Doggerel

A Little More Privacy, Please.

2011-11-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

I know, that's funny, coming from a public blog, but there it is. My writing life lately has been a mostly internal affair and, to be honest, I'm pretty happy with it. Hence, no posts since March. Used to be (way back then) I'd chime in on twitter or facebook to roust some eyeballs for this page, but it's just not terribly important to me lately. Lately I'm content to surf a couple of days a week, log the session in my journal, tinker around with a manuscript I've been tinkering with for the past year, and read a lot. I think it's a reaction to what seems to be the hyper-monetizing of every aspect of modern life. It's sickening to me, really, and I feel no need to get anyone's attention. In fact, it's a pretty magical feeling to create a really nice work of art (poem, story, drawing, whatever) and share it with just a few people, for their own private enjoyment. That's something you can't discount, much less put a price tag on.

Holy Mahabharata, Batman!

2011-03-27T10:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you finish a book, and the overriding feeling you get is of accomplishing a feat of endurance. Just so with the Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic of India. Now, the work in its entirety is eighteen volumes, so my one volume summary and translation is more like the Mahabharata Cliff's notes, but at 800 pages requiring over a month of dedicated reading, it was still quite a bit more substantial than a mere gloss. It was, to be frank, an effort to read it. Worth doing once, to be sure, but work nonetheless, and an effort I wouldn't have undertaken fifteen years ago, having in those days no tolerance for countless digressions and highly exaggerated and nearly interminable (even in summary) scenes of battlefield carnage.

In all honesty, it's an effort I probably wouldn't have undertaken now if not for another work: comic writer Grant Morrison's 18 Days, a retro-future (or more correctly, futuristic deep history) re-imagining of the eighteen day Bharata war, full of jaw-dropping illustrations by Mukesh Singh. 18 Days is, in a word, rad, and it's radness is such that it manages to infect the original with an apocalyptic relevance that makes it seem somehow less overblown and more accessible to the 21st century reader weaned on Science Fiction. If this seems trite, be assured that's not my intention. The Mahabharata is a great work, and certainly worth reading in summary with selected translations. The characters are astounding, particularly the incomparable man/god Krishna, and there are passages of incredible humanity and day to day relevance scattered like precious gems throughout. But it's not a casual read by any stretch of the imagination, and your mileage will vary with your patience.

An Irate Looks At Forty

2011-02-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Not quite a week ago I turned 40 and for the past several days I've been trying to figure out if it means anything. The only real conclusion I've come to is that if I haven't figured it out by the end of the year, I'm letting it slide. I've learned this much in 40 years - You can't know everything, you can't control most things, and you shouldn't have to finish anything that's wasting your time. Also: Platitudes come easier with age, but they still smell like bullshit.

Hell, I'm not sure I'm even a grownup yet, or what that means. Just look at my birthday gifts: A trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (a shared present with my son and my wife), a Wave caster-board (a two wheeled device that's ridiculously fun but mostly ridden by eight to twelve year-olds), and a copy of the Mahabharata (abridged at almost 900 pages). I can't make sense of any of these things in combination and I suspect I shouldn't try. Better just to let it slide and go surfing instead.

The Slim Margins Of Magnificence

2011-01-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't been writing much in this new year, but I have burned through four or five books in the past three weeks- a survey on popular crime, a book on presidential sex scandals, a biography of Muhammad Ali, and the biographical segment of a book on Leonardo da Vinci. On the surface they don't seem much related, and I suppose they're not, not really, but one thing that struck me after reading them is a sense of the temporal brevity of any one person's fame (or infamy, in the case of crime and scandal). That a book of two hundred to four hundred pages can contain the significant instances of a man's life (several men usually), hold him in essence like a specimen in a glass jar, is incredible, humbling, and terrifying, all in one big burrito.

It also says, to me at least, that even the best of us, leading the most eventful of lives, have spent an incredible majority of their time doing utterly mundane things. I suppose that could be depressing, knowing that we're all in thrall to the inescapable ordinariness of life, but it also means that any one of us on any given day is only ten minutes of determination and luck (good or bad) from transcendence. It means too that even the greatest in our midst are still ninety nine percent human being, godlike for the blink of an eye, but no more. Time runs away, my friends, even if you don't bother to chase it.

Reflections On A Recent Fan Letter

2010-12-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

If you want to be a successful (fiction) writer in this modern age, it is simply not enough to have a vibrant imagination and a talent with words. This is a truism. It has been repeated over and over, by the people who pay the bills (commercial publishers), by the people who serve the people who pay the bills (editors), and by the people who allegedly connect the writer to the people previously indicated (agents and Famous Friends of the Author). Even those people who pay their own bills will affirm that this is true, and any writer with an internet connection and a passing familiarity with this foolish business can clearly see it.

To this I say, So what?

In writing, there are greater truths (believe it or not) than those written in a publishing contract for a 5 to 50k copy print run, greater than Amazon sales rankings and long tail earnings, and much greater than the platform that many writers feel needlessly compelled to climb atop and do a silly market dance. I don't know what these truths are (Well, I know a few) but you do. So get them out of your head and into the world and share them, however you can. I swear, touching even one reader with the personal power of your hard work will make it all worthwhile.

I'm Sorry For Not Being Sorry

2010-11-26T14:30:00.000-08:00

This blog was going to begin with my love of Robert Graves and segue into Siegfried Sassoon, whose The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston I'm currently reading. Then I was going to mention an article in the Surfer's Journal regarding Felipe Pomar and a tsunami (!) and an excellent editorial by Ed Lin in The Believer that eviscerates the practice of putting human bodies on display for commercial entertainment. I would still encourage you to follow the links because they're well worth checking out, but, to be quite honest, my heart just isn't into producing a long post for its own sake. And that's all right, because as a doggedly amateur writer I am under no obligation to perform for anyone but myself. So enjoy the links and I'll be back whenever I have something I think is worth reading. And speaking of something worth reading, here's a link to a post from Levi Montgomery's excellent blog: The Write Rants that encapsulates perfectly the way I've been feeling lately. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a(nother) novella I need to be working on.

DIY Horrorshow: A Self-Pubbed Writer's Halloween Bestiary (abridged)

2010-10-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

Let's start our scary tour with:

ISBNs- I have some. I've even used them on three of my books. Still, they're ugly, unwieldy, and mostly unnecessary at my level of publishing. If this were a horror movie, my ISBNs would be named Renfield, or Igor (It's pronounced eye-gor. And one other thing- They're ISBNs, not ISBN numbers. International Standard Book Number numbers? Automatic Teller Machine machines? They're acronyms for Christ's sake; you're not supposed to add redundancies to them. It makes them go crazy and eat flies.)

Barcodes- Hey, do you think that guy in the jackass costume- No, not Kanye. The other guy, the one who referred to Kindle books as "crematoria lit"- do you think that guy realizes that his book and nearly every other carries the most widely accepted fascist tattoo in the history of modern civilization? After all, we gotta move that product. Arbeit macht frei, and all that. Oh, c'mon, lighten up. What's a horror list without Nazis?

The Em Dash- Seriously? Em dash? Why can't I just use hyphens? Ctrl what? I don't see it. Where? OK, this is getting creepy. No, I'm telling you it's not there. Wait, who turned out the lights? Hello? Oh crap, it's behind me, isn't it?-

Word Count- Just like being buried alive, without the mercy of suffocation.

Agents and Editors: Known best by the bloody limbs (occasionally a head), severed with sharp knives, that they leave littered on the ground. As in any entertaining horror movie almost everyone runs towards them, even when they should know better.

Money- The lure, like sex, fame, and rockstar status, that leads us back to Camp Crystal Lake every time. Like survival, it is largely illusory.

The Devil- If you write, and you don't know him (I'm looking at you, Nicholas Sparks), there will come at least one time that you wish you did.

A Platform- That place where you dangle from the noose, for the amusement of:

The Audience- That's you. I mean, what's the point of this whole little Danse Macabre without you? I hate you all.

Why I Skipped September: A Short Photo Essay

2010-10-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

This was the smallest day. 'Nuff said. Thanks to Nola Moosman for the photos. If they're lacking, it's entirely the fault of the rider, not the photographer.

The Writer's Toybox 4: Severian of the Guild, or, Yes I'm that big of a geek and, no, I won't make one for you

2010-08-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

As often happens when my creativity is running particularly high, it tends to spill over into strange places. There's been a lot of spillage lately, so much that a Playmobil Severian is little more than an afterthought, which, if you've read The Book of the New Sun, you'll understand is a bald-faced compliment to myself- so sue me, this is my blog. If you haven't read it then you're missing out on one of the three must-read doorstops of fantastic fiction, the other two being The Lord of the Rings and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books. As far as I'm concerned they're all three essential reading, and I don't even like the majority of science fiction and fantasy (It's true, I'm a firm believer in Sturgeon's Law). That said, this is a book nerd toy of epic magnitude, and a perfect companion for my- I mean my son's- Playmobil Elric and Conan.

A Message From The Anti-Vivisectionist Book Club

2010-07-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

Would you like to know the best way to ruin the aesthetic integrity of a book? It's pretty easy. Just pick your favorite literary obsession- The Lord of the Rings, Finnegan's Wake, The Trial, The Iliad, The New Testament, hell, even the Twilight series- then find a fan group (online or off) and start picking away at the narrative until there's nothing left but bone, break the bone and suck the marrow. Don't spend too much time thinking about the fact that the story (which you claim to love) was alive when you started gnawing away at its flesh.

Now I'm not saying that there's nothing to be found beneath the painted surface of an author's work, and I'm not denying that many writers welcome, even crave, a closer reading of the pages they took so much effort to craft. But a writer also understands (or ought to understand) that the act of creating a story for others often involves ruining much of its beauty within themselves. I can't imagine that any author who truly loves the work they've given life to would wish to see it pulled to pieces upon the altar of fandom, that "deplorable cultus" as Tolkien so aptly put it, and I can't see why some readers can't be satisfied with the pulse and rhythm of a story's heart, that they have to dig it out and eat it, too.

It Must Be In The Genes

2010-07-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

As a boy I never had much interest in my family history, partly (mostly) because my parents didn't express any interest in it, and partly because I just assumed there wasn't anything interesting to be found. But it turns out I was wrong.

It seems that my earliest knowable direct ancestor dates from the time of Henry VIII, from Suffolk, England, where he was a member of the minor gentry and where his house still stands. His grandson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe, et al., and a citizen (if not a resident) of London, was one of 205 investors in the third voyage of the East India Company. My first direct ancestor in America came over in 1669 and founded a church that I think is still standing. To my knowledge, none of my family fought in the Revolution, but several of them took part in the Civil War and, according to an excruciatingly vague anecdote, one was poisoned by his slaves. Yikes. A mixed bag, to be sure, but hardly boring. It amazes me to think that I'm one of these people.

And I know without a doubt that they're a part of me. See, sometime before 1665 members of my family began using a Coat of Arms: two greyhounds, standing on their hind legs and fighting, in various forms. The thing is, the family had never been granted a Right to Arms and therefore they weren't entitled to use a Coat of Arms. They just decided they wanted one and made one up without permission. My people, cutting around and generally ignoring the gatekeepers. I'm thinking very seriously about using that family emblem as the publishing icon for my future books.

June is a Bust

2010-06-22T13:56:00.001-07:00

. . . on the blog front. See you in July.

Woe Is Me, Woe Is You. Whoa, Now Wait Just a Cotton Pickin' Minute!

2010-05-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

Y'know, it's been a long while since I've indulged myself in a good old-fashioned mean spirited rant on this blog, and no one to my mind deserves to feel the brunt of one more than Garrison Keillor, a man who might be considered our generation's Mark Twain, if Mark Twain was a plodding, unfunny huckster intent on shucking a brand of faux Americana homespun cornpone horse manure - a nostalgia that's been so leached of vitality it doesn't even have the decency to stink. Seriously folks, if this man is lamenting the fall of the old publishing paradigm and the rise of 18 million writers with 14 readers each, then I say give me a baker's dozen and a sledgehammer and stand clear. God only knows this tired old industry could use the change.

But I suspect that none of this is really about change, good or bad. It's about money, something Garrison Keillor, Inc. alludes to not once but twice in his mercifully short and almost certainly well-compensated pap piece for the Baltimore Sun. Money. After all, biscuits ain't free, not even those bland, largely indigestible rocks stamped out by a certain copyrighted Midwestern purgatory.

To that I say this: Don't worry, Garrison Keillor, Inc., you're not going to starve. Not, that is, unless you chew at the same agonizing pace that you monologue.

Fools go, so do all, but fools keep going. . .

2010-05-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

And so do I. I'm not sure why. I promised myself that when my new novella was finished (It is done, and I'm quite pleased with it) I would take the rest of the year off from any serious new writing. That's a funny turn of phrase, take the rest of the year off. Like this is my job, writing. If it was I would starve; not for a lack of quality, only a dearth of paying readers. Water everywhere. . . But writing is not my job. It's an exhausting passion. Half a year away from everything but this blog, my surf journal, and a few odd bits of verse doesn't sound too bad at all.

There's just one problem: I've already started a new project, a relatively ambitious one, if ambition and hubris can lay claim to being cousins. Worse than that, I'm enjoying the work. The research, the planning, the small, imperfect passages I've already committed to paper and to memory. All of it. Never, Dear Reader, never trust in the promise of a writer. That's true in so many ways, isn't it?

A Personal History of the World

2010-04-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

I'm a writer. I write fiction. That is to say, I make stuff up and slap it onto a page. If it's good, and if I'm lucky, a few people will read it and some of them will come up to me, or call me, or drop me a line and say, "Hey, that stuff was pretty good. I like your style, kid." It happens sometimes.

It's nice to have an audience, wonderful really, but it isn't the main reason I write. See, I'm foolish enough to believe that I'm actually creating something besides "content". I call it my personal history of the world, an imaginative appendix to reality. Inside my head it's nothing but potential; a swirl of chaos, invention, and intent, but once it hits the page it's fixed. Solid. It exists, and the more people who read it the more imaginatively real it becomes.

Whoah.

It all sounds so serious, doesn't it? I suppose it could be, if this was someone else's show, but I'm the demiurge atop this particular sub-creation and in my world serious is trumped by strange. In my world, the Devil plays poker in a cheap motel room with a redneck prophet who just happens to have the bones of the baby Jesus in the trunk of his car. In my world, a dying Edgar Allan Poe is the focus of a bizarre pilgrimage, while in a distant time in faraway Japan, a heartless bandit is sheltered from his pursuers by a beautiful trio of foxes. It's a world of war, in which a young man is afflicted by the hideous ghost of his brother and troubled by the unhappy inheritance of a gentle heart. A world where the heroes of the Trojan War reenact their eternal drama with bullets and blood on dirty, crime-ridden streets.

My world is serious, it's silly, it's real and surreal. Sometimes it's poetic and many times it's vulgar. It's countless different things, but it's one world and it's mine. I'm its historian and I'm happy to share it with you. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Clockwork Betty

2010-04-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a tiny piece of fiction I whipped up and sent to Matchbook Story. Homeboy didn't want it, so I figured I'd put it up here. I also received a pretty funny rejection via email (It was serious, but I thought it was funny). Unfortunately, I deleted it. This version is longer than the one I sent (300 characters apparently includes spaces) and is a re-imagining of a longer short story I wrote a few years ago. Hope you enjoy it.

Clockwork Betty

Two cops found her wandering naked in an old industrial park, no I.D., a serial number stamped in crematory ink on the small of her wrist: BETAy2k10. They covered her in a blanket and gave her a pen, hoping she could write, but ones and zeros were all they got, and her lids snapping up and down like shutters over her liquid crystal eyes.

Writer, Be Stoked

2010-04-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

This is what stoked me out as a writer- an oil
painting of the main character, Watanabe
Kenjiro, from my book Ghost of Iga. It was
painted by my friend Jason Cheeseman-
Meyer, and if you want to stoke him out,
you'll go to his website and check out his
work.

If you're a surfer, then you know in your gut what being stoked is. You also know what an ephemeral experience it can be and how stubbornly it defies quantification. If you don't surf and you don't know, then I'll try and lay it on you: Stoke is an aggregate emotion consisting of a sense of mental connection and technical accomplishment, fused with unbridled joy and a certainty that what you've just done and what you may yet do are completely worthwhile, for the simple reason that you are doing it. There is no formula for stoke, unless it's You get what you give. If you don't meet it halfway, it'll ditch your ass in a hot second.

Believe me, I've surfed well in what some would call perfect conditions and had a miserable time. No stoke at all. And I've surfed knee-high slop with my friends and left the water beaming. I've also seen some really great surfers who sit in the lineup looking like they just drank the water out of a sewer pipe, and who nail every wave they want and never once smile. Of course, the reverse of all this is true as well. You get what you give.

So what does this have to do with writing? Everything. As writers, we all have a set of ideal conditions and a list of goals in our mind- money, fame, a sweet publishing deal, critical recognition, wide readership, whatever. Maybe they happen, maybe they don't. The few I listed are long shots for most writers- That's just how it is. However it turns out though, you should constantly seek a reason to be stoked. Otherwise, you should probably be doing something else.

A Writer's Reverie, or Why I Won't Quit My Day Job

2010-04-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

I don't really remember when it happened- It was quite some time ago- but there came a point in my writing life when I quit asking Why am I doing this? and started asking myself How am I going to keep doing this? The answer turned out to be Any damned way I can.

First off, let me just say that I hate manuscripts. They look like crap, they feel like crap, and the words trapped inside their barren pages hate them as much as I do. A story in manuscript form is like a bird in a chicken-wire cage: You should kill it and eat it or else set it free. I released mine into chapbooks and gave them to my friends.

Back then, fifteen years or so, it was just me, a sturdy little tank of a laptop computer, an inkjet printer and a bootlegged copy of Wordperfect. A ream of printer paper, a ream of cardstock, and a big-ass stapler. I was in love.

Things are different now.

For one thing, I'm a better writer than I was back then. Quite good actually, thank you very much. I haven't done a chapbook in a while either, though I've kept copies of most of the old ones, and I still have that big-ass stapler. Nowadays I have the internet. I upload files to create print on demand paperbacks. I create paperless PDF's that I've been giving away for free. I keep this blog and I find my way onto twitter and facebook when I can.

But the biggest difference? Back when I was making those chapbooks I used to think that it would be great to be picked up by a "real" commercial publisher. Now, I know that what I really wanted was to be able to play with their toys and dig in their sandbox. I've come to realize that I'm just not terribly interested in writing as a business. I'm not a merchant, I'm not a brand, and I'm not a commodity. And I'm still too in love with my own vision to have it any other way.

Light Always Changes by Levi Montgomery- a Review

2010-03-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's read Levi Montgomery's blog, The Write Rants, knows that he has strong opinions about doing things his own way, writing wise. He talks the talk, and talks it well, but does he deliver the goods? My answer is yes, yes indeed. Now, I don't completely understand why Levi doesn't like to label his work Young Adult fiction- I suspect he just doesn't like labels in general- but that doesn't change the fact that Light Always Changes is a fine young adult novel, one refreshingly free of teenage superkids and Beverly Hills High School antics. Light Always Changes is the story of a girl, Lydia, who is scarred not by the acid burn that crosses her face, but by a distorted concept of beauty and its fluid and subjective significance in human relationships. In the years since her accident, Lydia has transformed herself into a stereotype, and the circumstances that push her suddenly and sometimes painfully into becoming a whole human being are what give this novel it's heart and soul. Levi Montgomery has a feel for what makes young people tick, and while I as an adult didn't always agree with the moral choices his characters made, I never once found them false or contrived. This book is Doggerel approved, for quality of writing, independent spirit, and most important, solid entertainment value.

The Heart of the Amateur

2010-02-21T17:44:00.000-08:00

You can learn a lot about a society and its attitudes from the origins of certain words. Take villain, for example. In its original French and Latin it meant simply 'feudal serf' or 'farm hand'. Hmmm. . . working class=contemptible class, what a thoroughly barbaric analogy. It's nice to see we've moved past such prejudice in the 21st Century. Of course, it's always better to be rich, and being rich and famous is better still.

That will probably never happen if you're an amateur. Amateurs, by the modern definition, don't get paid for what they do. They haven't monetized (such an elegant word) their skill set, haven't declared themselves open for business (profess, the root of professional). Some, admittedly, can't get paid for what they do because it's nothing anyone would pay for, though the market has proven time and again that people will buy most anything given the right prodding, but there are others, and plenty of them, who don't even give money a thought. Painters. Photographers. Surfers (the only pastime I know where the majority of amateurs look on professionalism with a healthy dose of contempt). Basketball and Baseball players. Writers. They just do what they do, underneath, around, and through the gaps in the corporate structure supporting their professional counterparts, and if the whole damn thing came crashing to the ground they might sigh, might even be a little bit sad to see it go, but the painters would paint, photographers would look to capture fleeting moments of light, waves would be ridden, ballcourts and fields would still host fierce local rivalries, and writers would still struggle in futility to lay their strange visions onto the page. And why? The answer lies in the root of the word amateur: from the Latin amator, lover, from amare, to love. And if it is really true that the desire of money is the root of all evil, then the root of love can only be called the spark of the divine.

New Year's Miscellany

2010-01-26T16:55:00.000-08:00

Most years, at their end, seem to carry in their outline a theme, or at least a loosely discernible shape, but maybe that's just a narrative gloss we drape over top of our dwindling days to convince ourselves that we haven't wasted our time. Who knows? Last year most definitely had a theme for many people, myself included: Uncertainty. Of course, Uncertainty is just another way to say Reality, and it's probably not been a bad thing for us to become reacquainted with the fact that there are no guarantees from minute to minute, let alone day to day, month to month, or year to year. Still, it gets old when you're being bludgeoned with the same message five days a week and twice on weekends. As for 2010, it's too early to call a trend, and the only reason to try would be in the hope of proactively coaxing the year into a personally beneficial orbit. Nothing wrong with that, but since I believe very strongly in the jinx, I'm not gonna do it here in public. Instead, I'm going to do what human beings have generally done when other humans are around to listen (or read), in times of peace and plenty, in times of war and famine, whenever the big, important issues have become tiresome, or glaringly self-evident, or just plain overwhelming and unappealing:

I'm going to engage in small talk. Here goes.

About four days ago, I finished the first draft of a novella I've been working on, a work that I mentioned in this post, and in finishing it I discovered a new use for Print On Demand technology- creating manuscripts. I have two on the way, printed and bound, for the same cost or less than going to a copy shop or using my own printer. On top of that, the manuscript is now stored on the printer's server, where I can access it at any time. For people like me who like to play at being real writers (insert big sh*t eating grin) this abundance of inexpensive technology is the bee's meow. Art for its own sake has really come into its own, and I for one couldn't be happier.

Now, on to what I've been reading. Following my friend Kyle Hague's recommendations, I've recently finished three graphic novels, Garth Ennis' War Stories, volumes 1 and 2, and The Filth, by Grant Morrison. Up until now I've never really liked Garth Ennis. It seemed to me that any time he saw a chance to go over the top, he would indulge his worst impulses and go way over the top, and that always turned me off. But it turns out that what everyone says about him is true: He's the best writer of war fiction in comics today. War Stories is unbelievably good, as good as nearly anything you'll find on the page, be it prose or comic. Nothing in these stories rings false or contrived or over the top. They are masterful, and I have a newfound respect for Mr. Ennis.

As for The Filth, I'm really not sure what to say. It's going to take me at least two more readings before I decide whether I need to punch Kyle in the face or kiss him hard on the mouth. It's probable I should do both, but the order of operations (Punch, kiss, or kiss, punch?) eludes me. He's right about this though; the story Grant Morrison lays down in the pages of The Filth is untranslatable into any other medium. Absolutely. Untranslatable. Whether it works or not (my gut says it does but my brain says give me two more reads to be sure) it is without a doubt one of the most ambitious comics I've ever read.

So, here's a question. What's more satisfying than teenage vampire romance? Why, young wizards coming of age in an English boarding school, of course. But what's better than that? Really. Honestly. I'll tell you what's better- Forty-two junior high schoolers on an island killing the crap out of each other, that's what. Battle Royale, baby, six hundred pages (yes, six hundred!) of mayhem and carnage by writer Koushun Takami, that against all odds manages to have and to keep a heart and a soul. Battle Royale isn't really a teen book, it's more like a teen book's older angry brother, but I know a few YA lit fans who are thirty years old going on thirteen that could use the shock back into adulthood. This is a unique book and well worth the read.

I'll leave you now with what I'm reading at the moment. It may surprise, knowing how rabid a fan of Planet of the Apes I am, that I have never read the actual novel by Pierre Boulle. In another fifty pages or so, that gap will be bridged. The edition I have is a British one, published by Penguin and translated from the French several years before the movie was made. The English title is Monkey Planet, an illustration of just how flexible translation can be. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's lighter in some ways than the movie, but there are also many more touchpoints between the two than I expected. Below is a cover of the book, but not the edition I have, unfortunately.

And with that, I bid you good day.

Kickin' It Old School

2010-01-18T15:16:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a new year, and by popular consensus a new decade, and my family and I have appropriately turned over a new leaf. We've ditched the desert and returned to the promised land. For me that means one very, very, important thing.

Surf's up.

Does that sound trite? Well, if it does then there's nothing I can say that will change your mind, and I wouldn't want to waste my time trying. For me, however, riding waves is one of the three legs of a well balanced life, and my stool has been wobbling for several years now. I'm eagerly anticipating the regular cycle of check the beach, grab the gear, suit up and paddle out.

What's that? You want to know what this has to do with writing? Maybe the zen of the wave frees the mind, or the fresh air and nature releases the inner creative spirit? Bulls**t, I say. I actually wrote less when I was in the water all the time. But I did do one thing religiously: I kept a surf journal.

A surf journal. A record of every wave session, good, bad, and ugly. The animals I encountered (an angry mating seal springs to mind). The memorable waves. The frustrations and the joy, and the time I almost drowned. I ended it just before I moved to the desert, and now that I'm back I've started a new one. It would make a great blog- I write these things for public consumption- but there's only one way you can read it, and that's by picking it up, opening the leather cover, and thumbing through it, page by page.

Some things just can't be done any other way.

The.Muse.In.Action!

2009-12-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

This poem literally came to me in a rush of inspiration, and the irony of it is that as old-fashioned as the first few lines read, a rough version of them found their origin on twitter. Ah well, so much for the 21st century. She comes and goes as She pleases. Enjoy:

The.Muse.In.Action!
(acoustic)
O Stranger, do you hear?
My mistress calls
and cries for black blood spilled on fields of snow
Is it yours, or mine? I care not, cares not She
only that the furrows fill, the rivers flow
and nothing left of seed save wisps of husk
(electric)
Hey fucker, listen up!
Yeah, She's my shotgun
double-aught flash, both barrels to the face
your brains on the table
my blood on the page
and nothing on the floor but empty shells

Best of the Decade: The Real Threat to the Novel

2009-12-15T08:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Novelist

You're familiar with Warren Ellis, aren't you? The guy who wrote the novel Crooked Little Vein?
Well, he was slumming it for that gig. While we're all fumbling in the clay, cracking pots in the kiln and alternately creating functional tableware and grotesque, unlovely, and unwieldy monstrosities, Ellis and his contemporaries have taken what everyone presumptuously considered straw and are spinning it into a new golden age of fiction.

They're called comic books, fellas, the marriage of words and sequential art, and they're kicking our asses in the double aughts.

Age of Bronze, Black Hole, Blankets, the reissue of Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Marvel 1602, Criminal, The Walking Dead, Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter, 365 Samurai and a few bowls of rice, and these are just a tiny sample of amazing American comics. There's a whole dynamic world out there.

Of course you can dismiss them if you like, if it makes you feel better. And I don't deny there are a lot of really great prose novels out there. But this is the fact as I see it: the comic form in its malleability is a superior storytelling medium, superior not just to the novel but also to television and movies. And while I also don't doubt that these three media will continue to exist and produce quality art within their limits, the comic form has only just begun to push the boundaries of what it's capable of, art and story catalyzing one another into a beautiful blue flame.

Maybe an MFA in graphic design would have been a better choice.

HYMN NO. 33 1/3

2009-12-06T23:06:00.001-08:00

When the King comes down to earth again
be a hunk of burnin’ love
shinin’ like a diamond on His big white throne
save the lamb and save the dove
When the King comes down to earth again
gonna be a righteous rule
and we’ll fear no evil nor the shadow of death
cause He’ll teach us all kung fu
And when He comes to earth again
He’ll set the poor man free
and there won’t be no more Devil-box
cause He’ll shoot out your TV
O the King will reign on earth again
you’ll know Him by His face
and we’ll all drive pimped out Cadillacs
to a land of lasting Grace

Buck Up, Little Soldier, It's a Tough Old World

2009-11-30T01:02:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of people writing. A lot as in thousands, hundreds of thousands. In 2008, around 275,000 books were published by traditional means, and a few thousand more than that through print on demand and other venues. That's over half a million new books in one year. If you're a writer, especially one who's not traditionally published, that's sobering news. Basically, the market is glutted and there are probably not enough readers to sustain the industry as it now exists.

Is this a bad thing? Well, if you get paid to write then it might be, and if you're trying to get paid to write it almost certainly is. There are only so many seats at the table, and when there's more good writers (and I believe there are tons of good writers, contrary to the mostly self-serving, emotionally fragile, and territorial opinions I've heard recently) than there are deals to give, it all devolves into Who-Do-You-Know? And when the answer to Who-Do-You-Know? is nobody, the next logical question should be Why-Am-I-Doing-This?

It's an important question, because the odds are you're not going to make it as a writer the way you thought you were when you thought this gig was such a great idea. It's something we all have to deal with, but it can be liberating when you find the answer- your own personal answer. Because all great writing is created from a personal vision, and in the absence of money, prestige, and all the other trappings of the ever more distant and largely illusory publishing dream, your inner vision is all you have that's worth a damn anyway. Me, I wouldn't sell mine out for anything less than six figures.

Bal des Ardents

2009-11-21T20:57:00.001-08:00

Hairy handsome prince
He's doused in pitch
Watch him dance and scowl!
Hear him prance and howl!
He's a wolf you see
All the critics agree
And He's made of win
And of spin spin spin
But beware the flame-
One spark and. . .
On to the next big thing
Bark, dog!

It's a New World, Baby- pop a cork, pour a glass, and relax

2009-11-15T22:25:00.000-08:00

If I'm remembered at all as a writer, it's a surety and a certainty that I'll fall firmly, if I don't fall flat on my face, within the company of a not so rare new breed: The Twenty-first Century Author. Now, I'll admit there's not yet a lot to differentiate the Twenty-first Century Author from those who have come before, either in terms of what we write, or the manner we approach things, or in terms of the ghosts we fear and the goals we hope to accomplish. But amidst all the familiar pressure, the doom and gloom, the fear of the death of the printed word, and the apparent sinking of the publishing industry into the depths of the great pixel sea, I come bearing glad tidings to those of our kind.

You see, you and I, and anyone else fortunate enough to have begun our calling beyond the year Double-oh (or Dubyo- Now wouldn't that be an ill-omened nickname!), we are free. Capital F Free.

The Best writing of the Twentieth century? Not my problem. I don't have to play that game and neither do you. We're not burdened by Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Borges, Nabokov, Angela Carter, Tolkien, Dashiell Hammett, John Gardner, Raymond Carver, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Kerouac, W.S. Burroughs, Mervyn Peake, Flannery O'connor, Robert Graves, Marguerite Yourcenar, Virginia Woolf, Philip K. Dick, and so on, and so on, a hundred years worth. They've claimed their century, written all over it, marvelously and convincingly, but this one is ours. It's really a pretty sweet gig when you think about it like that.

But I'm not finished. It gets oh so much better. Not only is this a new century, if I needs must tell you, it's also a new millennium. Do you get where I'm coming from, you lucky, lucky writer you? Bye bye Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, Conrad, Melville, Thomas Malory, Mark Twain, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shelley, Bram Stoker, Voltaire, Dumas, Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swift, Kipling, Christopher Marlowe, etc. And a special goodbye to that greatest of all burdens on the modern writer's psyche: good William Shakespeare himself. I swear on my OED, it's enough to make a person weak in the knees.

But don't get me wrong, don't misunderstand what I'm saying, especially those of you who are unlucky in-betweeners. This isn't a dismissal of the past, not at all. We all live off those who came before us, and we build our mansions on their foundations. And they did the same, thank you Homer. This way of thinking is just a reorientation of the mind, an acknowledgment of the present and the future as a blank slate waiting to be filled. By you, by me, and by the new Best of the Millennium. It's a blessing and it's a challenge. And it's all ours. Better go have that drink now.

The Tragedy of Mowgli

2009-11-10T10:11:00.000-08:00

I love Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and The Second Jungle Book as well, and though they both contain several fine independent tales (Rikki Tikki Tavi, The Undertakers, and The Miracle of Purun Bhagat come to mind) it's the Mowgli stories that justifiably make these two volumes famous. They're dangerous, magical, mythic, and beautifully written, and as a hero Mowgli puts Tarzan to shame (in more ways than one- Burrough's derivative work is disturbingly racist in parts).

There is also a current of death, loss, and conflicted loyalty that runs through them like a dark jungle river, a current I barely noticed as a child and, judging from Kipling's consummate skill as a writer, most likely wasn't meant to. As an adult, however, I found this hidden layer of nuance to be a thrilling find, a validation of the substance in my nostalgic revisiting of a childhood memory.

Then I read In the Rukh. This is a Mowgli story told through the eyes of a British Forestry Service officer, set in the years after Mowgli left the jungle. It is not part of the Jungle Books and indeed, it is nothing like the other stories. It is naturalistic, adult in its themes, and completely lacking the wonder of Mowgli's childhood adventures. It's damn depressing, and in fact, I would go so far as to say it very nearly undermines the stories that precede it. In the Rukh is, in this respect, postmodern, or it would be, if not for one thing: It was written first, before The Jungle Book.

So, Kipling's obviously not an early postmodernist. Nevertheless, he chose to include In the Rukh within All the Mowgli Stories and he never felt any need to rework it to make it fit more comfortably, which makes me suspect that he might not have been entirely displeased with the dissonance between it and its brothers. I certainly found it a rewarding kick in the teeth.

I'm not sure The Jungle Book and its sequel are in fashion anymore, aside from the insipid (yet undeniably catchy) Disney version of the stories, but I hope that the popularity of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (which was heavily influenced by Kipling's work) will spur a greater interest in these classics. I would encourage anyone, young or old, to seek them out, and afterward, to read the last, which is actually the first, Mowgli story.

Notes on In the Rukh

Crom!!! The Writer's Toybox 3

2009-11-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

If you don't already get the gist of this, just follow the links:
The Writer's Toybox 2
The Writer's Toybox

I think I've said this before, but I love Playmobil. They're small, but not too small, sturdy, but easy to customize, and not so detailed that you can't use your imagination. Most important, my son loves them too, making them a way that I can share with him my love of fiction and history without sucking the fun out of his curious little brain. Kids are kids after all, and while everything is a learning experience, not everything has to be a lesson. So, with that in mind, I give you-

Conan the Barbarian

He's more or less after this image though honestly I customized him before I'd ever seen it. Robert E. Howard, Conan's creator, is one of those special writers, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft, whose legacy is not one of sustained technical skill (though The Frost Giant's Daughter is as good as any short story I've read) but rather of inspiring several generations of talented artists, filmmakers, and writers to build upon and pay homage to the mythos they created. In this way he is probably as important as any twentieth century writer, and may well be longer lasting in the public consciousness. Only time will tell, but this much is certainly true; Conan makes a heck of an addition to a three year old's (and his dad's) toybox.

Death Sees Your Fortune

2009-10-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Halloween is here, and in that spirit I thought I'd put out another piece from Carnival of Vulgarities, one that has its origins planted firmly in the holiday. You see, several years ago, I had a great idea to go out on Halloween as Death. All black, black cape, black faceless hood, Y'know, Death. It wasn't the most original costume on the surface but, in this case, it's what I did with it that made it special. Instead of a scythe I carried around a bag of skulls, thirty of them, the kind you put candy in. Inside each one was a piece of paper printed on one side with the image of a tarot card (Death, the thirteenth card) and written on the other with a message from the Grim Reaper himself. I took these fortune skulls out on the street on Halloween night and passed them out randomly to anyone that wanted one. I never stopped to watch anyone read them; it would have spoiled the effect and ruined the privacy of their moment. Death Sees Your Fortune is an assemblage of all of the messages that were in those skulls. Every one of them found someone, or someone found them. As you read them I hope you'll remember the holiday, that it's not just about the costumes, the candy, the parties, and the pranks; it's about the skull beneath the skin, the end before the beginning, and that one thing that we all do alone. Trick 'r Treat!

DEATH SEES YOUR FORTUNE

Manufactured 1933
by the Santa Monica Vending Machine Co.
of Detroit, Michigan
One fortune, two pennies
No Refunds
No Exceptions

13. You who read this, tonight I have passed you by. Did you feel
the cold wind on your spine? Do not think you
have escaped, do not think it. All come to me in time,
none get by.

13. Do not behave as if tomorrow is yours. Tomorrow you will be
dust.

13. I am the water that filled Shelley’s lungs. I am the gutter that
held Poe like a cradle. I am the little metal pellets of Hemingway’s
most desperate hour.

13. One man, when I came for him, sought to run away. When he
found he could not escape he said, “Take my brother instead. He is
old and sick and life gives him no joy.” “I will take him tomorrow,”
I replied. “Today is your day.”

13. From the moment you are born you belong to me.

13. How many books have I interrupted half done? How many
paintings sit incomplete? How many songs have I stilled in mid
note?

13. A man offered up his wife to me that he might not die. “For she
is young and passionate and more beautiful than any who has yet
lived,” he said. “What you say is true,” I answered, “but I will take
her when she is old and tired and a wrinkled-up hag. It is the same
to me.”

13. My house is of bone. My kingdom a mountain of skulls.

13. I am a blessing to the sick, a curse to the healthy, and a terror
to those in fear of hell.

13. Drink up, drink up, from my poisoned cup.

13. Those who do not fear me still cannot deny me.

13. Many have gone before you. The rest will surely follow in your
wake.

13. There is no sleep for me. There is no escape for you.

13. Your future is this: For certain you will die.

13. Do not occupy yourself with banal concerns. In the end you
will rot like a discarded piece of fruit.

13. None are so important that they may refuse my invitation to
dance.

13. My voice is a rattle deep inside your own body.

13. If you see my face, your time is come.

13. Your ancestors knew me well, for I visited them often.

13. Once I came for a miserly old woman who cared for nothing
but collecting money. Though in the end she offered it all, she
could not buy even one more minute, and her fortune was left for
her heirs to plunder.

13. Your unfinished business is nothing to me.

13. There was a woman who pretended I didn’t exist. She did it so
well that she fooled herself in time. When I came for her at last she
asked, “Who are you?” “An old lost friend,” I said. “Good,” she
replied as we went away. “I am tired and lonely and a friend is
what I need.”

13. While you race against the clock, look over your shoulder and
see me catching up.

13. Know me by the company I keep: Crows and Jackals and
Vultures and Hyenas.

13. I hold the keys to the world beyond.

13. I am the edge that breaks the last thread, the final exhalation of
the spoken word, the cold ash of the spent fire.

13. Warfare is my bread and butter.

13. I often wonder, when my work is done, who will come for me?

13. Your fear does not profit me, nor cause me sadness.

13. There is always time to die.

The Long and the Short of It

2009-10-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in the long novel. It's a subjective opinion, I know, but it's the truth and there's no use denying it. At this point in my life as a writer, I don't have anything worth saying that can't be said to good effect in two hundred pages or less.

Of course, I don't really think about page count when I'm writing. When the needs of the story are fulfilled then the work is done. There's nothing I hate more than reading a great book and hitting a flat spot, usually fifty to a hundred pages long, that just kills the momentum of the novel. It happens so often that I don't even bother to slog through them anymore. I just pinch a cluster of pages (usually about fifty) between my thumb and forefinger and turn them in one go. Then I repeat as necessary.

This isn't to say that I'm incapable or unwilling to read a great big doorstop of a book. In fact, the last two books I read were 800+ and 1000+ pages , and I enjoyed every word of each of them. But these were exceptions for me, and I believe by and large that most writers think they have much more to say than they actually do, and their novels often suffer for it. I would love to hear others' opinions on this, so please feel free to post a comment.

A Short Appreciation of a Very Great Work

2009-10-21T00:48:00.000-07:00

It's taken me twenty years to be ready for Mervyn Peake, and now that I've read his Gormenghast books (They are not a trilogy)- Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone- I feel as if I belong to some sort of secret conspiracy of magnificence. The end of Mervyn Peake's life was a tragedy of illness and under-appreciated genius, and it was only through the diligence of a few well-placed friends and admirers that his body of work has thrived rather than faded into obscurity.

According to Quentin Crisp, Peake once said of his work, "I believe in doing what I like. I set about selling it afterward." It is an attitude that appears to have cost him in his own too-short lifetime, but one that has rewarded readers immeasurably since his death. It is an attitude that I also hold dear, though if I could manifest even a thousandth of that man's talent and originality I would consider my job as a writer fulfilled. He was an accomplished artist, a poet, playwright, and a writer whose ability to paint with prose has had few equals in the English language. If you are a writer and you haven't read him, do it. It will make you better and it will humble you. As a reader, you must be patient. Traveling with Peake is a long journey in a vague direction with no particular destination, but the sights you will see and the company you'll keep will mark your psyche for the rest of your reading life.
http://mervynpeake.org - Peake's official site
An Excellence of Peake by Michael Moorcock

The Writer's Toybox 2

2009-10-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

The Writer's Toybox (link)

Welcome to the second part of what I hope (and my wife surely dreads) will become an ongoing chronicle of my chief writerly vice, an addiction to toys. Some I've found, some I've modified, but all of the ones I pick for this blog will have some sort of basis in books, writing, and my relationship to the two.
Today I give you:

Sumo! Yes Sumo Smash, by the same people who created Strollin' Bowlin', that portable game with the wind up bowling ball with orange shoes. I found this on sale at a bookstore which will remain unnamed and snatched it up. It is exactly as fun as it looks, which is very. Adjust their arms, wind them up, and let them bash each other out of the dohyo (ring). Grunt.

Now, it's all well and good that this little bit o' neatness came from a bookstore, but what the heck does it have to do with me as a writer? The answer, dear reader, is research. In the course of reading in preparation for a sequel to Ghost of Iga (available here, here, and here) I came across two books: Grand Sumo by Lora Sharnoff and Sumo: From Rite to Sport by Patricia Cuyler. The second book, which traced the religious and historical roots of Sumo, was more useful than the first, which is solely about modern Sumo, but both were fascinating reads. I think they're both out of print, but they're easy enough to get online. As for Sumo Smash, it's wind up, it's portable, and it's Sumo. Win to the 3rd power.

The Nob-ody gives a snowball in H-el Prize (for Literature)

2009-10-08T18:21:00.000-07:00

This was going to be The Writer's Toybox 2,but I guess that can wait. After all, the fate of the literary world is at stake, right? The Nobel Prize for Literature, the big daddy of lit awards, given to an obscure German from Romania. Well, as a minuscule contributor to the world body of literature (by its loosest definition, it's true) I have something to say to my fellow writers and book connoisseurs: Get over it because no one cares.

Really. No one cares. The Nobel Prize is the biggest non-event in the perfect storm of irrelevance that gave birth to the literary award. Oprah has more relevance to the written word. Why? Because people actually read the books she picks. Why anyone should care about a tiny group of Swedish academics hovering over Alfred Nobel's blood money like a five-headed curmudgeonly dragon is a mystery to me. Most writer's write to be read, perhaps to be paid, but seldom if at all for a worthless accolade. So writers, keep writing, and readers, go out and pick up your favorite author, critics and awards be damned. Just enjoy a good read and forget this nonsense.

Nevermore Forevermore: 1809-1849

2009-10-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

In this, the bicentennial year of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, as we approach the 160th anniversary of his death, I am still amazed by the power of the man as a myth. There is enough historical evidence available to support a reasonable speculation on the facts of Poe's life and death, but the real fact is that the morbid power of his stories has had the almost supernatural effect of transforming his biography into the final, posthumous tale in his canon. I myself can think of no finer tribute for a writer. Here then is my contribution to the mythology of Poe's end, from my book, Carnival of Vulgarities:

ME AND PESTIS AND RATTUS AND POE

Me and Pestis and Rattus on ending our travels
dropped down in the ditch where lay E. Allan Poe
While we stood there a moment assessing the poet
mesmerized at the bounties ill fortune can bring
Rattus’ eyes spied a shine that he fancied a ring

The writer reclined half in filth and in water
He acknowledged us not save to droop his dry lid
and breathed bubbles and rattles of pain and disorder
that when burst in the air loosed a piteous sound
Rattus, finding no ring, took to snuffling around

Pestis stirred from his perch in my gut and did wander
to the soul that now stewed in that vile urban brew
“It’s an honor, dear sir, one I’ll always remember.
Though you’ll pardon good Rattus, he’s helplessly nosy.”
Rattus bit of poor Poe, left a wound red and rosy

“Virginia!” Poe croaked, less a breath than a spasm
“Baltimore,” answered Pestis, to mock or to sooth
Yet the poet said nothing, not a word of rebuke
His left eye showed white in its half-lidded socket
and Rattus, still hopeful, nosed around in his pocket

“Look at him,” said Pestis, “they’ve run him to ground.
Picked him clean of his finery and clothed him in rags,
cast his soul to the spirits Regret and Despair,
till it’s fallen so far that it’s scarce fit to cull.”
Rattus dug in the pouch till it covered him full

Did the man not then shake and his face flush with anger?
Or was it a trick of the gaslight’s dim glow?
No words did he strain but his arm bent behind him
and he rolled on his back as to make himself cozy
Rattus hid in his coat like a corpse in the posies

“You despise us,” said Pestis. “Our nature offends,
knowing naught of compassion or mercy or love,
and you fancy us fleeting and grim apparitions.
But we’ll still be around when the sky groans and crashes
and Rattus will play in your bones and your ashes.

“For you wrong us, dear writer, to think that we come
as a torment to harry your vanishing soul.
We’re pilgrims, we three, not crusaders nor reavers.
Thus we’ve journeyed this far from the sands of the Pashas
to bask in the flame of a life burned to ashes.

“It is well you might ask, and as well I might tell you,
who we are to have traveled so hardy and long.
Though in truth we have died many times in our passing
we are Legion like Father, split after the Fall,
and the nature of one is the nature of all.”

Still the poet spoke not, only moaned incoherent
and wallowed in garbage beyond hope or pain
If he cared for the tidings of glory we brought him
it showed through the mask of his face not at all
Rattus poked out his head, said “I heard a foot’s fall.”

“By your leave,” Pestis bowed to the poet in reverence,
“we’ll depart you in peace and we’ll not meet again.
Though you die you will live in the rumors and stories—”
Here a cry cut him short as the body was found
Rattus sprang for a hole and we followed him down.

The Writer's Toybox

2009-09-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Writing, especially fiction writing, is a fairly aberrant pastime, and most writers need a coping mechanism to deal with the unnatural levels of solitude and introspection that decent writing often requires. In short, they need something to get themselves out of their own heads for a little while.

Every writer has a different way of doing this. The really legendary ones seem to turn to drinking, to drugging, or to chasing down a mid-life crisis in the guise of a string of women half their age. Me, I'm not the stuff of legend- I like to play with toys.

Previously, I've mentioned my, uh, son's (yes, that's it) Planet of the Apes Kubricks and the Monkey King Playmobils that I've customized. Believe me, I could go on and on about cool toys I have in the house, cool toys I've had, or cool toys I want (I'm on toy probation, in general. One in, one out is the house rule) but this isn't a toy blog, it's a writing blog, and in that vein, I won't mention my wonderful double barrel soft dart shotgun (oops). Instead, I present for your enjoyment, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone (I've been reading Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and it's given me Moorcock on the brain. Heh.) It's a Playmobil custom, done after Brom's well known painting:

The best part is that my son can play with it, though I've decided not to teach him the part about black swords and their soul-stealing properties. Maybe when he's four.

Habits

2009-09-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

I write nearly every day. Sometimes I write for fifteen minutes, sometimes for an hour. Sometimes it's just on this blog. But it's important to do it, because writing is a habit that must be cultivated like any other habit. The great thing about this particular vice is that instead of smoker's lung or a bad liver, you end up with a body of work that you can be proud of, perhaps even a legacy, if you're that ambitious.

Well, if anything's gonna break it . . .

2009-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

This post falls squarely under "write it down before you forget it". My son and I met my wife (and his mother) for lunch yesterday, and as a surprise she brought along a tiny meteorite her boss had generously loaned to her for me to see. Cool. Yet another thing I've always wanted to hold in my hands. So we're sitting in the taqueria, and I'm holding this neat little hunk of space iron, and I drop it onto the concrete floor. "Ah crap!" I say, and I think to myself I hope I didn't break it. Yes, I actually thought to myself I hope I didn't break this little melted hunk of iron that has been hurtling through deep space before punching through our burning atmosphere and plummeting tens of thousands of feet to collide with the Earth. Yep.

Storytelling

2009-08-31T01:28:00.000-07:00

There's a certain obvious freedom that comes with having a very small audience. Since I can never be sure that I'm writing for anyone but me, most of the time I simply write for me. I get a vision in my head, a line of dialogue, the workings of a theme, and I try to manifest it. It's something I enjoy, writing, something I find sacred in a strange irreverent way, and while I take my work seriously, I find it hard to think of myself (or most other writers for that matter) in a serious light. It's really a foolish bit of business, stringing words together into a sentence, sentences into paragraphs, hoping someone will read them. It can also be a pain in the ass, and I wonder if anyone would do it at all if the need to tell stories wasn't such a deep-seated human compulsion. I need to tell stories, and the stories in my head apparently need to get out. It seems like this should be categorized as a mental illness, but I've heard they actually give awards for it.

Taking it where I can get it

2009-08-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

When my son was born, close to 2 1/2 years ago, I was a little over three quarters finished writing my first novel. Thank God for that, because if the entire endeavor had been like that last quarter I would probably be working on it even now.

It's true that most babies sleep a lot in the first months after birth, but they don't do it all at once, and if you don't sleep when they do at least some of the time then you are screwed. Add in a full time job and the minimal amount of hours needed to keep the house from turning into a roach infested superfund site and, well, if you're a writer then you're screwed. Sacrifices must be made, and for me it was sleep. I did a lot of writing during naptime, with my son asleep in my lap, and a lot of writing and revising in the car while he slept in his seat in the back. Thankfully, he was born in winter, so this could be done at a park with the windows rolled down (it is the desert, remember). It was an arduous process, but I stuck it out, and like any habit worth having that perseverance has stuck with me.

Still, that was two years ago, and I can forgive you for wondering what relevance this little anecdote has to my writing life in the present. Well, let me tell you, it doesn't get easier as children propel themselves like lemmings headfirst toward their first years of school. They sleep less, and if anything they demand more attention. Also, forget about Quiet and Solitude, they left for the childless neighbor's house. So what to do? Right now I'm writing this in a notebook (a real notebook, pen and paper) in my car while my son is asleep in his seat in the back. Correction: was asleep. Sigh.

Write What You Know = Basically, Nothing

2009-08-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

How about writing what you don't know? That opens up the whole world to your fiction. Do a little research. Use your imagination. Learn something. Maybe even make a fool of yourself. God forbid you should make a fool of yourself, huh? Just remember: The Muse will forgive factual error, but She will never, ever, forgive creative bankruptcy.

Even a Swine Deserves a Small Pearl

2009-08-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, and in the bad habit of not finishing things, I used to worry that I'd run out of ideas. Now that I'm older I realize that what I'm going to run out of is time. It's a less terrifying but ultimately more depressing conclusion. But I have come neither to bury Caesar nor to praise him. I'm here, quite simply, to crow.

As a writer, I have certain personal ambitions. They're pretty modest, but they're the goals that keep me engaged, day in and day out, in a lonely calling that pays me in a sputtering stream of delayed gratification. Some I've achieved, which is truly a pleasure indescribable, but like I said, they're personal, and not likely to be of interest to anyone but me. Still, it's not really fair to bring a subject up and then say "Well, I can't really talk about it," so I'll tell you of one as yet unfulfilled ambition, the very one that's pertinent to this post.

If you didn't already know it, you will now be made aware that I am a history buff, and that ancient Rome is one of my obsessions (Medieval Europe, Feudal Japan, and lately, Elizabethan England, are the others) and for a long time I have wanted to write a novel set in the Empire during the second century. I'll get to it, given enough time, but there are several projects ahead of it, and one thing I've learned over the years is that I can only do one project at a time. The rest, no matter how compelling, simply have to get in line. Otherwise I end up with a bunch of half-realized, unfinished fragments. In other words, crap.

Nevertheless, just because an idea is in the back of the line, it doesn't mean it's been abandoned. I'm constantly on the lookout for relevant research material, which I store like a squirrel and often (gasp!) read for pleasure.

So. . .

The other day I'm in a certain bookstore and I find these fabulous books on Rome that are very inexpensive. Now forgive my saying so but books on Rome are a dime a dozen, I mean, the place is older than Jesus himself, so a lot has been written about it, but what really made these books special were the illustrations, full color recreations of Roman military life. It only took a cursory glance and those babies were mine, bought and paid for.

Well, I get these very inexpensive and beautiful books on the Roman army home and in my spare time I start to read through them. It seems they focus on the Dacian wars in the time of Trajan. Wow, that's the period I was planning on writing about in my novel. Cool. I read a little more and I realize that the title of these books are not simply The Legionary and The Cavalryman, but Tiberius Claudius Maximus The Legionary and Tiberius Claudius Maximus The Cavalryman. Dear reader, you will be forgiven for not knowing this, and I myself had forgotten it, but Tiberius Claudius Maximus was the cavalry officer who hunted down and captured the Dacian king, Decebalus, at the end of the war. He's no one, really, but his name is written in one of my notebooks as an important secondary character in my evolving narrative. Unwittingly, I had stumbled on a two part biography of an obscure Roman, who up to that point was nothing more than a name to me. My friends, I live for little moments like that. Oink, oink.

I Swear to God I Would Do It

2009-08-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

Before I start, let me just say that in general I really like Neil Gaiman as a writer. While his Sandman comics bored the crap out of me, I think he is a fantastic short story writer- Smoke and Mirrors is an amazing compilation and A Study in Emerald is a mind-blowingly good short story, utterly deserving of the Hugo it won. His young adult fiction is pretty good, too. Finally, on a personal level, I don't know the man at all.

Now that that's out of the way, I'll begin. The other night, my wife and I were drinking (her wine, and me this delicious organic pale ale that was so good I had another just before beginning this blog) and talking (and anyone who knows me will affirm I love to talk, more so when I've been drinking, but quite a bit regardless) and the thing we were talking about was the cult of personality, how in order to further their art (and eat), it's necessary for artists nowadays to commodify themselves, often to a degree that the artist becomes more important than the art. I mean, c'mon now, in what sane universe is an author's name five times bigger than the title of their book? As I slurred, quite seriously, to my wife "So and So, he's a great writer, but in the end tally he's just some schlub who sits in front of a typewriter and lays down sentences. It's the work that's important, not the writer. For all I know he could be a big jackass." (Note: I was not talking about Neil Gaiman, and I'm not just saying that to cover up that I was. Because I wasn't. Rest assured, Mr. Gaiman comes into play shortly.)

To this my wife replied something to the effect that I was full of it, and that If I had the chance to sit down for dinner or drinks with an author whose work I admired, I would jump at the chance."Maybe," I said,"but it's hard to think who it would be."

"Gene Wolfe?" she offered helpfully.
"Nope. The work is the man as far as I'm concerned."
"Harlan Ellison?"
"Nah. I'm sure he's interesting but, honestly, he terrifies me. Besides, once again, the man is the work, and the work is the man for me."

Here it comes.

"How about Neil Gaiman?"
"No. Actually, yeah. Yeah I would like to sit down with Neil Gaiman. Because, y'know what? I'd like to ask him why the hell he (or more likely his publisher, but it's N-e-i-l G-a-i-m-a-n, he's hardly powerless in these matters)keeps using that same damned author photo of him with the black leather jacket and the hipster hairstyle that has been on his books since the early nineties. I mean,Jesus (I pronounced it heysoos) Christ, the man is nearly fifty, and I know he's cut his hair. Use a new photo, willya? Or, better yet, none at all. And the jacket's got to go. Really, every photo? Really? I'm sure you're cool Mr. Gaiman (yes, you're over 45 and I don't know you so you're Mr. Gaiman)but you're in danger of becoming a Neil Gaiman Halloween costume. Change it. Please."

I actually went on for quite a bit longer than this, but I'll assume you're not imbibing any alcohol, and we'll all pretend I stopped there. My wife, God love her, actually listened to the entire rant. She was appreciative, but she doubted my resolve.

"You mean to say that if you got a chance to have drinks with Neil Gaiman, you'd hassle him about his author photo?"

"I swear to God I'd do it," I said, and I finished my beer in one contented swig.

It's Possible I May Have Carried It Too Far

2009-07-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

I've been in a creative dry spell lately with my writing. A drought, really. Family matters sent me back east around a month ago and I still haven't gotten back on track. As soon as I returned, my son, who is two and a half, hit his terrible twos/terrible threes in full stride, and everything in the house that was made of concentration was instantly shattered.

I tend to take these things in stride. I'm not writing for a living, so it's no big deal to take a week or two off. In fact, I tend to return to my work with fresh eyes and renewed energy. On this particular break from writing I've spent a lot of time thinking about my current project and the tone I want from it. I've been reading a little, but mostly I've been spending time with my son, and I've become fascinated with his Playmobil toys. More specifically, I've been modifying them.

It started innocently enough, first with switching hair and beards to turn a set of Vikings into Gauls to fight against my son's Romans (Yes, Romans. Did I mention Playmobils are the most bitchin' toys ever?). Next I made the emperor Hadrian and a German bodyguard to accompany him, then an auxiliary cavalryman, a Hun, and a Celtic warrior queen, now defunct. It was hella fun, maybe too fun, because two weeks went by, then three, then four, and I wrote all of seven sentences.

It was Monkey who woke me up, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy, and Tripitaka. Yep, I created all four of the main characters from The Journey to the West as Playmobil figures (Did I mention these are my son's toys?). Even as I exulted in how incredibly cool they are, a metaphorical rain fell on the inside of my head, and I realized I was channeling massive amounts of creativity into these toys. I mean, it's no simple thing to make the Monkey King and his entourage out of three inch plastic men. I did it though. Yay me. The drought is over, now it's time to write.

Paying in Caesar's Coin

2009-06-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

There's a hidden perk to self publishing, one that some authors probably don't dig, but that I find very satisfying: being paid in kind. I suppose your feelings about it depend on whether you're trying to pay your bills with your writing or not. That would be nice, but I generally consider my print run a success once I've sold enough books for it to pay for itself. Because let's face it: having to pay to be published just doesn't cut it.

But back to my point. I love trading a book that I've essentially (with the help of a printer, and a few very, very, kind and talented friends) made from the ground up for things other than cash. I've traded for other books, for self produced music discs, homemade art, delicious lunches, even knowledge (it's hard to find in good condition).

This last week brought me something different in that the trade I took for one of my books (Carnival of Vulgarities) was once cash. Seventeen centuries ago, give or take. Yep, an antique Roman coin from around the time of Constantine (I think the portrait is one of his sons, but while it's in good enough shape to be extremely cool, most of the writing is pretty worn down). It's the oldest thing I've ever held in my hands, beating the book in my earlier post by about twelve hundred years. How could I say no to a trade like that? In a very real way, experiences like this are much better than signing a deal with a publisher. Cash is fleeting, very fleeting, but it's this sort of sharing that makes the task of writing worth doing.

Do you think FSG would pay me in denarii?

I Love You Damn Dirty Apes

2009-06-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

I've found that when it comes to Planet of the Apes and everything therein related, there are two kinds of people. I'm the kind who dressed as a gorilla soldier for Halloween (at the age of 33) and who began writing an (as yet) unfinished biography of General Ursus, aping the style of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars. Planet of the Apes has pizzazz. It's got class. It's got sexy bikini cavewoman Linda Harrison. And it's got Charlton Heston being chased by angry gorillas with guns riding horses. Gorillas on Horses! With guns! So now you'll know where I'm coming from when I tell you about my dream and its outcome. Its glorious, glorious outcome.

About two weeks ago I was watching Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which is an incredibly entertaining movie in its own right, less clever in its satire (who can top Rod Serling?) than the original but relentlessly nihilistic and darkly funny. Needless to say I enjoyed the hell out of it.

That night I had a dream that I found a set of Planet of the Apes toys that were made for little kids, like my son's Galactic Heroes Star Wars toys, or those Superhero Squad guys, Captain America, Iron Man, etc, little two inch superdeformed bits of plastic simian joy. I am a 38 year old man, with all the responsibilities and stresses that entails, and I have to say that this was the purest, most golden dream I've had in a decade. "I'll take them all!" I said in my dream, and when I woke up I could still feel the smile that must have been plastered across my face for half the night. I don't usually remember my dreams and I talk about them even less, but this one stuck and I told my wife. As I did, the same goofy smile came back. Like I said, pure.

Now, I'm sure everyone has a good idea of where this story is going, but let me just say that by the end of the day I had completely forgotten this dream. It was one of those things that was so beautiful and childlike all you can do is accept it, enjoy it, and let it go. It's the natural thing, I think.

Anyway, a week later I'm in a comic shop (imagine that) and I'm standing at the counter waiting to pay. I look down into the glass case that houses various and sundry items.

"Oh my god!" is what I said next. Loudly.

General Ursus, on a horse. Four gorilla soldiers with guns and clubs. Astronaut Brent, in primitive human duds. Two mutant humans. And a cage wagon with another horse. Two inches tall. Kubricks. I'd never heard of them. These particular ones have been out of circulation for seven or eight years.

"I'll take them all!" I said. So f-ing pure.

Since then I've tracked down Dr. Zaius, Cornelius, Zira, her nephew Lucius, Julius the gorilla jailer, more gorillas, and of course, Chuck Heston himself, Taylor. I don't know if dreams come true, but I do know this: Gorillas on horses are something you never outgrow.

. . . the death of art

2009-04-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

I've been reading quite a lot the past few weeks, no need to name what I've been reading, it's not the point. Much of it came to me highly recommended, either through reviews or through recommendations from friends and acquaintances. Some stuff I've really enjoyed, some of it was a letdown, and some I didn't care for, but all of it was well written from a technical standpoint. None of what I read, however, was perfect, in fact, most were deeply flawed in certain places. And far from bothering me, these flaws pleased me most of all. They told me that a flesh and blood human being was behind the things I was reading, that a story was being told by someone who was excited, maybe a little too excited, to tell it, and that it had a soul. In the end that's all writing is about. A person telling a story to other people. Not money, not literary reputation, not immortality- that's all just useless vanity. So, here's to perfection: May we all fall short.

Writing in the Dead of Night

2009-04-08T00:51:00.000-07:00

So, I've been burning through Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal series and I'm driving myself crazy waiting for the last issue of 100 Bullets (I still can't decide if it was a mistake to read the five page preview that was online- holy shit), and I realize what it is about good noir that hits the vein for me. It's not the sex and violence, the booze, the grittiness, or the sharp (and vulgar) dialogue- I mean, it is, fuck yeah it is, but that's not the heart of it. It's not about the eternal fuck-up either.

It's about the moment and nothing else. Impulse and reaction. It's a hell of a way to live,and it usually leads to a bad end, but it's seductive too, because, really, there are no guarantees in life besides death. We try to voodoo it away with retirement accounts and insurance policies and vacation plans and a million other things, and that's all good, but the truth is smiling at us all in the mirror, just a few millimeters beneath the skin. Good noir rips the face right off, forces you to look at your own skull, then staples everything back into place. And it's all back where it was, but it never looks or feels quite right again.

Write. Time is short, my friends.

The Die is Cast

2009-03-26T23:36:00.000-07:00

Forgive my Julius Caesar reference, but I've found myself reading Rosemary Sutcliff these last few days, The Lantern Bearers, which is the third in a loosely connected series of novels about Roman Britain. Even though they all take place long after Caesar's murder, he was still the first Roman general to set foot in Britain, so the quote isn't a huge stretch. Anyway, Rosemary Sutcliff is fantastic; her novels are geared toward young adults but they're not childish, and anyone can enjoy them. She's pretty much my ideal for historical fiction at this point: accurate but streamlined and accessible to anyone.

So, the die is cast, and I'm crossing my own version of the Rubicon. I've decided to forgo the search for a publisher for Ghost of Iga and go it on my own. And I have to say that I feel good about the decision. As I've said before, I love doing my own thing, my way. The book's in the design and editing phase now and I look for it to be out before the year's end. It's a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it.

Whew!

2009-03-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

Well, that's that. My reading's done and it went pretty well. Having never read any of the poems aloud, my biggest fear was that my delivery would be boring, but everyone seemed entertained. I read eight or nine poems, including one I had written a few days before that's not in the book. It was inspired by the spiffy Monkey King t shirt which I bought just for this reading.

There were about thirty or so people present, some I knew, some I didn't, but I have to say I was definitely out of my comfort zone, putting myself in front of a crowd. It really underscores the general isolation of the writing experience. I'm not sure which surprised me more, the audience's positive reaction to the reading, or the emotional connection I felt to each piece as I said each line aloud.

Of course, like any self respecting poet/writer (involuntary roll of the eyes)as soon as the reading was over I went out with my friends for drinks, where we talked about everything but writing (thank god). Then, like any self respecting post boomer, I spent the rest of the night playing video games. Marlowe would have done no different, and he might have lived longer if he had Tekken to play.

I'll leave you with the last poem I read, the one not in the book, though it fits the tone.

The Monkey King's Mechanical Children

When he was their age Old Monkey had a pair-

of cloud-treading shoes
a cuirass and a cap
with phoenix plumes
a compliant rod
and a bad attitude

There were three of them, three brothers-

They seared the sky with their plasma boots
and towered in their mecha suits
above the ruin of Buddha's garden
Reclined in peaceful meditation
at first he denied paternity

But beneath the gaze of their monstrous guns-

He stood at last
grabbed his staff
and winked and spat and said:

"It's true in those days I was frequently drunk,
so I might have known your mother after all."

My grocery list. . .

2009-03-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

Not quite, but I thought I'd type up a list of things that I'm in the process of doing as a ***WRITER*** (pause for aplause). I hope it's more interesting than a grocery list.

1. Preparing for my poetry reading at Changing Hands this Friday. (my next post will be about that. yikes.)

2. Finishing the first draft of the sixth chapter of my second novel, tentatively titled Dogs of Edo.

3. Editing Ghost of Iga, the first novel.

4. Researching, which means reading, reading, reading.

5. Reading for fun to keep my mind flexible. I generally read a lot of comics and graphic novels when I'm in the midst of a project.

6. Thinking very,very hard about things.

Everyone loves a monkey. . .

2009-02-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

Especially a kung fu monkey. As anyone who's known me for a while will confirm, I have a thing about monkeys, especially the Monkey King. Over the years I've acquired quite a bit of Monkey King stuff- I have a Japanese woodblock print, a huge ceramic statue from chinatown, various smaller statues, and the most obvious testament to my obsession, a tattoo of Monkey on my right forearm. Aside from being a constant source of entertainment for me (I'm not kidding. Every time I look at that tattoo I smile a little in my head) old Monkey is my literary totem, reminding me that fiction should be a little contrary, a little mischievous, and sometimes a little rough around the edges. Oh, and if you don't know who the Monkey King is, shame on you. Do a little digging and you'll be well rewarded.

This is too easy

2009-02-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

It's true, writing in the twenty first century isn't all that difficult. I mean, look at me- I've powered up the computer, logged in to this site, and here I go tap tap tappety tap. Then I'll virtually press a virtual button and zap! Published. I've been told by some that this is a bad thing, because anyone with time on their hands, a computer and a website or a printer can assault our collective minds with whatever sort of junk that bubbles off the top of their head. The real danger, I've heard, is not that anyone will bother to read any of it, but that the Real Art will be impossible to find in the flood of mediocrity.

I don't buy it.

I think it's great that everyone that wants to can express themselves- post their words, pictures, music online, publish their own bound books, burn cds, all that. And I think that Real Art is often mediocre itself, as much a product of hive-mind branding and posturing and advertising dollars, as it is of real creativity. Most important though, I think that real art (whatever that may be) has the power to swim to the top of the flood or, failing that, to glisten so brightly in the depths that it won't easily be lost. After all, art is what you make it out to be.

Waste(d) Words

2009-02-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

So, as I write this I'm at the library (remember those?) using this blog as a little warmup exercise before I pop open my paper notebook and start longhanding a bit more of my novel. I tend to bounce back and forth between electronic writing and the old fashioned pen and paper method, and I've heard that some die-hards use a word processor or even a typewriter. Not me. I think that's a lot like the stubborn nostalgia for eight track cassettes, a format that has none of the richness of vinyl and none of the convenience of digital. Or to go back to apples and put it bluntly, a typewriter is a pain in the ass and a waster of valuable paper.

Just the other day, my friend P.J. was showing me his ipod Touch which, among other things can download electronic books from the internet and act as an e-reader. As a person who loves books as a tactile pleasure (holding them, turning the page, blah blah smooch smooch)my initial reaction was "Cool P.J., but who really gives a sh--?"

But then my good friend slapped me in the side of the head and yelled, "Think Man! Think of the convenience when you travel. Think of the books you like but don't love. Think of the magazines you read once and throw away. Join the future, man!"

And you know, he has a point. And while I think books (bound, paper books) should never disappear, I am appalled by the waste generated by the publishing industry. I firmly believe that magazines have no business existing in the 21st century outside of an electronic format. And as a non traditionally published writer, I can't help but see a great deal of opportunity in this rapidly emerging technology. That said, I'm going to crawl back into my dank hole now, light a candle, and write in my notebook.

It was a masterpiece, I promise.

2009-02-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am in the two double oh nine, and it may seem like I've taken a heck of a vacation, but it's only from this blog. I've been writing, I've self published a book of poetry, Carnival of Vulgarities, which I'll be reading part of at Changing Hands Bookstore in March, and I've been planning and executing the attack on my second novel, a sequel to my first(unpublished manuscript),Ghost of Iga. But as my late friend Geno was fond of saying, you don't need to worry about that. This blog is really about my latest gold star.

There are certain accessories that every writer needs in order to feel like a "real" writer. For some it's an MFA, for others it's publication, awards, or even cash up front. For a lucky few it's a pen, a copy machine, a ream of paper, and a good stapler. A nice desk. A library. A jacket with elbow patches. You get the point.

Me, I have my notebooks. I have my special pens. I have a complete OED in two volumes and a magnifier to go with it. I have a self published novella, the aforementioned book of poetry, and half a dozen chapbooks. And now I have my crowning glory: a lost manuscript.

Oh, it was real once. I worked on it for weeks, so I should know. I had one copy and now it's gone. Poof. And I didn't leave it on a bus. Didn't leave it on a train. Not a plane nor a cab. The dog didn't eat it and I didn't accidentally throw it away. This is the twenty first century, guys. I just didn't bother to back it up, save it on a disc, email it to myself, or even print it. Crash. Burn. Lesson learned. Back to work.

Go ahead, just write it!

2008-08-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Do you know what a writer is, really? You might laugh, and you might not believe me, but a writer is just someone who writes. Now, you have a little more cache if you complete the things you're writing, and even more if other people read them, but at the end of the day it's all pretty much the same. The differences between (as far as writing goes) you and Hemingway, or Dickens, or your writing professor, or me, are far smaller than our similarities. It starts in the brain and it goes to the page, and you're a writer. That's that. And someone will like it (you at least, I hope) and others, few or many, will hate it, and still others won't care at all. You wouldn't believe how many people I hear say "I wish I could be a writer." as if there's some magic to it. Just write. Start it, finish it, rewrite it until you're satisfied with it, and be damned everyone else. Now, I'm leaving on vacation. Hopefully I'll score some surf, and when I come back I'm going to finish another short story and start on my second novel.

100 Bullets day

2008-08-13T23:40:00.000-07:00

It's that special day that I look forward to every month when the newest issue of 100 Bullets hits the stands. Yes, it's a comic, but it's also a hundred chapter novel (only six more issues to go till the end), a really fine crime/conspiracy/noir work of art. I love books and I love the written word, but I have to admit that there's a dynamic to graphic storytelling that the standard novel just can't achieve. And it's such a young medium that it's not even come close to reaching its full potential, while the written novel, by and large, seems to have settled in to a comfortable middle age. It's a very exciting time, watching a relatively new mode of storytelling starting to come into its own. From Black Hole to Watchmen, Blankets to Hellboy to We3, there is just an incredible synthesis of word and picture out there.

Genrefication, or I'll do what I want, thanks

2008-08-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

I had originally intended to write this post on the absurdity of genre in fiction (including memoirs, but that's a subject for another day), the base meaninglessness of categorizing imaginary things and, by extension, imagination. But instead I'm going to tell you how Borges saved my creative soul. It was his Universal History of Iniquity, translated in the Collected Fictions by Andrew Hurley, read now over a decade ago, that did it. You see, Borges made up about half of the footnotes attached to those little biographies of villainous men and women. Just made 'em up. For fun. The people are real, the histories he recounts are mostly reliable, but the footnotes? Fab ree kate id. It was only when I found this out that I truly began to understand the power and the freedom of fiction. To learn that a writer of Borges stature could grant himself the pleasure of pure factual irresponsibility stripped away all the gravitas from the act of writing for me. Borges wrote his fiction for himself and no one else. Even now the memory of that revelation sparks my fire and makes me smile.

Making the pieces fit: A living city and a dog

2008-08-08T22:50:00.000-07:00

I think I've written in a previous post that I'm the kind of writer who likes to bounce a story in my head for quite some time before I seriously tackle a first draft. I'm a big believer in symmetry; the mind responds to it unconsciously, and if it's provided in the natural progression of the work then hopefully the reader goes away feeling satisfied rather than manipulated. The problem with this approach is that knots often appear in the plot that have to be teased out before it will work. This usually means (and I'm speaking only for myself here) that a character is missing. If I were a cynical Word-God I could simply spin one up out of clay, give it a name, and blast it into life. But I don't have those divine powers. I'm more of a revealer, I think, than a creator. This often means I have to wait, and search, until I can discover who or what is missing from the constantly changing pages in my mind. They usually come to me when I'm not thinking about them too hard- sometimes I've merely misplaced them in another half finished story or half realized idea, and sometimes they're hidden within the contested piece itself, but when I finally find them and put them in their proper place it's like a fog lifting and a clear straight road for miles, no curves in sight.

Which comes first, the writer or the word?

2008-08-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not trying to be cute, I'm serious. Is the writer more important, or is it the work itself? Or to make the question less abstract and more concrete, is Dickens more important than A Tale of Two Cities, Kafka more important than The Trial or The Castle? Do you have a favorite author whose every new release you wait for? I've noticed that a lot of bestselling genre writers (or their estates) seem to have franchised their names out, so that a lot of their new books have either co authors or approved torch bearers for their brand of fiction. It's a trend I personally find disturbing, but I suppose it's been going on as long as civilization. Look at Homer. Even if he was just one person (which I doubt) his versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey aren't the ones we have today. They're an accretion of the works of several, maybe several dozen different authors. But no one wants an Illiad by anonymous when they can have one by Homer, essentially the god of poets. Now look at Shakespeare and the debate that lingers over whether he wrote the plays attributed to him. As a person with a strong interest in history, I understand the desire for correct knowledge, but if it turned out that Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Richard III were each written by five different playwrights, what real difference would it make? I had a friend, a very well educated and well read friend, who hated Shakespeare, despised his plays. At the time I was shocked (I still like the Bard quite a lot) but now I feel a glow of admiration for that opinion, mainly because it cuts through the glamour of the name and goes straight for the work in question.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not saying it's wrong to admire a particular author. I have a signed first edition of Tim Obrien's The Things They Carried on my bookshelf, alongside a signed first of Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, a 1929 copy of Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, and a first edition paperback (Ecco) of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. But the stories they've written are what I truly love, and I must confess a certain fetish value in my desire for certain first editions. By owning them I hope to get as close in time as possible to the moment they were conceived, both to be inspired and to better focus on my own vision. Of the still living authors that I admire, I have absolutely no desire to meet any of them.

Milk and cookies are a delicious way to start anything

2008-08-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

It's true, as I am proving to myself this very moment. Excuse me if I pause to savor the chocolaty toffee milkiness of my snack. I received the proofs for my book of poetry today (self published, not because it's bad but because it's poetry). There's a little work to be done on the cover, but other than that it's ready. It should be out a little beyond mid August. The title is Carnival of Vulgarities, and I modeled it, about seventy five percent consciously, as a verse homage to The Circus of Dr. Lao, a fantastic and fantastically strange novel by Charles Finney. Issue 2 of the Maple/Ash Review should be out sometime next week, with a story by Etgar Keret and a host of other unsung worthies such as . . . ahem. The book on lycanthropy that I am reading is panning out better than I hoped, providing me with both a useful quote and a variant on the spelling of werewolves (war-woolfes). But, as I have said, the story I'm preparing to begin has nothing to do with werewolves in any supernatural, or even medical (lycanthropy is a psychological disorder) sense. I generally stew on a story until my brain starts to steam a little; I usually don't begin to write a draft until I've worked out a good deal of it in my head. That sounds like a good recipe for procrastination, but it actually works for me most of the time. That said, I started feeling the heat from this embryonic story today, so it won't be long before I start writing it.

Today is one of those, What do I write? days

2008-08-02T01:36:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you know the kind. You've worked all day at whatever you do to pay the bills, or maybe you've slept half the day away and can't get two thoughts to occur sequentially for long enough to write them down. Or maybe you have a subject to write about, but it's just too slight to carry its own weight. That's my problem. You see, I am a huge fan of Robert Graves. He was a wonderful historical novelist, a great poet, a gifted classicist, and a bit of a nutjob, and I think he was the bees knees. During World War One, he served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers who, among other things, fought with distinction during the American Revolution and participated in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (Graves, being British, spells it Guildford). I'm pretty sure I read that he visited the battlefield when he was living for a short time in the United States. Well, that battlefield is in the northwest part of Greensboro, NC, my hometown and it's one of the lynchpins of the city's history. Besides that, it was always one of my favorite parks to visit as a child, and it still is a wonderful place to visit. And now, to top it all, because of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, I'm only three degrees separated from R. Graves. It's trivial, I know, but in a certain strange way it inspires me to strive a little harder toward artistry. So I guess it's not so slight a subject after all.

The Immortality of the Soul, by Henry More, pub. 1659

2008-07-31T00:59:00.000-07:00

Three hundred and forty nine years old and it looked great. I don't know if it had been re-bound, but the pages were perfect and supple. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing like an antique book that's well preserved. They're works of art, even the simplest of them. They make even the nicest modern tome look trashy. And think about it; this book was printed and bound only fifty three years past the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Franklin Roosevelt has been dead longer than that. Maybe I'm just geeking out, but it was incredible to pull this book out of the cardboard box it was sharing with its fellows and see just how old it was. And to handle something so old without supervision and with no constraints. Man, I live for strange moments like that. Of course, the woman who owned the book had no idea what she had, even after I told her. She thumbed through the pages like it was a cheap dictionary, then she stuck it in her purse and left. I was dumbfounded.

Feral Writer's Syndrome

2008-07-28T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have a touch of it, I think, more than a touch of it, since I just now made up the condition. In my entire life I've taken exactly one creative writing class, I've never read book on writing from cover to cover (I doubt I've read fifteen pages of any one book in the genre). The idea of a writing workshop makes my skin crawl, and my gut response to the letters MFA is WTF? NFW! And I'm fine with it. I love, Love, LOve, LOVe, LOVE the absolute freedom of writing and producing my own work. There is nothing more satisfying to me than knowing that I have created something that's mine from start to finish. Love it? Great. I did it. Hate it? Cool. It's mine and I take the blame. No second thoughts, no regrets. I don't believe in writing as a collaborative process, at least not for myself. Writing is an expressive art, ideally a synthesis of stylistic influences, aesthetic concerns, and a hopefully a damn good story. If I could afford it (and there's the catch, yes?) I would never think twice about the publishing industry and the commercial concerns behind it. I would just write and write, design my own books and cast them out into the universe. It would be incredibly satisfying, I think.

So, I'm floating in this amniotic cyber-bubble. . .

2008-07-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

and it's so relaxing that I'm wondering how I'll find anything worthwhile to write about. No sound. No air. No gravity. No worries. Another bubble filled with five or six polychromatic mermaids floats past and they wave, going up as I go down. I'm pretty sure we're in a giant lava lamp (why not?), and I hope my compartment crashes into theirs so we can hang out. But somehow, through some terrible quirk of lovecraftian physics- it is Cthulhu's lamp, after all- my bubble stretches and splits in half, casting me from my shelter and into the turbulence of the greater miniverse. And as I continue unprotected my descent into the fiery core of the naked bulb I see to my horror a great eye, pressed eagerly against the glass, and the tip of a delicate tentacle, just below. I am grateful to burn.
* * * *
I wasn't really sure what I was going to write, but this journal is for me as much as for anyone else, and it's important for me to write in it consistently. If I wasn't entertaining, I beg your forgiveness. On a different note, I just purchased an interesting book: A Lycanthropy Reader, Werewolves in Western Culture. It's for research for my next story, which isn't actually about werewolves at all.

Into the Void, or Throwin' It Out and Seein' if It Sticks

2008-07-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

I've just finished a short story, Clockwork Betty, that should be finding its way into the second issue of the Maple Ash Review, a local lit mag in Tempe. It should be available in August, either from mapleash.org or various venues around town. The story was a struggle to write, especially for how short it is, but ultimately it turned out the way I envisioned it.
But in the afterglow of completion, I'm always faced with a question. Is anyone going to care enough about this little piece of narrative to make it worth the effort? As I sit in front of the computer screen, tap tapping out strings of letters and words, I feel like a lone voyager, an internet castaway, tossing my thoughts out into the unknown, in the hope that someone will read them, yes, but also in fear. As of now, I'm pretty sure no one is reading this blog; it's too new. And maybe no one, or almost no one will ever read it. But there's just as much chance that it will be read, and either way the question still applies: Who cares? The answer, no matter if it regards this blog or a story, poem, or novel, is this same, and it's the only one that I think can carry me through what I plan to be a lifetime of writing: I care. I want you to read my work, but ultimately I want you to read what I have written for myself.

Why are you reading this?

2008-07-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Shouldn't you be writing instead of goofing off on the internet? Shouldn't I be working on my story instead of blogging? Pot, meet Kettle, I suppose. But my lentils are cooking, the baby's in bed, and I have to start this journal somewhere if I'm ever going to start it. So welcome stray reader and welcome straying writer. I'll be here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with whatever's on my mind. Thanks for dropping in.