Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 139

GONE BIRDING

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This being the day after Christmas, as is traditional in my house, I have gone birding.

See you on Monday!

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A Mature Creche Scene

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How long have we been setting out our little creche scene for Christmas?  So long that I can't imagine a time when we didn't.  And, as happens with such things, figures get added.  Up on the roof, for example, is a griffin.  He probably migrated out of Sean's D & D figurines.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

And for the puzzle-lovers among us:  How many of the additions can you spot?  I'll post the answers either late tomorrow or on Friday.

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The Parable of the Creche

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Merry Christmas, everyone!  This is one of my favorite times of the year.  And, that being so, it's time to present my annual re-telling of something that really did happen, exactly as I tell it here.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you...


When first I came to Roxborough, a third of a century ago, the creche was already a tradition of long standing.  Every year it appeared in Gorgas Park during the Christmas season.  It wasn't all that big -- maybe seven feet high at its tip -- and it wasn't very fancy.  The figures of Joseph and Mary, the Christ child, and the animals were a couple of feet high at best, and there were sheets of Plexiglas over the front of the wooden construction to keep people from walking off with them.  But there was a painted backdrop of the hills of Bethlehem at night, the floor was strewn was real straw, and it was genuinely loved.
It was a common sight to see people standing before the creche, especially at night, admiring it.  Sometimes parents brought their small children to see it for the first time and that was genuinely touching.  It provided a welcome touch of seasonality and community to the park.
Alas, Gorgas Park was publicly owned, and it was only a matter of time before somebody complained that the creche violated the principle of the separation of church and state.  When the complaint finally came, the creche was taken out of the park and put into storage.
People were upset of course.  Nobody liked seeing a beloved tradition disappear.  There was a certain amount of grumbling and disgruntlement.
So the kindly people of Leverington Presbyterian Church, located just across the street from the park, stepped in.  They adopted the creche and put it up on the yard in front of their church, where it could be seen and enjoyed by all.
But did this make us happy?  It did not.   The creche was just not the same, located in front of a church.  It seemed lessened, in some strange way, made into a prop for the Presbyterians.  You didn’t see people standing before it anymore.
I was in a local tappie shortly after the adoption and heard one of the barflies holding forth on this very subject:
"The god-damned Christians," he said, "have hijacked Christmas."


And I've received the first review of my next novel . . .


On the one hand, it's immodest of me to pass along praise.  On the other hand, I do have an obligation to do what little I can to promote my own fiction.  (If I don't, who will?)  So...

Tor, the publishers of my next novel, Chasing the Phoenix, in which my post-Utopian con men Darger and Surplus accidentally conquer China (these things happen), has sent out advance reading copies to select writers, hoping for blurbs.  One of them was Michael Flynn, who liked it greatly.  On his blog he wrote:

The dialogue is entertaining, the plot twists clever and supple, the narrative voice perfectly tuned, and the whole story suffused with sly Swanwickian humor.

This is, I confess, exactly the sort of response I was hoping to evoke in the reader.  Which doesn't, however, diminish the pleasure of reading such words, particularly when they come from a writer I respect.

You can read Mike's entire review/reaction here.


Above:  That's the creche itself, as of last night.  A lovely thing, really.  Especially at night.

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Searching for the Bordello in Faerie and Other Matters

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I received the latest copy of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction in the mail yesterday.  Two copies, actually, because I have a piece in it, “How Many Miles to Babylon: Researching ‘The Bordello in Faerie.’”  Which is, just as the title implies, an account of my investigation of the nonexistent institution at the heart of my my unsettlingly explicit fantasy.

Here's the opening paragraph:
 

Some years ago I wrote a story titled “The Bordello in Faerie”, in which a young man in a weary old redbrick factory town takes to crossing the river to visit the eponymous establishment and over the course of a few seasons learns some hard truths about himself.  This sort of tale usually glosses over the actual sexual acts taking place in such places.  But for artistic reasons, I thought it worthwhile to be explicit.  When my friend and fellow fantasist Greer Gilman asked to read the newly-finished typescript, I cautioned her about the graphic nature of its depictions and handed it over.  The next day, returning the text, she drew herself up straight and in an amused simulation of shock, said, “Sir!!!”Alas, if you want to read more, you'll have to dig up a copy of the Volume 43, Number 118, Autumn 2014 issue.  It's not a long article, but I thought it was of interest because performed my research entirely via lucid dreaming.  Surely there must be other writers who have done this, but it seems to me that this particular technique is underreported.  So I did my bit.

And Speaking of Short Fiction Day . . .

My friend Sally Grotta, of virtual publisher Pixel Hall Press, asked me to help spread the word: this Sunday, December 21, will be the second annual Celebrate Short Fiction Day, a holiday invented by author Nancy Christie.  They're hoping to make this a big thing, eventually.  But in the meantime, they'll be celebrating the day by giving away free e-stories.

You can read more about it at the Pixel Hall Press site here.



And on Monday . . .

It's an Annual Holiday Rerun Tradition!  I'll be reposting "The Parable of the Creche Scene," a true tale of the real meaning of Christmas and who, surprisingly, kidnapped it here in my neighborhood of Roxborough.

Be there or be not-jolly.


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Solstice Fire!

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It's Christmas time and you need something rare and all-but-unobtainable for the bibliophile you love.  But you don't happen to be rolling in money.

I have the perfect gift for thirteen of you.

Every year Dragonstairs Press, my wife Marianne Porter's "nanopress," sends a  Christmas chapbook to its friends and patrons.  Twelve months later, those chapbooks remaining are put up for sale.

Solstice Fire , comprising three seasonal works of Solstice-related flash fiction, has just gone on sale at the Dragonstairs website.  There are exactly thirteen copies available.  You can buy one for five dollars.

Why so cheap?  Well... When Marianne resolved to create hand-made, carefully-crafted collectibles in very small numbers, she asked me to use my small press contacts to help her set a price.  The first expert I consulted breezily said, "Fifty dollars!  Anything less and the serious collectors won't touch it."

The second (hi, Lawrence!) said "Anything above ten dollars and people won't buy it on impulse."

I passed the first price along to Marianne and she was horrified.  The second she liked better.  But finally she went with what she called the "Beanie Baby Model."  Beanie Babies, you'll remember were small and lovable stuffed toys that sold in limited editions for only five bucks a pop. Their business model was that if somebody wanted to buy a child a Beanie Babie (or a child with an allowance wanted to buy one) the price was so low they would.

Similarly, if you want a signed and numbered chapbook, one in an edition of a hundred, with a holiday theme, you can buy Solstice Fire for only five dollars.

Just don't roll it up in a cylinder and stuff it into a stocking.  Your beloved bibliophile will grind his or her teeth at you if you do.

You can find the Dragonstairs site here.


Above:  Sometime in the future, collectors who won't touch anything below fifty bucks are going to be offering serious money for this chapbook to someone who bought it for love of words. That makes me happy.

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The Holy List of Antioch

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If there's one thing my house suffers from more than it does books, it's paper.  I have boxes, bags, and piles of the stuff, and it's particularly hard to organize because every piece has to be read, judged, and filed, stored, or recycled separately.

I was going through a bag of papers yesterday and I came across the above.

It doesn't look like much, does it?  Just a mimeographed list of typewritten names with my own indented and asterisked with the notation "I approve," signed D. Jenkins.

That was my permission to take Honors English 201 despite the fact that it was a sophomore level course and I was a freshman.  This was at the College of William and Mary and somehow, within days of arriving, I had sought out Dr. Jenkins and convinced him that I absolutely had to take the Creative Writing course he taught right away -- now! -- rather than waiting a year.

That took chutzpah.   Also a submission story, which I had either written over the summer and had in hand or else wrote on short order to get into the class.  The story was titled "The Theoretical Man,"  and it was, of course, science fiction.

There was only one creative writing course in all four years of college, though you could take it for two semesters and it existed only because Dr. Jenkins wrote fiction himself.  It was taught as a workshop.  You were expected to write a story every week, the department secretary typed them up and mimeographed them, and only those who had submitted a story were able to comment on those written by others.  I forget if Dr. Jenkins' critique came before or after the comments.  But I know that every fault pointed out to me was received politely.  After which, I would go to my room and, in a fury, rework and rewrite the story completely in such as way as to avoid making the suggested changes.  If the dialog was bad, I'd write all the dialog out.  If the description was long-winded, I'd find a way to tell the story without describing anything.

It would be something like eleven years before I finally wrote something publishable.  But, my God, I learned a lot in that class!

A few years ago, Dr. Jenkins died and I went to a memorial held for him at the college.  One of his friends commented in his remembrance that somehow he always managed to find the students who had something special.  I hope it's not hubris to think that, in my own odd way, I was one of that that number.  Dr. Jenkins was certainly somebody special to me.

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dream diary

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[December 14, 2014]

I spent most of the night letting tourists into my mind and showing them around.  This wasn't as onerous as it sounds because they were all apprehensive it would be a long-winded and pretentious tour.  So I simply showed them a poem I lad lying about and, after taking a few pictures, they would leave, relieved.
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There Are Only 40,000 People in the World

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So Marianne and I were in a B&B on Clontarf Road in Dublin some years back, when our landlady asked where we were from.

"Philadelphia," one of us said.

"Oh, the governor of Philadelphia stayed here once!"

"Um... I really don't think so."

"Yes, and she gave me a book as a present -- here it is."  Our landlady took a picture book of Pennsylvania from the shelf and showed it to us.  It was inscribed to her by Happy Fernandez.

Who was not only a one-time candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia, but a member of Marianne's then-church.

The other day, a friend commented on a historical article I posted on Facebook, that it was weird because she knew the people involved -- they were friends of her parents.  Well, these two incidents -- and a hundred more combined -- have convinced me that there are at most 40,000 people in the world.  Any more and such coincidences wouldn't be happening all the time.

I don't know who's arranged the fiction that there are billions of people on this planet, or why.  I only know that my version makes much more sense.

After all, have you ever met anyone from Ulan Bator?


Above:  Our large and sparsely-populated planet.

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Writing, Blogging, Despair, and Becoming a Writer

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New writer Adam Claxton posted a couple of intelligent questions to this blog on Monday.  The  second of which is:

Also, do you find it disheartening when, for instance, you post to your blog and you receive no comments?
 I do.

The answer to which is:  not at all.  I am a writer and therefore all my insecurities are tied up in my novels and short stories and occasionally, to a far lesser degree, my non-fiction.  The blog?  It's a pleasant way to keep in touch with friends, both those I've met and those I haven't, a way of making myself commit a fraction of my life to words in a sort-of diary, and little more.  

If you want your blog to have lots of responses, there are tricks for achieving this:  Ask questions ("Which genre writer pens the worst sex scenes?") or make lists ("The Ten Worst Lists Any Genre Writer Has Made This Year"), for example.  Use lots of flashy illustrations (see above).  Make controversial statements ("Robert Heinlein was the worst thing ever to happen to science fiction").  And on and on and on.  I'm sure there are hundreds of articles out there on this very subject.

But why?  Phil Foglio, in a statement I gather he now rather regrets having made, once famously wrote that "Winning a Hugo for fan art is the doorway to winning more Hugos for fan art."  The chief thing having a popular blog does is bring more people to your blog.  If you are, like John Scalzi, also a prolific creator of fiction then, yes, this does ultimately result in more sales.  But if you're at the beginning of your career, struggling to find time to write, struggling to improve your writing, struggling to sell what you write... why add another level of pain to your workload?  It's not going to bring you any closer to where you need to be.

So, were I you, I wouldn't bother with social media at all, except to the degree that it gives you pleasure or that the contact eases the sense of isolation all writers face at the beginnings of their career.  All your serious attention should be focused on writing and writing and writing.

The first question was (and here I paraphrase) how do I cope with the despair endemic upon being an unpublished or little-published writer?  And here nobody has a good answer.  You simply have to tough it out.  Jack Woodford (the onetime king of soft-core porn and author of writing advice books that are half brilliant and half abhorrent) once observed that learning to write was extraordinarily hard -- but that you should be grateful for this because it weeds out the competition.  Everyone wants to write.  But only real writers are willing to put up with the pain.  Or, rather, those who can't put up with it never do become real writers.

That's bleak, I know.  But until you succeed, there's no way of knowing for sure that you will.  All you can do is write, hope, and write some more.


Above:  The Flame Nebula in visible and infrared light.  From NASA, of course.


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When To Take Writing Advice

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This is for all the gonnabe writers out there.  It's possible I've said this before but if I have, it bears saying again.

There's a lot of writing advice out there.  In fact, there's a lot of good writing advice out there.  But not all of it is going to work for you.  This is because writing is not a single discrete thing but rather a diverse family of abilities which result in a superficially similar end-product.

There are writers who cannot begin a story until they know every twist and turn of its plot.  Then there are others who write in order to discover the ending.  Once they know how it all winds up, they stop writing -- even if it's before they've put the first word down on paper.  And I could go on and on.  Obviously, the same advice is not going to work for Franz Kafka and P. G. Wodehouse both.

So how can you tell what advice works for you?  You try it out.  If it works, you pat yourself on the back for having learned something today and place it carefully in your conceptual toolbox.  If it doesn't, you leave it where you found it without guilt or rancor.  It's just that simple.

Except, of course, when it's not.


Above:  This is what a writer's desk looks like.  Unless it doesn't.


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