John Walters's Blog, page 71

Book Review: Nebula Award Stories Eleven edited by Ursula K. LeGuin; Part Two: Tweaking Reality

There’s straight science fiction full of wondrous wildness like starships and androids and new worlds and bizarre aliens and so on, and there’s straight fantasy full of wizards and witches and fairies and elves and dwarfs and so on; and then there is a type of fiction that takes reality and gives it a subtle twist.  Often the twist is not even ostentatious, but it illuminates the core facet of the story in a way that would not be possible with conventional realistic fiction.  Several stories in this anthology are like that.  They read almost like mainstream fiction, but they have something running through them that is off-kilter, that doesn’t synch with reality.

“Shatterday”, for example, is one of the few major Harlan Ellison stories I had never read.  It’s an intensely personal story; it’s easy to see the author’s psyche-print in it.  It concerns a man who accidently dials his own home and he himself answers; then he has to come to the realization of which of his personas is real and which needs to be discarded.  It is much less flamboyant than most of Ellison’s fiction, but nevertheless is starkly effective in its simple, straightforward prose.

Tom Reamy’s “San Diego Lightfoot Sue” is another example of a realistic story with just a touch of the fantastic.  As a matter of fact, in most of its fifty-some pages there is no trace of fantasy at all.  It tells of a naive, gullible, yet likeable teenager who leaves a nowhere town in Kansas and heads to Los Angeles, where he by chance meets a sweet team of transvestites and a much older artist named Sue.  His journey, the characters he meets, and his love relationship with Sue are told in simple, sweet, highly readable prose, and the fantastic elements at the very beginning and the very end add just a touch of magic realism that accentuates the human drama.

“Time Deer” by Craig Strete tells the story of an old Native American man who is marginalized and humiliated by his son and his son’s white wife.  The old man’s depth of tradition affords him an escape into an alternate reality composed of the spirits of the past.

This was Craig Strete’s only appearance in a Nebula volume; he was nominated for one other Nebula award for his novelette “The Burning Man”.  I used to visit him sometimes when I lived on Van Nuys Boulevard in Los Angeles during my brief attempt to break into television and screen writing.  I’d get frustrated with my lack of professional progress and I’d get out and take a walk and sometimes my footsteps led to his door.  He was just starting to sell stories; as I remember he told me about the upcoming appearance of “Time Deer” in this volume but it hadn’t happened yet.  He’d be sitting on his living room floor, his typewriter before him, the TV on silently off to the side.  He told me he wrote his stories in one take; he’d just type them out and send them off without rewriting.  This awed me, as unsure of myself as I was.  I could hardly compose a word after hours of beating my head against my typewriter.  This anecdote, by the way, has nothing to do with the review of this book; I haven’t thought of Craig for years and reading his story brought up these memories.

Anyway, all fiction writers take the stuff of reality and shape it with a touch of make-believe.  Speculative fiction writers are simply more obvious, more liberal about it.  Chance dictated that these stories composed the bulk of the volume, but on the other hand they indicated a trend of the times (the 1970s):  a blending of the very best of the mainstream and the fantastic to create a literature that transcended both.

Book Review: Nebula Award Stories Eleven edited by Ursula K. LeGuin; Part One: Musing on the New Wave

I haven’t finished reading this book yet, but after just finishing the winning novella, “Home is the Hangman” by Roger Zelazny, I wanted to write something while the impression of it was fresh in my mind.  In short, this story awed me.  It gave me that sense of wonder that I look for in science fiction, that feeling I had so often when, after returning from the fiasco of my year at university in California, I perused the shelves of the local library, checked out early Nebula award volumes, and read stories by Zelazny, Samuel Delaney, Harlan Ellison, Kate Wilhelm, Robert Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr., R. A. Lafferty, and J. G. Ballard.  The so-called New Wave in science fiction was mounting higher and higher and becoming a tsunami back then.  There was a special sort of excitement in the air and a level of literary excellence that has, in my opinion based on the recent Nebula Award volumes I have read, diminished.  After finishing Nebula Award volumes from 2006, 2008, and 2011, I had the feeling of, well, okay, some of them were good stories – but that excitement, that thrill was missing.  Receiving it as a payoff at the end of “Home is the Hangman” reminded me what I was looking for.  In science fiction I don’t want to waste my time with okay stories; I want cosmic bursts of brilliance.  That’s what I try to write and that’s what I want to read.  I don’t want mediocrity; I don’t even want good.  I want great.  I want to be blown away.  There isn’t enough of that in contemporary science fiction.  Writers nowadays aren’t on a crusade; they aren’t trying to change the world.  That’s what’s missing.

Exemplifying the era of the New Wave in science fiction were the anthologies “Dangerous Visions” and “Again Dangerous Visions” edited by Harlan Ellison.  All the stories in these volumes were not good stories, but overall the books carry the literary excitement and thrill present at the time.  Ellison had his finger directly on the pulse of the movement towards relevance in speculative fiction literature and he illuminated it well in the stories he presented.

What sort of wave is there now, if any?  I can’t see any pattern or trend.  The stories voted each year as award winners are good stories, at least most if not all of them, but for me at least the thrill is gone.

I had been contemplating this a few nights ago when we rented Woody Allen’s brilliant film “Midnight in Paris”, about a writer who longs for the era gone by of the 1920s when Paris was full of struggling writers and painters.  His life changes when he journeys back in time to meet many of these famous literary characters.  It is a spot-on, brilliant movie, Woody Allen’s crowning achievement.  I admire the fact that Woody Allen keeps working no matter what else is going on in his life.  Sometimes he hits and sometimes he misses, but in this film he nails it.  And it struck me as I was watching that I was doing the same thing that the writer in the film was:  I was longing for an era gone by, for the New Wave era of the late 60s and early 70s in science fiction when there was real excitement in the air, when writers really thought that they could break free from convention and experiment and innovate and produce top-rate literature.

I had my chance back then.  I attended Clarion West back in 1973 and was taught by Harlan Ellison and Terry Carr and Peter Beagle and others.  I was caught up in the thrill of the times.  But I didn’t take advantage of it.  I was too young.  I am a late bloomer.  I wish I could have known back then what I know now; I wish I had the experience and the wisdom I have learned in the school of hard knocks.  Alas, a diploma from that school is not suddenly and magically endowed.  You have to go through the hard knocks first in order to earn it, and that I had not yet done.

No, I can’t time travel back to the late sixties and do it all over again.  All I am left with is what the character realizes at the end of “Midnight in Paris”.  He can’t physically go back and live in the Paris of an era gone by; all he can do is take his life as it is at that moment and shape it the way it ought to be.

So be it.

Maybe it’s time for a new New Wave.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories.  Thanks!

Book Review: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

When I heard about this book I had to have it.  I’m fascinated by the creative processes of others, one main reason being I have so much trouble with my own.  The temptation to compare is impossible to resist, but I have to say that though I might pick up a few tips from a book like this, I am not tempted  to change the way I do things just because famous author so-and-so does it that way.

Anyway, this book is interesting but it is not all I had hoped.  It is not an in-depth look at how artists work; it is rather a large number of very short clips, almost like mini blog posts, describing the routines of creative people.  It is kind of like sitting down to what you had hoped would be a big full meal and being served a lot of snacks.  It’s a small book too; I was disappointed when it arrived and I saw the size of it.  It only takes a couple of days to get through even with moderate reading.

Nevertheless, it is interesting.  Writers and other artists are a strange group of people.  Too many of the examples in this book detail dependence on drugs or alcohol or bizarre rituals or habits to sustain their creativity.  Some almost made me laugh out loud, but certainly didn’t cause me to want to emulate them.  There are some sad, sad stories here.

Most artists, however, seem to keep to a more or less steady schedule, and treat their work as a job, not waiting for some sort of magic burst of inspiration, but rather keeping at it day after day, thus allowing their creativity to flow in a steady stream.  The consensus seems to be that the morning is best, and the majority of artists keep a morning schedule during which they do their freshest, best work.

This is how I have come to work as well.  I have tried different approaches.  When I was intensely into teaching in Greece I tried writing a few hundred words when I got home late at night, and I got a few good stories out of it.  But I like it best when I can approach my writing at the beginning of the day when my mind is fresh and unencumbered with whatever else besets me in the course of the day.  I find that if I keep to a steady schedule and a set minimum word count that my subconscious cooperates and gives me material with which to compose.  I set as a minimum 1000 words, and often surpass it.  How long it takes varies, but generally about an hour and a half does the trick.  If the writing were my full-time job, which I hope happens soon, I would possibly take a break, exercise a bit, walk around to stretch and get the blood flowing through my system, and then get back to it for another thousand words or so.  As it is now after the first thousand words multitudes of things to be done, among them writing hack Internet articles to support my family, intrude and I have to jump away from whatever fantasy world in which I am ensconced into the realities of the day.

I love the maxim, “Two or three hours in the morning and the rest of the day to oneself.”  I think Henry Miller said it, but it may not have been original with him.  In an ideal world I would compose my couple of thousand words, take care of necessary household or business affairs, have lunch, take a nap, and then in the afternoon do business related to writing and publishing, and whatever else needs to be done, including a nice long walk or exercise period.

I would also spend a good part of the year traveling and write as I traveled, alternating between spending time at home base and venturing off into lands explored and unexplored.  High on my list of places to revisit are India and Europe.  In India I have specific locations in mind to which I want to return and stay for extended periods of time.  Europe, though, I would like to re-explore in a camper, wandering here and there as the urge took me.

Still, throughout the travels, I believe that a regular schedule or routine would be important.  That’s how you get work done.  If I could do my world wandering again, that’s one thing I would be sure of, that I took time every day to maintain a steady output of writing.

Back to the book.  It’s interesting and I would recommend it to other writers and artists, but be aware that it is very rudimentary, very short, and because of that overpriced for what you are getting.  You will arrive at the chapter for an artist you might be very interested in (in my case Henry Miller), read the short paragraph and then exclaim, “Huh?  Is that all?”  I would have much preferred Currey had covered half the amount of artists and doubled or tripled the content for each one.  But, then, it’s his book, not mine.

Book Review: Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 edited by Ben Bova

Having recently read the Nebula Awards volume for 2011, upon opening this volume I was immediately struck by the differences between the two.  The 2011 book is full of stories.  It has all the short story and novelette award nominees, and the winning novella.  This volume, on the other hand, has the winning short story, novelette, and novella, and one of the short story nominees, and the rest of the volume, almost half, is full of other material.  It’s interesting material:  articles on the state of the field of science fiction, a decades-old story by that year’s grand master, an excerpt from the winning novel, and so on, but these and similar items can be found elsewhere.  I buy a Nebula Awards volume so I can read the award-winning and award-nominated stories.  I’m very thankful that the series changed publishers, and that the new publishers have a policy of including as many stories as possible.

The first story presented here is the winning short story, “Echo” by Elizabeth Hand.  It’s about a woman alone with her dog on an island off the east coast of the United States.  I found it pretty, poetic, but undistinguished.  It was a fine read, but lone survivor stories have been done many times before and I wasn’t sure why this one stood out as the best story of the year.

Next, the winning novella, “Burn” by James Patrick Kelly, is presented.  Kelly prefaces the story with some disparaging remarks about Henry David Thoreau, and then proceeds to use quotes from Thoreau’s writings at the beginning of each chapter.  The story is based on Thoreau’s book “Walden”, and Thoreau’s attempt to live simply in the woods for a certain period of time.  Kelly exaggerates this situation, as is common in science fiction, and posits a planet on which the settlers have retreated from advanced technology and chosen to live simple lives as farmers.  They have reforested a good part of the world, and earlier settlers who refused to leave when the world was bought and resettled have become terrorists, setting fires to burn portions of the new forest.  The story is told from the viewpoint of a firefighter, and there are other complications and intricacies.  It’s a fine story, well told as far as it goes, and if Kelly hadn’t made the remarks he did at the beginning none of it would have bothered me.  But it seems to me that he didn’t understand what Thoreau was trying to do when he lived by the shore of Walden Pond.  It was an experiment.  He lived there for roughly two years.  He built his own cabin, grew some of his own food, and spent much of his time in isolation, writing and meditating and walking in the woods.  Both before and afterwards he lived in the company of other people and was even involved in some of the cutting-edge political movements of the times, such as the emancipation of slaves.  His time at Walden Pond was a short period cut out of his life deliberately, to see what might come of it.  I liken it to the time I took off on the road and ended up hitchhiking a good part of the way around the world.  When I was in the midst of it, it seemed like it would last forever.  It had to be like that, for the veracity of the experience.  But it was never really the plan.  It was something I did to cut to the basics, to get to the essentials, to shear away the voices of others in my head that I might find my own as a writer.  And I feel that that is what Thoreau was trying to accomplish as well.  It was not, as Kelly implies, a rebellion against technology per se, though he abandoned the trappings of civilization for a time.  It was rather an undressing process, a stripping of extraneous opinions and habits and customs to get to the core of who he was as a unique person, a unique writer.  And succeed he did, at least in my opinion.  Some of the writing in “Walden” is transcendent in its greatness, honest and forthright and true, something that can only be achieved when a writer is stripped bare before the cosmos and has no more defenses or pretences.  I continue to read sections of “Walden” from time to time when I need some strong, bracing, fearless prose to stimulate and inspire me.

The winning novelette, “Two Hearts” by Peter Beagle, is a classic fantasy tale, well told.  When I attended the Clarion West science fiction writing workshop in Seattle in 1973, Peter Beagle was one of the guest instructors.  Each instructor, during the week he taught, had a scheduled reading and lecture open to students and public.  During his reading Peter Beagle read from his now-classic novel “The Last Unicorn”.  As he explains in the introduction to the story here, for decades readers wrote and asked for a sequel, and “Two Hearts” is the result.

The only nominated non-winner presented in the volume is a short story called “The Woman in Schrodinger’s Wave Equations”.  It’s a well-told story; in fact, I liked it better than the story that won the award, but it’s not science fiction.  It’s a character study of a man studying physics and of his girlfriends.

As for the rest of the book’s content, I will not comment on the essays other than to say that they were interesting but the space should have been filled with stories instead.  The excerpt from the winning novel, “Seeker”, was a waste of space too; this is where a short essay could have served a useful purpose, if the author could have briefly written about how he came to write the novel.  When I read the grand master’s story, “The Listeners” by James Gunn, I recalled it fondly from reading it years before.  It is available in plenty of anthologies and didn’t need to be reprinted here.

The Nebula Awards volumes should be for new nominated stories and a minimum of other essays and filler.  As I already mentioned, I am very thankful that the new publishers have gone back to concentrating on the nominated fiction.

Book Review: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Library book sales are great places to find good reads, and while perusing the shelves at the Pacific Beach branch of the San Diego library I came across this volume.  I had never heard of the book but I had heard of the author.  Neil Sheehan is the author of one of the greatest books about the Vietnam War ever written, “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam”.  This book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and is one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time.  Despite its 1000 plus pages it is as fascinating as a novel.  So I was willing to give Sheehan another try, especially when I saw that this book’s subject matter concerned one of my ongoing interests, the modern history of the cold war.

As in “A Bright Shining Lie”, Sheehan uses a focus on the story of one man to flesh out an era, in this case the mad race between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II to develop intermediate and long range missiles with nuclear warheads.  It was an insane period of time during which the U.S. military sought to produce an absurd amount of nuclear missiles as a deterrent to nuclear war.  The plan was that the missiles would never be used, but as the book brings out, there were plenty of gung-ho generals who would have been all too happy to unleash the entire arsenal on the Soviets, not comprehending or uncaring if they did that they would bring nuclear winter upon the whole northern hemisphere.

The story traces Schriever’s early life as an immigrant from Germany, the struggles of his mother after his father died, his education, his entry into the Army Air Forces (before the Air Force was a separate branch of the military), his service during World War II, and ultimately the assignment to his life’s work, the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile.  The book outlines the lives and deeds of a number of famous figures of the times, including the mathematician and physicist John von Neumann; Edward Hall, who created the Minuteman missile, and his brother Theodore, who spied for the Russians; Curtis LeMay, the bombastic general who was Schriever’s nemesis; Wernher von Braun, the German creator of the V2 rockets; Joseph Stalin, the tyrannical Russian dictator; and presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

This is history brought to life through the stories of the men who made it, and it rivals any novel in its excitement and depth of characterization.  Sheehan is a great writer and he is in great form in this fascinating history.  As I said, the story itself tells of an insane period of human history.  God knows what future generations will think of the crazy race to build more and more and more death-dealing nuclear weapons until there were enough of them to destroy the world many times over.  At the same time, though, Sheehan has a gift for explaining the motivations of the times that led men to such deeds, and the personalities that struggled on heroically doing the best they could considering the circumstances.

I highly recommend this book as a first-class retelling of an important period of modern history.  Anyone interested in the cold war and how things developed as they did would do well to read this book.  If you want to go beyond James Bond and understand how things really happened, give it a try.

The Ongoing Relevance of the Sixties and Seventies

Last night I watched a wonderful film called “Pirate Radio”.  I had seen it in Greece a few years ago; the European title is “The Boat That Rocked”.  It’s the story of a time in England when it was illegal to broadcast rock and roll, and so rock stations were forced to broadcast from ships out in open waters.  Millions tuned in to the music, and eventually, of course, the laws were rescinded and rock and roll changed our lives forever.  The movie is full of terrific music, a cast of excellent actors, comedy, pathos, and relevance.  Relevance?  Come off it.  This is 2013 after all.  We are talking about over forty years ago.  What could be relevant about that?  Who watches the Woodstock documentary anymore?  Who listens to Hendrix, the Doors, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Grateful Dead?  A lot of people, evidently, judging by the successful tours of septuagenarian rock groups who continue to draw sellout crowds.

Something happened back then.  Something happened that made the Sixties and early Seventies a unique era in the history of humankind.  I came into adolescence and manhood during that era, but I don’t think it’s just a purely personal observation I am making here.  As I look back in recent history, I see a great burst of bright light from that time.  It was a light of freedom, of creativity, of exuberance, of tolerance, of hope, of passion, of free love, of optimism, of shifting of perspective.

I was not prepared for this strange kaleidoscopic twisting of traditional culture the first time I encountered it.  I had caught glimpses in Seattle in my last years of high school.  At the age of fifteen or sixteen I had begun to drink a lot; in fact I had begun to get so drunk at parties that I would black out and not remember what I had done.  Then one day some classmates turned me on to marijuana, the killer weed, reefer madness.  I was already drunk when I first tried it, and the room spun round me and I lost control and ended up throwing up in the toilet.  But I tried again, and again, and finally it became an irregular habit, the imbibing of the weed during weekends or breaks between classes at school.  By the time I headed down to California for university any traditional fifties standards and customs absorbed from my parents had been shattered and/or melted and I was evolving into a different sort of creature, a creature of the sixties and seventies.  I listened to the latest rock music; I smoked weed and hashish; I began to experiment with LSD and mescaline and psilocybin; I went to Grateful Dead concerts.

All of this turned out not to be a purely positive experience by any means.  I wasn’t ready to handle this inner deconstruction, because I had not the maturity nor the materials with which to reconstruct myself.  I became confused, paranoid, without initiative or direction, unsure of how to use this new perspective in a positive, life-affirming way.  My salvation, it turned out, was writing.  Out of that quagmire of confusion in California I wrested the realization of my life’s work, my calling.  I realized I had to be a writer, that there was nothing else in this world for me worth doing.

As years and decades have passed, I look back on that time with mixed feelings.  On the one hand it was a horror of loneliness, insecurity, fear, and confusion.  On the other hand it was when I discovered who I am as a person and what I am here to do.  That time, more than any other, I return to again and again in my writing.  I wrote about my travels around the world in the mid-seventies as a wandering hitchhiking hippy searching for truth in my memoir “World Without Pain: The Story of a Search”.  My first novel, “Love Children”, has young people raised by aliens coming back to Earth in the mid-seventies to search for their parents, and contrasts the drugs and disappointments of the era with the superior moral training of the alien culture.  My second novel, “The Misadventures of Mama Kitchen”, is about an idealistic young hippy woman in the late sixties who travels from wilderness commune to Haight/Ashbury in San Francisco to the Woodstock music festival in search of manifestations of the hippy ideal of peace and brotherhood for which she strives.  Many of my short stories are also set in the sixties and seventies, including “Mendocino Mellow”, about a special strain of dope which enables a group of hippies to travel back in time and attend Woodstock; “Slice-of-Death”, a horror story drawing on the paranoia of bad psychedelic trips; and “The Illuminations”, about a rock band that travels to the Indian Subcontinent in the wake of the Beatles and in the remote Himalayas discovers a cursed book which affects their lives in very strange and evil ways.

My thoughts return to the Sixties and Seventies again and again.  Even my current novel in progress, about which I will speak no more particulars than to say it is sort of a sequel or spinoff to “The Misadventures of Mama Kitchen”, deals with this era.  I can’t get it out of my mind.  And in my more self-questioning phases, which occur frequently, I wonder if there is something wrong with me, if I have somehow been caught in some sort of time loop which makes it difficult to deal with the world as it now is.  So much has changed.  There were no personal computers or cell phones back then, let alone the plethora of other gadgets with which we are now obsessed.  When I traveled from country to country the only means of communication I had with my relatives was an aerogram, a thin little piece of paper you would write on and then glue together into a sort of envelope.  It was lighter and therefore cheaper to send than a regular letter.  Long distance phone calls were so expensive as to be out of the question, at least to a wandering vagabond such as I was.  Drugs were abundant and easily obtainable, but the consequences of getting caught with them were much more severe.  There was a redneck-hippy gap, which caused many people to consider those with long hair or unorthodox clothing to be traitors, communists, criminals, or of uncertain sexual orientation.  I had many fleeting relationships with women, and in none of them did I use a condom; in those days most women were on the pill, and though the clap reared its ugly head now and then it was neutralized with a powerful antibiotic fix, and the scourge of AIDS was as yet unknown.

Yes, that era was so important to me that I can’t get it out of my mind.  I continue to write about it, and sometimes I wonder if I am just chewing my cud, if anyone is really interested in that era anymore besides me.  Certainly the sales (or paucity of sales) of my books would suggest that I am alone in my preoccupation.  And yet, I see the popularity of such movies as “Pirate Radio”, and that DVDs of the original Woodstock concert continue to come out in new editions.  Those old rock musicians continue to rock.  Yesterday I went to see the new film “Star Trek Into Darkness”.  There are a lot of “in” jokes and allusions in the film that you won’t get unless you have a thorough familiarity with the original TV series and the early Star Trek films, but I noticed a lot of folks in the audience reacting in the right way at the right time.  So it is with the sixties and seventies as well.  Plenty of people remember those days.  And those who do not remember should learn.  It was a bright shining of era of hope and fear, dreams and despair, peace and violence, love and hate.  In short, it was an era of contradictions, just like every era is in the history of the human race.  But this is the era of my formation, of my coming of age, of my birth as a creative artist.  I cannot help but write of it, whether others find it relevant or not.  A writer must write about who he is, what he is, where he is, and when he is.  Even when writing science fiction and fantasy a writer digs into himself, into his own core, and writes of the truths he finds there.

So are the sixties and seventies relevant?  Absolutely.  In my mind they are the most relevant of times, even more real in some ways than the time in which I now live.  I don’t follow the popular music nowadays, and much of what I hear I find inferior to music from the sixties and seventies.  A sincerity and seeking after truth is missing in modern music and literature.  Perhaps that is what I am trying to bring back when I write of decades gone by.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories.  Thanks!

The Pursuit of Elusive Literary Fame and Fortune

The quality of a literary work often has nothing to do with how often it is rejected by editors or how many copies it sells.  This thought consoles me in my own pursuit of fame and fortune, especially fortune in these days of troubled finances.  But for a writer one follows the other.  Or vice versa.  To illustrate my point I offer you four examples from the annals of recent and remote literary history.

John Kennedy Toole began working on a novel while in military service.  After he was discharged he finished it at his parents’ home, and eventually sent it to the publishing house of Simon and Shuster.  The novel made it all the way to the desk of the senior editor, but he expressed misgivings due to various flaws that he pointed out to Toole in a letter requesting revision.  Negotiations followed but the differences could not be resolved.  Toole put the novel aside, discouraged and despondent.  This rejection helped tip him over the edge into depression which eventually led to his suicide.  He stuck one end of a garden hose into the exhaust pipe of his car and the other end into the car window and died through inhaling the fumes.  Two years later his mother found the manuscript of his novel in his room and began to send it around to publishers, feeling that if the novel were successful it would vindicate her son.  It was rejected by one publisher after another.  Finally she sent it to the acclaimed National Book Award winning novelist Walker Percy, who read it and loved it.  After three more years he managed to get it published by a small university press.  The next year, in 1981, the novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  It has now sold well over a million copies and is considered a comic literary masterpiece.

Herman Melville achieved early fame for his first three novels, though the income was not enough to support himself and his family.  He moved to a farm in Massachusetts where he divided his time between managing the farm and writing what would later be considered his masterpiece, “Moby Dick”.  This and his other later works were not well received, however.  His finances waned, and he suffered from family problems, alcoholism, and depression.  By the time he died at age 72 he was almost unknown as a writer.  The initial 3,000 copies of “Moby Dick” did not even sell out in his lifetime.  Now he is celebrated as one of the greatest American writers, and “Moby Dick” is thought of by many as one of the greatest novels ever written.

From the past we move ahead into the present.  The Pulitzer Prizes for 2013 were recently announced, and the winner in the history category is a work called “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam” by Fredrik Logevall.  It is just the sort of history book I love: I haven’t read it yet but it looks to be a fascinating study of the buildup to American involvement in the Vietnam War, beginning in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference and concluding in 1959 with the deaths of the first American soldiers killed in the conflict.  I recently read an article on another site that listed the sales of the Pulitzer Prize winners before the awards were announced.  You know how many copies this book sold before it won the award?  Forty (40) copies total.

And we conclude with a story that many people now know, but it is a marvelous tale of obscurity to success that deserves retelling.  I can identify with it because I am living now as a single parent responsible for three of my sons, carving out time to write whenever I can.  This single mother, considering herself a failure, deeply depressed, living on welfare, nevertheless persevered in working on her first novel wherever she could, often in cafes, until it was finished.  Then she sent it out and it was rejected by a dozen publishers before being accepted for an insignificant advance.  Even after the book was accepted she was urged to get a day job, being told that she would never be able to make a living solely as a writer.  This woman was J. K. Rowling, and that book was “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”.  The Harry Potter books have now sold over 400 million copies, and Rowling is one of the richest women in England.  And she continues to write.

I think of stories like this whenever I check my sales figures and see no progress, or whenever I wonder if I am the only one on this earth that thinks my books have any merit.  I don’t really want to be a celebrity, but in order for my books to sell well a certain notoriety goes with the turf.  I long for my fortunes to change and for the money to flood in, so that I don’t have to balance my children’s every request with a perusal of the available finances.  But I know in my heart that my literary output is the best work I can do.  I have no control over whether anyone else ever agrees or not.  Such is life in the creative arts.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories.  Thanks!

Book Review: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

I have great respect for Michael Swanwick’s writing.  His short story collection “Tales of Old Earth” is one of my favorite collections, and stories in it such as “Scherzo With Tyrannosaur”, “Wild Minds”, and “Radiant Doors” are among the best science fiction stories ever written.

Though I have read many of his short stories, this is the first novel of his I have attempted.  It happened by chance; I found it at a bargain bin outside a bookstore.  My first thought was “Michael Swanwick?  In a bargain bin?  Time travel?  Dinosaurs?  How can I say no?”

The truth is, when Swanwick writes a short story there is so much packed into it you feel he could have made it into a novel.  That it is bristling with ideas makes its impact at short length so much the stronger.  I don’t know what I expected at novel length – much the same only more of it I suppose – but for me this book didn’t really get going until it was about 150 pages in.  From there until the end I found it an absorbing read.  The beginning I found a bit slow and rambling, setting up characters but never really coming together.  Part of the problem was that one of the plot elements, that as a reaction to time travel proving evolution a cult of Christian fundamentalists would arise to commit reactionary violent mayhem, I found a bit silly.  I just couldn’t buy that.  Fiction always involves a willing suspension of disbelief.  The best fiction makes you suspend your disbelief without even realizing you are doing it, but with this premise I had to consciously make a decision to let it pass because I wanted to read on, hoping for better things.  Fortunately, after those first 150 pages that plot point is left in the dust, so to speak, and the novel gets into some genuine excitement and interest as an expedition is lost in the Mesozoic era surrounded by huge dangerous beasts.  Swanwick plays a lot of games with time travel paradox too, and that’s fun, though he has done it more effectively in his shorter works.

In the end he takes us into the far future and introduces us to the beings that invented and introduced time travel to the human race.  The conclusion left me vaguely dissatisfied, the same way I felt dissatisfied with the conclusion of the “Matrix” trilogy.  It just wasn’t the way I wanted to see things go, not the way I would have done it.  It would have been cool if the humans could have somehow fought the inevitable, somehow prevailed against all odds.  That’s how I would have wanted to do it anyway.  I should have known better.  Even in his short fiction Swanwick is often deeply pessimistic, and I can’t fault him for that.  I have found the same to be true with my own work.  Often against my early predilections, a story cries out for a tragic ending because…well, just because the story takes over and that’s the way it ends.

I have read both “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World” by Michael Crichton recently and feel the temptation to compare them with “Bones of the Earth”, but I am going to resist the urge.  They are very different works.  One thing is sure, though:  “Bones of the Earth” would be much more difficult to film, with its large cast of characters and more complex plot.

In my criticism of various aspects of the novel I do not mean to suggest that it is not entertaining.  It is a good book, a fun read.  The fact that I expected more does not diminish from its obvious virtues.  Once it gets moving it is a fast-paced enjoyable novel.  Time travel?  Dinosaurs?  Multi-award winning author?  How can you go wrong?

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories.  Thanks!

The New Hack Writers

In bygone days pulp writers would churn out stories and articles by the bundle for magazines that would pay a fraction of a cent per word.  The only alternative to starvation was to write fast and furiously and pay more attention to quantity than quality.  Still, some excellent writers emerged from that era, and some truly great work was done.  After all, it is a myth that speed and quality are anathema to each other.  Consider “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, which was written in a tremendous burst of spontaneous prose as fast as he could type on a large roll of teletype paper.  Of course, the germination process was lengthy – he had to live it and mull over his experiences first; and the editing process was doubtlessly equally lengthy.  This is not what I am speaking of when I talk about hack work.  Hack work is done for no other motivation than money; if it were not for the money the work would not be done.  Literary work, no matter how speedily written, is a calling, a vocation, a necessity.  The two analogies I come up with for literary work are greatly diverse from one another but give an impression of the urgency involved:  a good bowel movement, and a mother giving birth.  A writer must write.

Hack work is when a writer uses his talent to produce something saleable, but the compulsion to create is lacking.  When I moved back to the States after thirty-five years abroad I had thought to get a regular job with a salary, but as I searched and searched I realized the proposition was much tougher than I had supposed.  In desperation I began to look for online writing jobs to bring in a few bucks.  This article is not an extensive analysis of the online writing scene, but a recounting of my own experiences.  I found a number of opportunities to make money writing online, some of which were outright scams and some of which offered a trickle of income.  Few paid anything other than poverty-level wages.

I’m writing here about purely freelance work.  I came very close to snagging a few regular salaried content provider jobs with fairly large online companies.  They liked me; they liked my work; we made it as far as second interviews.  Inevitably, though, they got down to the random, ridiculous criterion of the missing piece of paper:  I lack a college degree.

To search for online freelance writing work I looked on a number of sites.  It was meticulous and exhausting, as many advertisements turned out to be absurd timewasters.  Many expected quality writing for no pay but intern experience or exposure – deceptive terms to mask the fact that they wanted to profit from your work but did not want to allow you to do so.

The first promising web content job I found turned out to be little better than a scam, but I didn’t realize it at the time.  It was advertised on a job site.  The article site was attractive, and on the home page there were testimonies of writers who supposedly made hundreds of dollars a month in royalties.  They wanted writers to deliver good quality articles, and promised a share of ad revenue calculated on the number of times people clicked on your article.  I became all enthused about it and wrote articles on travel, parenting, teaching, writing, and other subjects with which I was familiar.  I proofread them to be sure they were perfect and uploaded them into the site’s template under a pseudonym.  I was proud of those articles; they were good quality work.  Then I went about logging into the financial system that would make it possible to get paid, and I found out it wasn’t so easy.  You had to have a certain number of articles published, and those articles had to get a certain number of visits.  For weeks I struggled to get locked in to the payment system, only to receive e-mail messages saying that I was not yet approved.  Finally – I think it was actually a few months after I had first applied – my application was approved.  Eagerly I awaited the outpouring of income; after all, I had begun to receive positive reviews, followers, and so on.  However, with over two dozen articles online my top income has yet to reach a dollar a month.  Payment is not made until a minimum of fifty dollars is reached.  Do the math.  I had better not hold my breath.

While waiting for the proverbial shower of income I sent out dozens of queries to folks requesting experienced help writing articles.  One day I received an answer from someone who proposed to start a website on a popular travel topic in Southern California and wanted help writing articles.  He offered me $250 for the first article, and promptly sent me an advance of $100.  I worked for days researching, writing, and honing the lengthy article, and in the end my employer praised the quality of my work and sent the balance of $150 right on time.  The problem was, such work was a needle in a haystack.  He never wrote back with more assignments, as he had promised.  I don’t know whether his website never got off the ground, or whether he decided to save money by writing the balance of articles himself, but I never heard from him again.  There’s the crux of the problem:  a freelancer cannot ever rely on steady work.  You never know when you might be cut off.

Next I snagged the best and steadiest job of my freelance writing career to date.  I had sent an application and some samples to a company who wanted some articles slanted at seniors.  They liked my work so much they offered me a year’s contract to provide them with at least five articles a day, six days a week, at a very good price per article.  Their main office is here in San Diego, so I went in one day to meet my supervisor, discuss what they wanted, and sign a contract.  Thereafter I got into intensive work.  To write so many articles I had to be constantly researching, constantly writing.  Usually I worked from about 7:30 in the morning until about 9:00 at night.  I stayed at it because it was good money and we really needed it, but I also got a lot of appreciation and rave reviews from my overseer.  Then from somewhere a company efficiency expert came into town and decided that their website was not growing enough regular viewers fast enough, and he canceled my contract.  Just like that I was left out in the cold.  Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the web would have told him that it takes time to grow an audience, but he was having none of it.  His first thought to save money was to cancel the content provider.  Me.  So that was the end of that gig.  A pity.  It had been a good one.  But so it goes.  You can never, ever count on anything in the online freelance business.  My contract had a provision that either side could cancel, and they exploited the fine print and disposed of my ass.

I was knocked for a loop for months; I couldn’t find any other work.  The money I had saved dwindled.  Depression and stress set in as I couldn’t find a regular job and I couldn’t find writing work.  I didn’t sit around eating chocolates and watching TV – I don’t like chocolates anyway.  It never occurred to me to take a break.  I worked full time on a number of short stories and novelettes and sent them off to magazines and anthologies.  Such work, however, is a long-term proposition as far as income is concerned.  Even if they all got accepted it could be years before I would see the money.  Income from my already-published memoirs, novels, and short stories trickled in so slowly it could never pay even a fraction of the bills.  I had to find something else.

The next writing gig I found was for a company that solicited work from businesses that had online presences, and hired writers and editors to do the work.  Payment was made through Amazon, with a system called Amazon Mechanical Turk.  I was invited to take a writing test; I was given a topic and wrote a researched article on it.  In short order I received the reply that I had passed the test and I should set up the payment system.  So I did.  Amazon Mechanical Turk is used by many companies to pay freelance employees, and while I waited to receive writing assignments I did other work for which I was qualified, mainly taking online surveys for research companies.  If there’s any online work that pays worse than writing it’s survey taking; I found on the best days, when I worked at it morning until night, I could make about ten bucks.  I did it anyway while I waited for final approval, to try to at least slow down the hemorrhage of savings from my account.  Weeks I waited and wondered why the writing assignments did not come.  Finally I called the company and found out the problem had been the misreading of one digit in my long worker ID number.

So I started work.  About five articles a day again, six days a week, morning to night.  This job paid about a third less than the job writing articles for seniors, but steady money began to come in and I began to slowly recoup my financial losses.  For a month and a half or so all went well, and it looked like I had found a gig through which I could make enough to at least survive.  Then out of the blue the company announced they were going to cut off the writing assignments for two weeks to catch up on editing.  The two weeks became three, then four.  In the meantime I passed a test to qualify as an editor, but could not get enough assignments to make a decent amount of money.  Those savings are going down again.  Such is the life of the freelancer.  Definitely not for those with thin skins and temperaments that react poorly to stress.

One final word I want to say about these articles freelancers write by the tens of thousands per day for companies that want them for their blogs or websites.  Where do you think the writers do their research?  Online, of course.  I used to buy used books and get stacks of books from the library for the articles for seniors I wrote, but very few writers go to such trouble.  Most articles are a regurgitation of what is already published on the Internet, often with only slight rewording.  Some writers use programs that remix information and lay it out in a new way.  Almost none do original work.  It’s the beast feeding upon itself, a humungous chaotic confusion of information that serves no purpose other than that of a predator putting out scents or lures to try to coax prey (customers) into its lair.  Yes, the Internet has an amazing wealth of information available out there.  But there’s a lot of crap.  A whole hell of a lot of crap.  The new hack writers, of whom I admit I am one, write this crap.  I would like nothing better than to cut loose from this hack writing scene and work solely on my own material.  I hold fast to the hope that someday I will.  In the meantime I struggle onward, day by day, task by task.

“Perseverance…keeps honor bright; to have done, is to hang quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail in monumental mockery.”  – William Shakespeare, “The History of Troilus and Cressida”

In other words:  Never give up.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories.  Thanks!

Book Review: What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be) by John McWhorter

At the science fiction convention ConDor 2013 I attended a panel on linguistics by David Peterson, who created four languages for the TV miniseries “Game of Thrones”.  His presentation fascinated me, and I kept interrupting to ask questions.  At the end I asked him if he could recommend some books on linguistics so I could get an idea of the basics.  This is one of the books he and his wife, who is also a linguist, recommended.

One thing I notice about linguists:  they can be passionate about their field, every bit as passionate as I am about writing.  I say this not only through meeting David, whom I met again and had a chat with later on at the con.  I have another friend who has a Masters Degree in linguistics, and there’s nothing she enjoys more than diving into linguistics research.

To each his (or her) own.  I find linguistics, even the very simple and basic variety presented in this book, to be as difficult as physics (for me personally very difficult indeed).  One might think it strange, as language is the tool with which I sculpt my stories, memoirs, essays, novels, and so on.  But then again, not all artists are familiar with the chemical composition of the colors they work with; not all guitarists can construct a guitar from scratch; not all drivers can repair their cars.  It is not necessary to have a knowledge of linguistics to be a writer.

Be that as it may, in this book the writer attempts to introduce a few concepts in language.  For an outline he uses the acronym IDIOM.  Language is ingrown, disheveled, intricate, oral, and mixed.  Each section of the book explains one of these concepts, and the author uses various languages, both obscure and well-known, to reinforce his ideas.  Language is ingrown when it does not receive much input from outside, and so mainly is passed on from one generation to another; it develops idiosyncrasies and complex grammar as a result; the writer uses Pashto, spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other obscure languages, as examples.  Language is disheveled when it becomes unimaginably complicated; he uses the Navajo tongue, which has more exceptions than rules, as an example.  Language can be intricate even though the grammar at first glance appears to be simple; the writer uses languages from West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Black English from the United States to illustrate this.  In explaining that languages are primarily oral, the writer points out that of the several thousand languages in the world, only a few hundred possess written form.  Writing is, in fact, only an approximate form of the basic spoken language.  In the last section, about how languages mix, the primary examples are the various languages of Sri Lanka.  I have to confess that I got lost in a few of the explanations here.  Perhaps it was my state of mind at the time; a lot is going on in my life.  But for me, the explanations are not easy to follow.

Overall, I found the book interesting but not easy reading.  Well, that’s okay.  Not all books need to be bubble gum or junk food.  But it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for when I picked it up.  I wanted a general overview of the field of linguistics, and that’s not what this book is.  This book is a popularization of some of the basic concepts, presented in simple, light, witty prose.  If you are interested in getting a little background concerning the languages the world’s peoples speak and write, it’s a worthwhile read.