Category: Words In

Somehow I wandered off and forgot to come back

On By griffinwordsIn Blogging, Words InLeave a comment

That seems to be how things go here, with me. I blog a lot for a while, then one day I forget, and a month goes by with no posts. OK, then.

What have I been up to? Lots of time off work, after saving most of my vacation for the end of the year. Dividing time between recreation (beach trips, mountain trips for snowshoeing, video games), a little bit of effort designing CD covers, lots of writing time, and a fair amount of reading.

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Hand’s collection Saffron and Brimstone, which is completely fantastic so far — poetic, moving and yet fanciful. At the same time, I’m reading Joseph S. Pulver’s Blood Will Have Its Season, a completely singular story collection, stylistically wild, with as much energy and “juice” as anything I’ve read in a long time. Reading Pulver’s story is like biting down on a live electric line… zzzzt!

Both these collections are inspiring, and both have things to teach, though in completely different ways. It’s great to discover new (to me) writers like this, who do what they do so well, whose styles are so personal, even idiosyncratic at times.

For some reason, I’ve never read story collections the way you’d read a novel — straight through to the end. My preferred way to read them is one story at a time, preferable in a single sitting, and moving between books as the mood suits me, the way you  might sit down to listen to music and play Metallica when I’m in that mood, then transition to Lustmord, then Brian Eno or Robert Rich, taking in a whole series of moods or flavors. Reading someone like Pulver in particular can be such a strong jolt, I’m not sure I could read this thing all the way through without a break. Sort of like living on nothing but tequila and jalapeno poppers for a week… yikes! In short bursts, though it’s tremendously inspiring to read this kind of feverish, all-out, slightly deranged writing. Even reading a few pages of this makes me want to jump up and write something. Pulver just released a new story collection this month, and I’ll have to order that soon. 

Hand’s book, on the other… erm… hand, is made up of much longer pieces (50+ pages, some of them), so it reads a bit more like a novel. Still, I enjoy taking this in piece by piece, with breaks in between. I love the realistic, literary quality of her storytelling. When fantastic elements arise, their impact is that much stronger because they seem to be intruding upon a life something like our own. Almost a polar opposite to Pulver’s work, Hand’s is restrained, delicately understated. I discovered her work in the “Poe’s Children” anthology edited by Peter Straub, which includes the story “Cleopatra Brimstone” which is also in Saffron and Brimstone. That piece is one of the most impressive pieces of literary dark fantasy (Straub calls it “horror” but I’m not quite sure) I’ve read recently, and she’s another writer I’ll definitely want to investigate. Her novel Generation Loss just arrived here, and that sounds fantastic.

I’ll try not to wander too far off, or forget again about this place.
 

A book worth a look: Occultation by Laird Barron

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Usually when I finish a new book, I mention it in this blog and give a quick statement about it. If it’s a big classic of SF I might write a full reaction and review for my “SF Academy” series.

Just recently I finished a collection I enjoyed more than anything I’ve read in some time, and as it’s a work by a relatively new writer (or let’s say “emerging” rather than new, as he’s been at it a while), I wanted to make a point of highlighting it.

Occultation is the second collection by Laird Barron, a native of Alaska who now lives near Olympia, Washington, and who can also be found here on Livejournal. You might’ve noticed I said “collection” and not “short story collection,” and that’s because many of the pieces here are well into novella territory. Six of the nine stories are over 10,000 words and one, the masterful “Mysterium Tremendum,” is nearly 25,000 words. That’s about half a Great Gatsby worth!

The longer format gives Barron plenty of room to develop his characters and settings in detail, and give us a sense of real individuals and actual relationships being affected by the onset of weird and macabre events. In “Mysterium Tremendum,” mentioned above, a group of four men explore wild, vacant land in Washington with the help of a dark guidebook they encounter. Events turn increasingly strange as they come to understand some of the warnings they ignored.

In “–30–,” which may be my favorite thing in the book, two researchers observe wild animals in a remote wildland, again set somewhere near the vicinity of the author’s own territory. The two researchers are influenced by their isolation, as well as by things they find in their surroundings.

In stories like these, Barron so gradually shifts the reality of these characters that we barely notice the change in their circumstances, from a reality like that which we inhabit, to something very different, and truly dark.

The shorter pieces in the collection are worthwhile too. The title story, which observes a young married couple drinking, drugging and sexing their way through a desert vacation, packs quite a punch despite its brevity.

I have a hard time remembering the last time I read a single-author story collection (not counting career-summations or “best-of” books by established greats) that was so solid all the way through. I have just as hard a time naming more than a handful of currently-active writers whose new work I anticipate with more eagerness than Laird Barron’s.

What I really Meant to Say

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I fired up ScribeFire and posted those two quick entries just to test it out, but I forgot I actually had something I meant to blog about.

I’m about halfway through Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, and though it started off fairly well, I’m finding it increasingly dull. None of the characters matter to me at all, and I feel I only barely know the two main characters. The rest are just a series of names, often without a single defining characteristic (aside from the senile old coot who thinks his legs have turned to glass for some reason). There are long stretches of political back-and-forth without apparent consequence. The scenes of military maneuvering and battle have a few nifty tech tidbits mixed in, but otherwise fairly flat, as if the outcome is always a foregone conclusion.

Am I nuts here? This fucking book was nominated for a Hugo award, but I don’t get it. Not a terrible book, but sort of a C-plus so far, as far as I can tell. Anybody out there who’s read Singularity Sky and can point out some angle I’m missing?

SF Academy 08 – Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

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I’ve been a reader of John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, since long before I had read any of his work. The first thing of his I encountered was his installment in the five-author collection Metatropolis, where I found Scalzi’s humorous, breezy blogging style carried over to his narrative fiction. Old Man’s War is similar, despite mostly focusing on a more serious subjects such as war and colonialist expansion.

scalzi-oldmanwar

John Scalzi – Old Man’s War

I don’t think I’ve seen a single mention of this book that didn’t refer to Robert Heinlein’s work, most often Starship Troopers, and after reading this, it’s not hard to see why. It really is fairly straightforward in its influence, but that similarity never makes Old Man’s War seem derivative in any negative sense. The setup is simple: on Earth a couple of centuries from now, 65 year olds have the option of signing a contract to join the Colonial Defense Force, so that when they turn 75 they undergo some kind of mysterious physical transformation process to become fighting machines, and leave Earth forever to bounce around the galaxy, fighting various weird aliens for control of habitable planets.

The CDF initiates discover the nature of the process that allows them to go from elderly to fighting form, and as in Starship Troopers, we follow the new recruits from training to initial skirmishes, and watch them lose friends to the inevitable effects of war. We also learn more about various interesting elements of the CDF, including the “Ghost Brigades” (title and subject of the first sequel to Old Man’s War).

Scalzi is a stronger storyteller than a stylist, but the characters and dialogue are entertaining and likable. I find myself ready to follow along in this series and learn more about the CDF and their various interesting technologies (a “Skip Drive” for example, which is more a quantum reality-shift device than a true drive), especially the “ghost brigades.” Scalzi has created a great premise, and even if I hadn’t come to this book so late that multiple sequels had already appeared, it would have been plain enough to me that subsequent development could definitely be done in this story’s world.

Overall, an enjoyable, well-executed work, and one that makes me want to read more by Scalzi, both in and out of this series.

H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon

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Following up on something I’ve mentioned before, which is the upcoming H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon event coming up here in Portland, October 1, 2 and 3rd. The promotional poster was just released.

hplff2010

Lena and I will be attending all three days of the festival, and I’m looking forward to checking out various bits of Lovecraft film, attending some readings and having a chance to meet a lot of kooky Lovecraft-loving filmmakers, writers, artists and editors.

The bad news is, they’ve announced this will be the festival’s last year in Portland, so if you live near enough to attend and you’ve been thinking “I’ve been meaning to check that out one of these years,” you’d better make it this year!

Semi-Serious Comment on Punctuation

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Kottke recently linked to a video of Kurt Vonnegut, the great writer-character, and he talked about the semicolon. I love this quote:

“Don’t use semicolons. They stand for absolutely nothing. They are transvestite hermaphrodites. They are just a way of showing off. To show that you have been to college.”

The semicolon has drifted out of contemporary usage, and I feel generally where a semicolon is used, a period or a comma might work better. I find the semicolon has an archaic feel, and those writers for whom the semicolon works well tend to be dead and buried, or else taking on an intentionally ornate, old-fashioned, or throwback style.

Elmore Leonard is handy with them, and uses them a lot, but the guy was writing and publishing novels before my parents were born.

Stephen King uses a ton of semicolons, but he also does a lot of nonstandard technical stuff. He’s a big-time Elmore Leonard worshipper.

I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt with semicolons if their voice is strong and their prose is unusual. I’m halfway through Laird Barron’s collection Occultation (fantastic work, review forthcoming) and he’s got a slew of ’em in there. His writing also includes all manner of unorthodox technical stuff, though — dialog set off not by opening and closing quotes but by an emdash at the beginning, or short paragraphs containing dialog by multiple, different speakers.

Generally I’d say the semicolon bothers me less when the writer shows a confident, slightly experimental, maybe even baroque approach to stringing words together. In the middle of plain vanilla prose, however, the semicolon stands out in just the way Vonnegut describes. Beginning writers, stick with the comma and the period. It’s easy enough to remember what those guys do, roughly corresponding to the yellow and the red traffic lights, respectively.

Recent Reading: Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

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Recently read Pretty Monsters, a collection of short stories by Kelly Link.  She’s one of the most interesting writers working in the fantasy, sf, horror, weird and slipstream/interstitial loose conglomeration of genres.

This is Link’s third story collection (she has not yet written a novel, though her stories are acclaimed), and her first geared toward a “young adult” audience.  It incorporates stories from her first two collections, in fact my favorite stories here were already familiar to me from her Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen collections.

The stories here waver between a slightly disturbing dreamlike weirdness reminiscent of David Lynch’s films, and a more whimsical, and at times humorous, fairy tale quality.  Link’s stories consistently have a casual, friendly narrative voice, and that’s a big part of their appeal.  It’s a lot like having a funny friend tell you a really interesting, weird story by a campfire.  There is a great deal of imagination and invention on display in these stories, and if any of the above sounds appealing, I’d definitely give Kelly Link a try….

But I’d start with one of her first two books instead, unless you’re a young reader.

Short Visit to No-Man’s-Land

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This weekend was one long, grueling expedition to a no-man’s-land of hard, dirty labor. Lena and I helped in the clean-up of a house vacated by a family member who died some time ago, which other family members are preparing to sell. It involved a lot of dust, mouse droppings, rusty tools, and boxes and shelves full of broken parts for long-vanished objects.

A plea to old men everywhere: be kind to your family members, and sort through your own shit while you’re still alive. There’s really no reason to keep fifty cans of motor oil in various grades that don’t work with your car, your lawn mower, your chainsaw or your wood chipper. Really, who better to throw that shit away than you, like before the garbage truck comes on Monday?

My hands ache, my wrists ache, my shoulders ache, my back aches most of all, and I have three giant, gruesome bug bites on my neck. Monster movie stuff. Lena ripped up her legs and arms with blackberry vines, and my aunt cut her own leg with electric hedge trimmers, thus winning the injury sweepstakes.

Done with that, though, and back to real life. For one thing, delving into Kelly Link, and back in love with her again. The novella “Magic for Beginners” I’d read before, as it’s the title story in her second collection, my favorite of her books. Imagine if Haruki Murakami and Russell Edson got together and had a love baby (maybe with a little Donald Barthelme mixed in for spice). If that child was a grown-up woman, that would be Kelly Link!

Now I’m into “The Faery Handbag” which is another story from the Magic for Beginners collection, and which is fantastical and at the same time, fantastic. Of course, so far the two stories I’ve flat-out loved in Pretty Monsters, I’d already read in her earlier book.

I have a good list of stuff I want to blog about so I’ll try to knock one of those out each day this week. I’m just so glad to be done cleaning out old dusty houses!

Plot or Not?

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Kelly Link is one of my favorite writers of weird fiction, slipstream, fantasy, horror, or whatever you want to call her stories. Her voice is always unique and her stories are consistently fresh and surprising. Some have criticized her work as essentially plotless, and that’s arguably true. Often the stories are more about observation and atmosphere, frequently surreal and dreamlike, and less about what happens. She’s always reminded me of David Lynch, but with a slightly more whimsical, childlike viewpoint.

I just started Link’s third story collection, Pretty Monsters, and came across a more conventional plot-driven story. It’s called “The Wizards of Perfil,” and it reads like first this happened and then this and then another thing. Just a bunch of events strung together. It ended up being not only my least favorite Kelly Link story, but might be the least compelling story I’ve read in the past year.

Not trying to pick on Kelly Link here. She’s still brilliant, and if she never wrote another story she’d go down as one of the most important genre writers of the past decade.

My point is that a creative person with an idiosyncratic approach that works ought to just keep following their path. If you’ve had success writing stories that emphasize mood and voice and attitude rather than plot — and those stories win awards and convince publishers to ask you for more stories — I’d say go with your strengths.

How many wonderfully weird musicians, writers and filmmakers have tripped all over themselves in a swerve toward the conventional? Don’t!

In and Out of Genre

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Following on from minutes-ago post about going from Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road…

A reasonable first reaction would be to say that these two are about as far apart as two writers could be. The sun-bleached lines of McCarthy, which manage to be terse even when they are poetic, stand in dramatic contrast to the casual, slang-filled conversational style of King. One is less, one is more-more-more.

On the other hand, both are quirky with punctuation, and both frequently construct sentences to feel like internal stream-of-consciousness.

Beyond that, there’s another similarity I would like to discuss. Both have written genre fiction (McCarthy dabbling in SF or apocalyptic horror this once, King obviously working in horror most of the time) that appeals widely to readers outside those genres. This ability is rare enough — and make no mistake, most genre writers very much want their work to appeal to readers outside the genre ghetto — to bear consideration. Why is Stephen King’s work so popular among readers who never read horror except King’s work, and more often read mainstream books or thrillers? Why do critics treat The Road with the same respect they give All the Pretty Horses or Blood Meridian, rather than saying “I’ll pass on this one — he’s just writing end-of-the-world shit?”

Despite the stylistic gap between these two writers, I think the explanation for trans-genre appeal is the same in both cases, and also explains writers like Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Atwood, and even Tolkien reaching way beyond the usual genre boundaries (in some cases to the point they are no longer considered genre writers even when what they’re doing plainly uses all the tropes). That is, the placement of the characters’ emotional drama at the forefront of the story in such a way that we are tangled in their experience. We experience their fears and hopes, and directly project ourselves into their place.

This seems a simple matter — all writers know they’re supposed to engage the reader on an emotional level — yet very rarely does that engagement occur in such an intimate way as with these writers. It’s about putting the “people stuff” ahead of the “trans-warp tachyon drive” or “vampire/zombie plague” or “Venusian cloud colony” bullshit. Most genre writers think they’re doing this, but they’re not. That’s because most genre writers get their start out of a love for the tropes and McGuffins, and not out of pure storytelling. They may try to figure out how to write relationships and emotions, but it’s not what drives them.

I haven’t read enough about McCarthy to know if this is true, but from reading him I’d say he’s strongly influenced by Hemingway and Faulkner (which probably says a lot about why I’m so smitten with him, because those are two of my favorites). Obviously King has more roots within horror than without, but I think it’s telling that his favorite writer is Elmore Leonard, and not Lovecraft or Machen or Blackwood or Shirley Jackson. Leonard is another writer whose primary focus is individual fears and desires. It’s incidental that his characters are murderers and thieves, con artists and detectives.

Sometimes a genre writer wants to break out, give themselves a shot at appealing to a broader readership, outside their own genre. Sometimes they try a different style to which they’re not really suited , such as Greg Bear writing an awful supernatural thriller with minimal SF content, Dead Lines. I think a better idea would be to focus on writing stuff with a more human appeal.

Lots of people love Friday Night Lights who don’t care about high school football. Normally I don’t like Westerns, yet I loved Deadwood crazy-much, because the characters and conflicts were so compelling. To my mind, the foremost goal of any writer should be to make their work appeal to people who normally dislike the subject matter or genre.