reading – Kelley Eskridge

Read this book: Dissension by Stacey Berg

Stacey Berg Dissension Cover It’s been ages since I’ve talked about a book or film or TV series I love. I want to start doing more of it, as I find them.

Let’s start with Dissension by Stacey Berg.

For four hundred years, the Church has led the remnants of humanity as they struggle for survival in the last inhabited city. Echo Hunter 367 is exactly what the Church created her to be: loyal, obedient, lethal. A clone who shouldn’t care about anything but her duty. Who shouldn’t be able to.

When rebellious citizens challenge the Church’s authority, it is Echo’s duty to hunt them down before civil war can tumble the city back into the dark. But Echo hides a deadly secret: doubt. And when Echo’s mission leads her to Lia, a rebel leader who has a secret of her own, Echo is forced to face that doubt. For Lia holds the key to the city’s survival, and Echo must choose between the woman she loves and the purpose she was born to fulfill.

Full disclosure: I had the pleasure of editing this book in an earlier draft before it was acquired by HarperCollins. I loved it then, and I love it even more after the work that Stacey did with her terrific team at Voyager Impulse to bring the book home. This is a book that pushes all my happy buttons as a reader. A novel driven by people making high-stakes choices and experiencing the consequences. A woman finding her identity. A human being diving deep into challenges of loyalty, love, trust, and survival. Lovely writing, big feelings, small joys, humor, grief, persistence. A compelling cast of characters.

If you liked Solitaire or Dangerous Space, I think you’ll like Dissension. I feel like Stacey is a sister explorer of the same human territory that fascinates me. This book has made me laugh, and weep, every time I’ve read it.

You can read the first chapter here. Dissension is available Tuesday, March 15 on Kindle, and in paperback on Tuesday, April 12. I hope you read it, and I hope you love it as much as I do.

Enjoy your day.

Reminder: reading Tuesday night in Kirkland

Reading Tuesday night in Kirkland and hope you can join me!

I am reading Tuesday night in Kirkland, and hope you will join me.

It’s been a while since I’ve read in Seattle, and this one is special from my perspective: an opportunity to share work that I haven’t read to Seattle audiences yet. I love to read, and I’m excited to read something new.

Location details below, and you can head over to Nicola’s blog for more details about the structure of the event (because I am just that lazy, ).

Wilde Rover Irish Pub and Restaurant
111 Central Way
Kirkland, WA 98033

Starts at 7PM.

Enjoy your day, and come share some story with us if you can.

Join me at Norwescon this weekend

I’ll be at Seattle’s Norwescon this coming weekend (April 21-24), doing panels and a reading. I’ll also be at the banquet on Thursday night.

My big hope for the weekend? The chance to meet Patricia McKillip and tell her how deeply I love her work and how much it means to me.

Here’s my schedule. If you’re planning to attend, please find me and say hello!

Thursday, April 21, 5pm
Banquet

Friday, April 22, 3pm
Editing the Novel
Editing a 5,000 word short story is one thing – how do you edit a 100,000 word novel? A panel of professional editors discuss their own experience in editing the novel – how to keep a work that long consistent, how to maintain energy and enthusiasm, how to liaise with the author over the long haul, and how to decide how long or short a novel should ultimately be.
Kelley Eskridge (moderator), Shannon Butcher, Lou Anders, Nick Mamatas, Jana Silverstein

Saturday, April 23, 1pm
Building Character Using Any Method You Can
How do writers make their characters seem real—what techniques work best? Do characters have to be complex, and how do you get them that way?
Mary Rosenblum, Ted Kosmatka, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Kelley Eskridge

Saturday, April 23, 2pm
Kelley Eskridge reads Solitaire
A young woman convicted of a terrible crime is sentenced to eight years in solitary confinement — in a virtual prison cell within her own mind. Solitaire is a New York Times Notable novel and was a finalist for the Nebula, Spectrum and Endeavour awards. Rated PG
Kelley Eskridge

Sunday, April 24, 1pm
The 10% Solution: How to Edit Your Work
Stephen King said says that your final draft is your first draft minus 10%. We’ll discuss how to cut passive voice, unnecessary words, and anything that else slows your fiction down.
Patrick Swenson, Renee Stern, Ted Butler, Craig English, Kelley Eskridge

Olympia SciFiFest

It all happens in Olympia WA on October 24 at the Olympia Timberland Library.

Nicola and I kick things off at 5:30 with readings and Q&A. Science Fiction Museum curator Jacob McMurray (who designed Nicola’s beautiful memoir) hosts a showing of video interviews with SF authors. Blöödhag plays literary heavy-metal music and then MCs a fashion show.

See those words “All Ages” on this poster? Ignore those words (grin). Of course all are welcome, but it’s billed in the library events calendar as an adult show, and if you’ve read my work or Nicola’s, you know we’re not exactly kittens-and-bunnies (or rocket-ships-and-rayguns) storytellers.

Should be fun. Join us if you can!

Books of life

Writer, artist, fire lookout and friend of this blog Jean Rukkila wrote this lovely piece about books we can’t find online — the books that we make ourselves.

The first blank book I filled for public consumption began at the locals’ end of the bar in Crown King, Ariz. When I lived up that dirt road I’d noticed how the fellows kept their personal cue sticks in the care of the bartender. ‘Hey Bob,’ I asked the owner, ‘Can I keep a blank book and watercolors with you?’

— Jean Rukkila, from “Not available online: a place for books that breathe”

Jean and I have never met, but as I type this, I’m enjoying imagining her at a lunch counter or a corner table in a bar, or high above the forest watching for the smoke to rise… with a book that she is making of the life that she’s part of, that is part of her. It’s especially the notion of sketches and words together that I love so much. I’m no artist (I have negative drawing talent, seriously, ask Nicola…) and it can be so frustrating, because images can say things that I cannot say with words. I think this is why I’m so drawn to screenwriting — because the end result is words and pictures of people doing, being, living.

As I said, reading Jean’s article makes me see her: or maybe it’s myself I’m imagining, magically gifted with hands that can draw the important things around me — my versions of men playing pool, gurgling ducks, a full glass of beer on a hot afternoon.

Jean, I hope I’ll see one of your books one day. And as much as I am a willing traveler in this land of pixels, I’m glad, like you, that some things aren’t available online.

The President’s nightstand is full of books

From USA TODAY‘s The Oval:

The five — count ’em, five — books that the president toted along on his vacation amount to a whopping 2,352 pages of reading. Obama packed two novels, two non-fiction tomes and one thriller, all of them hits with the reviewers. In case you’d like to read along with the commander-in-chief, here’s the list:

The Way Home, a crime thriller set in Washington, D.C., by George Pelecanos. USA TODAY reviewer Carol Memmott called it “well-written and touching.”

Lush Life, a novel set in New York City, by Richard Price. Memmott said it “shows all the shades of grey in our urban landscapes.”

Hot, Flat and Crowded, an examination of today’s green revolution, by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that made the USA TODAY best-seller list.

John Adams, David McCullough’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the second president.

Plainsong, a best-selling novel by Kent Haruf. Reviewing the television show that the novel inspired, USA TODAY’s Robert Bianco described it as a story in which families are tested by difficult circumstances but prevail out of “sheer decency.”

I gotta say, someday I would love to find out that a President had read my book! Must be a pretty cool feeling.

And I’m biased, of course, but I worry a lot about people in power who never read; who don’t see the use in story. How do they learn about other experiences, other perspectives, other possible lives? And if they don’t learn that, how can they lead well?

Resting

Here’s another in the series of excerpts from With Malice Toward Some:

Oct 7th
The days melt away like cough drops on the tongue. I brush my hair and take a long walk and type out Henry’s notes and stand for a while in the garden composing my face to look like a Landed Gent, and ping! the day is gone. The Devonshire countryside grows upon me like an obsession; I sometimes suspect that somebody has given me a philtre. Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife. Whenever you have definitely made up your mind to send her to a home for morons, she turns her heart-stopping profile and you are unstrung and victimized again. The garden still spurts roses and snapdragons and Michaelmas daisies, which I cut and arrange at great length in bowls and vases. This pursuit I estimate to be about the sheerest waste of time I have ever indulged in. The flowers wilt and only have to be done all over again. Henry, being a native New Yorker, looks pained if his attention is called to flowers. And the flowers in the garden are virtually forcing the house right off the property as it is, without my introducing them into the drawing room to bore from within. But it is principally because it is so fruitless that I like to do it. It makes every day feel like Saturday afternoon.

— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I’m thinking a lot about the difference between relaxation and rest. I’m a champion relaxer: I know how to kick back, share a bottle of wine and talk for hours; spend an hour on the deck with a book; fall so deep into a movie that I forget where I am; sit on a park bench and stare at Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond while crows and seagulls spiral up and down from the beach. I know how to enjoy these moments.

But I don’t know how to rest. I spend my life doing: it’s my response to responsibility (whoa! just made the linguistic connection…), to stress, to challenge, to learning. To life, really. I’m good at doing; but it turns out I have very little skill at stopping. I relax, but in a little back corner of my mind I am already figuring out the next process, making the next mental list, preparing to do the next thing.

I’m lucky; the busy-ness of my life is not the treadmill variety. I like my life; but it is full, and I have a lot to do, and somewhere along the line I learned that my culture won’t give me a lot of slack for “wasting” time. For just spending a hundred Saturday-afternoon-days in a row arranging flowers or sitting under an umbrella on the beach at Musha Cay — those cuffy thing moments that I find I am yearning for more and more these days. I want to do fruitless things just because they are lovely to do. I want the beautiful surroundings just because they are beautiful, and then I want to simply sit and be in them with no responsibility to anyone, not even myself. I want to unhook from all of that results-oriented list-bound doing.

I’m good at being. But always I am being in motion. Now a part of me just wants to be still.

More Peg Halsey

In today’s excerpt of With Malice Toward Some, Peg and her husband Henry have settled in a village called Yeobridge, close to Exeter where Henry is teaching for a year. They have been getting to know the local gentry, and are now at dinner at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Vinnicombe, where Mr. V is about to surprise Peg:

Oct 26th
…When we had finished the music, he suggested whiskey-and-soda, not to Henry only, but to me, moi qui vous parle. In middle-class England a woman is offered a drink with the same degree of frequency with which she is offered deadly nightshade, and at English dinners, when it gets on for ten o’clock and you are numb with cold and half hysterical from hearing about English weather, the gentlemen all have whiskey-and-soda and the ladies, God bless them, have tea! A woman who wants hard liquor at an English dinner has to ask for it, and then her host (nice and warm himself, of course, in woolen clothes, long sleeves and the radiation from a quantity of port) glances questioningly at her husband, as who should say, “She’s a little minx, but I don’t believe a tiny bit would hurt her.” It is a discouraging state of affairs, for (quite aside from the cold storage dining) probably no class of people in the world could do more handily with a little of the stimulation and release of alcohol than well-bred Englishwomen. However, a visiting American does better to refrain from proselytizing, to do her drinking in large batches (if possible) on the maid’s day out, and on other occasions to remain silent and stoically let the pleurisy fall where it may.

— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And here’s a bit, from the summer, about a holiday in Stratford:

June 28th
…The countryside around Stratford is green and plenteous and full of repose. Cushioned with trees and padded with hedgerows, it runs up into little mattress slopes which fade imperceptibly away again. In the villages, the thatched houses rest on their gardens like cuff-links on jeweler’s cotton. An aimless walk through this engaging landscape, on which we started out this morning, ended by taking the whole day. We turned down whatever paths looked promising; crossed empty, sunlit fields that were rough underfoot and hard going, for all their smooth-looking grass; and followed wavy lanes which perpetually unfurled new arrangements of trees and cows. Occasionally we passed farmhouses, sheltered with barns and looking like people who have the covers pulled up to their chins…

— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I am thinking a lot about the difference between rest and relaxation, and picked that passage because it sounds so beautifully restful to me. But today I am not resting: I am organizing, thinking, cooking food for friends who need it, and looking forward to dinner out with my sweetie; an early anniversary celebration because next week is very busy, including a Neighborhood Shindig on the street outside our house, about which I am sure I will have much to say and for which I know I have much to do. At least I will be allowed to drink, moi qui vous parle…

Enjoy your day.

With Malice Toward Some

Today I want to introduce an old friend of mine — the book, not the writer, whom sadly I never met. Margaret Halsey published With Malice Toward Some in 1938, based on letters that Halsey (an American) wrote to her family when she and her husband lived in England.

The book is a fond, acerbic, bemused and sometimes who-are-these-people look at the English of the late 1930’s. I’ve probably read this book a dozen times, and I still laugh out loud. I like that it is often pointed but never mean-spirited: I hate the irony of our current days in which something must be hurtful in order to establish the writer as a person of “wit.” There’s enough real contempt and diminishment of others in the world, why should anyone make a career out of it?

And Halsey’s a good writer: concise, observant, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and the ability (that I especially prize in writers) to be particular; to create moments that feel alive and immediate seventy years later. She fell in love with the English countryside and many of the people. She hated the food, marveled at the social customs, and found herself constantly surprised by the reality of a culture whose differences were far greater than she had expected. The Peg Halsey of this book is a vibrant, funny woman, curious and open and adventurous. She’s alive in her world, and it’s fun to be there with her.

My plan over the next little while is to occasionally share some of Halsey’s pithier moments with you, just because I like them and hope they will please you. It’s no bad thing to start a Monday with a smile.

June 7th
While Henry has gone to buy chocolate bars and reading matter, I am sitting in the waiting room of the Southampton station of the Southern Railway. My eyes, I am afraid, are going to fall right out of their sockets before the end of the day — I have been looking at everything so strenuously. It took a long while to get off the boat, and involved a great deal of standing in line and filling out cards and blanks. There is something about filling out printed forms which arouses lawless impulses in me and makes me want to do things that will have the file clerks sitting up with a jerk, like putting in

RELIGION……Druid…..

Today, when one of my blanks said OCCUPATION, I wrote down none, though I suspected this would not do. A severe but courteous official confirmed this impression. So I crossed it out and wrote parasite, which, not to be too delicate about it, is what I am. This made the official relax a little and he himself put housewife in what space there was left. “Be a prince,” I said, “Make it typhoid carrier.” But he only smiled and blotted out parasite so that it would not show.

— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And this one’s for Nicola, who had remarkably similar experiences from the other direction when she first visited America. Ask her sometime about the salad dressing. Or the vinegar.

June 8th
Today Henry and I and some of the faculty from the college lunched at an Exeter restaurant. It was a bad lunch, half cold and wholly watery, and in order to keep body and soul together, I asked for a glass of milk. The waitress was staggered.

“Milk?” she said incredulously.

“Why, yes,” I replied, almost equally incredulously. “A glass of milk.”

She wheeled off in the direction of the kitchen. In three minutes she was back again.

“Please,” she asked, “do you want this milk hot or cold?”

I blinked a little and said I wanted it cold. The Englishmen who were with us looked amused. “You Americans,” one of them said, with a spacious tolerance. We resumed our conversation, and in a short space the waitress made a third appearance. She had a hounded expression.

“Do you,” she inquired desperately, “want this milk in a cup or a glass?”

“Just roll it up in a napkin,” I answered thoughtlessly, and then was sorry, seeing how embarrassed and confused she was. I started to make amends, but she suddenly bolted and I never saw her again. Another waitress came to take the dessert order, and the milk project was tacitly abandoned.

— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

Enjoy your day.

Night Train

I’ve been reading Martin Amis’ Night Train.

Nicola has been telling me about this book for years, and it always ended up in the well, maybe someday shelf in my brain. Until last week, when I picked it at random from its actual shelf in my office and read the first two paragraphs:

I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement — or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.

What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case — for me, that is. When you’re a police, “worst” is an elastic concept. You can’t really get a fix on “worst.” The boundaries are pushed out every other day. “Worst?” we’ll ask. “There no such thing as worst.” But for Detective Mike Hoolihan, this was the worst case.

— Night Train by Martin Amis

And now I’ve read it and am kicking myself for waiting so long. Kick, kick, kick.

Some people really hated this book and did some kicking (of it, and Amis) in print reviews when it came out in 1997. They said it didn’t capture the American voice. They dismissed it as a faulty police procedural. They called it clumsy noir. They said it was pretentious.

And you know what? I’ll betcha dollars to donuts that most of those folks had never read a speculative fiction book (excepting possibly Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which they would doubtless have characterized as literary fiction in a bold futuristic setting and besides, Peggy Atwood’s a genius!). Well, I’ve read a ton of speculative fiction, and no, Night Train isn’t spec fic: it’s her fascinating sister, slipstream. It’s a literary psychological study that has paused to shrug into a noir coat and put on a crooked smile just before delivering that first fast punch to your brain.

I get so tired of the precious twee writing that passes for literary fiction most of the time, the kind that essentially points neon fingers at itself: My writer is such a fabulous writer, look how pretty she made me! Pretty and empty. Pretty much all about nothing at all. This is my beef with many of the major players; they are, to use one of Nicola’s favorite Americanisms, all hat and no cattle. But the ones who aren’t, the ones who bring home the goods — well, what difference does it make what kind of package those goods come wrapped in? A sweaty wife-beater stained with gun oil, a bloody startrooper uniform or clothes that look just like yours. What difference does it make?

How much more fun is it to see a really good writer doing the literary equivalent of cross-dressing? Dipping out of whatever genre bucket he wants to get the job done. Breaking the rules in the ways that only the best can do successfully. And oh, the energy and biting-on-tinfoil exuberance of this book, right up to the end, which ending is devastating, by the way. Socked me right between the eyes.

It’s not a book for anyone looking to spend a cheerful hour. But it’s a great book, a compelling story, a fierce distinctive sad human character, and an energy that burns. I really liked it.