I have one novel completed and revised once. Last August, I received a bunch of great feedback on it and, after mulling things over for awhile, I think I know what changes need to be made. I plan on these being the last major changes before I start shopping it around. When that will be, I don’t really know. So I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate those changes, since I like to have a pretty good idea of what direction I’ll be going in before I start editing because everything needs to tie together by the end.

I broke ground on the beginnings of another (unrelated) novel a few days ago set in an alternate Pacific Northwest around 1870. This novel-in-my-head is the primary culprit for keeping my brain agitated. The basic idea has been rolling around in my head for about two years now, and is part of a trilogy of alternate history, pseudo-Western novels. At this point, I have a good 60-70% of the first novel outlined in my head. While you might note that this is well under 100%, one of the lessons I learned from writing my first novel is that this is probably a good amount to get started. Most of the major events are nailed down, the story has an arc, and I think I know what I’m trying to get at by writing it. Most of this will change during the actual writing, I suspect.

As for the second book in the trilogy (third book on the brain, if you’re counting) that takes place in the Southwestern desert around 1870, I probably have about 20-30% figured out in my head, including some major events that happen at the beginning, middle, and end. Many times when I’m reading, watching TV, or just cruising around, I note things ideas or situations that would fit with this novel. Ideally, I’ll get up to that 60% by the time I get to writing it. The third book in the trilogy is very nebulous, probably only 10% imagined at this point, and takes place in a far-future surrogate Minneapolis. I look forward to imagining more about it.

That’s four novels, only one of which has been written and still needs work. To make matters worse, after buying my story “Eskhara” JJA recommended writing a novel in the same world since it seemed so fertile. Alas, he was right—and early in the morning or late at night I find myself plugging holes and building bridges between sections of the story. Alarmingly, I would guess I’m at the 40-50% point as far as imagining a full-fledged novel; for those of you keeping up, that’s pretty close to “go” time. I feel like I could crank it out in no time.

Of course, you can’t write five novels at once. Or at least I can’t, nor do I want to. My plan (if you can call it that) is to finish revisions on the completed novel before putting significant work into novel #2. This is complicated somewhat by having a new baby, needing to finish my coursework, and taking my preliminary PhD exams. Once the baby is not so new and classes have gone away (for good! yay!) then I should have time (for the first time in about four years) to really focus on writing. As long as I show up to work regularly, I think I can put some serious dents in writing some of these novels.

The hard part will be keeping the short stories at bay during all of this. Ideas are like weeds on the brain: if you don’t get them out by the base, then they just keep coming back. For a long while, novels were too big for me to imagine so I (subconsciously) stuck to writing short stories. Now it seems most ideas I get are novel-length. Lucky me.

Current Mood: Daunted |

What makes this even more disconcerting is the fact that I want to start revising the first draft of my novel soon and I need to make some major changes. I wanted to write a novel that takes a bunch of the old tropes of the hero’s quest and show how such heroes could be viewed as psychopaths, and how everyone who isn’t the white male lead gets shabby treatment. My problem? I’m pretty sure it reinforces these stereotypes rather than exposing them. That’s a tricky thing to solve.

These are not easy problems to deal with. For instance, I wrote I story that was well-received in a grad workshop where the protagonist is quite clearly not a good guy, and is not someone the reader should be rooting for. So that’s challenge number one—getting the reader to be interested in someone they would ordinarily not like very much without necessarily being for or against him or her. The world in which this story’s protag operates is heavily patriarchal, and in one scene a man offers the protagonist a night with his daughter as a peace offering (the twist being that the man is about 80, his daughter about 60). This is supposed to be shocking and revolting, yet the majority of the readers just accepted it without comment. Those that did comment expressed criticism of the author (i.e. me) rather than considering the violence in the context of the fictional world. So that’s challenge number two—getting the reader to critique the social dynamics of the fictional situation rather than thinking the author is a bigot. (Granted, this example is one small episode in the context of a novel-length story in a world I’m still figuring out, but the readers of course don’t know that or have access to anything outside the page—nor should they need it if I’m doing my job right.)

And then there’s hardest challenge of them all—don’t be a bigot, even if you don’t mean to be. After googling around a little I found this bit by Charles Stross on Bechdel’s Law. After reading through things like this (be sure to check out the women in refrigerators link) it always raises a serious question for me: do I really need to be writing stories where violence happens to women? Is there some other, better way to make the same point?

Like with everything in writing, you can do whatever you want as long as you do it well—it’s just that doing it well happens to be very hard. The danger comes in thinking “I’m just telling a story, it’s not about all that other stuff” when in fact it’s always about that other stuff, whether you accept it critically or uncritically. So if I write a novel that tends to define women more by their role (mother, temptress, etc.) rather than by what they do, then not only is that lazy writing but it also goes against my personal politics. What’s scary is how remarkably easy it is to overlook these issues, probably because so many (most?) movies, books, and television shows tend to follow an uncritical “just telling a story” route; as a writer, it’s very easy to follow that same path without thinking through the bigger issues and considering what societal values you’re reflecting or reinforcing.

Thinking this stuff through the last couple days has actually helped me figure out how to open my novel differently. It will also change the overall shape of the story, but that’s okay—it’s quite good, actually, since I think the plot needs to be less formulaic (or archetypal, take your pick) and more messy, more complicated. I wanted to get the main women characters more involved in what’s currently a “guys doing guy things” kind of plot, and now I think I found the thread. Wish me luck, as I’ll most certainly need it…

Current Mood: Thinking Hard |

The Egyptian striker Mido has revealed that Wigan want to sign him on loan. From Spurs to Boro to Wigan? There’s a trajectory there son, and it sure as hell ain’t up. Next stop: Millwall.

My fiction group critiqued my novel Thursday night and I got a ton of valuable feedback. The things I thought were problems and I could quickly paper over? Still glaring problems. The parts I thought were the best part of the book? Yeah, they liked those the best. All without me really saying a word.

Sadly, the novel needs more work than I would have hoped. Happily, thanks to these friends, I have a much, much better idea of where and how to start fixing. Having good critical readers is invaluable. What I really learned is what themes or parts to ramp up a bit and what parts to suppress. And I found it oddly liberating to laugh along with them at the parts that just didn’t work. Like I said, far better for us to laugh so I can cut them than have potential agents and editors laughing at them as they seal up my pink slip.

Current Mood: Sleeping While Typing |

My overall feeling? I think it’s okay, actually. There are plenty of twists and turns and the plot is always moving (or perhaps rocketing) forward, so I think it would keep a body reading. My only question is whether it’s too plot-driven, but I’ll let my reading group be the judges of that. I find that it’s much easier to let the spirit take you where it will when writing a novel, but whether that translates into salability, who knows? Yet we shall see…

I’m finishing Blood Meridian today and it’s just as good, if not better, than the first time. A part of me wants to start it over and read the whole thing through again just because I like it so much, but I’m not going to do that.

I’m wondering, however, how Cormac McCarthy votes. Googling for his political affiliation results in nothing. My guess would be some strain of libertarianism, but I’m not sure—individual liberty turns pretty friggin’ ugly in Blood Meridian, for instance. In researching this question, I stumbled across some libertarian interpretations of No Country For Old Men that point out that the drug war that’s at the core of the story can only come about by governments making drugs illegal, and that the police (as representatives of the state) are unable to do anything about it. And then there’s the passage where the sheriff relates a story about sitting next to a woman at some event dinner going on about “right wing this and right wing that” and him responding that the world started to go down the tubes once young people stopped using sir or ma’am.

It’s an interesting interpretation, but ultimately makes the mistake of thinking McCarthy the author is on the same political side as the folksy sheriff who is totally out of his league against a force of nature like Chigurh. It seems to me that McCarthy is writing above politics and instead delves into the heart of human nature, which he sees as black and mean. We paper over that black heart with morals and social graces of our own invention (as opposed to necessary truths about the human condition) but ultimately, violence is at our very core. Characters who embrace this notion like Chigurh and the judge are alive at the end of their respective books, whereas those who act morally wind up dead. In my reading, this is neither right nor wrong (nor right nor left in the political arena) but rather it just is, and that to me is the ugly truth McCarthy wants to force readers to look at.

This doesn’t take into account The Border Trilogy, but again I would have to say that a strong political reading doesn’t come naturally to these books, which I would guess is part of the point. Early westerns certainly espouse what I would consider a libertarian ethic, but in The Border Trilogy McCarthy is both critiquing and criticizing this conception of the American West as an idealized space of individual freedom (an idea that of course is also at the center of Blood Meridian). And I’ve read a few interesting essays on how McCarthy’s fiction is a critique of capitalist expansion, where life is little more than a series of forced commodity exchanges that are rarely negotiated on equal footing between the two parties and hence always turns out bad for one side, an argument that I find compelling considering the strong evidence presented in both The Border Trilogy and Blood Meridian. Just because I buy the argument doesn’t mean that I think McCarthy is a Marxist though.

The complexity of McCarthy’s work makes me not only want to reread his books, but to also read about his books and compare and contrast different interpretations and positions. The fact that his books spawn so many solid yet contradictory arguments would be one of the reasons why he can be called the best living American writer with a straight face. That may be debatable but when it comes to McCarthy, it seems like most things are.

Current Mood: Pensive |
Currently Listening To – The Hold Steady – “Stay Positive”

I heard this morning that Tom Disch died, or rather took his own life on July 4 at the age of 68. Of his body of work, I have only read a number of science-fiction-related essays and Camp Concentration, all of which I liked. I know very little of the man otherwise, but what I do know is this: he was a major figure in the New Wave of sci-fi and had an enormous impact on a number of readers and writers. But I also know that Google news search hasn’t mentioned it yet, and if in his last days Disch was fighting to stay in his rent-controlled apartment, then the unparalleled riches that many writers hope will be theirs when they finally make it “big” may not be as vast as imagined. Sad, sobering news all around.

The revisions to the novel continue more or less on track. I really can’t tell anymore whether the thing is any good and I’m ready to be done with this round so I can circulate it to my reading group and get some more feedback. Right now I’m trying to clean up the language a bit and to better tie the beginning and middle to the end.

I had it in my mind to take inspiration from China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station but upon further review it is much more like his King Rat. Whereas PSS has long and vividly described passages that really root the reader in the fictional world of New Crobuzon and the overall plot works in tandem with this world-building, KR takes place in contemporary London and is both more episodic and plot-driven as the protagonist learns more about himself and the city he thought he knew. In fact, swap out London for New York in that sentence and you pretty much have my novel. If it’s anywhere as good as King Rat I’ll be in good shape…

Otherwise, I haven’t sold any new short fiction in over a year and that sucks. Part of the reason is that my submissions in the last year have been anemic, but I also think that many of the stories I’ve sent out need some touching up—many of the rejections I’ve been getting have more or less said “this story is just okay.” Personally, I think really, really paying attention to language might be what’s needed, but my writing time is going into the novel right now.

And on the school front, it looks like I might have a lighter class load than usual come fall. It looks like an almost certainty at this point that I will not be getting a teaching position but all is not lost—at least not totally. They offered me the Program Assistantship, which is full tuition remission and some pay.

This does nothing to help me with the problem of getting teaching experience (and contrary to what some folks at my school think, it really is hard to get adjunct teaching positions without any experience, and when you apply they really do think something is strange when a 2nd year Ph.D. student hasn’t been a TA ) but the tuition remission staunches the outflow of cash and makes things a little more comfortable academically, meaning I only need to take two classes per semester. Unfortunately, the PA position does almost nothing for income since it works out to be around $3K per semester. Realistically, if I’m only taking two classes two days per week and doing 10-12 hours of PA work, I’ll need to get another job to help bring in some cash. Just another ball to keep in the air…

Crawling back into bed for another year or two sounds like a pretty good idea right about now.

UPDATE: Oh, how fortune can swing so dramatically. I just got word that I will indeed be getting a full TA position for the upcoming school year, which pretty much makes all of the above moot. And the sun came out. I’m not even kidding…

Current Mood: Monday Blues |

After a month-long hiatus, I listened to the second half of Owen Wister’s The Virginian and finished it yesterday. My verdict: not very good. It’s widely regarded as the first Western published, and I expected more cattle rustling and villain foiling rather than protracted courtship scenes.

There are many problems with this book (especially for a pinko lefty reader such as myself) but politics aside, there is a massive problem with the title character. It won’t surprise you to learn that the Virginian is a real man’s man, one who knows right from wrong and doesn’t need law or religion to understand the world, and of course he’s the guy nearly everyone in the book looks up to—if not upon their initial meeting, then over time. The problem? He never makes a mistake. Basically, everything he says is true and everything he does turns out to be the correct thing to have done. This makes for extremely dull reading, but the book does an excellent job describing both the American West and the kind of man (and to a lesser extent, woman) it takes to settle there.

Which is why casually rereading Blood Meridian alongside it has been so enjoyable. Against the flawless, chivalrous Virginian you get McCarthy’s ultra-violent kid, and McCarthy depicts a very different kind of American West and the kind of men who inhabited it. My next audio book is going to be Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, another classic Western, and I’m starting The Orchard Keeper by McCarthy in hard copy. And I’m continuing to read Blood Meridian, because I love it.

I’m also working on rewriting the novel I wrote last summer and lo! ’tis way more work than I expected. I knew minor repair work would be needed but I underestimated the extent of the job. To belabor the construction metaphor, I believe the novel is structurally sound but it’s fleshing out every scene, removing clunky dialogue, and smoothing out the storyline so the beginning actually points to the ending that’s taking much longer than I expected.

My goal is to get a revised draft in front of my summer reading group by July 31st. It’s going to be tight.

Current Mood: Fine |

Did anyone see Jose Mourinho’s demise at Chelski coming so early? I certainly didn’t. After he survived the summer I figured he was good for the season. Wrong-o. I can’t say that this is the best tactic. A number of the clubs key players are loyal to Mourinho and I would think that this move may have deep-sixed Cheski’s quest for a quadruple.

And we’re not even to October yet and I’m already sick of hearing about @#$@in’ Ars*nal. Yes, they’re playing well at the moment but it’s easy to ignore their cake schedule. Of their six games so far, four have been at home and one (Spurs) was in London. So the only travel game has been Blackburn. Now look at their upcoming fixtures: home to Newcastle (who just lost to Derby for christ’s sake) then away to West Ham (erm, still in London) then home again to both Sunderland and Bolton. So just to put this in perspective, for the first two months of the season (nine games), they’ve had to play one league game outside London, and in those six wins they faced four of the bottom six teams. In that same time, Liverpool has hosted Chelski, and Chelski will also be playing Man Ure tomorrow.

Recap: play lots of games at home, play one away game outside London, play crap teams, and avoid the other three Big Teams. Must be a nice way to ease into a season.

I had a meeting with my professor Friday to go over my novel and it went really, really well. He doesn’t shy away from (ahem) critical remarks, but he was overwhelming positive. Better yet, he had a lot of helpful suggestions to improve the novel. Overall, it made me excited to start revising it. When I get time. Whenever that is.

Almost exciting is taking notes for my Joyce paper, which has consisted of circling proper nouns in Dubliners in red pencil and trying to make an argument about whether they appear as subjects or objects in the sentence, and why that’s significant. Exciting shit, this scholarship. Another professor referred to Joyce scholars as “aliens.”

In a vexing turn of events, it looks like I’m going to have to restructure my independent study. I had grouped my books into three basic categories: fictional societies; the human, inhuman, and post-human in sci-fi; and American dystopia. After kicking this around with my professor a bit, we mutually agreed that it the study should have a narrower focus. As structured, this is a breadth of work covering a lot of material shallowly; it would be more useful to read with more of a thesis in mind.

So what I’m toying with now is the (failed) utopian promise of California, and how the locus for utopian thinking slid northward to Oregon and California. “North is better than southern California” is a prominent theme in a lot of Philip K Dick’s work as well as in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Obviously, Kim Stanley Robinson’s California Trilogy will be central, too. The question is why the Pacific Northwest became the new hot spot for utopian thinking, and whether the problems of southern California (as presented in these novels) would be solved by moving north. This entails a lot more research, and is more utopian-based rather than sci-fi based. Which is okay. As long as I get something useful out of it.

Current Mood: Bored |

I started with an 8800-word short story and wrote about 10K words a week for eight weeks, averaging about 2K words per day. This was neither easy nor excruciating and tended to having bigger production days on Mondays and Tuesdays, lower production days on Thursdays and Fridays, and tended not to work too much on weekends; I often wrote but rarely on the novel. If pressed, I probably could have written faster but there are worse ways to go about your business.

Oh, Slushmaster Doug Cohen from Realms of Fantasy posted a piece on surviving the slush pile. He asked his survivors if he could share our opening paragraphs and why they made him keep reading; mine’s #10, “Black Jack Davy.”

Watched the non-event of the LA Galaxy vs. Chelski but I simply couldn’t not watch the first steps of David Beckham as an MLS player. I told myself, “You know, he’s going to play about ten minutes and won’t do a whole lot.” Which is pretty much what happened. His 60-yard pass was nice (even if not 100% effective) and yes the tackle that made everyone’s heart skip a skip made mine skip too.

And gawd, do Wynalda, Smyth, and O’Brien form a three-headed jackass in the commentary booth or what? They’re flat awful.

I finished the film version of A Scanner Darkly last week and forgot to comment on it. It was good but not great. It leaned a little too much toward slapstick for me. As Dick’s daughter said in the extra features, there’s no doubt the book has its funny parts but I thought Paul Giamatti did a better job evoking the general feeling of disorientation, where you have to laugh at the characters’ drug-addled antics because otherwise it’s just too damn depressing.

Still, I wasn’t sure how the director was going to be able to pull off such a complicated book, but he actually did far better than I expected. One of those movies where I’m not sure how people who hadn’t read the book first would feel about it.

I’m about a quarter through Jim Shepard’s Love and Hydrogen, a short story collection. I read the title story in one of my fiction workshops and was ga-ga over it. The others I’ve read so far haven’t wowed me nearly as much, I’m afraid. The stories are good but lack the sheer imagination of the story “Love and Hydrogen,” even they match its audacity. If that makes any sense.

I’ve also nearly finished Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Civil War. The play is crap. The stories are pretty good. On the back jacket, it’s called “unmistakable Hemingway” and I would have to agree—for all the good and bad connotations.

I tested out of the advanced level for my Spanish course Friday and begin the Expert level this week. At once, I’m fairly impressed with my reading comprehension and ability to hold a conversation in certain areas, but I’m also depressed with trying to comprehend a native speaker speaking at a normal pace and topics outside the narrow wedge of my vocabulary.

Geez, did you know they now make a see-thru bear can? Granted, you’d need to line it with a clear plastic bag, but it would be so much nicer than the black one, which was the only game in town for many a year.

Also, if I can vent: I’m not a fan of the Madison REI. It’s a small store that has an uncanny knack for never having what I want, meaning I should just cut out the middleman and order the stuff directly from the REI website and have it shipped to the store. I’m planning on getting an ENO Doublenest Hammock but, of course, they didn’t have it.

Worse, the workers are either clueless or assume you are. Most of the salespeople at the Seattle REI would ask a couple questions first to figure out who they’re talking to: a car camper, a day hiker, marathon backpacker, sherpa, etc. The workers at the REI assume that because they’ve been backpacking a half-dozen times, that’s more than you. I don’t like being told that my super-kickass all-time favorite piece of gear (the $135 featherweight bulletproof sil-tarp) that was tragically lost on a trip isn’t normally kept in stock because it’s “overkill.” If by overkill the guy actually meant “a bit pricey but often a friggin’ lifesaver” then I guess I would agree.

So when I tell the guy that I’m looking for a +55 degree sleeping bag to use for humid summer sleeping and for skeezy Central American hotels where the sheets can stand up and walk, don’t try to nudge me towards the +40 degree, $180 version because it’s more versatile. It’s also, erm, $120 more than I want to spend, considering I already have sleeping bags rated for both 20+ and 0 degrees. Thanks for the advice, but when someone walks in saying, “Yes, I want this exact product” you may wish to consider the fact that said person may not be a complete novice.

At the REI Seattle, the workers there were wilder mountaineers than I’ll ever be; at Rutabaga in Madison, the paddlers there know more about being on the water than your average duck. So it burns my cheese when some dope who has done a couple overnights in the Kettle Moraine thinks he’s a pro. Brutha, please, please, PLEASE!

And man, has this been a learning experience. A few premature musings about the process:

* I wonder how much what I was reading came out in what I was writing. My suspicion? A lot. I think parts of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell bled through, even though the books are complete opposites. Magic—how it’s done, what it looks like, etc.—are at the core of both. I can only hope that my version is somewhere near as interesting as Ms. Clarke’s. The other book I’ve been reading, Regeneration is largely about repressed emotions, heroism, and Freudian psychology. My novel was always going to hit on these themes, but Ms. Barker’s book turned out to be a great companion piece to get me thinking about my book’s plot a bit differently.

* I wonder how much what I was listening to came out in what I was writing. My suspicion? A lot. The book was a lot darker than I originally imagined. I wonder how much Elliott Smith has to do that as I got hooked on him at the same time, and it’s not cheerful music; rather somber and defeatist. So’s the book. I listened to quite a bit of moody Wilco too, and that didn’t hurt either.

* As stated, the book came out darker, less comic, and more graphically violent than I originally imagined. I thought it was primarily going to be about clashing cultures in the global city, but it’s much more about walking the dark and filthy corridors of heroism. The last chapter is flat out horror—very gruesome and very Machiavellian. Didn’t expect that.

* Having the first draft of a novel is great, but I have a feeling it’s like finishing the first quarter of a marathon. There is so much work to be done but, at the moment, I’m looking forward to it. Now that I actually know where the story goes, I can start shaping the early parts to point in that direction.

Overall, I feel pretty strongly that there’s all the makings for a good novel here. The open question is whether I can make it a good novel. I hope so.

But I can totally see how novel writing can be addictive. This has been so much longer and more twisty and complicated and frustrating and rewarding and surprising than short story writing. Short story writing is snipe hunting; novel writing is snipe herding.

Current Mood: All is a Blur |
Currently Listening To – Elliott Smith – “From a Basement on the Hill”

I haven’t been able to write much in the last week or so because I didn’t know where the story went. The big climactic section has to more or less make sense of (or at least with) everything that came before it. Right now, I’ve got 70K words that constitute the plot, but not so much on what it all means. But I’m slowly figuring that out. I checked out some Jung and Freud from the library and it’s helping—helping the novel, not me personally, I swear!

Anyway, this novel started as a meditation on Theseus and other Greek heroes and how they weren’t really that nice. It’s no secret most myths and fairy tales in their original form are really pretty nasty. So I guess I’m trying to write a modern story that’s at once mythic and yet simultaneously nasty, so you get this “Man, that dude is bad ass” along with “Erm, wasn’t that just mass murder he committed?”

And after reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a book I read as being largely about the magic of books, I realize that my book wants to say something about fantasy; about why we desire the fantastic, why the nasty bits often make it better. That’s where the Jungian and Freudian stuff comes in handy as a handrail with all the archetypal hero stuff. Horribly, however, it doesn’t help me with my ending.

My project for this week is to try and work through that, to just write an ending that doesn’t need any meaning whatsoever. There’s the big showdown, lots of explosions and fireworks, death at every turn, that kind of stuff. It definitely needs a twist or the stakes raised or something, because the ending as I envision it is pretty straightforward and predictable. But once again, the lesson that I’ve learned over and over again while writing this novel is that the only thing that counts are the words on the page. Of course it needs to be reworked (probably pretty heavily in fact) but that can’t happen until there are words in sentences in paragraphs in chapters to tear apart. Waiting for the right answer to pop into my head is not a good solution.

Rolling up the driver’s window in the Jeep yesterday caused it to break. There was a grinding noise and the window fell as though it had just been dropped and, amazingly, no amount of pressing UP on the button would make it come back up. And wouldn’t you know, after weeks of it looking like rain, today it’s actually going to rain. Perfect.

A quick note: Brazil 3, Argentina 0 in the Copa America final? Who’d have thunk it? Far from a classic and, regardless of what Phil Schoen and Ray Hudson said, you can’t call it an upset. Yes, Argentina were playing silky football heading into the final and Brazil was stop-n-start, but c’mon—I don’t care if it’s a team of 6-year-olds playing against pros, it’s never an upset if the Brazilian team wins.

And I have a love/hate relationship with Ray Hudson. Sometimes he says stuff that makes me laugh, and he often makes astute points about the game, but often he just won’t shut up and Phil Schoen just feeds into it. Check out his over-the-top commentary parts one, two, and three, courtesy of YouTube.

Current Mood: Peevish |