I'm still alive, though I'm sometimes dubious on the prospect. And I just sent out a query for Len, more or less on impulse. Wish me luck.
I have got to get out there and figure out what might serve for comps. Back when I was actively selling comps weren't really a thing, so it's a new trick for me; one I honestly can't take that seriously. I try, and then I get this vision of how the real estate appraisers I used to work for did comparable sales - adjust -5% because the Work is Historical and the Comp is Contemporary, adjust 15% because the Work depicts strong lesbian/horse bonds and Comp doesn't, etc. But does the camel adjust the value up or down? And pretty soon I've collapsed into a fit of giggles.
But hunting for comps ought to be fun, because it primarily involves rounding up and reading a bunch of books. You'd think I could do that much, health crap or no.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Publishing Today
Nothing sums up modern publishing like the fact that Lois McMaster Bujold's fourth theological thriller set in the World of Five Gods did not get picked up by the publisher, so she's e-pubbing it herself.
And now I have to cave in and get an e-reader. Because there's not going to be a print run, and Bujold is a read-while-walking, read-while-eating, take-book-to-bed-to-finish-chapter-oh-look-I-finished-and-it's-three-AM author.
And now I have to cave in and get an e-reader. Because there's not going to be a print run, and Bujold is a read-while-walking, read-while-eating, take-book-to-bed-to-finish-chapter-oh-look-I-finished-and-it's-three-AM author.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
May Day is for Revolution, Right?
So, today's the start of We Need Diverse Books tripartite campaign, which begins with sign-picture posts (captioned so blind-enabled browsers can read the signs in the picture; this is the kind of detail that people who don't need something often overlook) of reasons why we need diverse books, and culminates in going out and actually buying diverse books.
So make a date with your bookseller this weekend.
I have never understood the mentality that assumed people, especially kids, didn't want to read about people too different from a narrow norm. I have always been more interested in a book if the protagonist wasn't too much like me. I know what it's like to be me. One reason I read is to get a break from being me.
And face it, if you read English-language media, you already have a fair grasp of what it's like to be a cis-het white middle-class American or British person, regardless of who you are.
I tend to write protagonists who are more or less like me, because that's sure ground. In an ideal world, or even a sensible one, everyone would do this and there'd be a proportionate number of available books covering all the bases. This does not happen. People like me are disproprotionately represented in media; and people like John Green are disproportionately represented in awards, panels, and reviews. And this is silly, as well as unfair to everybody. Including the people like John Green, who is not being challenged to be the best he can be by competing on a level playing field with the women of color who have to write and market so much better than he has to, even in order to get a review.
Which places a burden on those of us who partake of privilege, however innocently or unintentionally, to write diversely. This is scary; but it is also exciting to try out other identities. For one thing, it means - research!
Which research is made much harder by the historical narrowness of media representation. (Heavy sigh.) If I want to find out what it was like to be (for example) a medieval person of color, or a blind woman in antebellum Texas, or a nineteenth century Apache little person, I've got my work seriously cut out for me, reading all around the subject and, sometimes, even finding appropriate lines to read between. Ideally I should today know people who resemble my protagonist in some way, and run the work by them, and ask them questions that aren't too obnoxious; which is problematic because I'm not much of a people person.
The internet is a big help with this. But sometimes - okay, a lot of the time - I won't even know what questions to ask. Or that I even know a person who is appropriate to ask, because you can't know if a person you've been talking to online about cats or sewing or gaming is black or autistic or intersex or whatever unless the subject comes up, and why should any of these things come up in those conversations? (So thread drift is your friend.)
Which means that when I try to write diversely, odds are good I'm gonna screw up.
But you know what? I can screw up writing undiversely, too. I'll just screw up in ways that are unchallenging, comfortably familiar. Boring even. I could even be rewarded for those screw-ups, and I am just about mature enough not to want that.
And when I express these concerns about writing diversely - which I know is extremely common; people don't want to lose their liberal cred by "doing it wrong" - to someone from an underrepresented group, they always say the same thing: That none of us should be limited in the points of view from which we write. That saying a white person can't write about American Indians is the same as saying that an American Indian can't write about white people. Which is clearly and egregiously racist.
We can't limit ourselves without limiting others, too.
The reach should exceed the grasp, or what's a heaven for? (That's Robert Browning, a cishet white middle-class 19th century Englishman writing as a cishet white middle-class Renaissance Italian. You see how hard it is to get out from under? I'm sure somebody from an underrepresented demographic has a similar quote I could go for, but it isn't culturally positioned to be in my head ready for use.)
If making the world better were easy, everyone would be doing it.
So make a date with your bookseller this weekend.
I have never understood the mentality that assumed people, especially kids, didn't want to read about people too different from a narrow norm. I have always been more interested in a book if the protagonist wasn't too much like me. I know what it's like to be me. One reason I read is to get a break from being me.
And face it, if you read English-language media, you already have a fair grasp of what it's like to be a cis-het white middle-class American or British person, regardless of who you are.
I tend to write protagonists who are more or less like me, because that's sure ground. In an ideal world, or even a sensible one, everyone would do this and there'd be a proportionate number of available books covering all the bases. This does not happen. People like me are disproprotionately represented in media; and people like John Green are disproportionately represented in awards, panels, and reviews. And this is silly, as well as unfair to everybody. Including the people like John Green, who is not being challenged to be the best he can be by competing on a level playing field with the women of color who have to write and market so much better than he has to, even in order to get a review.
Which places a burden on those of us who partake of privilege, however innocently or unintentionally, to write diversely. This is scary; but it is also exciting to try out other identities. For one thing, it means - research!
Which research is made much harder by the historical narrowness of media representation. (Heavy sigh.) If I want to find out what it was like to be (for example) a medieval person of color, or a blind woman in antebellum Texas, or a nineteenth century Apache little person, I've got my work seriously cut out for me, reading all around the subject and, sometimes, even finding appropriate lines to read between. Ideally I should today know people who resemble my protagonist in some way, and run the work by them, and ask them questions that aren't too obnoxious; which is problematic because I'm not much of a people person.
The internet is a big help with this. But sometimes - okay, a lot of the time - I won't even know what questions to ask. Or that I even know a person who is appropriate to ask, because you can't know if a person you've been talking to online about cats or sewing or gaming is black or autistic or intersex or whatever unless the subject comes up, and why should any of these things come up in those conversations? (So thread drift is your friend.)
Which means that when I try to write diversely, odds are good I'm gonna screw up.
But you know what? I can screw up writing undiversely, too. I'll just screw up in ways that are unchallenging, comfortably familiar. Boring even. I could even be rewarded for those screw-ups, and I am just about mature enough not to want that.
And when I express these concerns about writing diversely - which I know is extremely common; people don't want to lose their liberal cred by "doing it wrong" - to someone from an underrepresented group, they always say the same thing: That none of us should be limited in the points of view from which we write. That saying a white person can't write about American Indians is the same as saying that an American Indian can't write about white people. Which is clearly and egregiously racist.
We can't limit ourselves without limiting others, too.
The reach should exceed the grasp, or what's a heaven for? (That's Robert Browning, a cishet white middle-class 19th century Englishman writing as a cishet white middle-class Renaissance Italian. You see how hard it is to get out from under? I'm sure somebody from an underrepresented demographic has a similar quote I could go for, but it isn't culturally positioned to be in my head ready for use.)
If making the world better were easy, everyone would be doing it.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Railroad, Sandbox
Between the messy process of writing the current book and figuring out exactly what the plot is as I go, and various gaming situations, I've been thinking a lot about the railroad vs. the sandbox.
A game has a "railroad" plot if there's only one correct way to finish it - if you need to put all the elements together in the correct order in order to win. Most videogames are of this variety, because it's so well-suited to the way computer programs behave. The more choices a player has, the complicated the program has to be, and in any program there's an upper limit to the choices that can be allowed. The pleasure of these videogames is at least partly the pleasure of learning and implementing the optimal set of choices. It's almost like formal dancing - without the full-body movement, and I'm not sure how well the soundtracks of these games are synched to the rhythms of the winning strategy.
A "sandbox" game, however, is much more free-form and player-controlled. You have a game map of some sort (visual, mental, whatever) and you can go anywhere within it and find something interesting and fun to do, with the potential of leading you to a scenario in which you count yourself as winning. Non-computer based roleplaying games are the ultimate in sandbox games, because the players and game master are cooperatively developing a plot peculiarly suited to themselves, limited only by the resourcefulness of the players and the flexibility of the DM. For my money, a sandbox game is the most fun you can have, full of surprises, improvisation, teamwork, and self-expression.
They are also a lot of work for the GM, who can't tell whether the players are going to turn left or right and needs to know what they see in either direction. Once you hit a time of your life when your free time and energy are limited - when you're old enough for the need to sleep to kick in, when you're supposed to be holding down jobs and raising kids and maintaining your household and watching your health, when your creativity needs to be channeled into outlets that will provide economic benefits - it is difficult to find time to build up a world and create appropriate challenges from scratch, or even to expand one that's already in existence.
Which is why tabletop RPGs produce modules, in which people have been hired by the game company to do that work for you, and all the GM has to do (theoretically) is guide the players through the module and adjudicate the combats; or (in reality) is to tweak the module to suit his group's preferences, strengths, and weaknesses.
The trouble with modules is, that it's a lot easier (especially for younger creators raised on videogames and formula fiction) to write a railroad module than a sandbox one. And if you happen to get one written by someone who has only ever played with players very different from yours, it can be as much work to adapt it as it would have been to homebrew an adventure, yourself. My own gaming group is currently in the middle of a very railroady indeed module, which assumes a batch of players with a radically different playstyle from us, and we're both consistently poorer in resources than the module expects us to be, and consistently better at using them than the module writers anticipate, so that they did not provide enough information to allow the GM to improvise easily. (Our playsessions at the moment are sprinkled with such cries as: "Who traps his own bedroom?" "How is building a tentacle monster supposed to bring his wife back?" "Pickled garlic?" and "That's what it says, guys, I don't know." On the plus side, we managed to rescue the mad scientist and get him to provide us with the specs on which the tentacle monster was built, without fighting the tentacle monster; the GM predicts that, with this information, it will take us three game rounds to take out a monster that, had we encountered it unprepared, could probably have killed us all.) The event that has most engaged us emotionally as characters is a random encounter which has had consequences, so that at least some of the characters are now fully prepared to jump the rails and take off into territory the GM would have to make up as he goes. And if he had the time and energy to do that we wouldn't be running through this stupid module in the first place.
Books (and movies, and TV shows), on the face of it, have to have railroad plots. After all, the reader starts on Page 1 and reads till the end. She has freedom to interpret the plot, characters, and themes, but she can't change the pace at which information is released to her, or directly interrogate the text for clarification, and she's pretty much at the mercy of the author. This is true whether the story is a formula mystery or an avant-garde experiment - the author controls the presentation, and the amount of leeway the reader has in modifying the presentation is limited, in most cases, to skimming, skipping ahead to read the last paragraph, going back to check something from earlier ("Wait, wasn't the person who found the body walking a dog?"), and mentally turning the elements of the story around and around trying to anticipate the next development, the solution, or the third-act turn. A reader cannot make Dorothy settle down to live among the Munchkins, or overthrow the Wizard and attempt to rule Oz...
Except in fanfic, of course. Fanfic makes the universe of media into a giant sandbox.
And a book, or movie, or TV show, really should feel like a sandbox, don't you think?
It should contain surprises. It should feel as though the characters have complete free will, that they can turn left or right and deal with different consequences based upon that choice. They should be able to make bad choices based on insufficient information or character flaws, and learn from those choices, and make better choices later. Nothing is more discouraging than the moment when you realize that a character is about to make a bad choice, even though he should know by now it's a bad choice, not because of some driving personal imperative but because if he doesn't the plot won't wind up where it needs to be; because the set piece won't play out properly; because this is the only way to blow up the lost city at the end and lost cities always blow up, it's a rule. The game of predicting dialog and plot points is a dreary game, which I only ever play, to keep myself sane, when trapped in the vicinity of one of those shows.
I don't read books like this. I put them down, and reach for another one.
I damn sure don't want to write a book like that.
I don't think I have a conclusion, here. It's just on my mind.
A game has a "railroad" plot if there's only one correct way to finish it - if you need to put all the elements together in the correct order in order to win. Most videogames are of this variety, because it's so well-suited to the way computer programs behave. The more choices a player has, the complicated the program has to be, and in any program there's an upper limit to the choices that can be allowed. The pleasure of these videogames is at least partly the pleasure of learning and implementing the optimal set of choices. It's almost like formal dancing - without the full-body movement, and I'm not sure how well the soundtracks of these games are synched to the rhythms of the winning strategy.
A "sandbox" game, however, is much more free-form and player-controlled. You have a game map of some sort (visual, mental, whatever) and you can go anywhere within it and find something interesting and fun to do, with the potential of leading you to a scenario in which you count yourself as winning. Non-computer based roleplaying games are the ultimate in sandbox games, because the players and game master are cooperatively developing a plot peculiarly suited to themselves, limited only by the resourcefulness of the players and the flexibility of the DM. For my money, a sandbox game is the most fun you can have, full of surprises, improvisation, teamwork, and self-expression.
They are also a lot of work for the GM, who can't tell whether the players are going to turn left or right and needs to know what they see in either direction. Once you hit a time of your life when your free time and energy are limited - when you're old enough for the need to sleep to kick in, when you're supposed to be holding down jobs and raising kids and maintaining your household and watching your health, when your creativity needs to be channeled into outlets that will provide economic benefits - it is difficult to find time to build up a world and create appropriate challenges from scratch, or even to expand one that's already in existence.
Which is why tabletop RPGs produce modules, in which people have been hired by the game company to do that work for you, and all the GM has to do (theoretically) is guide the players through the module and adjudicate the combats; or (in reality) is to tweak the module to suit his group's preferences, strengths, and weaknesses.
The trouble with modules is, that it's a lot easier (especially for younger creators raised on videogames and formula fiction) to write a railroad module than a sandbox one. And if you happen to get one written by someone who has only ever played with players very different from yours, it can be as much work to adapt it as it would have been to homebrew an adventure, yourself. My own gaming group is currently in the middle of a very railroady indeed module, which assumes a batch of players with a radically different playstyle from us, and we're both consistently poorer in resources than the module expects us to be, and consistently better at using them than the module writers anticipate, so that they did not provide enough information to allow the GM to improvise easily. (Our playsessions at the moment are sprinkled with such cries as: "Who traps his own bedroom?" "How is building a tentacle monster supposed to bring his wife back?" "Pickled garlic?" and "That's what it says, guys, I don't know." On the plus side, we managed to rescue the mad scientist and get him to provide us with the specs on which the tentacle monster was built, without fighting the tentacle monster; the GM predicts that, with this information, it will take us three game rounds to take out a monster that, had we encountered it unprepared, could probably have killed us all.) The event that has most engaged us emotionally as characters is a random encounter which has had consequences, so that at least some of the characters are now fully prepared to jump the rails and take off into territory the GM would have to make up as he goes. And if he had the time and energy to do that we wouldn't be running through this stupid module in the first place.
Books (and movies, and TV shows), on the face of it, have to have railroad plots. After all, the reader starts on Page 1 and reads till the end. She has freedom to interpret the plot, characters, and themes, but she can't change the pace at which information is released to her, or directly interrogate the text for clarification, and she's pretty much at the mercy of the author. This is true whether the story is a formula mystery or an avant-garde experiment - the author controls the presentation, and the amount of leeway the reader has in modifying the presentation is limited, in most cases, to skimming, skipping ahead to read the last paragraph, going back to check something from earlier ("Wait, wasn't the person who found the body walking a dog?"), and mentally turning the elements of the story around and around trying to anticipate the next development, the solution, or the third-act turn. A reader cannot make Dorothy settle down to live among the Munchkins, or overthrow the Wizard and attempt to rule Oz...
Except in fanfic, of course. Fanfic makes the universe of media into a giant sandbox.
And a book, or movie, or TV show, really should feel like a sandbox, don't you think?
It should contain surprises. It should feel as though the characters have complete free will, that they can turn left or right and deal with different consequences based upon that choice. They should be able to make bad choices based on insufficient information or character flaws, and learn from those choices, and make better choices later. Nothing is more discouraging than the moment when you realize that a character is about to make a bad choice, even though he should know by now it's a bad choice, not because of some driving personal imperative but because if he doesn't the plot won't wind up where it needs to be; because the set piece won't play out properly; because this is the only way to blow up the lost city at the end and lost cities always blow up, it's a rule. The game of predicting dialog and plot points is a dreary game, which I only ever play, to keep myself sane, when trapped in the vicinity of one of those shows.
I don't read books like this. I put them down, and reach for another one.
I damn sure don't want to write a book like that.
I don't think I have a conclusion, here. It's just on my mind.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Interlude
Some days, all you can do is read stuff.
And I better hurry, because my order came in at the indie bookstore.
And I better hurry, because my order came in at the indie bookstore.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Tonight is World Book Night
Tonight is the night free paperbacks get given away. The chosen books this year are listed and available for sale at Bookateria.
I have no idea how effective this promotion is in encouraging literacy and fostering a love of reading for pleasure, but it is impossible for me not to love a holiday specifically dedicated to giving books away. And the list is reasonably diverse given that there's only 28 of them.
I'd have gone for a bigger ethnic diversity myself, and more genres, but hey, when I finance the book giveaway I can decide what books to give. And at least there's some.
I have no idea how effective this promotion is in encouraging literacy and fostering a love of reading for pleasure, but it is impossible for me not to love a holiday specifically dedicated to giving books away. And the list is reasonably diverse given that there's only 28 of them.
I'd have gone for a bigger ethnic diversity myself, and more genres, but hey, when I finance the book giveaway I can decide what books to give. And at least there's some.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
The Joy of Nitpicking
So I'm reading for the Andre Norton award (and I'm not going to get them all read), and I'm on China Mieville's Railsea, and though I'm having no difficulty getting through the story I'm having a couple of problems with it. The relevant one at the moment is in buying into the premise, which is (roughly) a vast sea of intertwining railroad tracks "sailed" by trains fulfilling all the functions of ships - pirates, navy, merchants, and "molers," who hunt the gigantic burrowing animals that tunnel, hunt, and breach through the ground below the rails, which is qualitatively different in some undefined way from the "hardlands" on which people actually live. For the sake of the story I can deal with that, but it keeps bugging me that burrowing animals like the great southern moldywarp, apparently analogous to sperm whales (since one of them is standing in for Moby Dick) breach all over the place and leave molehills and have room to live and hunt without breaking the tracks.
So far the whole business of track maintenance is handwaved by references to "angels," mysterious trains that no one ever more than glimpses that fix tracks when no one is looking; but even if we grant that (and I am hoping that some information that makes it less handwavey comes along in the second half of the book), it should be common, in a great moldywarp hunt, for one to come up under the tracks and wreck them and the trains on them. They must come up very close to them, or the molers couldn't pursue them in their jollytrains, since the dirt itself is much too dangerous to get onto. Even if the moldywarp takes damage in the process, the tactic should be worthwhile, as breaking the track before the train can shunt (another point handwaved a lot), and in particular breaking a bunch of related tracks near their point of intersection, would cause the train to derail and turn the molers from hunters into prey.
This point alone is enough to keep me from voting for this book, especially in the stiffness of this year's competition.
Coincidentally, gaming group e-mail this morning contains a message, from my husband, discussing discrepancies in the description of a kind of magical construct we recently dealt with and the information describing how to construct it. We were going to sell the remnants as scrap metal, but with these discrepancies we have no idea how much of the scrap metal we have. The problem should be familiar to most gamers, "D&D economics" having plagued the simulationist end of the player spectrum since the infancy of role-playing games.
Hand-waving this sort of thing by saying "It's only a game/story" or "It's magic" or "Just roll with it" is common, but it is not adequate. Science fiction and fantasy, whatever the medium, attracts a large number of people who actively enjoy figuring out how things work - engineers, programmers, actual scientists. Not just at the physical end, either. Practitioners and enthusiasts of the soft sciences and the arts like to see linguistics and cultures that work. An artist who makes kinetic sculptures is as likely to be a nitpicker on a mechanical point as an engineer, because the jobs overlap.
Okay, there's a point of diminishing returns in worrying about fiddly details; but a lot of people give up long before that. And yes, a big chunk of the audience doesn't care. But those who do, care a lot. Disrespecting this more demanding segment of the audience seems counterproductive to me, as they are also the most loyal and dedicated audience one could ask for.
The most effective tactic, I have found, for the creator who doesn't have the expertise or patience to work out the details of how some essential part of his vision would work in the real world, is to subcontract the labor. A wise DM who has a geologist continually criticizing his dungeons will make talking to this person a routine part of his planning. "You know what would be cool? An obsidian dungeon with a big lake in the middle with a whole lost civilization of giant kobolds. But I don't know how that would come about, and wouldn't the tunnels be too slick to walk in?" Next thing you know, the player's drawing diagrams and talking about water tables and lava tubes and suddenly you have A Better Idea, and you put the dungeon together and instead of constantly having to interrupt the game to answer this guy's objections on the fly, he's eagerly pushing the rest of the party through a much more improbable scenario than you would ever have come up with on your own. Reduced labor and stress for you, increased fun for him, everybody wins.
Alternatively, for those of us working for larger audiences, identify the least plausible part of your vision, and attack it head on. Research the stuffings out of it and find a way to show it working, vividly and immediately. Make all the visible detail convincing enough, plausible enough, ordinary enough, and most of all consistent enough, and the audience will take the parts you don't show on faith, or work them out for themselves. Fandom is full of people producing starship schematics from hints collected throughout the lifetime of a series, resolving minor discrepancies, and having a blast doing it.
This advice is most applicable for fantasists, but it applies in the mainstream, too. How many TV shows have thrown you right out of the plot by their reliance on magical computers, inaccurate history, absurd biology, or impossible physics? If you like a genre or a show enough otherwise you'll willingly suspend your belief by its neck until it's dead, if necessary, but the creators need to make that as easy and fun as possible for you. If it's more work than fun to believe in a situation, the audience won't do it.
Besides, the Better Idea tends to lurk like a moldywarp under layers of lazy imagery. Digging down to them is well worthwhile.
So far the whole business of track maintenance is handwaved by references to "angels," mysterious trains that no one ever more than glimpses that fix tracks when no one is looking; but even if we grant that (and I am hoping that some information that makes it less handwavey comes along in the second half of the book), it should be common, in a great moldywarp hunt, for one to come up under the tracks and wreck them and the trains on them. They must come up very close to them, or the molers couldn't pursue them in their jollytrains, since the dirt itself is much too dangerous to get onto. Even if the moldywarp takes damage in the process, the tactic should be worthwhile, as breaking the track before the train can shunt (another point handwaved a lot), and in particular breaking a bunch of related tracks near their point of intersection, would cause the train to derail and turn the molers from hunters into prey.
This point alone is enough to keep me from voting for this book, especially in the stiffness of this year's competition.
Coincidentally, gaming group e-mail this morning contains a message, from my husband, discussing discrepancies in the description of a kind of magical construct we recently dealt with and the information describing how to construct it. We were going to sell the remnants as scrap metal, but with these discrepancies we have no idea how much of the scrap metal we have. The problem should be familiar to most gamers, "D&D economics" having plagued the simulationist end of the player spectrum since the infancy of role-playing games.
Hand-waving this sort of thing by saying "It's only a game/story" or "It's magic" or "Just roll with it" is common, but it is not adequate. Science fiction and fantasy, whatever the medium, attracts a large number of people who actively enjoy figuring out how things work - engineers, programmers, actual scientists. Not just at the physical end, either. Practitioners and enthusiasts of the soft sciences and the arts like to see linguistics and cultures that work. An artist who makes kinetic sculptures is as likely to be a nitpicker on a mechanical point as an engineer, because the jobs overlap.
Okay, there's a point of diminishing returns in worrying about fiddly details; but a lot of people give up long before that. And yes, a big chunk of the audience doesn't care. But those who do, care a lot. Disrespecting this more demanding segment of the audience seems counterproductive to me, as they are also the most loyal and dedicated audience one could ask for.
The most effective tactic, I have found, for the creator who doesn't have the expertise or patience to work out the details of how some essential part of his vision would work in the real world, is to subcontract the labor. A wise DM who has a geologist continually criticizing his dungeons will make talking to this person a routine part of his planning. "You know what would be cool? An obsidian dungeon with a big lake in the middle with a whole lost civilization of giant kobolds. But I don't know how that would come about, and wouldn't the tunnels be too slick to walk in?" Next thing you know, the player's drawing diagrams and talking about water tables and lava tubes and suddenly you have A Better Idea, and you put the dungeon together and instead of constantly having to interrupt the game to answer this guy's objections on the fly, he's eagerly pushing the rest of the party through a much more improbable scenario than you would ever have come up with on your own. Reduced labor and stress for you, increased fun for him, everybody wins.
Alternatively, for those of us working for larger audiences, identify the least plausible part of your vision, and attack it head on. Research the stuffings out of it and find a way to show it working, vividly and immediately. Make all the visible detail convincing enough, plausible enough, ordinary enough, and most of all consistent enough, and the audience will take the parts you don't show on faith, or work them out for themselves. Fandom is full of people producing starship schematics from hints collected throughout the lifetime of a series, resolving minor discrepancies, and having a blast doing it.
This advice is most applicable for fantasists, but it applies in the mainstream, too. How many TV shows have thrown you right out of the plot by their reliance on magical computers, inaccurate history, absurd biology, or impossible physics? If you like a genre or a show enough otherwise you'll willingly suspend your belief by its neck until it's dead, if necessary, but the creators need to make that as easy and fun as possible for you. If it's more work than fun to believe in a situation, the audience won't do it.
Besides, the Better Idea tends to lurk like a moldywarp under layers of lazy imagery. Digging down to them is well worthwhile.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Did you know...
...that Diana Wynne Jones is readable even through a migraine?
Granted, by migraine standards mine are so mild that I've resisted for years the idea that I had them; but nope, that definitely was one. I read Hexwood and The Ogre Downstairs. I'm not sure what possessed me to even try to read Hexwood under the circumstances - you'd think that complicated structure would play holy hell with a migraine-fuddled brain, but it didn't. And Gwinny's attempt to murder the Ogre is still laugh-out-loud funny even when you're too sick to laugh.
I get more in awe of that woman all the time.
Granted, by migraine standards mine are so mild that I've resisted for years the idea that I had them; but nope, that definitely was one. I read Hexwood and The Ogre Downstairs. I'm not sure what possessed me to even try to read Hexwood under the circumstances - you'd think that complicated structure would play holy hell with a migraine-fuddled brain, but it didn't. And Gwinny's attempt to murder the Ogre is still laugh-out-loud funny even when you're too sick to laugh.
I get more in awe of that woman all the time.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Ah, Libraries! And Buses.
I had a lot of errands to run this morning, before it got too hot, and some books due, so included the library on my rounds. I've been using Wowbrary a lot, which is a good service, but it means we place a lot of holds and pick books up/drop them off in passing, when I pick Damon up to run after-work errands or he has a doctor's appointment near the library or something. It's been a long time since I did a proper library visit.
I still didn't have one today, but I had more of one than I have in a long time. A proper library visit goes like this:
Drop books at return desk.
In any convenient order:
Browse new books and displays.
Go to non-fiction section containing books on topic of current research.
Browse YA books.
Browse special displays.
Browse mystery and science fiction sections.
Browse children's books.
Heft backpack, consider whether it's wise to do a quick scan of the sections where the Fortean material winds up, decide what the heck, browse Fortean books.
Check out.
Go to bus stop, begin reading.
Since I was in the car I lacked two key ingredients, the ginormous backpack into which books hurl themselves with astoundingly little input from me, and the reading time that starts at the bus stop. I had as many as I could carry by the time I finished with the new books. I was also light-headed, so I started reading Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making while I waited to trust myself to drive. Yeah, big hardship there. But if I'd been on the bus I could have gotten twice as many books and begun reading them at once!
I'm glad I learned to drive, but the bus is a much more enriching experience. I miss it.
I still didn't have one today, but I had more of one than I have in a long time. A proper library visit goes like this:
Drop books at return desk.
In any convenient order:
Browse new books and displays.
Go to non-fiction section containing books on topic of current research.
Browse YA books.
Browse special displays.
Browse mystery and science fiction sections.
Browse children's books.
Heft backpack, consider whether it's wise to do a quick scan of the sections where the Fortean material winds up, decide what the heck, browse Fortean books.
Check out.
Go to bus stop, begin reading.
Since I was in the car I lacked two key ingredients, the ginormous backpack into which books hurl themselves with astoundingly little input from me, and the reading time that starts at the bus stop. I had as many as I could carry by the time I finished with the new books. I was also light-headed, so I started reading Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making while I waited to trust myself to drive. Yeah, big hardship there. But if I'd been on the bus I could have gotten twice as many books and begun reading them at once!
I'm glad I learned to drive, but the bus is a much more enriching experience. I miss it.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Learning from the Giants
In German: Biography of a Language, by Ruth H. Sanders, I read this quote:
The subject at hand is the task Martin Luther faced of translating the Bible so that could be read and understood by as many people as possible, in a social milieu in which every district had its own distinct dialect with variations not only in vocabulary and pronunciation, but in grammar and syntax. To do this he sweated every word, not once, but many times - revising his translation of the Bible until the day of his death - and in the process transformed the German language and wrote a masterpiece of clear, strong, literary style. And, oh yeah, had some impact on the spiritual life of millions of people down to the present day, but that's outside my present scope of interest.
You can't get better stylistic advice than to imitate Luther, not in what came out of his process, but in what goes into it: the attempt to communicate the content of the work, as clearly as you can, so that the maximum number of people can understand it. Strive to do that, whatever you're saying, and all the things people strain after in writing class will be there in the end result. Your personal literary voice. Style, grace, elegance, eloquence. Even humor - I can't count the times I've made people laugh, just by telling the truth as precisely as I can. (Face it, truth is absurd even when it's not strictly speaking funny.)
You should, of course, be prepared to be zen about the audience's ability to take your clear, lucid prose and derive from it interpretations with which you violently disagree. Luther wasn't expecting that and it drove him up a tree to find that people could read his Bible translation and still disagree with him theologically. Six hundred years of history give you at least that much of a head start on him.
...Luther's main interest was not even language itself; rather his first priority was the content...From the beginning, his compulsion for universal comprehension was a basic characteristic of Luther's German language creation.-- Edwin Arndt,Luthers deustches Sprachstaffen,1962
The subject at hand is the task Martin Luther faced of translating the Bible so that could be read and understood by as many people as possible, in a social milieu in which every district had its own distinct dialect with variations not only in vocabulary and pronunciation, but in grammar and syntax. To do this he sweated every word, not once, but many times - revising his translation of the Bible until the day of his death - and in the process transformed the German language and wrote a masterpiece of clear, strong, literary style. And, oh yeah, had some impact on the spiritual life of millions of people down to the present day, but that's outside my present scope of interest.
You can't get better stylistic advice than to imitate Luther, not in what came out of his process, but in what goes into it: the attempt to communicate the content of the work, as clearly as you can, so that the maximum number of people can understand it. Strive to do that, whatever you're saying, and all the things people strain after in writing class will be there in the end result. Your personal literary voice. Style, grace, elegance, eloquence. Even humor - I can't count the times I've made people laugh, just by telling the truth as precisely as I can. (Face it, truth is absurd even when it's not strictly speaking funny.)
You should, of course, be prepared to be zen about the audience's ability to take your clear, lucid prose and derive from it interpretations with which you violently disagree. Luther wasn't expecting that and it drove him up a tree to find that people could read his Bible translation and still disagree with him theologically. Six hundred years of history give you at least that much of a head start on him.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Just Read It
Yesterday the weather was sitting on my head, but it was okay. I had a new Diana Wynne Jones book.
Not new fiction. A collection of essays, Reflections, came from Amazon UK - anybody who thinks I'm waiting till September to get a DWJ book I can have in May by paying extra shipping has another think coming.
It was one of those days when print slides away from my eyes a lot and I either have to pace myself with easy housework or give up and play sims all day; but Jones's prose has the remarkable quality of being much more readable when I'm having vision problems than other people's prose is. (DWJ was dyslexic, which I hadn't known before; I wonder if one reason she wrote so well was that she had to make the prose transparent enough to read the meaning through even when the words were wriggling around?) I had to stop periodically instead of shoveling it down with both hands like I usually do, but it's all read now. Some of it I'd read before, in photocopies or online or in other collections around the house. A lot of it I hadn't.
Y'all should read this book. Anything I could possibly say as a blogger is already said, much better, in it, but I don't mind being upstaged by a master. Having my own thought processes upstaged by Diana Wynne Jones is more invigorating than any number of pep talks.
I feel like maybe I can get back to Pellin now. You know, the story I wrote about awhile ago, with the memory loss and the cranky male hero that isn't going to make the agent search any easier.
I also need to get queries back in the mail, but important as that is I can never seem to do it when I'm not writing something else. It's the only way to get my drive back.
Now if I can figure out how Pellin's going to figure out what's going on with him...
Not new fiction. A collection of essays, Reflections, came from Amazon UK - anybody who thinks I'm waiting till September to get a DWJ book I can have in May by paying extra shipping has another think coming.
It was one of those days when print slides away from my eyes a lot and I either have to pace myself with easy housework or give up and play sims all day; but Jones's prose has the remarkable quality of being much more readable when I'm having vision problems than other people's prose is. (DWJ was dyslexic, which I hadn't known before; I wonder if one reason she wrote so well was that she had to make the prose transparent enough to read the meaning through even when the words were wriggling around?) I had to stop periodically instead of shoveling it down with both hands like I usually do, but it's all read now. Some of it I'd read before, in photocopies or online or in other collections around the house. A lot of it I hadn't.
Y'all should read this book. Anything I could possibly say as a blogger is already said, much better, in it, but I don't mind being upstaged by a master. Having my own thought processes upstaged by Diana Wynne Jones is more invigorating than any number of pep talks.
I feel like maybe I can get back to Pellin now. You know, the story I wrote about awhile ago, with the memory loss and the cranky male hero that isn't going to make the agent search any easier.
I also need to get queries back in the mail, but important as that is I can never seem to do it when I'm not writing something else. It's the only way to get my drive back.
Now if I can figure out how Pellin's going to figure out what's going on with him...
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Happy Birthday, Miss Alcott
Today is the birthday of one of the most significant figures in American literature, and the goddess of my idolatry, Louisa May Alcott.
Though often scorned at her own valuation, as a producer of "moral pap for the young," it only takes a small amount of historical acumen to realize how radical she was at her time; and only a little more social self-awareness to realize that in many ways, American society is still more conservative than her. Witness the reluctance of many, even most, of her modern readers to admit that
Jo was right not to marry Laurie!!!!!!
Louisa May Alcott was a hustler, writing to market, explicitly and obsessively writing for money to counteract the legacy of her idealistic and improvident father. She enjoyed catering to morbid fantasy, and did - the stories she satirized Jo for writing to make money for the illustrated papers seem mild compared to the drug use and sexual power games in the pseudononymous stories Madeleine B. Stern first unearthed for us back in the 70s - but the work that survives is unrelentingly realistic in ways that made (and still make) the public uncomfortable, to the point that many of us whitewash these things out of our reading.
Marriage is not the climax and happy-ever-after of life; it is the opening of a whole new can of worms. Too much candy will make you sick and too much ease will make you useless. Sexual attraction will not overcome other incompatibilities in the long term. Peer pressure will lead you to do stupid and even wicked things. It is possible to hate your little sister murderously and love her at the same time. Life is unfair. You have to deal with the world you're in, not the world you want, and the person you are, not the person you dream of being. You won't get it if you don't work for it and you may not get it even then.
Happiness is hard work.
But it beats the alternative.
Though often scorned at her own valuation, as a producer of "moral pap for the young," it only takes a small amount of historical acumen to realize how radical she was at her time; and only a little more social self-awareness to realize that in many ways, American society is still more conservative than her. Witness the reluctance of many, even most, of her modern readers to admit that
Jo was right not to marry Laurie!!!!!!
Louisa May Alcott was a hustler, writing to market, explicitly and obsessively writing for money to counteract the legacy of her idealistic and improvident father. She enjoyed catering to morbid fantasy, and did - the stories she satirized Jo for writing to make money for the illustrated papers seem mild compared to the drug use and sexual power games in the pseudononymous stories Madeleine B. Stern first unearthed for us back in the 70s - but the work that survives is unrelentingly realistic in ways that made (and still make) the public uncomfortable, to the point that many of us whitewash these things out of our reading.
Marriage is not the climax and happy-ever-after of life; it is the opening of a whole new can of worms. Too much candy will make you sick and too much ease will make you useless. Sexual attraction will not overcome other incompatibilities in the long term. Peer pressure will lead you to do stupid and even wicked things. It is possible to hate your little sister murderously and love her at the same time. Life is unfair. You have to deal with the world you're in, not the world you want, and the person you are, not the person you dream of being. You won't get it if you don't work for it and you may not get it even then.
Happiness is hard work.
But it beats the alternative.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Let the Dice Fall Where They May
I've always tried to make games into stories. My chess game is erratic because I automatically think in terms of what the queen or knight would choose to do rather than what is strategically the best move. When I play Risk, I tend to roll well in North Africa, for example, which I attribute to that space harboring General Rommel, who is on my side. (Oddly, nobody ever thinks to deploy General Patton against me.)
Most board games, alas, are not amenable to this treatment. When I discovered role-playing games - by which I always mean real, free-form games played with other people, not computer games - I took to them at once, because the whole point of them is to play a character and create, as part of the social group of players and GM, a story in the genre of the game. My fondness for Sims is rooted in the same tendency. One reason I play Sims2 and doubt I will ever play Sims3 is that 3 has no storytelling tool.
The experience of story creation in game format, however, is very different from that of writing one. One of the most fun things about the game/story format is that the creator is not in control. No one likes a "railroad GM," one whose story is set down to run on rails and will work out roughly the same regardless of how the dice roll and what choices the players make. Sit down any bunch of gamers and start them telling their "war stories," and time after time you'll get hear about crucial dice rolls falling at an extreme - the natural 20 rolled by the least powerful party member that saved them all, the critical fumble by a key character that resulted in a Total Party Kill, the failed saving throw that changed everything.
Recently we had one of those failed saves in our group, which resulted in the party rogue succumbing to a magic-induced psychosis and plotting to assassinate the entire party. The player hated it, but as an honest player he played it out, laying a plan that should have worked and, if it had, would have required a complete rethink of the game and new characters all round, probably with the insane character as a major nuisance villain. Only a miraculous series of successful saving throws and the rogue's underestimation of the party cleric prevented this; and now we get to play out the change in the relationship between the now-cured and wildly remorseful rogue and the friends he turned on. Similarly, in recent Sims games the unexpected birth of twins, an alien abduction, and a lightning strike fire that killed a teen on the verge of college have thrown my expectations for the neighborhood into a cocked hat. I am left scrambling to adjust my responses to the new realities and relationships. This is all to the good.
Sometimes, I wish mainstream story forms relied more on dice. Last night I mistimed cooking dinner and had to be in the kitchen for large chunks of the second episode of Terra Nova, but I couldn't feel that as a hardship. Damon didn't have to fill me in on the parts I missed, because it was clear from what was going on when I came into the room what had happened in the interim since I left it. The design of the plot spread out before us like a map. A familiar map; not drawn well enough (though the dinosaurs are pretty good; but I prefer mammalian megafauna to dinos) to hold my attention on aesthetic grounds. It desperately needed a failed saving throw or a critical fumble or a natural twenty rolled by a character which the staging had earmarked as a mere secondary.
It's not that I have spoiled the show for myself by understanding the structure of the one-hour TV show and the genre conventions of science fiction. I understand the structure and genre conventions of the puzzle mystery, too, yet I can read and reread Agatha Christie's and Dorothy L. Sayers's work endlessly, caught up in the sheer pleasure of their execution.
We are all sophisticated critics these days. We may not be able to articulate them, but we know about The Hero's Journey, three-act structure, and of course the TV tropes. We apply them without thinking - and that's our problem, not when viewing, but when creating.
What we've got to do, when creating, is recreate the sensation of the critical fumble, the natural twenty, and the random lightning strike for the reader. This may or may not entail recreating it for yourself. Ideally we are in full control of our material and balance the element of unpredictability with the necessary structure and coherence that fiction (and for that matter narrative non-fiction) requires. But we don't live in an ideal world. Your first draft may be a major structural mess. You may not know until the final scene that a gun needs to be lying on the mantel in the first scene. You may be on the fifth draft before you realize that your narrator cannot be your protagonist. You may be find yourself casually writing a line like "Bean'd jump off a cliff if I asked him to" and only then realize that your heroine needs to ask her faithful steed to jump off a cliff in the climax.
It doesn't matter; not as long as everything's in place in the version the reader sees.
Most board games, alas, are not amenable to this treatment. When I discovered role-playing games - by which I always mean real, free-form games played with other people, not computer games - I took to them at once, because the whole point of them is to play a character and create, as part of the social group of players and GM, a story in the genre of the game. My fondness for Sims is rooted in the same tendency. One reason I play Sims2 and doubt I will ever play Sims3 is that 3 has no storytelling tool.
The experience of story creation in game format, however, is very different from that of writing one. One of the most fun things about the game/story format is that the creator is not in control. No one likes a "railroad GM," one whose story is set down to run on rails and will work out roughly the same regardless of how the dice roll and what choices the players make. Sit down any bunch of gamers and start them telling their "war stories," and time after time you'll get hear about crucial dice rolls falling at an extreme - the natural 20 rolled by the least powerful party member that saved them all, the critical fumble by a key character that resulted in a Total Party Kill, the failed saving throw that changed everything.
Recently we had one of those failed saves in our group, which resulted in the party rogue succumbing to a magic-induced psychosis and plotting to assassinate the entire party. The player hated it, but as an honest player he played it out, laying a plan that should have worked and, if it had, would have required a complete rethink of the game and new characters all round, probably with the insane character as a major nuisance villain. Only a miraculous series of successful saving throws and the rogue's underestimation of the party cleric prevented this; and now we get to play out the change in the relationship between the now-cured and wildly remorseful rogue and the friends he turned on. Similarly, in recent Sims games the unexpected birth of twins, an alien abduction, and a lightning strike fire that killed a teen on the verge of college have thrown my expectations for the neighborhood into a cocked hat. I am left scrambling to adjust my responses to the new realities and relationships. This is all to the good.
Sometimes, I wish mainstream story forms relied more on dice. Last night I mistimed cooking dinner and had to be in the kitchen for large chunks of the second episode of Terra Nova, but I couldn't feel that as a hardship. Damon didn't have to fill me in on the parts I missed, because it was clear from what was going on when I came into the room what had happened in the interim since I left it. The design of the plot spread out before us like a map. A familiar map; not drawn well enough (though the dinosaurs are pretty good; but I prefer mammalian megafauna to dinos) to hold my attention on aesthetic grounds. It desperately needed a failed saving throw or a critical fumble or a natural twenty rolled by a character which the staging had earmarked as a mere secondary.
It's not that I have spoiled the show for myself by understanding the structure of the one-hour TV show and the genre conventions of science fiction. I understand the structure and genre conventions of the puzzle mystery, too, yet I can read and reread Agatha Christie's and Dorothy L. Sayers's work endlessly, caught up in the sheer pleasure of their execution.
We are all sophisticated critics these days. We may not be able to articulate them, but we know about The Hero's Journey, three-act structure, and of course the TV tropes. We apply them without thinking - and that's our problem, not when viewing, but when creating.
What we've got to do, when creating, is recreate the sensation of the critical fumble, the natural twenty, and the random lightning strike for the reader. This may or may not entail recreating it for yourself. Ideally we are in full control of our material and balance the element of unpredictability with the necessary structure and coherence that fiction (and for that matter narrative non-fiction) requires. But we don't live in an ideal world. Your first draft may be a major structural mess. You may not know until the final scene that a gun needs to be lying on the mantel in the first scene. You may be on the fifth draft before you realize that your narrator cannot be your protagonist. You may be find yourself casually writing a line like "Bean'd jump off a cliff if I asked him to" and only then realize that your heroine needs to ask her faithful steed to jump off a cliff in the climax.
It doesn't matter; not as long as everything's in place in the version the reader sees.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Thoughts on Award Week
Alas, I am once again behind the curve, as I haven't read any of the major award winners! Newbery, Caldecott, Prinz, King, Belpre - nothing makes me feel how completely out of the loop I am in my own profession like award announcements! It's also a little embarrassing because I know some of the authors. Not till you get down to the awards for audios do I start knowing the books involved, and that's because the audio version is done a year or more after publication. Oh, and I have read one of the Stonewall honor books. I reckon that's something.
I've read a lot of books I enjoyed, all the same; though 2010 was the first year in a long time I didn't crack 200 read. My final total was 179. I blame the combination of driving and computer games. I've done a lot of reading on buses over the years, and if I'm at a computer I'm not reading a book. Even a lot of my reading time doesn't count toward the total, as I only count books I read all the way through. If I mine two or three chapters of seven or eight books for research, that's a fair number of books that I read intently but can't put on my tally. Magazines and comics don't count unless they're bound collections. And no online reading counts.
The trouble is - there's always more good books published in a year than anybody, even someone on an awards committee, can read. Probably when I do read this year's award winners - and I will read a lot of them eventually - I'll think that this or that other book that never got any buzz probably deserved an award more than this or that winner, whether by some objective standard or by dint of my taste diverging from the judges. I might even think that its failure to win proves the judges hadn't read it. And I might be right, or I might be wrong.
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Even with recent proliferation of awards, there's more good books than there are awards to give to them. Society has worse troubles than that!
I've read a lot of books I enjoyed, all the same; though 2010 was the first year in a long time I didn't crack 200 read. My final total was 179. I blame the combination of driving and computer games. I've done a lot of reading on buses over the years, and if I'm at a computer I'm not reading a book. Even a lot of my reading time doesn't count toward the total, as I only count books I read all the way through. If I mine two or three chapters of seven or eight books for research, that's a fair number of books that I read intently but can't put on my tally. Magazines and comics don't count unless they're bound collections. And no online reading counts.
The trouble is - there's always more good books published in a year than anybody, even someone on an awards committee, can read. Probably when I do read this year's award winners - and I will read a lot of them eventually - I'll think that this or that other book that never got any buzz probably deserved an award more than this or that winner, whether by some objective standard or by dint of my taste diverging from the judges. I might even think that its failure to win proves the judges hadn't read it. And I might be right, or I might be wrong.
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Even with recent proliferation of awards, there's more good books than there are awards to give to them. Society has worse troubles than that!
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Why I Love Literature
So anyway, I was reading a book called Jane's Fame, by Claire Harman, which is a history of Jane Austen's reputation. Her literary one, mostly, but with her, even more so than with most authors, it's all tied up with her personal reputation, and what people assume about who she was and what she thought and felt (in the face of a dearth of solid information, thanks to her sister's notions of privacy). It is in regard to these assumptions that I find this story particularly delightful.
The first reliable French translation of Jane Austen's work was undertaken by one Felix Feneon (excuse me for leaving out the accents; the present internet setup refuses all subtleties) in the 1890s. He discovered her while he was in prison on suspicion - and pretty reasonable suspicion at that - of being associated with an anarchist bombing. He was a War Ministry clerk who kept detonators and mercury in his desk. Kept in solitary while awaiting trial, he was denied access to outside reading matter and soon read through all the French volumes in the limited prison library - which apparently only stocked female authors on the grounds that they wouldn't corrupt the morals of prisoners, or something like that. What remained was Northanger Abbey, so he read it.
And he loved it. Unlike many of her more conservative fans, he saw all kinds of satiric savagery in her social commentary; and he immediately set to work to get permission to import an English dictionary and begin a translation. After he got out, acquitted of anarchy but fired from the War Ministry anyway, he worked in company with John Gray, a lover of Oscar Wilde's (who was at that time languishing in Reading Gaol and complaining he could get no Jane Austen at all) and supposed to be the model for Dorian Gray, to finish the translation, publish it, and move on to the rest of the novels. Feneon's subsequent literary career included being the first French publisher of James Joyce.
What is not to love about this?
The first reliable French translation of Jane Austen's work was undertaken by one Felix Feneon (excuse me for leaving out the accents; the present internet setup refuses all subtleties) in the 1890s. He discovered her while he was in prison on suspicion - and pretty reasonable suspicion at that - of being associated with an anarchist bombing. He was a War Ministry clerk who kept detonators and mercury in his desk. Kept in solitary while awaiting trial, he was denied access to outside reading matter and soon read through all the French volumes in the limited prison library - which apparently only stocked female authors on the grounds that they wouldn't corrupt the morals of prisoners, or something like that. What remained was Northanger Abbey, so he read it.
And he loved it. Unlike many of her more conservative fans, he saw all kinds of satiric savagery in her social commentary; and he immediately set to work to get permission to import an English dictionary and begin a translation. After he got out, acquitted of anarchy but fired from the War Ministry anyway, he worked in company with John Gray, a lover of Oscar Wilde's (who was at that time languishing in Reading Gaol and complaining he could get no Jane Austen at all) and supposed to be the model for Dorian Gray, to finish the translation, publish it, and move on to the rest of the novels. Feneon's subsequent literary career included being the first French publisher of James Joyce.
What is not to love about this?
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Essence of Summer
Once I faced up to the fact that vertigo was kicking my butt and I was neither smart nor steady enough to do anything useful, I made the most of it and spent some long June afternoons indulging in the prime luxury of summer: Reading true ghost stories on the balcony, with a cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Medicinal Power of Libraries
I felt really crappy this morning; badly off balance. (Meniere's Disease. Basically, once in awhile I can't tell up from down. Big nuisance.) If I hadn't been way overdue to polish the dining room set (if I don't the warranty is voided; if I do, even cat scratches are covered) it would have been a sewing day, something I can do sitting down. Polishing the dining room was pretty much all I could do this morning and after lunch I felt lousy. So I did the only thing I could do.
I changed clothes, hopped on the bus, and went to the library.
The librarians had set out a couple of books for my husband, so I got those. I went to see if the sequel to The New Policeman was on the shelf (it was). I felt fine. I went upstairs, loaded the Semi-Weekly News into the microfilm reader with a little bit of fumbling, and I started reading newspaper. I put off getting to this part a long time because microfilm reading used to make me queasy, but it doesn't anymore. I worked till five and barely felt the time pass.
What causes this? Why is it that symptoms that normally floor me float away in a library? It's like the books set up an insulating field in which gravity is reinforced or something.
Fortunately, I'm not someone who has to understand something to take advantage of it. Read on!
I changed clothes, hopped on the bus, and went to the library.
The librarians had set out a couple of books for my husband, so I got those. I went to see if the sequel to The New Policeman was on the shelf (it was). I felt fine. I went upstairs, loaded the Semi-Weekly News into the microfilm reader with a little bit of fumbling, and I started reading newspaper. I put off getting to this part a long time because microfilm reading used to make me queasy, but it doesn't anymore. I worked till five and barely felt the time pass.
What causes this? Why is it that symptoms that normally floor me float away in a library? It's like the books set up an insulating field in which gravity is reinforced or something.
Fortunately, I'm not someone who has to understand something to take advantage of it. Read on!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Yearly Summary
I'm not a good record keeper, but during the year I keep my expense ledger for taxes, track where I send manuscripts when, and try to make a note in the back of my diary of each book read, movie seen in a theater, and species of bird seen. I'm not sure what the point of the diary notes is, as I don't have great faith in my accuracy and if I want to remember the name and author of a book I have to skim backward through diaries puzzling over my own handwriting. If I had a serious purpose I'd put this stuff in a database. I think it's all there because the diary, inefficient as it is for record-keeping purposes, represents the years of my life more than anything else does. On New Year's Eve I make a tally, as a rough guide to what I was thinking and doing during the year.
In 2008, I read 219 books, saw 18 theater movies, got approximately 70 bird species, prepped 5 books for submission, and drafted one. In 2009, if I finish the book I started last evening, I will have read 205 books, prepped one book for submission, not quite finished researching one, gone to a whopping 5 movies, and seen - my goodness - about 180 species! That will never be a precise number because every major birding trip and some casual sightings will always have question marks next to them. I will never be the kind of birder (is there such a thing?) who is always positive in her identifications and can always make them; also, since I traveled a bit and kept trip lists, I might have accidentally counted some species more than once.
I've been accustomed for a long time to say that I read between 200 and 300 books a year, and while this is still technically true it's clear that I don't read as many books as I used too. That doesn't necessarily mean my reading time has diminished. The list deals only in books I read all the way through, so books which I've mined extensively as research but didn't read cover-to-cover, books I read half-way and got fed up with or couldn't face the foreshadowed climax, magazines, journals, comics(except in bound collections), blogs, and internet communications aren't counted. Also, looking further back in the diaries makes it clear that the drop-off began when I quit the soul-sucking dayjob and no longer had the reading time built into that (riding the bus back and forth; walking to and from the restroom; taking the stairs up to the office - my weight ballooned, too, till I took it in hand). Plus, all those trips - New York, Tulsa, 2 trips to Austin, Atlanta, and two trips to the coast. Only Atlanta and New York were plane trips, with all their hours of reading time. Car trips are better for getting birds than books (though you can stop impulsively at bookstores and buy more, since you have a back seat to put them into).
We're told it's not quantity, but quality that counts. I'm not at all sure that's true; certainly not in the American economy, in which the volume of mediocre product has more influence than the price of superior product in the overall health of a market. I've always been an indiscriminate reader, partly on the theory that you have to read a lot of crud to appreciate the good stuff, but mostly because I have a low tolerance for boredom and reading anything is better than traversing a concrete-lined stairwell four times a day with nothing to read. My family's reading, and consequent borrowing and buying, habits have a direct impact on the San Antonio library system and a wide range of retail outlets, and an indirect impact on the literary economy and hence on my own potential to make a living at my profession.
If you want a library in your community, check books out of it. If you want to sell books, buy them. If you want to write them, read them.
I'm not reading too much. I'm setting a good example.
Happy New Year, y'all.
In 2008, I read 219 books, saw 18 theater movies, got approximately 70 bird species, prepped 5 books for submission, and drafted one. In 2009, if I finish the book I started last evening, I will have read 205 books, prepped one book for submission, not quite finished researching one, gone to a whopping 5 movies, and seen - my goodness - about 180 species! That will never be a precise number because every major birding trip and some casual sightings will always have question marks next to them. I will never be the kind of birder (is there such a thing?) who is always positive in her identifications and can always make them; also, since I traveled a bit and kept trip lists, I might have accidentally counted some species more than once.
I've been accustomed for a long time to say that I read between 200 and 300 books a year, and while this is still technically true it's clear that I don't read as many books as I used too. That doesn't necessarily mean my reading time has diminished. The list deals only in books I read all the way through, so books which I've mined extensively as research but didn't read cover-to-cover, books I read half-way and got fed up with or couldn't face the foreshadowed climax, magazines, journals, comics(except in bound collections), blogs, and internet communications aren't counted. Also, looking further back in the diaries makes it clear that the drop-off began when I quit the soul-sucking dayjob and no longer had the reading time built into that (riding the bus back and forth; walking to and from the restroom; taking the stairs up to the office - my weight ballooned, too, till I took it in hand). Plus, all those trips - New York, Tulsa, 2 trips to Austin, Atlanta, and two trips to the coast. Only Atlanta and New York were plane trips, with all their hours of reading time. Car trips are better for getting birds than books (though you can stop impulsively at bookstores and buy more, since you have a back seat to put them into).
We're told it's not quantity, but quality that counts. I'm not at all sure that's true; certainly not in the American economy, in which the volume of mediocre product has more influence than the price of superior product in the overall health of a market. I've always been an indiscriminate reader, partly on the theory that you have to read a lot of crud to appreciate the good stuff, but mostly because I have a low tolerance for boredom and reading anything is better than traversing a concrete-lined stairwell four times a day with nothing to read. My family's reading, and consequent borrowing and buying, habits have a direct impact on the San Antonio library system and a wide range of retail outlets, and an indirect impact on the literary economy and hence on my own potential to make a living at my profession.
If you want a library in your community, check books out of it. If you want to sell books, buy them. If you want to write them, read them.
I'm not reading too much. I'm setting a good example.
Happy New Year, y'all.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Rereading A Christmas Carol - again
So yesterday I was feeling way too crappy to make decisions about where to send the two remaining books that need to go back into the mail (the demon lover story and the fluffy daydream romance that is so off-brand I don't know why I wrote it, much less why I believe in it so strongly), and today I'm overcaffeinating and had to bus downtown to take my husband the pills he forgot and I still have to make the pecan pie for the Christmas Eve dinner our best friend's new girlfriend is hostessing; and the cats don't want me to type; I've put on Melissa Etheridge's Christmas album; and I'm going to talk about Dickens.
I don't do Christmas, but I read A Christmas Carol every year about this time, and have pretty much done so since I was nine. It was among the first books I ever bought for myself, sixty cents from My Weekly Reader Book Club, when I was nine. I'm sure I was nine, although the handwritten address inside did not become ours till I was ten; I don't think I started putting my name and address in books till then, probably because I didn't start carrying them around with me till then. I associate the book with the classroom where I picked it up, the fourth-grade classroom in Maryland, winter of 1970; and this printing is dated October 1970, in confirmation. I didn't read that copy this year, though. My husband got me the Time-Life facsimile set of the Christmas books a few years ago, with the original illustrations. It's much sturdier, and I can still see my old purchase through the pages as I turn them.
One of the reasons to have these established media traditions - Christmas Carol in December, "Alice's Restaurant" at Thanksgiving, 1776 for Independence Day - is the way it puts us in touch with our old selves, layering one on top of the other, with the raw, half-comprehending perceptions of the original nine-year-old showing through the layers of age as I came to understand the text better and better. Although I now have less anachronistic images to call on, I like flashing back to my initial formulation of the Ghost of Christmas Present as a hippy, based on his long hair, bare feet and chest, and his greeting to Scrooge: "Come in and know me better, man." I still hear those words in that half-stoned hippy drawl, the holly wreath askew on his head, sizing up square, selfish, uptight Scrooge with genial skepticism that he can be reformed but game to give it a shot. I was a pretty square, uptight nine-year-old myself, but I wanted to be good, wanted to reform without knowing what was wrong, and I could tell the secret was in this book.
Much that confused me once, that I accepted on faith, I now have the facts and background to comprehend. I still don't know the story of St. Dunstan and the Evil Spirit, but I know that lobsters phosphoresce when they spoil (Marley's face in the knocker has a "dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark celler"). I know that most people in Victorian London didn't have ovens in their homes and had to pay for the baker to cook anything they couldn't accomplish on an open hearth, hence the Cratchits fetching the goose from the bakeshop; and the conversation Scrooge and Christmas Present have about people wanting to close the bakeshops on Sundays in his name refers to an early movement for what we in our day call "blue laws," requiring businesses to close on Sundays to keep the Sabbath "holy." I still can't quite picture the hearse going up the stairs broadwise. A lot of reading of 19th century literature finally resulted in my realizing that Scrooge's nephew's wife is sitting out the Blindman's Bluff game because she's pregnant, but I can't convince other people who aren't as well versed in Victorian delicacy. Never mind, I know it now, as surely as I know that Marley was dead, to begin with.
The virtues of Dickens's style are out of fashion, but oh, how I love his rolling, generous, liesurely, abundant sentences in this book; and how I loved them when I was nine, how they drew me into a sensuous bath of words! Nine-year-olds are supposed to have short attention spans and are assumed to have no appreciation for the tactile joys of style, but I did. Words lodged in my brain and became part of it: "Oh, he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" "I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere!" "The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" "O God, to hear the insect on the leaf pronounce upon the too much life among its hungry brothers in the dust!"
And images, piled up in my head like the oranges and apples in the fruit stands where Christmas Present took Scrooge, scattering drops from his torch as profligately as Dickens uses adjectives. Those half-closed shops, the onions like fat Spanish friars; the bleak moors around the house where the old man leads his family in old, old songs; the horny-handed lighthouse keepers and storm-tossed sailors; Mrs. Cratchit and her daughters brave with ribbons; Tucker chasing the plump sister; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, its kind hand trembling, dwindling into a bedpost; the Ghost of Christmas Past with its lighted belt accurately forecasting the visual effects Christmas lights decades before they existed; the Christmas turkey that never could have stood upon its legs without snapping them off like sticks of sealing wax; and, emerging disturbing and scary from under Christmas Present's festive robes, the boy Ignorance and the girl, Want.
I'm an agnostic. I stopped doing Christmas years ago. The whole business of presents stresses me out - I don't really like getting them, except when they are a surprise, a free and open indication that someone was thinking of me and saw something I might like, and I resent feeling that I have to buy them - and though I like decorating and baking and caroling and so on, as part of a group, no one else around me seems to, at least not enough to want to do them with me. I hate Christmas displays in stores and I hate the monotonous repetition of the same Christmas songs over and over on the radio; but I like to play the local college station, KSYM, when all the student DJs have gone home and some hardworking soul put together about 48 hours of Christmas music with no repeats, gospel choirs and Gene Autry, Cheech and Chong, obscure groups singing about Christmas on West Mistletoe (two blocks over from me! Yay!) and how Muhammed Ali taught the singer the meaning of Christmas. Celebration is good. And A Christmas Carol is wonderful.
A few years ago a friend of mine read it for the first time and e-mailed me about it, a little blown away, saying that it wasn't about Christmas at all, but about living your life. And that's exactly so. Scrooge, and Marley before him, aren't living. They have their heads down in their business, have let it eat their lives, and their crime is not so much being greedy as being miserable. They have lost their way as social animals.
We speak and act as if alienation were a modern invention. It's not. Christmas was commercialized long ago and the "old-fashioned Christsmas" of Dickens was never the norm. If it had been, he wouldn't have felt impelled to write the story.
Read it. Enjoy it. Get your head out of your troubles and enjoy yourself and others. If your own heart laughs, that will be quite enough for you.
Merry Christmas.
I don't do Christmas, but I read A Christmas Carol every year about this time, and have pretty much done so since I was nine. It was among the first books I ever bought for myself, sixty cents from My Weekly Reader Book Club, when I was nine. I'm sure I was nine, although the handwritten address inside did not become ours till I was ten; I don't think I started putting my name and address in books till then, probably because I didn't start carrying them around with me till then. I associate the book with the classroom where I picked it up, the fourth-grade classroom in Maryland, winter of 1970; and this printing is dated October 1970, in confirmation. I didn't read that copy this year, though. My husband got me the Time-Life facsimile set of the Christmas books a few years ago, with the original illustrations. It's much sturdier, and I can still see my old purchase through the pages as I turn them.
One of the reasons to have these established media traditions - Christmas Carol in December, "Alice's Restaurant" at Thanksgiving, 1776 for Independence Day - is the way it puts us in touch with our old selves, layering one on top of the other, with the raw, half-comprehending perceptions of the original nine-year-old showing through the layers of age as I came to understand the text better and better. Although I now have less anachronistic images to call on, I like flashing back to my initial formulation of the Ghost of Christmas Present as a hippy, based on his long hair, bare feet and chest, and his greeting to Scrooge: "Come in and know me better, man." I still hear those words in that half-stoned hippy drawl, the holly wreath askew on his head, sizing up square, selfish, uptight Scrooge with genial skepticism that he can be reformed but game to give it a shot. I was a pretty square, uptight nine-year-old myself, but I wanted to be good, wanted to reform without knowing what was wrong, and I could tell the secret was in this book.
Much that confused me once, that I accepted on faith, I now have the facts and background to comprehend. I still don't know the story of St. Dunstan and the Evil Spirit, but I know that lobsters phosphoresce when they spoil (Marley's face in the knocker has a "dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark celler"). I know that most people in Victorian London didn't have ovens in their homes and had to pay for the baker to cook anything they couldn't accomplish on an open hearth, hence the Cratchits fetching the goose from the bakeshop; and the conversation Scrooge and Christmas Present have about people wanting to close the bakeshops on Sundays in his name refers to an early movement for what we in our day call "blue laws," requiring businesses to close on Sundays to keep the Sabbath "holy." I still can't quite picture the hearse going up the stairs broadwise. A lot of reading of 19th century literature finally resulted in my realizing that Scrooge's nephew's wife is sitting out the Blindman's Bluff game because she's pregnant, but I can't convince other people who aren't as well versed in Victorian delicacy. Never mind, I know it now, as surely as I know that Marley was dead, to begin with.
The virtues of Dickens's style are out of fashion, but oh, how I love his rolling, generous, liesurely, abundant sentences in this book; and how I loved them when I was nine, how they drew me into a sensuous bath of words! Nine-year-olds are supposed to have short attention spans and are assumed to have no appreciation for the tactile joys of style, but I did. Words lodged in my brain and became part of it: "Oh, he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" "I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere!" "The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" "O God, to hear the insect on the leaf pronounce upon the too much life among its hungry brothers in the dust!"
And images, piled up in my head like the oranges and apples in the fruit stands where Christmas Present took Scrooge, scattering drops from his torch as profligately as Dickens uses adjectives. Those half-closed shops, the onions like fat Spanish friars; the bleak moors around the house where the old man leads his family in old, old songs; the horny-handed lighthouse keepers and storm-tossed sailors; Mrs. Cratchit and her daughters brave with ribbons; Tucker chasing the plump sister; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, its kind hand trembling, dwindling into a bedpost; the Ghost of Christmas Past with its lighted belt accurately forecasting the visual effects Christmas lights decades before they existed; the Christmas turkey that never could have stood upon its legs without snapping them off like sticks of sealing wax; and, emerging disturbing and scary from under Christmas Present's festive robes, the boy Ignorance and the girl, Want.
I'm an agnostic. I stopped doing Christmas years ago. The whole business of presents stresses me out - I don't really like getting them, except when they are a surprise, a free and open indication that someone was thinking of me and saw something I might like, and I resent feeling that I have to buy them - and though I like decorating and baking and caroling and so on, as part of a group, no one else around me seems to, at least not enough to want to do them with me. I hate Christmas displays in stores and I hate the monotonous repetition of the same Christmas songs over and over on the radio; but I like to play the local college station, KSYM, when all the student DJs have gone home and some hardworking soul put together about 48 hours of Christmas music with no repeats, gospel choirs and Gene Autry, Cheech and Chong, obscure groups singing about Christmas on West Mistletoe (two blocks over from me! Yay!) and how Muhammed Ali taught the singer the meaning of Christmas. Celebration is good. And A Christmas Carol is wonderful.
A few years ago a friend of mine read it for the first time and e-mailed me about it, a little blown away, saying that it wasn't about Christmas at all, but about living your life. And that's exactly so. Scrooge, and Marley before him, aren't living. They have their heads down in their business, have let it eat their lives, and their crime is not so much being greedy as being miserable. They have lost their way as social animals.
We speak and act as if alienation were a modern invention. It's not. Christmas was commercialized long ago and the "old-fashioned Christsmas" of Dickens was never the norm. If it had been, he wouldn't have felt impelled to write the story.
Read it. Enjoy it. Get your head out of your troubles and enjoy yourself and others. If your own heart laughs, that will be quite enough for you.
Merry Christmas.
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