Posts made in January, 2012

• “The covers of this book are too far apart.”

  Trusted Collaborator or Annoying Schoolmarm?

  Apologies in advance for what will be a short post. I really don’t have much to contribute to this thread, simply because I’ve only had one thing commercially published – my novel FAITH, published on January 3, the date of my first Night Bazaar post – and so I’ve only had one set of dealings with one editor, Jeremy Lassen. It was unexpectedly painless, but more of that later.

  Going back a stage, I should mention the edits suggested by my agent, Jason Yarn of Paradigm. They were very perceptive, and tightened the book while leaving most of it intact. Maybe Jason’s feel for what FAITH was about explains my (so far) only interaction with an editor.

  Jason had always been at pains to warn me about the editorial battles I’d have when (he always said When, not If) a publisher took my book. The edits a publisher would demand, he said, would make his edits look like the mere dabbings of a powder-puff. I was conscious that FAITH was already of more-than-average length, and that I was a totally unknown debut novelist. So when Nightshade came in, I mentally girded my loins and made ready to hear something like the remark used above as the title of this post (it’s attributed to Ambrose Bierce).

  And then the unexpected happened. I got a short note from Jeremy Lassen, via Jason. It began “Not much to cut here”, and went on to outline, in only two or three paragraphs, suggestions for enhancing the book in some very specific ways. His Editorial Letter, when I finally got it after a period of some anxiety, did no more and no less than his original note had said it would. Some of his suggestions actually involved additions, not deletions. All of them made perfect sense. The net effect was that FAITH was only about 500 words shorter.

  I’ve already thanked Jason and Jeremy privately, and I’m glad to repeat it publicly.

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• The floating ‘s,’ tables that stand, and how I got my commas back

  Trusted Collaborator or Annoying Schoolmarm?

  The first thing I must say about editing is that I have worked as an editor and copyeditor myself. I am accustomed to cutting out flab, reorganizing information into coherent strings , switching out “which” and “that,” and moving commas. When it comes to commas, every company I have ever worked for used the Chicago Manual of Style.  The guidelines therein have soaked through me and into my bones, so that when my victims argue against corrections I can respond with, “Chicago Manual 5.30 . . . Chicago Manual  5.33 . . .” holding up that icon of perfect consistency as proof of my goodwill.

  But that is not to say I enforce my preferences on everyone. I recommend the Chicago Manual to those who are struggling with punctuation and cannot get a grip on how to use it effectively. But it is the Manual of Style. It is not a rule book. Nothing is more tiresome than people on the internet telling each other what the “rules” are. One does not have to put a comma when a sentence has two different subjects , for example – but once one has chosen to do so, one should do so always. That is the only rule.

  And so it happened that when I turned The Emperor’s Knife over to Jo Fletcher Books I knew that a different style may be applied, and it was. I had taken great pride in my perfect punctuation, but it was all wrong, terribly wrong – completely at odds with all acceptable forms of human communication. (more…)

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• Member News

  Member News

  Mazarkis Williams: Check out what the Portland Book Review has to say about The Emperor’s Knife. Read an interview with Mazarkis at Fantasy Faction.

  John Love: John takes part in the Debut Author Challenge at the Qwillery.

  Will McIntosh: Tor reviews Hitchers. Justin at Staffer’s Musings interviews Will here.

  W.G. Marshall: Talks Enormity here. Read a fantastic review here.

  Stina Leicht: Announced as a Crawford Award finalist! Congratulations Stina.

  Jennifer Safrey: Tahlia Newland reviews the awesome Tooth and Nail!

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• Books that changed my life: My genre and non-genre favorites

  Reading Habits of a Writer

  I choose what to read differently since I started writing.  In my pre-writing days all that mattered was that I be engrossed in the story, and that it made me feel something.  Sometimes I was in the mood to feel warm and comfortable, sometimes scared, sometimes thoughtful, and I chose accordingly.   Nowadays, there’s another important consideration that goes into the mix: Will this book help my own writing?  There are books I feel I really have to read so I know what’s going on in the field, like each year’s Hugo and Nebula nominees.  If I’m working on a novel in a particular sub-genre, say a werewolf novel or a steampunk novel, I feel like I should read some of the notable books in that sub-genre.  Part of that is so I don’t repeat what’s already been done.  That’s a real concern–imagine if you wrote a cyberpunk novel and made your protagonist a pizza delivery guy.  Every review of your novel would begin by pointing out that your protagonist had the same vocation as the protagonist in Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, Snow Crash.  Not good.  So reading has become part of my job (though certainly a pleasant part of my job).                                             

  Of course certain books influenced my writing in another, more fundamental way: they led me to fall passionately in love with books, and to believe that nothing would be more satisfying, more worthwhile, than writing books.  Those are the books I’m going to focus on–the ones I re-read, the ones I wished would never end when I was reading them for the first time.  Until I turned 17 or so, nearly all of those books were genre.  I had no interest in books that didn’t contain at least one elf, dinosaur, alien, or apocalyptic plague.  Since then my fiction reading has run about 50-50, genre versus mainstream. 

  Here are the ones that bowled me over and changed my life:

   Genre

   Watership Down by Richard Adams.  I read Watership Down for the first time when I was thirteen, and I fell deeply, passionately in love with an adult book for the first time.  It’s an epic fantasy, structured like many epic fantasies with a journey, a hero, and companions who each have some ability that will prove crucial to the success of their quest.  Only, they’re all rabbits.  The only weapons they have are their teeth, yet there are heart-pounding battles here.

  Pet Semetary by Stephen King.  Pet Sematary is the first book that truly terrified me.  I read it when I was in college, and I remember putting it down late one night, wanting to read more but too scared to continue.  I’ve seen movies that have scared me that badly, but scaring someone with words alone?  I think that’s a masterful feat .

   Inverted World by Christopher Priest.  This novel has such a wonderfully strange premise: A city pulled along by the residents on a track they must constantly entend.  If the residents don’t keep the city moving at the correct pace, very strange things happen.  It’s sort of like Stephen King’s The Long Walk, only they don’t just have to keep themselves moving, they have to carry their entire city along with them.   It was a premise that just blew my mind with its originality, and then the novel itself delivered on the promise of that initial strangeness.

   Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop.  I think I’ve read most of the baseball-related novels written since the 1950s.  There aren’t many.  I wish there were more, because I loved Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural, The Southpaw.   (I loved them so much that I wrote one of my own.  It’s the one novel I’ve written–so far–that’s languishing on my hard drive.  More on that in my next guest-blog.)  Most of all, though, I loved Brittle Innings.  It’s a gorgeous book, with rich characters, an evocative setting, a compelling plot with a wonderful surprise, and baseball. 

  Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre.  This one is just so lyrical and beautiful.  The imagery has stayed with me for years.

  Non-genre

   Straight Man, by Richard Russo.  Part of the appeal of Straight Man is that it’s about life as a university professor, and that’s been my day job for the past twenty years.  What I really love about it, though, is that it’s really, really funny while remaining realistic.  It must be damned hard to write a funny novel, especially one that doesn’t stray into outrageousness or parody, because there seem to be so few of them.    I’ve loved all of Russo’s novels.  Bridge of Sighs was also wonderful, although unlike Straight Man it’s not the least bit funny.

   High Fidelity by Nick Hornby.  I have to admit, I saw the film first, and hunted down the novel afterward. That’s all right, though, because the film stuck closely to the novel, right down to borrowing dialogue word-for-word, so they’re nearly interchangeable in a sense.  I often write about love and romantic relationships.  Even when I’m writing about something else, love and relationships seem to work their way into the plot in some fairly central way.  Hornby’s novel is a wonderful study on modern love from the male perspective.  His character is immature and self-centered, yet likeable despite these vicious flaws, and that character worked his way under my skin in a powerful way.  When I set out to write a novel about a young man seeking love while civilization collapsed around him (Soft Apocalypse), I couldn’t help but be aware that in some sense I was propelling a Rob Gordon-esque character into the future, where he would step around corpses while angsting about his love life.

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.  A Pulitzer prize winning novel about comic book artists and writers during the Golden Age of comic books?  Oooh, baby.  I collected comics as a kid, ran a rare comics business when I was in my teens, so this one had me from the first paragraph.

  The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman.  With apologies to Dan Millman, I didn’t find this a well-written book.  It’s clunky; in places plot and dialogue are wincingly hokey.  For me, though, that didn’t matter, because the book has such heart.  Millman writes with such passionate conviction about the path of the warrior-sage, and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, that the subtitle of the novel–A Book that Changes Lives–isn’t as hyperbolic as it sounds, or at least it wasn’t for me when I read it in my twenties.  In my novel Soft Apocalypse, one of characters happens upon a book about living the life of the warrior-sage, and though I changed the title, this was the book I had in mind.

  Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.  Or anything by Kurt Vonnegut, really.  The man knew how to make reading fun.  He tossed around fascinating, irreverent, quirky ideas and characters in a manner that couldn’t help but have an impact on how you thought about the world.  Once, when I was nineteen, I stood in line to hear Vonnegut speak.  I got there early so I would get a good seat, then discovered that I was in the ticket-holders line, and was supposed to purchase my ticket before getting in that line.  The tickets were sold out.  I’m still devastated.

  If I had space, I’d add something by Pat Conroy, and Tom Wolfe to this list.  Lord Valentine’s Castle should be on my genre list, and Hyperion. 

  As a writer, one of the perils of reading others’ novels is the risk of becoming frozen by envy and  despair, because you feel as if you’ll never be capable of writing so brilliantly.  When this happens to me, I try to step back and remind myself that it’s not a competition.  There’s room for lots of books on the shelves, and how cool to have one of mine up on the same shelves as these, maybe pressing up against something by Vonda McIntyre.

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• W.G. Marshall talks about Enormity

  Member News

  http://douglascobb.wordpress.com/w-g-marshall-interview-author-interviews/

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• Hurts so good

  Reading Habits of a Writer
  Well, this is just ridiculous.

  As I write this, I’m looking up at a wall of cluttered bookshelves suspended precariously over the tiny computer nook in my office (otherwise known as my living room), and I’m feeling a bit like Sophie in Sophie’s Choice.

  Which is one of the books up there.

  This is a nice little library, but it’s just a tiny fraction of the books that have been important to me in my life. So how am I supposed to pick favorites? They’re all good! Most are older works, because I formed the strongest attachments when I was younger, and also because they’re the ones that have stood the test of time. Plus I don’t have room for any more. New books filter through, joining the temporary stacks on the coffee table before being donated to the Salvation Army. I don’t have an e-reader…yet.

  As a writer, I find it necessary to constantly refer back to these books, the way that priests must consult their holy texts – religiously (rimshot!). Seriously, though, these are sacred books to me, because I am the product of their teachings. They literally (literally – ha!) created me.

  Hmm, what do we have here…let’s see…

  There’s fiction and nonfiction, genre and non-genre, poetry, plays, and prose, sheet music, magazines, comic books – all manner of printed stuff and random weird knickknacks. Happy Meals toys, sea urchins, rocks. Everything is arranged more or less by size (what is alphabetizing but a form of Socialist groupthink?) in order to give the rows a reasonably neat appearance (fail!). The trick is finding anything.

  What were we looking for? Oh yeah: fiction – both genre and non-genre.

  It’s a pretty random mix. Many of my must-read authors are represented by only one sample of their work, often but not always their most famous:

  HUCKLEBERRY FINN in the case of Mark Twain, WHITE JACKET for Melville, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES for Bradbury, THE GRAPES OF WRATH for Steinbeck, GATEWAY for Pohl, JAILBIRD for Vonnegut, HEART OF DARKNESS for Conrad, DEAD SOULS for Gogol, A ROOM WITH A VIEW for Forster, JUDE THE OBSCURE for Hardy, THE STAND for King, HARD TIMES for Dickens, STARSHIP TROOPERS for Heinlein, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE for Burgess, 1984 for Orwell, ELMER GANTRY for Sinclair Lewis, I AM LEGEND for Matheson, JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR for Daniel Defoe, and so on. The Majors.

  My collection has been torn down and rebuilt many times over the years, but I’ve tried to preserve at least one example of each important author. I haven’t succeeded: I’m embarrassed to say I don’t at present own even one book by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Kafka, William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Dostoyevski, Homer, Larry Niven, Harry Harrison, Tolstoy, Mishima, Hemingway, James Cain, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Berger, or scores of others that I admire and think essential.

  Actually, some of the more obscure authors in my pantheon are better represented than the giants:  I have several books by morbidly funny Irish author Patrick McGinley, and almost the full complement of Charles Portis.

  And not to suggest that Robert Graves is so obscure, but I’ve got both his Roman epics, I CLAUDIUS and CLAUDIUS THE GOD, as well as a complete Nathaniel West, Tolkien’s greatest hits, and a bunch of stuff by Jack Kerouac, including his 2-volume SELECTED LETTERS, which is a great help in coping with the doldrums of writing life.

  It makes it easier if an author wrote a bunch of books, but only one that I really loved (or happened to read), such as with INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, CATCH-22, JAWS, THE EXORCIST, ON THE BEACH, CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, WATERSHIP DOWN, LORD OF THE FLIES, MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, REMAINS OF THE DAY, HEART OF DARKNESS, DELIVERANCE, DUNE, PERFUME, SGT. GETULIO, DON QUIXOTE, THE MAGUS, LOLITA, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, THE SHELTERING SKY, DRACULA…

  Enough – stop!

  Phew. But you see my point: I’ve barely scratched the surface here, focusing only what’s literally within arm’s reach, and already the list of my favorite novels has become unwieldy. Yet to arbitrarily trim some out would be pointless – if anything, the list should be a lot longer. Not that I have the energy.

  Looking at this list, it occurs to me that the element connecting many of these books is an underlying (or even explicit) sense of humor. However dark the subject, my favorite books tend to be kind of funny. Kafka thought of his books as comedies (he couldn’t stop laughing as he read passages to his friends), and I guess that’s what I seek most in literature. Black comedy. Satire. Tragedy so grim one can only laugh.

  I admit to being somewhat jaded. I’m not big on sentimentality, on comforting illusions of Good and Evil, and neither are most of these authors. They see life as the bleak and wonderful mystery that it is, and help us to not take it quite so seriously. That to me is the highest goal of art.

  Thanks for reading!

  –W.G. Marshall

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• Without Whom

  Reading Habits of a Writer

  This week’s Night Bazaar topic is “My Favorite Genre and Non-Genre Books.” I’m tweaking that just a little so I can talk about my favorite genre and non-genre writers, and their influence, for good or ill, upon me and my writing. These are the writers, in other words, without whom I would not be the ink-stained wretch who stands before you today.

  Fritz Leiber – Believable Heroes and Lyrical Mischief

  Scouring my local used bookstore for more fantasy after I had devoured the Lord of the Rings, my twelve-year-old self discovered a book called Swords and Deviltry. In it I found a pair of heroes who were not martyrs to hopeless quests, who did not have great destinies, and who thought as often with their privates as they did with their heads. I was seduced, utterly.

  As much as I liked the epic story and noble emotions of the Lord of the Rings, the mixture of the fantastic and the mundane that I found in Fritz Leiber’s work felt true to me like Tolkien’s never did. Fafhrd and Grey Mouser were people I knew, no different than the dreamers and big talkers I hung out with, the “get rich quick” pals you had to bail out after every failed scheme. These were people whose motivations and emotions I understood. If I met Aragorn in the Prancing Pony we’d be out of things to talk about in five minutes. I’d be bullshitting with Fafhrd and Grey Mouser in the Silver Eel all night.

  At the same time, these two regular guys lived in a wild world of swords, sorcerers, towers, demons, jewels, skulls, and dangerous, delicious women – all the pulpy fantasy trappings that my perpetually adolescent heart has always craved. It was the best of both worlds, and described with the delirious, dizzying prose poetry of a man drunk on words. No other writer I have read has put pictures of his places and people in my mind with such wit and painterly grace.

  Because of Leiber, my heroes are more human than iconic, and my prose sometimes a little tipsy.

  P.G. Wodehouse – Comic Complications and a Limited Palette

  You would think that the kid who wanted more blood and sex and believable heroes wouldn’t have had much interest in a world where even couples rarely kiss, where a cartoon knock on the head is as violent as it gets, and the characters are more comic archetype than real people, but I did. (more…)

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• at the heart of all machinery a button, a coiled spring

  Reading Habits of a Writer

  I have gotten flack from video game players for comparing the popular Elder Scrolls series of titles from Bethesda as golf. Imagine, if you will, going for a walk in a lovely, perfectly-sculpted park. While there, engage in stiff, uncomfortable conversation with various folks you know and do not know, who are probably there, in part, for the networking. You’re swinging your weapon in a surprisingly simple, yet impossibly difficult manner to achieve goals that are constantly measured.

  Elder Scrolls games are like golf. Generally, if you like golf, you might enjoy an Elder Scrolls game.

  This is, of course, my opinion, and one that fans of the games do not appreciate.

  Still, I mention this not only to irk the fans of the Elder Scrolls titles, but to keep it as a handy reference when I talk about the two sides to the question of the relationship between different books.

  Fiction creates an alternate reality in the brain. It is not real reality. It is a speculation on what is real. All fiction is speculative, yet also none of it has to be.  In face, often books that do not appear connected to each other can become very connected, indeed, when the art direction and trappings of genre are set aside for a moment, and the individual characters are given an opportunity to be exactly what they are.

  I recently read an excellent book by Steven Milhauser, “The King in the Tree” which houses three novellas. The first novella, “Revenge” was a powerful exercise in narrow, first-person narration, in a specific format of showing a potential homebuyer a house. At first this exercise in narrative voice feels like a series of domestic scenes that will, the reader hopes, turn into something far more sinister. Oh, it does. This could be a ghost story. This could be a mere murder story. This could be a domestic thriller. There’s so many things it could be, because at the center of the words on the page is a woman and just her voice, and just her point of view. If I may borrow again from my metaphor above, as Elder Scrolls=Golf, imagine looking at that equation from the opposite side of the metaphor, so to speak. The activities are presented, and no frame is placed upon them. The activities that make up murder mysteries are present, as well as ghost stories, domestic dramas, thrillers. All the activities are present. Yet, by focusing in on the voice of one woman, one character in this macabre novella, the possibility of place in all sorts of other genres remain present.

  I shall, then, think of this story in comparison to another haunted house. James Patrick Kelly has recently released some of his earlier work in his own eZine, called Strangeways, and in the inaugural issue, the work of fiction entitled “The Propogation of Light in a Vacuum” involves a man living with the ghost of his wife, sort of. You see, past the speed of light things get a little… well, strange. It’s not a perfect foil to the Milhauser story in many ways, for there is no “revenge” plot, and the infidelity that occurs happens with a quantum quirk that becomes sort of like a ghost of the narrator’s wife. He knows it’s not her, though. Early on, he calls her a hallucination. She speaks, too, in parentheticals that sort of reinforce the idea that she’s an hallucination, for if he is the voice of the narrator, and her voice is present as an aside… Anyway, he’s just moving faster than light on a ship in space. He’s experiencing a very similar claustraphobic ghost story to Milhauser’s jilted librarian. She, too, if it is a ghost story, is eternally haunted by the same woman. In Kelly’s tale, the narrator struggles trying to figure out what to do with himself, much like a ghost would if it had a choice.

  Still, these are both stories where a tightly-narrated, ambiguous narrative is driven by a single, claustraphobic lens into a space. On the hand, there is a spaceship, and on the other there is a house in some small college town. The end comes as something of a surprise. resolving the action while also maintaining a strong sense of ambiguity. There is infidelity, of a sort. These stories, then, are closely related to each other, then, aren’t they? At least as close as the latest Elder Scrolls game and a rousing round of golf?

  Unlike both golf and Elder Scrolls, I didn’t have to put on ridiculous attire to get through the excellent works of fiction, neither daedric armor nor those hilarious faux-Scottish checkered pants.

  What matters in games and in story is not the art direction, but the fundamental narrative act at the heart. Whether you agree with me or not about the Elder Scrolls being a fancied up form of Golf, Call of Duty being Tag for people who are too cool to play Tag, and etc., you can, I hope, at least agree with me that at the heart of the both stories there is a driving similarity in at least one thing: both James Patrick Kelly and Steven Milhauser are masters of the written word. Both collections of stories, and the individual stories I mentioned, come highly-recommended.

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• True Love

  Reading Habits of a Writer

  They say the key to success and happiness is to do what you truly love — whatever that is and they’re right, but love is tricky as we all know. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between infatuation and love. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?) So it is that it will come as no surprise to most of you (hopefully) that writers read. Seems fairly obvious when you think about it. Artists enjoy looking at art so much that they pretty much live in it 24/7. Musicians are the same. I promise Jim Hensen loved every little thing about puppetry — even the things that made him just a bit crazy or frustrated. Writers, real writers, are the same way about writing. We love good writing* with every fiber of our being. So, again I say, writers are readers. If you’re wondering if you’re a writer, I’ll give you a hint. If you read, if you have a book or a poem or a short story crammed in your pocket/handbag most of the time, if you talk about stories at least a couple of times a day, if you glory in the feel of paper bound in book form and are thrilled with the texture of the cover, if you’ve ever given up lunch in order to buy a book or an eBook, if you’re interested in everything about publishing, even the bits that make you want to scream, you’ve got the heart of a writer. If you don’t, you just don’t.

  All writers have their writer heros. I’ve a long list, and it grows every year. Ray Bradbury tops it because he was the first to teach me the astounding beauty of language and story working together as a whole. Charles Dickens showed me how story can be used to create change. Madeleine L’Engle made me fall in love with science fiction. Mark Twain taught me about the power of humor. From Charlotte Brontë I learned the joy of words and how to use layers of meaning in every word. Kurt Vonnegut taught me the importance of rhythm and of positive and negative space in writing. Stephen King illustrated the flawless use of gritty reality entwined with fantasy to get reader buy-in. Charles de Lint taught me wonder and spirit. Adrian McKinty helped to teach me Irish dialog. So did Gerard Brennan and a whole host of other Irish crime writers. (Speaking of dialog, I feel I have to mention Joss Whedon as one of my favorite dialog teachers.) There are many, many others. I’m always looking for new instructors. It’s important. There’s so much to learn. One of the most amazing and frustrating things about writing is that you’ll never learn everything there is to know, and one of the most worrisome is that it’s so easy to forget your lessons.

  What am I reading now? (more…)

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• Everything old is new again

  Reading Habits of a Writer

  Recently I lost a bet with a friend, and now I have to go four months without buying a new book.

  Per the agreement, I can only read the unread books I already own. Or go to the library.

  My friend did this because he knows the money I drop on books weekly. He’s seen the number of empty Amazon boxes on my back porch. He’s seen me at the bookstore, juggling five paperbacks and a hardcover that I just have to have because I can’t wait a whole year until it comes out in cheap version. I mean, everyone but me will have read it by then.

  I’m a writer, I reasoned to him. I have to buy new books. It’s, like, my job.

  Sure, you can buy new books, he said. In April.

  (more…)

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