Category: blog

Solid air

Here is the fabulous John Martyn, with the absolutely brilliant Danny Thompson on bass. They’ve played together on and off since the 70’s, two wild boys grown into men whose talent and expertise seems DNA-deep.

This is music for anytime, any day, but it seems perfect for today with tea and breakfast and the last of summer just outside the window: and autumn grinning from behind leaves barely touched with yellow, in the whiff of ice in the breeze, in the sky that is beginning to be smaller as if drawing in on itself when I’m not looking; in the days that are only a moment shorter, just a moment, but enough to make me feel that the world is spinning faster, faster, as if it has just put its foot on the gas pedal…

I love exuberance. I love the energy of young artists, the fizz of sharing their discoveries, the sense that anything might be possible. They are the summer people. But what I love today is the certainty in these men as they play — they know exactly what they can do and they do it with utter confidence. That’s part of the energy of autumn for me. I wish I could explain it better (so much for being a writer!), but maybe you will see it for yourself.

Of interest to writers

Agent extraordinaire Colleen Lindsay has been publishing a series of posts with tons of useful information for writers or anyone interested in becoming one. Check them out if you want to get down in the details of how book publicity and marketing really works.

Be sure to read the discussions going on in the comments section as well. There’s so much here that writers can learn from. Thanks, Colleen!

And also check out Joshua Palmatier’s Query Project, in which more than a dozen writers share successful query letters and commentary.

It’s so important for writers and publishing folks to share this kind of information. We need to know how to best work with each other, how to behave professionally, how to help each other get books to readers. We need to be honest with each other about how to break into the business, how the money works, the importance of playing nicely, and the changes that may be coming our way.

If you have links to share that you think are useful to writers, please post them in the comments and I’ll do a round-up post at some point down the road.

The days of information = power = all of us wandering around in various stages of ignorance need to be over, brothers and sisters. We need to help each other. We’ll all do better that way.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

Yikes, Friday again! It feels like I blinked and missed the week. Except that I’ve had so many nice moments — discovering True Blood, some sun-and-reading time, a nice evening with our good friend at our neighborhood joint, working on the screenplay. Enough nice moments to fill up a week. But I’m still surprised.

Here’s the weekly serving:

And cheers to you. Enjoy your Friday.

Quantum of Solace

I’m excited about Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond movie releasing in November. Actually I’m excited about quite a few films right now, including The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film that played at the Toronto Film Festival and just got a distribution deal. Bigelow rocks as a director. And I’m over the moon about True Blood on TV. But we’ll get to all that another time… today is superspy angst and action, baby!

I’m a Pierce Brosnan fan (loved him in The Matador), but my James Bond heart belongs to Daniel Craig. I think he does an excellent job with the essential tension of Bond, the roughness and rage that is intrinsic to the character no matter how well he wears a tux. With Casino Royale I was glad to see a turn back towards the core character, a Bond who relies more on his wits and his gun (or his hands) than on techno-toys. A more human Bond than the screenwriters and producers have allowed for a long time.

And the trend seems likely to continue in Quantum of Solace. If you’re wondering why the wacky title, the story is here. Not the title I would have chosen, but it’s James Bond, you know? People will find it.

I’ve got two trailers to show you today, because it interests me that they are very different in how they frame one’s expectations. The first is a real mood piece without a lot of information, the second more focused on action and the revelation of story. I admire how the two layers come together in the line “You don’t have to worry about me,” which take on such different tones in the two trailers.

The art and science of trailers is fascinating to me, the way they can spin a story just by recombining snips of action and dialogue. I wonder how that would work with books — imagine a word-trailer that would shape expectations of the story just by the phrases one chose to include.

Oh no, I feel my brain saying to itself, Oh cool! Avoidance behavior!. No, no, I have too much to do today. Quick, let’s watch a trailer before I fall down the rabbit hole.

The truth inside the lie

In 2003, Stephen King received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Many in the world of “lit’rachure” were not amused, and a few went all foamy-mouthed bugshit crazy (a pause to imagine many froth-flecked moths batting frantically against a lit window, bump bump flutter flutter bump).

And then Stephen King made his acceptance speech..

The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I’ve told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation…. We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one’s own work in particular.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I have read everything King has written. He’s one of my favorite writers because in his work I always find joy (and you know I’m big on joy) and hope and truth. I find real people living real lives, and when the monsters come they heighten rather than diminish that reality. The everyday people in King’s work are laid low or made great, found wanting or given a chance for redemption when the monsters come.

And they take me with them. Their bewilderment and fears and unexpected joys in the midst of their own personal armageddons are mine too. I understand their metaphors and their rhythms of speech. They are quintessentially American people, and their stories are plain and visceral and rooted in the deepest layer of the country’s collective psyche in way that, for my money, the “great American authors” do not routinely achieve. Those people are not my writers. They do not speak for me or about me or to me as a reader. Stephen King does.

And when I re-read his speech yesterday, I found him also speaking to me as a writer:

There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there’s a time when things can go either way.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I had that time fairly recently. I fire-walked my own hopes and fears and other people’s expectations, and now I am in a place where the air is cleaner and the world is bigger for me. I found my truth inside the lie. It sounds like Stephen King found his a long time ago, and good for him.

I’d love to meet him. Not to make forever friends — just for a beer and a burger and a conversation between two writers who are fascinated by the things people will do if given half a chance. I wish that someone who knows him would give him a copy of Dangerous Space and point him to the title story, because I think he’d like the rock ‘n’ roll of it, the everydayness in which Duncan and Mars find their whole world made new by music… I would like something I wrote to put a smile on Stephen King’s face, the way he has so often put a smile on mine.

Get happy

I went wandering around the internet the other day and found this article — “Five Things Happy People Do.” It’s at the Oprah website, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but that’s the (sometimes wacky) beauty of the wide-webbed world… we end up so many unexpected places. In web as in life, no?

[Happy people] design their lives to bring in joy. — from “Five Things Happy People Do” by Gabrielle LeBlanc

I like this. And I like the notion (also in the article) of eudaimonia, that happiness is found in “flourishing,” in becoming “one’s most golden self.” Happiness as a process, not a state of being. I am learning more and more that I can be essentially eudaimonic — essentially still in process with happiness — at times when I am fiercely angry or sad or feeling kicked in the teeth. Like certain kinds of hope, this is a kind of happiness that I can get down with.

Apparently, many of us are thinking about happiness these days. We’re studying it and measuring it and trying to find the formula. I hope it works, because the happiness of the flourishing self is a Good Thing, and I would wish it for all of us. But I am not so much a scientist, and I do not have Five Pearls of Wisdom or the Secret Equation to offer you. I don’t even have an equation for myself.

Or maybe I do. Maybe I do. I have a deck, and iced tea in the refrigerator, and a book. So I think I will take 20 minutes away from my work to sit in the sun and be Kelley and give attention to a part of myself that often gets short shrift but is also essential for the flourishing of me — the part that is not so much about doing as it is about being.

I tend to think of process as a dynamic thing, a moving thing…(shakes head). My perspective can be so fucking limited. Sometime the heart of a process is in a stopping point, a stillness that is necessary if there is ever to be movement again.

Today my wish for all of us is that whatever else we may be — peaceful or angry or afraid or joyful, dreaming big dreams or picking up their pieces, nursing wounds or back in the battle, smiling in the rain or watching the elegant aerobatics of crows or eating our second-favorite flavor of ice cream because the first has run out — that underneath it all, the stillness and the motion, we know that we are daimons, becoming, becoming.

Connections

Many thanks to you and Nicola for signing several books for me in the past few months. I gave them to my partner, Lisa, as a wedding present. We will be getting married next Tuesday, September 2nd, in San Francisco. She was terribly surprised and especially happy to receive a copy of Dangerous Space, a book she’d wanted since she found out it had been published.

I really appreciate you both going to such trouble to accommodate your readers. After Lisa told me how much she loved The Blue Place, I read it and the two other books within the span of a week. I just read your short story, “Strings,” that you mentioned in the past day or so on your blog, and I enjoyed it very much. I will read the rest of the stories after Lisa finishes the book, as well as your novel Solitaire.

Please pass my thanks along to Nicola. Very best wishes to you both.

Patti Weltler

And our best wishes to you! My apologies for taking so long with this — you’re practically an old married couple already (grin). I’m delighted for you and Lisa, and hope your wedding was absolutely splendid.

And you may have squeaked in under the wire on this incarnation of personalized books. I think we’re going to have to find a better system for the future. Since we moved, it’s very tough to get to University Books to sign things — we end traveling anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes each way, plus the time it takes to park and get into the store and sign, and then we get distracted by all the pretty books… It is a much larger cost in energy and time than it used to be. We may have to get people to start sending books to our post office box or something instead. We’ll see.

Because it pleases me to accommodate readers when I can. It’s a relationship, after all, albeit a distant and single-stranded one. It may only be a few words written on the title page, but I value it as the often most direct and personal connection between artist and art and audience.

And on the practical side, I think artists can no longer afford to ignore the importance — the imperative — of the direct and the personal. I imagine it’s a huge challenge for A-list actors and rock stars and mega-popular authors like Stephen King. There’s always been a cultural tension between privacy and access: the assumption that it’s okay to insert oneself into the private experience of famous people in a way that one would never do to some random stranger on the street. That’s been exploded by the internet — the ability to keep tabs on people anywhere in the world, to monitor everything they say and do in public, to “stay close” in a way that (I worry) feels “real” to people because it’s happening in real time. And I think the end result is that famous people no longer feel like strangers to us. We confuse (or choose to ignore) the difference between our personal connection to their work, which may be very deep, and our personal connection to them, which is usually none.

I certainly wish for personal connection with artists whose work touches me. But my mom and dad raised me right, so I don’t march up to celebrities in the middle of their dinner and demand an autograph. And it wouldn’t satisfy me anyway: that moment of interaction does not constitute a real relationship. It’s not a connection, it’s an encounter. It’s one of the unexpected consequences of art, I think, this blurring of the lines between art and self that translates into a desire to blur the lines with the artist. I don’t know what everyone else seeks when they approach an artist: I seek to touch them in an instant as deeply as they have touched me in hours or years. I seek to matter to them as much as their work matters to me.

Which is a fool’s game, of course. There is no way to re-balance the scales in an instant, unless you pull someone out of the way of a speeding bus or something. The truth is, I cannot have “a relationship” with these people. They are for the most part beyond the reach of the small-crowd appearance where everyone in the room is real to everyone else, the random-but-real moments of encounter, the situational golden moment.

But I’m not famous. I am a common artist, and it is both professionally important and personally rewarding to me to read for people, to sign books, to have the occasional beer, to have conversations here in my little corner of the internet about things that interest me. I’m glad I like it: not all artists do, and I think those who are not willing to create some space for connection with audience will find they have less audience as time goes by. This is the world we live in. And I’m glad to be in this world, Patti, to sign books for you and Lisa, and to wish you both a marriage full of joy and love.

Let’s talk about short stories

A while back, Tania Hershman, editor of The Short Review, published a review of Dangerous Space that I appreciated for two reasons. First, because she liked the stories (I am not immune to this, says the writer with a smile). And second, because she did not come to them as a fan of speculative fiction: her perspective was that of an avid reader and writer of (what I would call mainstream) short stories. She crossed genre lines to read my work, and discovered that, like the mainstream, speculative fiction is a big space with room for many different kinds of story, many different kinds of reader.

Tania talks about this over at Vulpes Libris in a guest article that I recommend to anyone interested in the writing, publishing, reading and general vitality of short fiction. There’s also a good discussion in the comments, including remarks by a reader whose resistance to short stories is grounded in the common experience of (rant alert! rant alert!) the kind of short stories that pass for “real literature” these days. You know the ones I mean. You can read them every week in The New Yorker. They are precious and self-conscious and all about the writer’s voice. They are often dreary beyond belief. They revolve around characters whose purpose is to be small in some way — trapped and fearful, or hapless, or so quirky that it makes my teeth ache — and to stay small, because that’s how we know that the story is “meaningful.” I choose the word revolve carefully, because these stories are designed as collections of beautiful phrases that turn in stately (or in carnival) fashion around the “idea” of the character, around the “theme” of the story…. oh, please shoot me now. No wonder readers complain: even those whom the literati would characterize as “unsophisticated” (a word that just makes me want to howl in rage when applied to readers — hello, Ms. LitSnob, these people are reading!) can tell when they are being fed 5,000 words of self-indulgent bullshit whose deepest message is look how well I write!.

I want more than that. I want stories of people who feel so real to me that I hurt and hope and laugh with them, so real that they carry me out into a wider world, or deep into myself. I want writing that is so good it isn’t even there, writing that is not a performance but a bridge, a transporter beam, a mainline to the heart of the story.

Okay, rant off. For now.

I’m grateful to Tania for her passionate support of short work of all kinds. One of the grandest things about the InterWeb is that there is room for so much more than there used to be — more opinion, more art, more stupidity, more curiosity, more silliness, more difference. More connection, if we want it.

And certainly for more story, which is nothing but good.

I’m especially pleased today to point you to a couple of those stories. Sarah Kanning is a writer who generously gave a lot of time and words-in-email to a stranger (me) to help with background for my Kansas book. Sarah’s first fiction sale “Sex With Ghosts” is up at Strange Horizons.

And Karina Meléndez, who frequently comments on this blog and is currently translating Dangerous Space (the writer bows in the direction of Canada), has “The Sound of Morning Glory” up at Joyland.

Congratulations, Sarah and Karina, and my best wishes for many more stories out in the world.

I’ve been writing stories since the days when there were only a few print publications that would publish “that sci-fi stuff.” These days are better.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

A beautiful hanging-onto-summer day in Seattle. Enjoy these little flashes of the past.

Enjoy.