A sudden bigger project

*sigh* Once you start drawing yourself reference maps -- you're probably moving out of short-story lengths.

Stuff I hate (part 1 of a series)

Finding I left kleenex in a pocket after doing laundry.

"Napoleon ... with dragons!"

"The American Revolution ... with dragons!"

"Apollo 13 ... with dragons!"

"The Holocaust ... with warlocks!"

"The Cold War ... with aliens!"

I hate video blogs

And most audio posts too. Example: Slate V. I keep seeing rss headlines for Slate articles I think I'd like to read but turn out to be videos. I don't want to load a video, or put my headphones on just to see something I may or may not be interested in. You can scan video or audio the way you scan text. I think Seth Godin blogged some time ago about this being the reason vBlogs and podcasts will not supplant text. But vblogs are popping up everywhere, and that's annoying.

Russell Davis

is running for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and his platform is here. In addition to his writing resume, he seems to bring a great deal of publishing, business and non-profit experience to the table. I especially like his statements about the need to enhance SFWA's reputation in the publishing industry.
[via Scalzi via Buckell.] [Err ... I'm mean via Nebula-nominee Buckell! Congrats Toby!]

Mallory's review

From a blog review of Talebones #35:

The second story featured in the magazine is Landing Day by Michael Canfield. The editorial preview for this story says, "This story attempts to marvel at the yawning gap between our nobler and our most ignoble desires." Quite frankly I remain a bit troubled by the quantifier of 'attempts' but then I can support the word as well because after two attempts to read this story, I eventually gave it a pass. The story didn't hook me and I gave it two solid tries.

SF Observer Review of "Landing Day"

of "Landing Day" in Talebones #35 from SF Observer. Follow the reviewer's advice and order a subscription!

[Landing Day] is also heavily character-driven, following an astronaut and her criminal father in juxtaposed scenes on Earth (him) and landing on an alien planet for the first time (her). It explores how people react to – and change with – the catastrophic events that they face.

An enjoyable tale, well written and digging into the psyche of both father and daughter. Canfield avoids the all-too familiar tendency of some SF writers to dwell too much on the science/tech side of the astronaut daughter, instead sticking with the character-oriented nature that’s this story’s strength.

Tangent Review: "Landing Day" Talebones #35

Tangent Review by Michelle Lee:

With “Landing Day” by Michael Canfield, the issue jumps from classic horror to social science fiction. Two stories in one, the first follows a triumph of humanity that echoes the first moon landing. April Greer is part of a two-person exploratory team, the first to walk on an ethereal new planet, across our solar system. The second occurs on Earth, where Tom Greer takes advantage of the holiday and slips into a bank for enough cash to keep running, getting distracted by the televised account of his daughter's landing. The story muses on whether Tom's darker nature predestines April to bad happenings as well. Can luck cross bodies with DNA and determine the best or worst of a person, before they even have a will of their own to exercise?

Jane Espenson on a certain species of SF & Fantasy, and me in major bitch-mode

Jane Espenson is one of a (far too small) number of good television writers that is actually known by name to (at least a portion) of her audience. She's written for BS:G, various Joss Whedon enterprises and my favorite fantasy series of all time: The Gilmore Girls.

She's got a brief article on the New Republic website about "the secret of selling Sci-Fi."

It strikes me (sorry to say) that this article is dead accurate.

Well, in truth, I found one overreaching statement ...

"The people who don't like Harry Potter seem to be the ones who haven't tried it yet."

... which I refute by my own experience. I tried it (two whole books). I don't begrudge anyone their Harry Potter, and if J.K. Rowling ordered me to fly to her estate on my own dime and clean her toilets for the rest of my life I would obey, so great is the debt that any writer today owes her for turning a generation on to the pleasures of reading in this (supposedly) post-literate, ADD age.

I also will add what should go without saying, but since the internet is an ugly, ugly place, can't. As the great art-forger Elmir (sp?) says in Orson Welles' F for Fake (I paraphrase): "There should never exist in the world this situation where one person can say what is good and what is bad. Never. Not ever. No."

But my preference is (most of the time) for another kind of story.

That is why I say I'm sorry Espenson's assessment of how to write wildly popular entertainment is so very correct. The modern templates are George Lucas' Campbellian (errr, Joseph Campbellian, that is) Star Wars trilogy squared, and LOTR. If you read more than four books a year (or even four in a lifetime) you most likely can recreate the template yourself: boy (usually a boy) born in obscurity, full of questioning and mysterious longing, discovers he has a special destiny. Along the way, he doesn't get the girl. The other guy usually does. But the Boy is too busy for love anyway. He is the one. Excuse me. The ONE. Espenson names contemporary examples, the big three: Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Buffy Summers. She overlooks (maybe another example is redundant) the other ONE, the Neo, the Keanu, from the excreable Matrix movies. Anyway, this ur-story, as J.E. reminds us, appeals to a vastly wider section of the story-hungry than do, say, the ratings challenged series Firefly, BSG, and (though she doesn't mention it) Farscape.

Farscape, like Firefly is right up my street. People fuck. They break up. They get back together. (They are even attracted to two different people at once! Possibly for the first time in televised SF.) They get richer. They get poor. They are friends. Then they don't speak for a year. They disappoint one another. They keep secrets. They can't keep secrets.

Execution matters too of course. I like Buffy because Whedon's universe is so lively. He upends the old archetypes with unexpected humor and a sense of awareness that like The Worm Ouroboros, the story goes on and on. In an second (?) season episode of Angel, the titular Vampire-with-a-Soul is given a warning that the apocalypse in near. He battles through many layers of hell. Reaching the depths at last, he steps out of an elevator to battle the ultimate evil, only to find himself back on the Santa Monica Pier, crowded with families and young couples walking in the cool evening air, enjoying ice cream while intermingling with (and hardly seeing) L.A.'s homeless. "What happened to the Apocalypse?" Angel asks. "The apocalypse?" responds a Wulfram & Hart senior associate. "Oh yes, I think we did have one scheduled for today." And then he instructs Angel to just take a good look at the world around him if he wants to find heaven and hell.

Or the late season BtVS episode where Buffy is found locked in a mental institution, her mother apparently alive, her father not absent (for the only time in the series). Is she under a demon's spell -- or, as her doctor insists, has she retreated into a fantasy world of her own? One where she is the Chosen One. Where, in contest after contest the stakes are raised, where she battles stronger and stronger demons each week -- even gods. Whedon is smart, and smart enough to believe other people might actually be smart too, so just juice the pump and get out of the way. I'm beginning to see that that is an all too rare quality in a story teller. The willingness to trust the audience, to refuse to condescend, rare in creators, is even rarer in gatekeepers: editors, agents, producers, etc.

So that's my Buffy Hero-with-a-Thousand-Faces defense. And here's my Battlestar:Galactica complaint. That show is simply not good. The first season was a bit stronger I felt, but then someone over there decided that they were in possession of something SPECIAL and something IMPORTANT. BS:G is all too often Star Trek with better art direction. Oh, Adama might order Starbuck to kill the captain of the Excelsior Pegasus for the good of the fleet, but never fear, he will rescind the order, he's the good guy. You can ALWAYS trust your captain, soldier. The writers will then contrive to eliminate said captain in battle. This happens all too frequently, writes jumping in to resolve a conflict they couldn't bear to sacrifice their characters to resolve. And reset. Roslyn will always be president again, because that is what it says in the show bible. Cancer goes away, politicians rig elections, but then think better of it and give back the stolen votes. I'm sure that happens all the time. Or never once in the history of elections. And characters aren't really consistent, but blur to justify the plot points of the week. Remember when Roslyn needed Starbuck to return to Caprica for the magic (or not) Arrow of Apollo? She appealed to Starbuck's deep religous faith. The deep religous faith that is never demonstrated in any episode before or since. Remember how Lee just decided he wanted to die and one point? And then he -- I guess -- undecided. And remember how the Six model snapped a baby's neck on Caprica in the pilot episode. She's a lot nicer now. Snapped a baby's neck. Now if Dr. House snapped a baby's neck how many episodes would it take before we could smile at his curmudgeonly antics again? Six's spine also glowed during sex in the pilot episode which means that there was never a need for half a dozen episodes devoted to Baltar NOT inventing a Cylon detector device. One already exists. Or maybe the twelve colonies hadn't discovered doggie-style. There's the whole historically-impossible borrowing of the Greek pantheon (which got switched to the Roman Pantheon at least as far as Zeus becoming Jupiter mid-last season -- though not on the closed-captioning, I'm told). That might be explained with the introduction a of really cheesy MOR rock cover of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" which is supposed to be something in the zeitgeist, something that Dylan picked up from the MUSE in our world, and some other songwriter tapped into on Caprica. Well it strikes me as a bunch of new age bullshit, and mostly made up as they have gone along. Also, in SF we really need the following rule: no more than one (and most of the time not even one) of the characters should live in another character's head, seen by and spoken to by him or her. These may be all little things, but it is by the thousand little things that a story lives or dies. This one has lost me. And they killed Starbuck, changing her character and stealing her strength, and her dignity and her spirit in order to work that into the story, then they brought her back as a spirit guide. It is on to The Bionic Woman for me.

As I say, it's mostly the non-Hero's non-journey of no Plan with a capital Pee for me. I like to read working-stiff fantasy. You can keep your Frodos, your Bilbos: significant Hobbits of Destiny. Give me Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser any day and every day of the week: a couple of guys trying to make a dishonest buck, and hoping to avoid getting turned into turtles by the local Wizard-King. Sure, Fritz Leiber is known only to approximately one one-millionth of Tolkien or Lucas fans: but that is their loss, the loss of the millions, the multitudes loss. Not mine.

I know there is a theory the all stories are versions of the Hero's Journey, but I don't subscribe to it. It's too reductive for my purposes. It's like saying that all women are one woman, which is another thing people say. It has a symmetry easily mistaken for profundity, but it's just noise. Like those SF con panels where the definition of science fiction is discussed endlessly. One panel eventually settles on the idea that only Hal Clement is true SF, while the panel across the hall discovers that everything ever written by anyone is SF.

I'd pray from Espenson to come back from the Darkside: to not write "The Chosen One" across the top of her notebook before a brainstorming session, but I can't, because I know a secret. Not the Oprah Secret, there is no THE secret (which is part of the secret). A secret that Fritz Leiber taught me, and Chandler, and Graham Greene, and Shakespeare, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, John D. MacDonald, Malamud, and Chekov, Borges, Tolstoy, even Wodehouse, David Milch and Amy Sherman Palladino, and a hundred other names (the varying critical and commercial reputations of these individuals being entirely irrelevant, we know). Namely, that, for story-telling purposes, it's mostly just people.

Furthermore, no helpful mountain ranges delineate The Light from The Dark, there is no Dark side of the map, in fact there is no accurate map, and no wise old guide exists to dole out cryptic prophecy at the act break. What exists is us, just us, bumping into one another in interesting ways.

Now I will finish with my own overreaching statement: even when you were six, Darth Vader was not really scary. Not the least little bit.

Technorati Tags: firefly, farscape, Espenson, writing, science fiction , Whedon

Update: I've decided to close comments now, because of all that spam this post has attracted!

Novel Progress II

As far as my novel is concerned, I'm in Paul Masson mode ...

[comments closed because of spam]

Excerpt from an email I sent Fred a few minutes ago

"I haven't been reading any fiction lately, mostly nonfiction, or nothing. Well that's not true, I read the novel Battle Royaleby Koushun Takami, which kicks more ass that any novel has a right to kick ass. It's a crazy gonzo scifi pulp about Japanese teenagers under fascism in 1997 forced to fight to the death, which is one thing, but its secret weapon is excellent characterization, which is why, at 600 pages it is not at all too long."

Due to cannibalization this post took almost no time at all, though still more time than I thought, owing to time I lost to the tangential task of setting up an Amazon link for which I tried several different versions. Waste of time.

Some things take a long time ...

It's not always clear which things these are, nor is it often clear (certainly not often enough) how long each long time will be. Maybe that's the lesson I should take from this minor revelation. I'm not talking about writing (not exclusively about writing anyway). It took me a long long time to realize that thinking about how long things are taking is not only a poor use of time but is counterproductive. In comparison to, say, just slacking off, being over preoccupied with how slow, haphazard, and frustrating the rate of progress is, is and order off magnitude more counterproductive than daydreaming. This assumes that I have realized it, of which I'm not really certain the more I think about it.

Some things don't take very long at all, such as this blog post, and that might say more than I should really admit about this blog post -- which reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon, which featured a man outside a hippie restaurant seeing a sign in the window which read: Vagueness Spoke Here.

Preposting update: writing this post actually took me longer, a lot longer, than I thought it would. But I learned some things in writing it, and clarified my own ideas (to what small extent they are clarified, anyhow) in unanticipated ways.

Postposting update: (Good gracious Great googly moogly Great Caesar's Ghost, will I ever finish this post?) I forgot to include this point: there is a fudge in all of this. Tasks occur in time, and it is impossible to finish anything outside of time. But creating an imaginary bubble in which to pretend time is unimportant in order to get on with the getting on seems to me a useful effort from (heh) time to time.

Novel Progress

There has been some. I'm not quite at the point I hoped to be here at the end of June (i.e. -- done) but I am close. So close in fact that I see the solution to one problem. In too add four chapters, and in know exactly where they go.

This is good.

The best website ever.

A sane voice in the mad wilderness of Internetica. Should be required reading before blogging or leaving comments. Definitely.

Technopleasantries

For International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day I've posted two free stories. Each contains a nice illustrative photo, and some attempt at elegant presentation.

Peas and Carrots, was originally published in Realms of Fantasy, Feb 2005, and is one some nice people seemed to like. It also one of three stories I presented to SFWA to obtain my active membership status.

Think of a Pink Ship, contains adult content and has never before been published. (An editor once rejected it with the prediction that it would be published somewhere, sometime, and by someone. He is now proven right, even though it falls to me to be that someone.)

Both stories are released under a Creative Commons License.

Find links to other participants' stories here.

Technopeasants Unite!

(image by marydell)

technopeasant
sfwa

Update: I've decided to close comments now, because of all that spam this post has attracted!

Monday April 23rd is In't'l Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

Jo Walton has come up with an excellent plan in reaction to SFWA office-holder Dr. Hendrix's self-described "rant" over what he calls webscabs -- which under his sweep includes many many professional writers. In short, Walton is inviting members of SFWA and others to participate in IPSTP Day by giving away "professional quality work" online in order to "celebrate our technopeasanthood." [via Scalzi.]

I will post a new SF story, "Think of A Pink Ship," under a Creative Commons License of some sort, right here, on Monday April, 23rd.


Technorati Tags: science fiction, technopeasant, fiction, free, creative commons,
sfwa.

Vonnegut on "Psychopathic Personalities," or "PPs"

Via digg, from an In These Times interview that Vonnegut gave in 2003:

[Snip] What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

Reminds me a little of Yeats' famous lines:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut

Rest in Peace

New Story

Today I wrote a draft of a short short story "People with Earplugs" about a thousand words. It's a little rough*, as it's been a long time since I've done anything of much interest outside work on my two novels-in-progress. Though I hope to get off this extended micro-fiction kick and start writing longer short stories again eventually, it certainly felt great to come to the end of a piece of fiction again. I estimate the final draft will be around 1500 words, as a scrimped on details here and there. Either that or it will be a thousand words in final draft as well, however they may be substantially different words than those I have now.



* Pretty crappy actually, but there is a worthwhile concept on display, for all of that crude execution.

A very short reprint

My "essay" appeared in the eSkeptic Newsletter in December 2005 but is no longer available in the archives. [Actually it is.] So I present it here, in the cribbed, cut & pasted "original":

A Very Short Essay On Doubt (composed of very famous quotes)

"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. " - Russell

"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. " - Descartes

But,

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. " - Russell

"The best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." - Yeats.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." - Voltaire

Therefore,

"Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more...doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought. " - Albert Guerard

Book meme

Via Tropism, Tim Pratt's started [picked up on] a book meme. Here are my own answers. Appropriately enough I also begin with Stephen King.


1. One book that changed your life:


The Stand by Stephen King. The first fantasy book I read where the characters were like people who lived in my town and in the everyday universe I live in.


2. One book you have read more than once:


The Code of the Woosters. I don't often reread books. I should do more. There are probably only a handful of books I've read multiple times, but this particular Wodehouse novel, I still reread a couple times a year. No exaggeration.


3. One book you would want on a desert island:


Probably Shakespeare's complete works, if picking an omnibus isn't cheating. Some of my favorites to read again and again are (in no order) Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, Henry IVi, Henry IVii, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Lear, Othello, and The Tempest. And there are a few important ones, like Julius Caesar, that I've never read at all. So that would keep me busy.


4. One book that made you laugh:


The Three Musketeers: There's probably no writer I admire more than Dumas right now, who I've only read recently. He's the master storyteller. Before I'd read this book, I assumed that the self-referential humor in various Three Musketeer film incarnations was a modern interpretation. Not so, the original is more witty, contemporary, action-packed, and sexy than any film version.


5. One book that made you cry:


Hm. Maybe Charlotte's Web? I honestly don't remember crying at any book. Which is weird because I cry all the time over movies and TV. Sometimes even over the lamest or most cynical manipulations, like the death of Mr. Echo on Lost. But not Starbuck, even I didn't cry over the death (or "crossing over" or whatever the fuck) of my beloved Starbuck. I did almost fall asleep though.


6. One book you wish had been written:


Shakespeare's autobiography. I want to know what his attitude to his own work was.


7. One book you wish had never been written:


I'm drawing a blank. I was going to pick one or all the the Dune sequels, but really the fact that there are shitty sequels doesn't ruin my admiration of the original novel. Then I thought, maybe Dianetics, as Scientology is such an embarrassment to the SF community, which I once naively assumed would be populated by rational thinkers. I think everyone has to be free to write what they want, even if it sucks. I don't think I'm qualified to draw a line here. Anyhow, without Scientology we would had fewer hilarious South Park episodes.


8. One book you are currently reading:


Besides The Count of Monte Cristo by the aforementioned Alexander Dumas, I've been reading Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton for awhile now.


9. One book you have been meaning to read:


I've got The Nymphos of Rocky Flats by Mario Acevedo tucked away, while I wait for just the right occasion. From the editorial material:

"Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire.


"Now he finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue when an old friend prompts him to investigate an outbreak of nymphomania at the secret government facilities in Rocky Flats."

Which I'm guessing still won't leave me with much of an answer for #5.


Technorati Tags: books, writing, fiction