbols, most of which represent whole words or concepts. So while a text message novel in English would be ridiculous; chopped up into 160 character blocks, it's possible that you can put quite a bit of meaning into a single txt in Japanese? It's also possible that Japan allows far more text per txt message; cell phone networks in Europe and especially Asia are years better/more advanced than what we've got to use here in the US.
Also, note that these were stories delivered in serialized txt messages, which people then bought in book form. The original txt stories probably got media coverage, people heard about it and wanted in, but they missed the start of the book, or missed some installments with network problems, or their cell provider wasn't eligible, or they just wanted a hard copy. People buy books that are comprised entirely of blog posts, or articles, or online comics. Hell, the best seller lists have been choked with Dilbert and Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes and other cartoon collections for decades, and no one thinks it's odd to buy a book that's 100% comprised of cartoons that most people already read when they were free in the paper or online.
Also, just because the stories were delivered serialized via txts, that doesn't mean they were written stream of consciousness, by authors tapping away for 60 seconds between stops on the subway. One could easily write up a short story in a word processing program, divide it up into short chunks, and then email those out to the cell phones of subscribers. Or just mail it to your own cell phone, and then send it from there.
All that aside, it's a clever concept. Why not delivery serialized fiction over cell phones? It's a valid business niche. Nothing like this exists in the US, as far as I know. There are some txt message games and contests and such, and fake dating/porn chat for $.99 a message, and special services like the ESPN phones will deliver sports info, but the commercial sale/delivery of txt messages is a market that's still largely untapped.
All that said, it is kind of depressing that half the 10 bestselling novels in Japan were composed in this fashion, and that one of their authors says it's because people are too illiterate to read real books. Still, it's possible that book sales in Japan are as driven by media hype as they are in the US, and that these new cell phone novels are getting a ton of media coverage, which leads people to buy them, which leads the media to talk about their popularity, which leads more people to buy them, and so on.
Labels: weird news, writing
Monday, February 11, 2008
Lovecraft and Fictional Inspiration
I spent a couple of hours reading fiction this evening, and it was almost a novel experience. Pun not really intended. I've read, and written, and discussed, and thought about, so much non-fiction the past few months that I've been having trouble getting into a fiction mindset. I've been reviewing and rewriting my fantasy novel for the past week, but doing so very mechanistically, without feeling any of the magic or fantasy or literary inspiration. That's an approach that works for The Evolution of Desire and other books I've got lying open, but it's not the best way to approach a fantasy novel. At least not for me.
I think that approach can work, and I'm sure it's what the authors-for-hire who churn out those video game novels in 3 months do. After all, they're on a deadline, it's not their fantasy world or their dream project, and they've got to approach it in a businesslike fashion. It's the approach editors take too, since it helps them to cut through the bullshit. But it's not an approach that best serves an author who is trying to create a convincing magical world, since I think you've got to be caught up in your own fantasy to write it convincingly.
There's a balance to strike, of course. Too lost in the world and the prose becomes turgid and purple, and the book too fanboy. But I've been having trouble getting into the theme of things and the flow of the world by approaching it too technically, so I'm trying to loosen up a bit. It's tricky though, since my main priority rewriting the first half of the book is to cut out at least 50% of the overlong length, while working in a good 50 pages of extra info to set up later events, more scenes from the POV of characters who become more important later on, etc. Which means I need to cut out more like 60% of the first half of the book, so I can add in 10%. And I've got to do that without making it feel like 300 pages of skimming summary, and while preserving the good scenes that make the book worth reading.
So, today I read a number of Lovecraft shorts, both for enjoyment and inspiration. I got a little of both, and then got on the computer and did 4 hours of relatively tedious website work, since um... money. But I did feel like my mind opened up a bit in an artistic way, and I spent most of the mindless website work thinking about the novel, and ways I could change around various scenes and characters. I really want to finish it so I can get to the sequel, as it happens.
I've long felt the sequel will be a lot more interesting to the reader (of both), since so much of the first book sets up the world state, and then the second book starts up some years later, when that world state has been radically shifted by events in the first book. I'm still not sure what'll happen in the third book, assuming I do like every other fantasy author and write a trilogy (that turns into 11 books?) I have a discrete plot line that starts in book one and then twists and turns into really cool stuff in book 2, but I see it largely concluding then; at least as concerns the principle characters. The state of the fantasy world will be evolving during book 2, and may prompt ideas for book 3. Besides, it's not like I kill off
all of the main characters in the conclusion of book 2. Readers will want to know what happens next to _________ and _________ and what _________ does next after she's forced to kill the only person she's ever loved.
Unteasing teasers aside, I read this Lovecraft short in the tub earlier, and noted it in the book to transcribe and blog later. But since every Lovecraft story is posted online, I can just
link and cut and paste.
Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
It's not a brilliant quote, and the story is just a fragment, only a couple of pages long, but it worked on my mind. It's the sort of thing I try to inspire myself with, anyway. Inspire to write better, and inspire to write at all, with an eye towards marketability. I'd like to escape the daily torture of the commonplace, you see...
Labels: lovecraft, writing
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Neologism of the Day
Word of the day. pornnui. It's a combination of porn and ennui, and refers to the state a person (generally a man) reaches when they've grown totally bored with porn, or one type of porn, or the concept of porn in general. A guy might say, "I've got to download something new; nothing but Asian handjob movies are giving me total pornnui."
I don't think I need to explain "porn" to anyone. "
Ennui" might be less in your head, but it's a very useful word, and a fun one to say too.
ennui: "ahn-wee" a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: The endless lecture produced an unbearable ennui.
So, my new word is pronounced "porn-wee" and sadly for its fortunes as a word anyone will actually adopt for use, it's far better said than read, since it looks awkward and consonant-heavy on the page. That's not necessarily a fatal flaw for a neologism, except that in this case, people write about porn far more than they speak about it. Seriously, when's the last time you had or imagined having a conversation with a remark like the one I listed above to show this new word in usage? Never? Exactly...
I thought of the word late last night, hours after reading somewhere online (blog comments, maybe? I don't remember.) some guy saying how tired he was of all the porn he had or had seen lately, or something like that. Ironically, I'd already turned off the computer, so I had to write it down on dead tree and then remember to Google it today to see who'd already thought of it. Much to my surprise,
no one has. Which is why I went to the trouble to type up this blog post. Well, the word exists, but not with this meaning. It's used on some
Thai language blogs, but apparently as a guy's name, or a company name; not in a way that has anything to do with boredom and pornography.
So it's my word, and I will cherish it always. Until I get bored with it.
Labels: writing
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Rearranged.
To follow up
yesterday's ramble... I ended up going to get a frozen pizza, baking it, and eating half while drinking two full glasses of semi-fine red wine. It wasn't great pizza, or shiraz, but they meshed nicely, and motivated me enough to turn away from the computer and put on a DVD for the first time in weeks. It was the first time my TV had been on since early October, in fact. I haven't bought a new DVD since 2006, more out of non-desire than any desire to budget or deny myself, so I just stuck in Bourne Identity 2, and enjoyed the first hour of that smart action thriller. At that point my viewing was temporarily interrupted by a phone call, and I answered it to speak to my mom.
She was calling to congratulate me on my email notifying her that I'd passed the math CLEP and was actually done with college and had successfully earned my degree. It was an interesting conversation, since we talked for about 5 minutes, and it all felt normal and typical to me, and yet she seemed ready to get off the phone. And at that point I realized that I was drunk, or at least pretty thoroughly-tipsy, and that it must be affecting my personality, since my mom never wants to end one of our phone calls that quickly into the affair.
I don't believe I'd ever (previously) talked to my mom before while drunk. That's not a real surprise since I've only been drunk about half a dozen times in my life, and never with my mom (a couple of times with dad on wine tastings, two or three times with Malaya when we were doing shots for fun or Scrabble success, and a few times alone, most of them within the last year of post-breakup aloneness and occasional loneliness and often school stress) around. But neither she nor I have much patience with drunks, especially not trying to talk to them, and since she'd asked me what I was up to, and I'd admitted to the pizza and vino, she wasn't trying to guess what was my major malfunction. She knew, and it was probably obvious, though I don't think my rambling verbal stories were any much different than they usually were. Still, if you can't get sloshed the day you clear the last hurdle between you and your degree, after a long and very work-filled semester, when can you? Though admittedly, there should be more warm beer and keg stands involved.
Today's been more of a usual day, though it began rather late since yesterday's non-sleep and math test study stress combined with warm covers, a cold room, and no weekend deadlines to let me sleep for almost 10 hours, or about 4 more than usual. I didn't regret it a bit, either. I did wander around aimlessly in the
morning afternoon, but some leftover pizza and caffeine got me on track, and I set to work cleaning and vacuuming and moving furniture. I'd grown tired of the arrangement of my apartment over the past year, and with school finished with and seven or eight months of non-academic work awaiting, I wanted to change things around. The hope is that my mental state will reflect the physical condition of my domicile, so I moved everything around. My desk went over to the side wall, turning 90 degrees in the process, a bookshelf switched walls, the TV moved to where my desk o used to be, and my Ikea futon/couch also turned 90 degrees, to face the TV across a much less yawning chasm than it previously spanned.
None of this means anything to anyone other than the half dozen or so readers who have actually seen my apartment, but the objective was to shake up my working environment, while also making the apt a bit more accessible to other people. So my desk no longer squats in the center of the room, the couch has open space in front of it and is near the open space kitchen/dining area, the TV is close enough to the couch that it could be used to comfortably watch a movie, (ideally a female someone I could put my arm around) etc. It's by no stretch of the imagination a "bachelor pad," but it was never intended to be. I do hope it's a bit more welcoming to some potential, largely-hypothetical female guest, and that it'll help me work more and be more focused on things I should be focused on. Slightly cryptic though that statement might be.
As of yet, it's neither of those things. In fact it's make me feel rather sideways. I suspect the floor in this cheap apartment is slightly concave, since I feel a bit like I'm falling downhill to my left. It's been 11 months, but I have vague recollections of feeling like I was falling to my right when I set up my desk and chair in their former position. Since my left now is towards the center of the room, which was formerly to my right, that's evidence of the floor sagging, or at least evidence that my delusions are consistently delusional. In the final analysis it doesn't matter if i feel crooked because the floor is, or because I'm delusional. In either event, I can take comfort in the fact that the same thing happened back in January, and I got used to it after a few days, thus have cause to hope I'll do the same now.
Even though I'm sideways.
One welcome benefit of all the rearranging was that I had to turn my bookcase 90 degrees as well, which rendered everything on it... backwards. It's one of those Ikea bookcases made up of multiple small square compartments, so there's not back on the back; in fact,it can be used as a sort of room divider if you so desire, turning the back into a second front. I'm using the second front now, but not the room divider since my apt is far too small for such activities. I had to turn all my books around once I moved the bookcase, but that was okay since it gave me an excuse to pull most of them out and rearrange and organize them.
I did so, packing the good stuff together by author and theme, stacking together all my leftover college books that the bookstore wouldn't buy back at even their insulting "pennies on the dollar" rates, (it's always fun to sell them a used book for $2.50, then walk over and see the same book on sale "used" for $14.50) and generally condensing my holdings to free up more cubbyholes for non-book storage in the 4x4 array. There's something soothing about sorting and arranging and putting disparate objects to rights. As evidenced by the popularity of various "collecting" hobbies, most of which require/allow their collectors to spend far more time arranging and sorting and fussing over their collected items than would be tolerated in any other circumstances outside of a mental ward.
I was surprised by one thing though; the sheer amount of books I own that I've never read. None of them were purchases, but Malaya and me haunted various library book giveaways during our time together, and at almost every such event I obtained half a dozen titles that I never got around to reading. Malaya sorted through all of our joint books when we split up and I moved out, and quite generously packed me off with every book of even slightly dubious provenance.
So now I have two full cubbyholes of books I've never read, most of them by authors I have, at best, a passing familiarity with. The prime example of this is are the four titles by Stephen Donaldson. Hardcovers of "Forbidden Knowledge" and "The Lost Story" and paperbacks of "Lord Fool's Bane" and "The One Tree." I don't recall picking any of those from the endless rows of cardboard boxes, and yet here they are. Worse yet, I've got no idea who the author is. His name sounded familiar, but I think I was confusing him with famously hawk-faced television journalist
Sam Donaldson. However, I don't believe that other S. Donaldson is an author, and if he is I wouldn't be moved to read his work. Even for free.
The author Donaldson is not a writer I'm familiar with (at least not yet) but looking at
his offerings on Amazon I see a fair number of fantasy-looking titles. None of the ones I have here look much like fantasy from their covers, but most likely I, or perhaps Malaya, had in the past seen his other titles with Merlin-looking dudes on the front, and the name bubbled up when we saw it in the stacks at the book giveaways.
Other noteworthy books include "Jian," by Eric Van Lustbader. I've never read anything by him, but he's got one of those names you never forget once you hear it. I'm not sure if it's a good name, or not, for an author? It's certainly memorable, and not just because we share a first name and middle initial, but it's outrageously fake, even if it's his given name. It's a better name for a male porn star than a novelist, though I guess we can be thankful it's not "Lustbladder" or worse, "Lustbatter," which would
really be porn-centric.
Another author I've long meant to try out is Terry Goodkind. He's the author of
The Sword of Truth, one of the most popular fantasy series going, and is blessed with a memorable last name, and at least in this book, the 1994 hardcover "Temple of the Winds," an absolute LOL gem of an author photo. He looks like a younger, pony-tailed version of General Zod, the bad guy in Superman II. Intentionally, I assume. You see the shot here, assuming it didn't make your eyes water so badly that you had to close your browser and give up on reading the rest of this potentially-neverending blog entry.
Goodkind's intense posing presents the best/worst example, but a very common theme in these library freebies, most of them published between from 1965-1985, are their awful author photos. It's not real surprising; no one becomes a novelist because they were so good looking that they grew weary of the constant demands of modeling agencies, and most people look pretty stupid in any photo more than 20, but less than 50, years old. But still. Dude! I think the key, demonstrated conversely by Senior Goodkind here, is to not try so hard. You wrote a book. No, it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not exactly an unheard of achievement. Just pose. Be Mr. Serious Writer Man if you can't bring yourself to smile or have bad teeth, but don't be a douche bag. And that goes double for authors of cheap pulpy fantasy/sci-fi/mystery, which sums up most of the books I looked through today. I shouldn't complain, though. The time capsules of clothing choices, hair styles, and silly poses were almost worth the price of the books by themselves. Which were um... free.
Labels: apartment, drinking, writing
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Book Review: Deryni Rising
Deryni Rising is the first book in Katherine Kurtz' long-running Chronicles of Deryni series. This book was published in 1970, and the series is still going, with over a dozen titles now in print. The most recent was published in 2004, though I've got no idea how well it, or any of them, have sold. They must be somewhat popular, given that the first book is still in print nearly 40 years after being published. Buy (or not) your copy here; it's got a
4 star rating on Amazon, but from only 24 reviews.
Kurtz has an official site, which Google told me was appropriately located at
Dernyni.net. So yeah, this is her big series. I clicked the link, and after I recovered from the eye-injury her home page inflicted upon my unsuspecting eyeballs (Deryni.net = best page design on Geocities, circa 1998), I browsed through the lifeless forums and wound up on her Deryni FAQ. It seems to be out of date, since the most recent Deryni novel listed on Amazon is
In the King's Service, from 2004. That one's not listed on Kurtz' FAQ, but one as recent as 2002 is, and there are more than a dozen titles in total, along with a few short story collections and other assorted tie-ins. Including one that looks like it's half fan fiction, half Kurtz' original. Interesting concept.
So she's chugging along, and good for her. I'm not too down on any author who can earn a living with their words. It's certainly more than I've done thus far, and no, another blog entry/book review choking full of snarky criticism isn't real likely to change that. To the scores!
Deryni Rising, 1970, by Katherine Kurtz
Plot: 3
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 4/6
Characters: 4
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 4
I don't know how fair it is to judge Kurtz and her whole series just from the first book; after all, even Shanarra improved greatly after book one, but unless/until I read another Deryni book this one is all I've got to go on. And it wasn't very good. It wasn't horrible, and I've read worse, but it's nothing special. It's not an adult novel, and must have been marketed in what they used to call the "Young Adult" category. That's not because it stars children, though the main character is a young prince, but because it's simple and formulaic. Bad guys are entirely bad, good guys are noble and honest and valorous, and who do you think triumphs in the end? Go on, take a wild guess...
More curious than the novel itself is the way I came to read it, since my copy of the book has been in my possession longer than some of you have been alive. The book has a used bookstore stamp inside, proclaiming that it came from Larry's Discount Books in Arlington, Texas. Arlington is a glorified suburb of Dallas, Texas, and home to the new Dallas Cowboys stadium. It's also where I lived with my dad during 6th and 7th grade, back in the 1980s. So yes, I'd been carrying this book around for over two decades, and had never gotten around to reading it until a few weeks ago.
Well, I hadn't actually been carrying it; it was in my bookshelf at my dad's house in San Diego, where I'd left it when I combined the books from my apartment with books I'd left at his and my mom's house, when I moved up north to live with Malaya in summer 2003. I was browsing that bookshelf this summer while visiting the folks, saw this book, and two others in the Deryni series, remembered I'd had them forever without ever reading them, and stuck them into my suitcase on a whim. I read it on a similar whim, and it wasn't good, but it wasn't horrible.
I picked the book up all those years ago since other kids I knew in junior high were always reading it, and the Elfstones of Shannara books. I never got into either of them then, and since I read my first Shanarra novel a couple of years ago, it's fitting that I have now read one of the Deryni books too. Kurtz is better than Brooks, at least judging her first book against his first two, but neither of them are going on my recommend list.
The world of Deryni Rising is basically England, circa 1300, if the Druids could actually work magic. They're not called Druids in the book, nor is their land called England, but it's any generic middle ages kingdom, with a brave king, potential enemies on the borders, traitors in the court, and a powerful and corrupt clergy. The magic comes from the Deryni, a race who appear to be exactly like humans, but who possess magic that humans do not. They used to be part of the main kingdom, but there was a war and all of the Deryni moved away or went into hiding. They and magic in general are now thought to be evil, and the priests condemn it.
The book starts with the noble king on a hunt, most of which he spends thinking about his half-Deryni bestest friend and General who's off in some distant outpost. The king is promptly murdered by some sort of witch, and his 15 y/o son the prince is in command. His first act is to call home General half-mage. He arrives two weeks later, and the rest of the story takes place in about 12 hours, as the General does stuff to help the prince ready himself to become king, and to regain or somehow tap into some form of magic; the kind his human father had and used to fight off enemies while he ruled the kingdom.
The Queen is hysterically opposed to magic though, the priests hate it too (though they never say why, or mention Satan, in kind of a wimpy cop out on Kurtz' part), and almost the entire court hates and fears the half-mage General, simply because he's a Deryni. The fact that the beloved late king used magic constantly to save the kingdom isn't really discussed.
None of this is awful, but it's all very formulaic. The scheming traitor noble is one-dimensional, as are the disapproving priests. We're told right away that the prince must regain his father's magic to survive, but it's not made clear why, until coronation the next morning, when the witch who murdered the king marches into the royal hall with about fifty of her enemy soldiers, and demands to fight a magical duel, to the death, for the right to rule, against the young prince.
Why this is allowed is never explained. Why the city guards didn't stop them from entering, why the royal guards didn't fight them off, and why anyone expects the prince to have a chance against a super powerful sorceress, when he's never shown any kind of magical ability at all. The clergy vanish entirely from the book come the last 50 pages and the magical showdown, presumably because after Kurtz spent most of the short book portraying them as eager to arrest or execute anyone with any magical ability, there's no way to justify them allowing it to happen.
There's also no way to justify why the evil witch would be allowed to challenge for the throne. Can anyone just waltz in and throw down? Doesn't she have to be in the royal line of succession, hated/feared magic or not? The best part is after the prince miraculously regains his father's magical powers (which he does just in the nick of time, if you can believe it), and uses them to defeat the evil witch (yeah, I was surprised too), all of the witch's soldiers just sort of melt into the crowd while everyone else is applauding the former prince/new king's victory. Because you know, when a regicidal usurper challenges the new king to a magical death match, and brings fifty of her bodyguard, all of whom are sworn enemies of the kingdom with her, it's only natural to let them all go once you defeat her in combat. Including the ones who were attendants of the scheming, traitorous noble who just got defeated by the king's champion. No hard feelings, guys. And the priests are fine with you using magic too; it's only the prince and his best friend/protector who they object to casting fire serpents.
In addition to this book I possess book 3 in the series, and another book from later on. I might skim that one at some point to see if it's any better than this one was. I'll probably have to read it to say for sure though, since this book wasn't written poorly, and there weren't an abundance of LOL-bad moments (unlike
Brooks' Shanarra series). Fortunately, the Deryni stuff reads really fast. I got through all 280 pages of this book in around 90 minutes, and yeah, I was kind of skimming, but not really, since it's written on such a simple level and all the characters are so straightforward and unambiguous that I don't think I missed anything. There's not really anything to miss, other than kid's cartoon-level plot twisting.
Labels: book review, writing
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Werewolf Movies
A new werewolf movie opened this weekend in the US.
Skinwalkers, a low-budget, crappy one that was kept from the critics and universally-loathed by the few who did see it. (Only
17 reviews on RT, and only 1 positive.) I didn't see it and didn't want to, but I skimmed a couple of reviews and thought
this one summed things up pretty well.
No subset of the horror genre has created a higher percentage of dogs than the werewolf movie. Since The Wolf Man reached screens in 1941, it has become possible to count the number of good films about lycanthropy on the fingers of one hand. The problem with most werewolf movies isn't that they're derivative - that's pretty much a given when one considers the inherent limitations - but that they're badly written, badly acted, or just plain silly. Skinwalkers hits the trifecta: all three apply.
...
The impact of the PG-13 rating is evident everywhere. The bad guys inflict PG-13 torture on their victims then have PG-13 sex. There's PG-13 cursing and PG-13 gore. Everything is carefully sanitized so that teenage boys can see this movie without having to worry about adult supervision. Never mind that it's pretty much impossible to tell a werewolf story with anything less aggressive than an R. I don't claim that the rating is the reason why Skinwalkers fails, but it certainly doesn't help. Shots of horrific wolf attacks and an unobscured view of Malthe's body would at least have made the film seem less juvenile, if no more intelligent.
So it's poorly written, has bad actors, bad special effects, poor direction, and the back story/mythology isn't any good. Not much left, is there?
The tragic thing is that there's a perpetual audience appetite for horror movies, and monster movies, and worse, that almost all of them suck. Reading about
Skinwalkers, I was reminded of my initial reaction to
Underworld. That wasn't a good movie either, but it had the clever marketing angle of a hot chick in latex as the hero, and the (relatively) interesting world fiction of vampires warring against werewolves. And it made money.
Skinwalkers isn't like to do so, (opening weekend half a million is a disaster), but it cost nothing to make and they'll do decent business on rentals and DVDs, as all horror movies do, so I'm sure it'll be profitable, in a minor sort of way.
Skinwalkers looks like a B-movie that's about as good (bad) as anyone involved could have hoped.
Underworld, on the other hand, had a decent budget and some actual acting/directing talent, but it undermined itself with a horrible script in which every opportunity was missed and most things made no sense. I belabor those points in
my rather overlong review.
I concluded my
Underworld review by remarking that crap like this makes me want to write my own monster movies. I still plan to, but honestly, why do most action/horror movies suck so hard? What prevents the vast collection of theoretically-talented screen writers in Hollywood from putting together a decent 90 minutes of action? It wouldn't seem that difficult, but judging by the results on screen, it must be. Maybe it's interference from studio executives and bad directorial choices, but so often the errors in the film and script are glaringly evident to virtually everyone who sees the film. Some character is painfully stupid or annoying, there's no continuity in the action sequences, there's an excessive focus on some unimportant element that distracts from the main focus of the film, etc. (
Transformers hit that trifecta.) The problems seem correctable, but they so seldom are that I'm left puzzled.
Why can't movie studios even get the basic stuff right? They sometimes do on big budget films, or at least come close enough that viewers are willing to overlook the misses, but the medium and low budget action movies seem quite incompetent. Action fans aren't looking for a masterpiece. All we need are the basic elements of story; an interesting protagonist, tolerable sidekick, clearly-defined struggle, a few action sequences, maybe a love interest, and a big finale where the good guys triumph. How hard is that? Polish and shine are just details, and it obviously helps if the action sequences are exciting, the acting is good, the characters are believable and sympathetic, etc. Those help, but they're not required, so long as the film doesn't suck at the key elements.
I think a lot of it is about the writers (or else the sausage assembly line that mutilates their original scripts into what we see on the screen). Good writers don't write formulaic action movies. They want to be Tarentino-esque and reinvent film with time flow trickery, a dozen quirky characters, unconventional stories, original concepts, etc. All of which are great if they work, but most of the time they do not, which is why we end up with neither fish nor fowl pictures like
Domino and
Smokin' Aces, which are meant to appeal to action fans, but are too clever by half with artsy film making techniques and crazy writing, and end up appealing to basically no one. Or overly-intelligent action films like
Firefox which are loved, but only by the sliver of audience that knows about/is interested in them.
It makes you wonder what would happen if the talented writers had quotas to meet. Lots of old time movie critics lament the passing of the "studio system" where directors and actors had to do what the studios told them to do, and as a result they turned out far more quantity, that some think was also of a higher quality. What if we had that today? Instead of Tarentino (trying to) produce a masterpiece every 6 years, what if he had to turn out a movie every 12-14 months? He couldn't make films with as many inventive things as he does now, but if he were on a deadline he wouldn't have time to fool around with all the reinventions of cinema, and while his movies wouldn't be as different and unique, there would be 5x more of them. Apply the same situation to other good writers, like the interchangeably-named/talented JJ Whedon and Josh Abrahams. Take away the pet projects like
Serenity and make them punch up mainstream studio action films!
Looking at their body of work on IMDB I am reminded that one of them wrote Mission Impossible III, which I enjoyed, thus my point is proven. Of course they also wrote the sucktastic Armageddon and Aliens 4, and mostly work on TV shows I've never seen and have no interest in, and it occurs to me that writing a TV show is the ultimate expression of "doing mainstream work on a tight schedule," so I might have to rethink my solution.
Labels: movies, writing
Monday, July 30, 2007
Old writing, quality, and publishability.
This was in the news a couple of weeks ago, and I meant to blog about it then, but didn't get around to it. Better late than never though, so here's the deal. An aspiring author who hasn't had any luck getting his stuff published went and submitted some classic Jane Austen novel to publishers and agents,
all of whom rejected it, most with brusque form letters. The inference the clever, unpublished guy wants drawn is that those dumb publishers don't know brilliant literature when it smacks them in the face, and that they're too busy cranking out shlocky celebrity "biographies" and barrel-scraping, formulaic genre
novels about video games to recognize quality writing when they pull it from an unsolicited manila envelope.
Which may or may not be true, but it's kind of not the point. The point, as heretically related
by scifi author John Scalzi, (a successful novelist and blogger who's blog and business model I will write about at length in the immediate future) is that 19th century literature isn't marketable today unless it's by a famous 19th century author.
If I were an editor today, and Jane Austen had not previously existed, and someone submitted Pride and Prejudice as a mainstream novel, I'd probably reject it. Because it's the 21st goddamn century, that's why, and the style is all wrong to sell a whole bunch of them (even if it were pitched as a mainstream historical novel). In point of fact, I'd probably reject anything written in a 19th century manner, with the possible exception of Mark Twain's work; for my money he's probably the only 19th century author whose writing style doesn't make me feel like I'm slogging through a morass of commas and odd language structure. After Twain, it's a hard slog through to the 1920s, and then everything suddenly becomes far more tolerable.
A further point Scalzi makes, by quoting another blog on the subject, is that if you're working the slush pile at a publisher/agent, and you get a submission that you recognize as plagiarized from some classic piece of fiction, what are you more likely to do? Email the author a condemning rejection and run the risk that some lunatic who thinks he's the reincarnation of Nathaniel Hawthorne will become fixated on you? Or just rejection stamp it and hope the kook leaves now and never comes again? You're an overworked cog in a big business, desperately trying to assuage your conscience by balancing some degree of literay quality with the crap that's more marketable. You are not a college professor. You are not the plagiarism police. It's not your problem, and you do not have the time/energy to get involved.
On this topic, I'd had a big, 600-page hardcover collection of Edgar Allen Poe's writing sitting on my bookshelf for years. I bought it for $6 from the discount section at a Borders in 2003, and I kept meaning to start reading it, but never quite got around to it. Not until earlier this summer, when I vowed to consume it all, in reasonable daily chunks. It was easy to read in 20-40 page blocks since the collection is made almost entirely of short stories, essays, and poems. I got through about half the book before I bogged down and got too busy with other things to keep at it, but the half I read included all of Poe's famous stories, so I think I had a fair sample of his
oeuvre. Better than fair, since I read all his best stuff and didn't get to lots of his (probably justly) lesser known or unknown work.
How was it? I hate to say it, but on the whole, it sucks.
Poe lived from 1809-1849, and his writing is an artifact of the time. It's a morass of wandering sentence structure, armored by a semi-impenetrable thicket of verbosity, unconventional punctuation, unnecessarily-obscure multisyllabic spelling-bee killer words, and most of the prose is infected with a general wandering pointlessness. It's a slog to read the stories, even the famous ones, and though I went into the book with high hopes and eagerness, I was soon reduced to creeping through one or two rambling short stories a day, while constantly struggling to pull my attention back when it drifted away on each semi-endless page. It was with not a little relief that I put the collection down four or six weeks ago when more pressing matters demanded my reading time, and I have no idea when/intention to pick it up again.
It hurts me to not enjoy or even appreciate Poe, since I love Lovecraft, and his writing style is easily the equal of Poe's in terms of being difficult to crack. Despite that handicap, I've read everything Lovecraft wrote several times by now, and I am definitely not a detractor of excessive verbosity and archaic linguistic conventions. It's just that Poe brings very little else to the ballgame.
Lovecraft wrote in the early 1900s, and in an intentionally archaic style, but he had such visionary, genius subject matter that his mythos is still resonating today. Poe had a few cleverly-gruesome ideas, but they're never very well executed in the stories, there's no unifying concept or theme to his work, and it's all very small in scale. Individual weird things happen, but it's just some guy (or orangutan) doing unto some other guy, (or mother and daughter) and since every story is quite short there's never any emotional heft to anything that happens. Every story is brief, all the characters are completely static and largely devoid of unique traits, there are no human interactions (just scenarios/plot events), women and children are nonexistent, all the narrators/main characters have the same voice/personality, and even Poe's reputation for a healthy weirdness of imagination is misplaced. Most readers have heard of the stories starring investigator Arthur Gordon Pymm, short stories
The Cast of Amontillado,
The Pit and the Pendulum, and poem
The Raven, but really, that's about it for the good stuff, or the lurid stuff. The rest is often bizarre, but in an absurd, forgettable way. Poe wrote a lot of farcical, humorous shorts about things like con men pretending to have ridden hot air balloons to the moon. Poe was also deeply involved in the literary magazines of the day, so the collection has numerous shorts that are satire about magazine publishers and dueling literary journals. The stories are not bad, and sometimes even interesting, but the subject matter really couldn't be more disconnected from any modern reader's interests.
As best I can tell, Poe is famous largely for his short life and tragic death, for being one of the first to write stories that were kind of horror-esque, and for sort of pioneering the mystery/detective genre. He never wrote any novels or even novella-length tales, and it's weird that he gets credit for horror stories, since his aren't especially horrific, and countless, centuries-old folk/fairy tales have many more elements of horror and weird fiction than anything this side of Clive Barker.
I'm glad that Poe is still remembered and read, and I'm sure a lot of his work was ground-breaking and visionary and brilliant in 1830, but it's all pretty dated and often quite hard to get through these days, and would have no chance of being accepted for publication today. Which is, I suppose, the whole point/greater truth elucidated by the
perennial efforts of someone to expose publishers as modernistic-hacks.
Labels: edgar allen poe, publishing, writing
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Hellgate Novel #1
The first of three novels set in the Hellgate: London world has just been published, and there's a short excerpt on the Simon and Schuster site. It's by Mel Odom, a
very prolific writer who does his own original novels on top of his constant work adapting stories for TV shows, video games. I have not read the novel (Flagship didn't offer to send out promotional/review copies) but after reading the preview, I don't think I could have gotten through the whole book anyway. Mel's under contract to write all three books in this prequel-style trilogy, and I think they're all done, from what I heard talking to the Flagship guys earlier this year.
Are they any good? Um... well... Mr. Odom certainly writes quickly. A quote
from the excerpt. It looks like this is the opening of the book, or at least an early chapter in it.
Loud gunshots woke Simo Cross from a too-short slumber and threw him directly into the path of a killer hangover. He sat up in the tent, automatically reaching for the hunting rifle beside his sleeping bag. He tried to figure out where the gunshots had come from, but had to admit that he might have dreamed them.
Or hallucinated them. He groaned and cursed as he forced himself to his feet. You know better than to drink like that, you stupid git. Especially while you're out in the brush.
Bright sunlight lay in wait outside the tent and the mosquito netting. No one else was up and about. The three other tents comprising the group of vacationing tourists he'd brought out to view the flora and fauna of the Fynbos grasslands for the last two weeks hadn't stirred.
I know, who am I to snark when I've published exactly nothing, but honestly... WTF? When the main character's name is misspelled in the first sentence of your novel, that's not a real good sign. And how about the last sentence from my excerpt of the excerpt?
The three other tents comprising the group of vacationing tourists he'd brought out to view the flora and fauna of the Fynbos grasslands for the last two weeks hadn't stirred.
That almost leaves me speechless. Is it a dangling participle? A run-on? I can't even begin to dissect that grammatical atrocity. I guess when you're on deadline and churning out three or four novels a year, you move well past sweating the details, especially when they're written for the barely-literate
Left Behind and videogamer audience. If people can kind of get the gist of what you're describing, it's good enough. "Drop the red pencil, Professor Dorksalot!"
Seriously though, this sucks ass. It's dreadful. And that depresses me, since I know how much time and effort the Flagship guys put into perfecting the game, down to the smallest details. The game is great,
the cinematics are awesome, and most of the other ancillary products are quality. I've read the comics and enjoyed them, the
action figures they're just releasing were done by WETA and look awesome, etc. The game and the company making it deserve better than this rushed, derivative, lowest-bidder shite for
their novels. They should have hired me to do them! Of course I'd still be laboring over my rough draft of the first novel, trying to cut the length down by 300 pages while keeping every single word exactly perfect, but that's why I'm here entertaining an audience in the dozens, while Mel Odom's got fifty paperbacks in the fantasy/sci-fi section of your local bookstore.
Labels: Hellgate: London, writing
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Harry Potter History
Nice
article on AP news about the history of the Harry Potter phenomena.
True phenomena are never planned. Not "Star Trek," a series canceled after three seasons by NBC; or "Star Wars," rejected throughout Hollywood before taken on by 20th Century Fox, which didn't bother pushing for merchandising or sequel rights. The public knew better — the young people who screamed for the Beatles or watched "Star Wars" dozens of times or carried on for years about "Star Trek" after its cancellation.
In the beginning, "Harry Potter" simply needed a home. Several British publishers turned down Rowling, believing her manuscript too long and/or too slow, before the Bloomsbury Press signed her up in 1996, for $4,000 and a warning not to expect to get rich from writing children's books. An American publisher had bigger ideas: Scholastic editor Arthur A. Levine acquired U.S. rights for $105,000.
"I can vividly remember reading the manuscript and thinking, `This reminds me of Roald Dahl,' an author of such skill, an author with a unique ability to be funny and cutting and exciting at the same time," Levine says. "But I could not possibly have had the expectation we would be printing 12 million copies for one book (`Deathly Hallows'). That's beyond anyone's experience. I would have had to be literally insane."
They go through Rowling's history, how she was unemployed and writing in coffee shops, how the early books were considered great successes when they were selling tens of thousands of copies, how publishers congratulated her but warned her not to expect to get rich writing children's books, etc. I wonder what percent of aspiring (and already published, for that matter) writers around the world read this article and get a gleam of dream in their eye. I certainly do, even though I realize that anyone aspiring to be the "next Harry Potter" is insane, since it's quite probable that we will never again see a publishing phenomena of this magnitude.
Still, it's fun to pretend. The funny part is that a new author could literally be 1/1000th as popular as Rowling, and still be a great success. Perhaps even 1/10000th as popular? Quick math: 350,000,000 Harry Potters books in print. Knock off 4 zeros and that's 35,000 books in print. Okay, not a great success, but if you jump up to 1/1000th, 350,000 books, that's huge bestseller status. You can quite happily live on that, in a world where most authors dream of selling even 50,000 copies of anything.
It's certainly an argument for fantasy series, too. Everyone laments fantasy series that go on too long and get soggy in the middle, and spin in the sand like the Wheel of Time, but imagine if Rowling had written a one-off Harry Potter book? Or even just a trilogy, with each book rushing through 2 or 3 years of his school time? It would probably still have been popular, but nothing like it has been, with time for the story to develop, time for the audience to grow, time for the movies to become successful, etc.
Labels: harry potter, writing
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Writing advice for teens and other aspiring fools...
I've recently been reading a blog by John Scalzi, a writer I'd never previously heard of. He writes Sci-Fi and lots of articles and other non-fiction, and is apparently pretty successful. He's a good blogger too, and while I ended up reading him thanks to his posts about the new Creationism Museum and his offer to visit it if enough readers donated money to a separation of church and state charity, (
