John Walters's Blog, page 56

What Norwescon Means to Me

Norwescon is a fairly large regional science fiction convention that takes place each spring near Seattle.  I attended my first Norwescon in 2015 with my youngest son.  The event took place from Thursday to Sunday in early April, and we rented a room at the hotel near SeaTac Airport where the con took place on Saturday night so we wouldn’t have to make the long journey to our apartment in north Seattle and back on public transportation.  I skipped Thursday’s activities, and went out and back on Friday while my son was in school to attend some writer’s panels on my own.

This year the con took place in late March – it traditionally coincides with Easter weekend – and I rented a room at the hotel for both Friday and Saturday night so we could spend more time there and better immerse ourselves in the experience.  I attended some of Thursday’s activities by myself.  My youngest son came again from Friday on, and by happy coincidence another son was flying in from the east coast for a visit, and he happened to arrive Friday evening, so he came straight to the hotel, bought a membership to the con, and attended with us.

Science fiction and fantasy conventions vary greatly in emphasis.  Some highlight games, some comics, some film and TV.  This one, as I mentioned, devotes itself mainly to books and literature, although there are also games, masquerades, an art show, a film workshop, and other activities.  Throughout each of the days there are a variety of panels from morning until fairly late in the evening.  Many of them are on writing themes: advice on how to write stories and novels, how to commence a writing career, how to market, how to self-publish, how to promote, how to create alien worlds and credible aliens.  These usually have panel members who are professional science fiction and fantasy writers.  Generally the panel members discuss the panel topic together and then receive questions from the audience.  I’ve found attending such panels to be edifying and informative, and I spend much of my time at the con sitting in on them.  Other panels are aimed more at fans than aspiring professionals.  These might discuss what influences writers and artists draw from, favorite books and films, upcoming projects, what it’s like to be a fan, how to behave at a convention, and many other subjects.  Panel members for these topics may include some professionals, but also may include members of the fan community who may or may not be knowledgeable about the particular topics under discussion.  I’m just giving you a glimpse here, a bird’s eye view.  In truth, there are so many events transpiring simultaneously at Norwescon that it’s seldom hard to find something to do but often difficult to choose from a number of desirable alternatives.

For me, Norwescon 2016 was a far different experience from Norwescon 2015.  In 2015, I had just recently moved back to Seattle after being gone for thirty-five years and I knew almost nobody.  In 2016, I had met many of the area’s professional and aspiring writers at gatherings of Clarion West writer’s workshop students and alumni as well as at other meet-ups, and I kept running into people that I knew.  That added an extra dimension to the experience.

My youngest son had called the 2015 Norwescon the best weekend of his life.  One of the reasons was that he got a chance to meet and get an autograph from George R.R. Martin, who was the writer guest of honor that year.  He enjoyed 2016 just as much.  Because he was a little older and more familiar with the locale and the situation, I was able to let him attend panels he chose on his own, which allowed us to split up at times to pursue our individual interests.  For my other son who flew in from the east, it was a new and unique experience.  He appreciated being surrounded by people who were loose and open and relaxed and devoted to having fun and being themselves.  He’s also an aspiring writer, and he attended panels on a variety of subjects that he said opened his eyes and gave him an abundance of ideas.

Many of the writers I talk to are rather jaded on science fiction conventions.  After all, they have been attending them for decades.  They go more to promote their books than for relaxation and enjoyment.  For me, however, cons are still fresh new experiences.  For many years, while I was living overseas, I longed to attend conventions, and now that I finally have a chance, I revel in the opportunities.  There may come a time when I too become jaded, and I attend more for marketing and promotion than for entertainment and edification, but I don’t think that time will come soon.  I had great fun in 2016, and already look forward to Norwescon 2017.

Book Review: The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner

I’m winding up the reading of this book; I’ve got about a chapter and a half to go.  It’s time to set down a few words about it, mainly because I have a block of time to spare.  It’s Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning I’ll be busy with other projects.

I’ll start by saying that I enjoyed – or am enjoying – this book.  It is just what I needed.  I was reading a thick volume of short stories, many of which were ponderously and pretentiously literary, and I needed to break it up with some lighter fare.

This is a travel book.  Ostensibly the author is journeying the globe searching for the key to what makes people happy.  In reality, it’s more like a stand-up comic doing a routine about a global search for happiness.  You can tell all along that the author isn’t really serious about it.  He uses the happiness motif as a theme, an excuse of sorts, for some fairly random traveling and enjoying a diversity of cultures.  One thing that made me skeptical about his true intentions is the writer’s obvious wealth.  He can afford to travel all over the world, stay in fine hotels in places like the Netherlands and Switzerland, sample the cuisine, hire private transport to take him from place to place.  The book is a surface-level perusal of some of the places the author equates with happiness, a sort of smorgasbord where he samples a bit from here and a bit from there and ends up drawing few conclusions about the reason for his search.

Now remember that I said I like the book.  It’s a fun read.  But don’t read it if you are interested in finding real happiness, or even if you are looking for where to initiate your own search.  The author is insincere, and he makes it clear at the outset that sincerity was never his intention.  He constantly pokes fun at himself for being the type of person he is, while at the same time manifesting no inclination for genuine change.  In each chapter he posits theories as to what might constitute happiness, but it is obvious that he is bluffing.  For one thing, as I said, he gives up nothing of himself.  He maintains the position of impartial journalist throughout; he allows nothing of what he experiences to faze him.  He gives no hint about any personal unhappiness that might have initiated his search.  Now that would have been a first-class read – if he had had a crisis in his life and had genuinely, desperately needed to find a modicum of happiness to salve his pain.  Alas, there is not the tiniest inkling of sincere personal unease.  He goes about his supposed quest on a higher plane, above it all, untouched by individuals he encounters.  His interview subjects are presented as caricatures – fodder that the stand-up performer can use to sharpen his wit – not real people with real problems.

The author journeys to ten countries in search of the elusive fountain of happiness, and devotes a chapter to each.  He goes to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Thailand, Great Britain, India, and the United States on his happiness quest, and for contrast makes a visit to Moldova as supposedly the unhappiest place on the planet.  Of course the reader realizes that it is impossible to delve into the culture and current circumstances in any one of these countries in just one chapter and that the excuses he makes for choosing to visit these countries rather than others are just that – excuses rather than valid justifications.

I have visited a number of the countries presented as examples in this book, although under starkly different circumstances.  I was generally broke and struggling to survive, and as a result became enmeshed in the culture and lives of the people around me in ways that this author does not even pretend to pursue.  I was genuinely searching for happiness, which in my mind was linked with finding my voice as a writer, and I tell the story of the early part of my journey in my memoir “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search.”  If the author were truly interested and in need of discovering sources of happiness, he would have had to initiate his task in emptiness.  When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, right?  A true search involves a desperate need to reach the goal or find the answer.

I would have to write another book to sift through my own experiences to find even a semblance of an answer to the questions flippantly proposed in this book, but one observation I had as I read it was based on the many years I lived in Greece – which, by the way, the author should have included in his itinerary.  I got to see an example of deep-seated happiness in the reactions I saw around me when the Greek economy collapsed and many Greeks were plunged into economic chaos and despair.  Sure, they grumbled and complained and held demonstrations.  But the people I saw around me in their day to day lives generally reacted in a mature, nuanced, and joyful manner.  They continued to live their lives, take care of their children, take whatever work they could find, celebrate their feast days and holidays, visit their relatives and neighbors, drink their coffee and smoke their cigarettes.  In short, life went on.  I think that the contentment, the resiliency, the affection for each other, the joy in tradition and family is such an integral part of Greek culture, and has been for so long, that they have the emotional reserves to see themselves through a crisis.  Crises have happened before and they will happen again, but life goes on.

For a final time I will emphasize that despite all my comments above, I enjoyed this book and you probably will too.  Just don’t expect what isn’t there.  Don’t look to it for any answers – or even clues – in your search for happiness, and don’t expect any sort of comprehensive look at the countries that the author visits.  Still, it’s a light, fun read.

Book Review: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor; Part Three

I continue to read this thick volume of short stories for entertainment and analysis.  We’re coming to the best part.  First, though, I have to share a couple of disappointments with you.  There were some stories in this volume that I felt were just plain wrong, and not only shouldn’t have been in this volume – they shouldn’t have been accepted for publication at all, as far as I’m concerned.  Well, qualifying the last statement, in this era of self-publishing writers can always upload whatever they want for reader perusal.  What I am saying here is that editors should not have given space to these stories in traditional publications when there must have been far superior submissions available.

Let me share with you a particular problem I have with criticizing other writers’ work: I don’t like to do it.  Having been discouraged so many times in the past, I dislike discouraging others.  I realize that a lot of criticism is a matter of taste, and I don’t like to call out writers by name and deride them and their works.  This puts me at odds with most other reviewers, I realize, but so be it.  So I am going to mention what I dislike about these two stories without giving their names.  You can figure it out if you read the book.  You’re also more than welcome to disagree with me.  Here goes.

One story I read tempted me to throw the book across the room.  I couldn’t believe that any prestigious literary magazine would touch it.  The story tells of a kind, self-sacrificial man.  It gives many examples of his generous nature.  This man dies and goes to the gates of heaven.  He sees all the wonderful things that heaven has to offer and is grateful that he is there.  He approaches Saint Peter at the gate, and Peter instead sends him to hell because the man committed some minor infractions of church doctrine.  Hell is vividly described as a horrific place full of torment where the inhabitants habitually rape each other.  The man lives there for a time and finally leads the denizens of hell in a sincere prayer of repentance and a plea for mercy.  In response, God makes hell even worse.  End of story.  Ugh.  I couldn’t believe I had read the whole thing.  What a bitter, cynical, pointless story!  If you want to read a well-written, brilliant story about a world in which God, heaven, hell, angels and so on are literal realities, read the award-winning novelette “Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang instead of the piece presented here.

The other story in this volume to which I took objection concerned a musician who was talented but not top quality.  He meets a singer whose performance is also flawed, and they begin a romance.  The story is actually very well told up to a certain point where out of left field the musician insults and derides his lover and they separate back into their lonely lives.  End of story.  Bullshit.  Okay, I realize that romances don’t always work out, but the story didn’t lead the reader, consciously or unconsciously, into readiness for this tragedy.  Instead, it appears as if everything is going to work out for the two lonely people and they are going to fill voids in each others’ lives.  The sudden turnaround simply didn’t make sense in the context the writer had set up.  It’s like he built up this beautiful, elegant structure just for the cynical, bitter anti-joy of knocking it down.

Okay, that’s enough about the negative.  Now we’re going to delve into the beating heart of the book, the best part.  It’s near the end, in the last few decades the book covers.  In short, the book is rescued by people of color, by ethnic writers.  One of the best is Bengali-American Jhumpa Lahiri, one of my favorite writers.  She’s one of the few authors whose works I order in hardcover as soon as they come out because I can’t stand to wait for less expensive editions.  She has a wonderful story, “The Third and Final Continent,” about a Bengali man from Calcutta who emigrates first to England and then to the United States.  It tells of his adjustment to the different cultures and also to his arranged marriage and his new wife, who joins him in Boston.

Another great story is “Xuela” by Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid.  It’s a dark, deeply atmospheric story about an adolescent girl who is abandoned by her father, raised by their family laundress, and then later reunited with her father.  Despite her displacement and loneliness, the girl lives a rich inner life.

“If You Sing Like That for Me” by Akhil Sharma, an Indian writer from New Delhi who moved to the United States when he was young, tells the story of an Indian bride in an arranged marriage who at first despairs of the hopes and dreams of her youth but then unexpectedly falls in love with her husband.  Sharma evokes the ambiance of Indian daily life and culture very well, so that the reader feels immersed in the story.

Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer who is always entertaining and amusing even when he deals with heartbreaking subject matter.  In “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” he tells of the misadventures of a homeless alcoholic Native American who wanders the Seattle waterfront.  He finds his grandmother’s traditional regalia in a pawnshop and for the next twenty-four hours or so tries to raise money to redeem it, all the while falling prey to temptation and squandering any money he comes across on booze or food which he promptly throws up.  Alexie’s wise and witty voice is what raises this story from tragedy to transcendency and elevates the main character from shiftless bum to unlikely hero.

This book holds too many stories to comment on them all.  So I’ll just mention two more standouts and then I’ll let it go.  “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” begins as a light exercise in Jewish humor.  Two aging couples who used to know each other get together in Florida, reminisce, drink, smoke pot, and carry on.  Initially the narrator distrusts the couple visiting from Israel that follow strict Hassidic customs, but gradually they all loosen up and have fun.  Most of the story describes their partying antics and is very well-written.  However, at the end the author throws in a wicked twist, seemingly from left field but actually subtly prepared for.  I don’t want to tell you what it is if you have not yet read the story, but it’s one of the most adroitly devastating endings I’ve recently read.

Which brings me to “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders, the second-to-last story in the book and the only selection of science fiction.  It’s a great story, by the way, but the reason I mention it is its uniqueness in being the only genre entry in this vast collection.  In the introduction to the section of stories from 2010 to 2015, the editor supposedly welcomes the trend of genre-mixing and diversity in recent fiction, and yet with the exception of this one story, science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, mysteries, and horror are completely excluded.  I know that such stories have been included in “Best American Short Stories” of past years, but the editors chose to leave them out of this presumed best of the best volume.  This in large part accounts for the book’s weakness, for its failure to live up to what it could have been.  I know that there is terrific literary genre fiction, some of which far surpasses many of the stories that the editors chose to include here.  It’s a shame that they decided to marginalize such great work in favor of inferior work that meets some critics’ definitions of “literary” but in fact is just plain ponderous.  Be that as it may, there are some great stories, good stories, mediocre stories, and poor stories in this anthology, just as there are in most anthologies.  As I said earlier, my disappointment stems from my heightened expectations.  One expects the best of the best to be the epitome of effort.  Instead, it’s a selection of stories just like any other.

Book Review: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor; Part Two

As I wrote in the first essay about this book, the early entries disappointed me.  There are some great writers, but the selected stories are not among their best.  They read like the stories that you have to read in school because they are assigned, not because you want to read them, and afterwards, as you are older and begin to appreciate good writing, you wonder what the educators were thinking in assigning these stories instead of some of the many truly exciting ones you discovered on your own since then.

In the midst of the decade 1950 to 1960, though, this book begins to blossom, starting with the elegant “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin.  It’s a character study, but it’s about music, and there’s music in the prose.  The story builds from a fairly standard, although grittier than usual, beginning to its stunning climax describing a jazz session in a night club, described in beautiful, melodic prose.  It reminded me of the end of the movie “Whiplash.”  The music is the message; there is nothing more to be said.  This is what I had been looking for and expected from the beginning when I started reading this book.  From a volume that proclaims it includes the best stories from the past one hundred years, you don’t expect any mediocrity, let alone poor entries.  Yet this story was the first that exploded with greatness.

Next is “The Conversion of the Jews” by Philip Roth.  This is a slight, comedic entry, but it uses its humor to touch on some very sensitive subject matter.  Roth is a master of prose, and this is a good story.  My favorite of his works, though, is still his excellent novel “American Pastoral.”

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor is a well-written story, but it’s not one of her best.  One of the problems with it for me is a problem that I have with a lot of her stories:  they are unpleasant.  Granted, the unpleasantness of human experience is a core ingredient of short story material, but the way O’Connor often presents it is in the context of ordinary people that you expect something good to happen to, and then bam!  Something devastates them and that’s the end of the story.  But at least it’s a nicely told, comprehensible story, unlike some in the early parts of this book.

“Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike, is a brilliant and brilliantly written story.  I remember having to read it – it must have been in one of my high school classes – and not understanding it at all.  Although it is about a child, or rather a young teen, it is not for children and should not be taught in schools.  It’s ostensibly about a boy who has a crisis of faith and begins to question his religious upbringing, yet his parents, his teachers, and his religious instructors can offer him no consolation or reasonable explanation that helps him with what he is going through.  There’s no way I would have been able to relate to the themes in this story when I was young.  Only now, when I am over sixty years old, can I appreciate it for what it is:  a short story masterpiece.

When I first started reading “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver, I wondered when he would get to the point and how an editor kept reading long enough to get to the strength of the story.  It is a strong story, but it starts slowly, with an important but lengthy info-dump of background.  It is a story of infidelity, guilt, and the need for absolution and forgiveness, but it doesn’t offer simple solutions.  Instead, it addresses the ambiguity and shock that follows revelations of betrayal between couples, and how hard it is to regain stability after an emotional upheaval that shatters a complacent, unrealistic seemingly idyllic marriage.  Once it gets going, it’s an excellent story.

“By the River” by Joyce Carol Oates is a very well written character study, and it held me absorbed right up to its violent climax. The violence, however, I couldn’t help but consider gratuitous.  I didn’t see the story going in that direction, and I don’t think there was sufficient buildup for the plot to go that way.  Ultimately, it’s Oates’s call, but had I been writing the story I would have ended it differently.  Or perhaps not.  Who knows?  Sometimes when I am writing, the story takes over, and unplanned things happen to the characters.  It happened to me when I was writing the story “Opting Out.”  I loved and identified with the main character, and when I wrote the tragic climax, I wept for him.  I didn’t want it to end like that.  I had emotionally invested so much in him.  I wanted him to find his way out, to find his way home.

Book Review: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories Edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor; Part One

I feel disappointed, and the feeling is tenacious; it won’t go away; so rather than stew in my own juices and wait for it to pass, I have to write about it.  Just to clarify, there are other disappointments and frustrations in my life right now, but what I am going to focus on in this essay is a book I have been reading.

I’ve been looking forward to reading it for a long time.  When I was looking for “The Best American Short Stories 2015” on Amazon, this book came up in the search results as well.  As of 2015, it’s a brand-new book that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Best American Short Stories series.  I’ve read several volumes in the series, and I’ve always found them a mixed bag:  a few great stories, some good, some readable, and some unworthy.  This book, though, I expected to be different.  After all, it’s the best of the best; its contents include some of the greatest American short story writers.  Interesting indeed.  On my next trip to the Amazon physical bookstore here in Seattle, I took a look at the volume:  a big impressive hardcover with over seven hundred pages of fiction.  When I got home I ordered it from the online bookstore and waited anxiously for it to arrive.

I had my first foreboding while reading the introduction.  First of all, it didn’t seek to provide more information about the stories and the authors and the evolution of short story writing in America, which I would have liked, but rather tried to define what a short story is in metaphorical or anecdotal terms.  The introduction also warned that John Updike had recently edited a similar volume of a century of short stories and the editors of this volume had decided not to duplicate selections.  That meant that any of the stories that Updike felt were the best of the best were automatically excluded from this volume.

Still, there should have been plenty of gems to choose from.  We’re talking about one hundred years of literary effort, after all.  Of course, only stories that made it into the Best American Short Story series were considered, and as the introductions to each decade of stories attest, the series was long edited by first one editor and then another who had decidedly singular, idiosyncratic opinions about what constituted the best in literature.  This left out many stories, among them some of my personal favorites, that other editors would have selected as the best of various years.

So far I’ve only made it through the stories that represent the best of the years 1915 to 1950, and I have to say that most of them have been mediocre.  A few have been good, notably “Those Are as Brothers” by Nancy Hale.  One was unreadable, and I reluctantly skipped the rest after reading halfway through.  The Hemingway and Faulkner stories were definitely not representative of their best work.  The Fitzgerald story, “Babylon Revisited,” was all right, but he did better work too.  Overall, my impression of the volume up to this point was the sort of reading experience you’d find in a textbook that you had to study for school, not something you’d read because you want to.  This is what disappoints me.  I really did expect more.

I think there’s a dynamic at work here that asks the question:  For whom is a writer writing?  Is it for a literary elite or is it for the mass of world readers?  Many writers write for themselves, and that’s fine as far as it goes – and ultimately correct.  Henry Miller once said he’d be happy with one true reader.  Too often so-called literary works, though praised by reviewers, appeal only to a few people.  That accounts for the rise of so-called genre fiction, which has a broader appeal.  There’s room in the universe of books for both, but one – that is, literary fiction – appeals to a niche readership, whereas genre fiction has a much more diverse audience.

I want to keep reading, to give this book more of a chance.  I know there are some good stories coming up.  Maybe the problem is the evolution of style of modern short stories.  Some of the older stories are simply slow and ponderous.  As I was reading, I wondered why editors and readers of popular magazines would go for this sort of literary fare.  I considered the stories of Jack London, which predate the stories in this volume, and how much more lively and exciting the best of them are.  Some of Hemingway’s best stories, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” have this vitality that makes a short story hard to put down, but nothing approaching the quality of these works appears in the early pages of this volume.

I like most of the writers and editors that I have corresponded with and met; I know that it’s not easy to work in a field that involves such a great amount of subjectivity.  For this reason I hesitate to bring up the negative quality of books that I have read.  In this I suppose I am unlike many reviewers whose caustic wit comprises the main substance of their reviews.  I know that many people would disagree with my opinions and my analysis of this volume, and that’s fine.  One person’s classic novel is another person’s recycled waste.  That’s just the way it is.  Don’t get me wrong, though – I am speaking generally.  I’m not ready to give up on this volume yet.  I will read on and let you know how the situation develops.

*     *     *

Update a week later:  After 1950 the stories have a sharp upturn in quality.  Stay tuned.

Book Review: Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True? by Charles Seife

This short, spare volume reads like an extended Internet article.  Indeed, all the information it contains is easily available online through a search for its topics.  The bibliography in the back, in fact, has very few listings of complete books, but is mainly composed of articles from magazines and websites.  For someone unfamiliar with the perils of the Internet, it offers some useful advice and warnings, but for most Internet users, who are constantly surfeited with online danger notices, it may seem like yesterday’s news.

In writing the above, I’m not putting the book down or saying it is not a worthwhile read.  It has its interesting moments.  The problem is that it dwells only on the negative.  It does not attempt to provide any sort of balance or any solutions to the problems it enumerates.  It’s a series of warnings, nothing more.  It would have been a great book if it had kept the material it has now and added to it an accounting of the many positive aspects of the Internet and some details on how Internet users can combat the evils that lurk in dark virtual alleys.

As a writer whose work appears in online magazines and is for sale at online venues, I was especially interested in what Seife has to say about online writing and publishing.  Unfortunately, his sensationalist dismissal of copyright law as irrelevant in its ability to deal with digital publishing is one of the weak points in the book.  It couldn’t be further from the truth.  Seife claims that copyright law loses its basis when digital copying is so easy and inexpensive. However, copyright law is as valid as it ever was and even more necessary in the digital age.  It is designed to protect the exclusive rights of creators to their intellectual properties.  This fosters an environment that stimulates further creative work.  Just because crime is easier to commit doesn’t make it any less criminal.  Copyright law gives a desperately needed recourse to writers and other artists when criminals steal their works, and copyright law has been upheld in many instances of online theft of intellectual properties.  In analogy, the ease of obtaining firearms doesn’t make murder any less of a criminal act or negate laws that are designed to protect victims from murderers.

Another weakness of the book is its quick dismissal of modern online self-publishing platforms.  The author shares a number of negative stories about self-publishing fiascoes, but does not seem to be aware that many, many talented writers, including those who used to work with traditional publishers, have turned to self-publishing channels as a valid way to distribute their work, and that many of these writers are making a better living doing so than if they had confined themselves to the limitations of the big New York publishers.  Big publishers have reacted to the rise in e-book popularity by revising their contracts so that the lions’ shares of profits go to themselves, while writers receive smaller advances and miniscule shares of royalties.  Self-publishing platforms, on the other hand, allow writers to keep most of the royalties from sales of their books.  Additionally, self-publishing platforms offer the freedom to publish original artistic endeavors that big publishing won’t touch because of its tendency to focus on what sells well in the current marketplace rather than on literary work that is fiscally untried.

I disagreed less with other sections of the book that expose obvious dangers such as the creation of false personas and corporations to facilitate scams.  I also found the author’s description of the pointless, money-wasting, and time-wasting games foisted on unwary Internet users on social media sites to be informative and accurate.

All in all, the book is an interesting, albeit brief and far from complete, summary of common drawbacks of the Internet.

Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2015 Edited by T.C. Boyle and Heidi Pitlor; Part Two: Imbalance in Story Anthologies

Today is Sunday, and I do laundry for my son and myself on Sundays.  I make sure that I am in the laundry room with our two loads at eight o’clock in the morning, which is the earliest permissible time according to the rules of the apartment complex, so that I can get it started before other people start coming and commandeering the machines.  The washing machines are old and do not always work well.  If you overload them only a little, the cycle stops before the final spin, and when you open the door, you find a soggy mess of clothes that you either have to divide in half and wash again or run through two turns in the dryer.  The problem, say the instructions on the wall, is imbalance.  If you put too many clothes in or too many bulky items, the machine can’t spin properly because it is imbalanced.

Why am I digressing into this fascinating description of our Sunday laundry habits, besides the fact that I am even now typing this while waiting for our loads to finish?  Because I am just completing the reading of “The Best American Short Stories 2015” edited by T.C. Boyle and Heidi Pitlor, and one of the biggest problems of the anthology is its imbalance.  One of the editors made the decision that, instead of taking the trouble to balance the stories throughout the anthology according to subject matter, theme, style, length, and so on, that it would be easier to place them alphabetically according to the authors’ last names.  That may work sometimes, but it doesn’t work in this collection.  What they ended up with is a string of abstract, mediocre stories all in a row, then a number of decent ones.  It just doesn’t work that way.  The first part of the anthology is weak, and I began to wonder, as I read, if 2015 was a very bad year for short stories, or if perhaps the selection process this year was amiss.  As I read on, though, I realized that for the most part the stories in this anthology were not better or worse than the stories in other similar anthologies, but that they were just badly placed.  You have to get halfway through the book before you start to hit the truly superlative stories.

Although it’s been decades since I’ve read the book, I recall that in one of the extensive introductions to the stories in “Dangerous Visions,” Harlan Ellison explains that he puts the strongest stories in a collection at the beginning and the end: at the beginning to draw readers in, and at the end to close with a flourish and make the book unforgettable.  This is sound advice.  To leave the thematic balance of a collection of otherwise unrelated stories up to chance does not seem like a wise alternative.  You might hit it, but then again, you might not.  The editors might argue that it doesn’t matter because all the stories are equally brilliant, but that’s never so.  As I explained in the previous essay, best of the year collections, just like any other anthologies of short stories, are made up of subjective choices of only a few editors, unless they happen to be awards anthologies in which the stories are decided upon by the ballots of a large number of eligible voters.

There was another problem with a number of the stories in this collection.  Nothing happens.  There is no dynamism, no activity.  Although a focus on reality in a story is fine, that reality has to absorb and involve the reader in some way.  Several stories here fail to do that.  This is one reason I am more often drawn to speculative fiction rather than so-called mainstream fiction, because many mainstream writers seem to have no imagination.  Maybe what should happen is the dissolution of all genre distinctions.  Best of the year anthologies should contain the best stories written regardless of their subject matter.  Indeed, even in this anthology, one of the better stories is a near-future science fiction tale that somehow escaped “The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015” and wound up here instead.  Recent best of the year anthologies in this series have typically contained several science fiction and fantasy stories, but now that the publishers have begun a series composed exclusively of science fiction and fantasy, I wonder if the mainstream best of the year collection will be weakened.  It certainly seems to have happened this time.  If the trend continues, I may look elsewhere for my dose of yearly mainstream short stories.

Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2015 Edited by T.C. Boyle and Heidi Pitlor; Part One: Subjectivity in Short Story Appreciation

Reading the collection “The Best American Short Stories 2015” edited by T.C. Boyle had a curious effect on me.  Well, to clarify, I haven’t read it all yet.  I’m several stories in.  I’ve been reading modern short stories recently because I’ve been writing a good number of short stories recently.  I want to glean what I can from the work of others:  their triumphs, mistakes, nuances, styles, anything I can use to improve my own command of the short story writing craft.  So I ordered this collection from Amazon to find out what literary editors consider the best of the best that’s being written these days.

The conclusion I have come to is that once you get past the obvious mistakes in grammar and other rudiments of rank beginners, it’s amazing how subjective are the choices that editors make as to what appears in literary magazines and anthologies.  To be honest, I knew this already.  Every story collection I read, whether they are single author or mixed authors, has good stories and bad stories.  I don’t know why it hit me so forcefully now.  Perhaps it was because earlier today I was marketing some of my own stories, deciding which magazines or anthologies would be best to send them to, and balking about sending off some of the pieces because they are so strange or different.

I should know better.  Writers are rarely the best judges of their own work.  All they can do is complete their stories, check them for mistakes, and send them off.  Once I sat down to write a story, “The Disappearance of Juliana,” and I was simply fed up with rejections and worrying about the idiosyncrasies of the personal opinions of editors, and I decided to pull out all the stops and write the story however the hell I thought it should be written.  So I alternated sections with second person present tense and third person past tense, and in some places, especially at the climax, I changed font sizes and created word pictures to accompany the text.  The story was rejected a few times, but it sold faster than most, and I got paid more for it than any other story I had sold up to that time.  You never know.  You just never know.

Reading the stories in this recent anthology and noting the great differences in quality and style made me realize that every editor is just one person with an opinion.  And there are no master’s degrees or doctorates in editing.  A lot of people come to editing in roundabout ways.  Sometimes they are failed writers who didn’t manage to make a living with their prose.  Some are business majors looking out for the publishing company’s bottom line.  Some got their positions because they knew someone.  Admittedly some are very dedicated and have a genuine love of books, but even these people are humans with personal tastes that cause them to prefer one type of story over another even though the stories may be equally deserving of publication.

What does this mean for me personally?  It means that if I want my stories published in traditional venues, I should get them out there to as many editors as possible.  In the back of this best of the year anthology the magazines from which the stories are chosen are listed, and there are, says the editor of the volume, about two hundred seventy-seven entries.  Now, I would discount over half of them right off because I am a professional writer and some don’t pay except in copies, if that, but that still leaves many options.  Those many magazines all have idiosyncratic editors with different tastes, different preferences.  There is no story evaluation computer program that they run them through to definitively determine which ones are most worthy.  It’s all a matter of opinion.  The editors read them and decide which ones strike their psychic cords or touch their literary sensibilities.  Some editors have first readers to wade through the slush piles for them, and some first readers are students trying to earn a few bucks to make it through college or are failed writers themselves and have much less idea than the writers they summarily reject about what makes a good or bad story.

Anyway, so after I came to these conclusions, I sent off those strange or offbeat stories.  Why not?  The worst that can happen is that they do not suit the editors’ preferences.  If that happens, I turn them around again and send them somewhere else.  Or I upload them to self-publishing channels and make them available directly to readers.

All that to say:  Writers, write from your heart.  Don’t write to formula.  Do the best work of which you are capable, get it out there, and then start on the next story.  A piece you may have doubts about may end up in a best of the year anthology.  Who knows unless you try?

Book Review: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

I occasionally like to read books about writing, to see what other writers have to say about it.  I came across this book at a Seattle Friends of the Library book sale.  It was almost free so, since I had heard of it, I thought I’d give it a try.  It was first published in 1994, which makes it over twenty years old.  That’s not important, except that you should take what it says about publishing with a grain of salt, as this was before digital publishing and the self-publishing revolution.  No matter.  The book doesn’t go into publishing much, not even the rudiments.  It is taken from Lamott’s writing classes for beginning writers and deals with much more basic topics.

I can’t really call myself a beginning writer anymore by any stretch of the imagination, with about twenty books and many short stories published, but I still found some of her advice readable and enjoyable.

Before I go on, though, I need to give a bit of advice myself on the reading of books on writing.  Every writer’s journey is different.  If you read books about the writing process and rules of writing by other writers, always keep in mind that in the pursuit of your own voice and your own calling you should ignore any advice that you disagree with.  There are no absolutes in the writing game.  It is subjective.  It is a matter of ripping your heart open and communicating what you find there, and it is a different experience for everyone.

That said, I find some of Lamott’s advice to be useful, and some not so much.  She is opinionated and entertaining, though a bit too dogmatic sometimes.  I sometimes found her writing style, especially her flippancy, exaggeration, and self-denigration, annoying.  In one section she talks about writing shitty first drafts which you can then revise again and again until you whip them into shape.  That’s how some writers write, but not all.  I prefer to write good first drafts and, though I do go over my work several times afterwards, I generally make very few changes.  There are exceptions to be sure.

I am concerned about stories I send off to publishers, but I cannot overly fret about my creations that I send off to market as Lamott describes that she does; there are too many of them.  Right now, besides all the digital stories I have available for purchase at various online venues, I also have about twenty short stories and novelettes making the rounds of magazines and anthologies.  If I wasted time fretting over editors’ reactions I’d never get anything else done.  Instead, I send them off and start on the next ones.  If they come back rejected, I find another suitable market and send them out again.  If they get accepted, paid for, and published, well and good; otherwise I format them, create a cover, and self-publish them.  Life is too short for the anxiety of placing my well-being in an editor’s hands.  The best thing is to do the work, send it off or upload it, and move on.

As I said, the advice in this book is for beginning writers.  Some of it is sound, some of it not.  For the best advice on the nuts and bolts of short story writing, though, pick up a copy of “Creating Short Fiction” by Damon Knight.  So far I have not found a better guide to the practical aspects of short story composition.  It’s even older than Lamott’s book, but Knight’s advice is timeless.

I don’t know if I would recommend this book or not, as there are definitely better books about writing on the market.  One of my other favorites is “On Writing” by Stephen King.  I don’t agree with all of his advice either, but he sure is entertaining, and blends the writing advice with some fascinating memoirs.  I suppose “Bird by Bird” may be a good read for writers who are just starting out, as long as they realize that some of the advice is dated and that they should ignore anything that doesn’t apply to them and feel free to break any so-called rules they want to break.

Book Review: Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

I hope it doesn’t sound like a contradiction when I say that I admire much of Stephen King’s work but have read little of it.  For the most part I have seen the films, and that has been good enough for me.  That includes “Firestarter,” “The Dead Zone,” “The Stand,” “The Green Mile,” and others.  The length of his novels has intimidated me from tackling them, and the fact that once I saw the films I didn’t see the need to delve into the books.  I made an exception for the novel “11/22/63” about a man who goes back in time to thwart the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The subject matter fascinated me so I bought the book and read it, even though, as I remember, it was over 1100 pages long.  Another King book that is one of my favorites is “On Writing,” which is mostly a memoir.  One thing I would pay good money for, in fact, is a full-length memoir by King.

This book, “Everything’s Eventual,” came into my hands via one of my sons, who brought it with him on a Christmas visit.  I didn’t think I had read a volume of King’s short stories before, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I came to the conclusion that Stephen King’s short stories have the same strengths and weaknesses as his longer fiction.  One of the weaknesses of King’s longer fiction is its length.  He has a tendency to ramble.  For instance, “11/22/63” is a great story, but it is twice as long as it needs to be.  It would have been a much greater story at half the length.  The same can be said for his shorter fiction.  A number of the stories are just too long for the subject matter and take too long to get going.  Trimmed to half the length, they would be twice as effective.  Some of the best stories in the collection are the tight, compact literary ones that have focus of character and go straight from one point to another.  Alas, not all the stories are like that.  Some of the weakest are stories of gangsters or zombies or undercover spies that take forever to get anywhere significant.

Another problem I had with some of the stories was their gratuitous violence.  I have no problem with violence in short stories if the violence is integral to the plot.  But King too often introduces interesting characters with real-life problems and then injects violence into the stories as if out of left field.  Which brings up a further problem with several of King’s stories, a tendency towards deus ex machina solutions or conclusions, in other words, closing the stories with neat endings that have no buildup in the main body of the story.  For instance, he tells an interesting story of the impending divorce of a married couple, and then out of nowhere has a deranged waiter attack the woman’s lawyer and split his head open.  Or he tells a fairly comedic story about how a couple’s pets are attracted to either the husband or the wife, and then throws in a bit at the end about a serial killer murdering someone’s wife.

Don’t get me wrong.  Most of the stories are entertaining.  But they are not as tight as short stories I am accustomed to reading by such masters as Zelazny, Delaney, Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., and others.  As I said, King rambles in his short stories, and most of them would be much more effective at half the length or less.  I couldn’t escape having the feeling, too, that if anyone else’s name had been attached to some of the tales, they never would have found publication in the first-class markets listed for these stories.

All in all, the book is an okay read, but you can do better picking up a collection by one of the masters of the craft that I listed above.  King is a fine writer, but as he says in “On Writing,” he likes to unwind his tales slowly and gradually, and that focus is not optimum for shorter works.  That’s what the stories in this collection lack:  power right out of the gate.  If you have the patience and stay the course, eventually the stories display some interesting facets, but stories that do not have famous names attached to them, if they are to succeed in retaining reader interest, have to punch you fast, punch you hard, and keep punching.

*     *     *

When I wrote the above, I still had a few stories in the collection left to read, and I offer this afterword because a couple of them are strong stories and I want to give credit where credit is due.  Their opening scenes are, perhaps, too long – but then again, perhaps not.  Overall, they are finely executed soft horror stories.

I saw the movie “1408” long ago when I was living in Greece, and it’s a rather poor film.  The story, however, works well.  This is an example of a Stephen King story far exceeding the film adaptation in quality.  Perhaps part of the problem with the film is that the story is rather slight.  It works as a short, but to increase it to feature film length took a lot of stuffing.

The other strong story is “Riding the Bullet,” about a hitchhiker who gets picked up by a dead man after a visit to a graveyard and then has to make an awful choice. As King points out in the introduction, there’s nothing original about the story.  Its strength lies in its characterization; King creates sufficient background for the protagonist so that you care about what happens to him and the choices he makes.  This story originated as an e-book, sold a lot of copies, and became a phenomenon, more for the pioneering abundance of its e-book sales than for the content of the story itself.  But it is a well-told tale.