Matt Snee's Blog, page 92

Your Dream of Dark Angels!

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The time is near. My new book, "Your Dream of Dark Angels" will be released very soon! I'm very excited about this one, it's been a long time coming. Featuring interior illustrations by Gisela Pizzatto, it's sort of a revisionist YA mystery novel. Look forward to it!

This machine kills fascists.

Working hard!!!

An Excerpt from Our New WIP

Chapter One

Today is Jonah Proud Sky’s birthday. He is fifteen now. In another era, he would be a man. Instead, he is just a high school student. 

            He rides the bumpy school bus along with the other kids to the white school where they teach him arithmetic and states’ rights. He stares out the window at the desolate landscape of his people’s land. Arizona. Nothing grows here but despair.

            But he catches sight of a coyote, on a raised hill, perhaps headed home after a night’s hunt. Jonah wonders if the coyote goes home sated or with an empty stomach.

            Hello coyote, he says in his mind. You are sacred, and I am not.

            Once outside the reservation, the bus slows to make its next stop and Jonah smiles. The bus door opens and three students climb about, one of which is his friend Lois Smith. Well, she’s sort of his friend. He thinks she knows his name at least.

            As she passes to the back of the bus he lifts his smile to greet her, but she looks past him, not noticing his silent salutation.

            Lois is a year younger, a black girl, and more beautiful than anything Jonah can think of. He just wishes… she knew who he was. He did talk to her once, a month ago, when there were no seats on the bus and she sat down next to him.

            “Nice shoes,” he had said, of her pink sneakers.”

            “Thank you,” she replied, her skin glowing, her eyes as bright as wild moons.

            Since then he has thought of many ways to talk to her, but none have succeeded. But, he thinks, time is on his side. Yes, time is on my side.

             After riding for another twenty minutes, the bus pulls up in front of the high school and lets the students out in a clump of adolescence and backpacks. Jonah looks at the long stretch of day in front of him and his shoulder sink. He hates school, hates everything about it, would rather be home or out on his horse, anywhere, really.

            But –

            Here I am, he thinks.

            For now.

Good Year!

Writing is a solitary thing for sure, but making a book certainly isn't. I've gotten to a point now where I have a team revolving around my work - Clare doing the editing, Gisela doing most of the artwork, and Miika and company putting it out there into the world. It's really quite amazing. The thing is, you can't play at being an artist if you want to accomplish anything. You have to industrialize yourself and your work to assure productivity, and products.

It's been a good year.

Simple Stories

I got to talking to my brother about the structure of The Force Awakens versus Star Wars: Rogue One today, and my complaint was that ROgue One jumped around too much and never got the thread of an emotional story, though it kind of played at it. When I watched it with my dad I could tell he was losing track at it jumping around in the beginning instead of telling a simple, personal story. Now, don't get me wrong, I sometimes like movies and books that are more ensemble pieces, and many TV shows do it very well. But for me, for myself, I'm trying to stick to simple, linear stories that more often than not focus on one or two characters primarily surrounded by secondary characters. 

Some of my favorite novels - Moby Dick, Madam Bovary, Holy Fire - are primary focused on just one viewpoint and a few characters. I don't know why I prefer that - I think maybe writing a novel is so difficult that I prefer keeping what I have to do as simple as possible, but like I also describe in this blog in the past, simplicity is one of my guiding principles when it comes to writing. 

I like to write stories that go from point A to B to C. Sometimes, I flashback to the pasts of the characters to explain how they got here, but I don't do things out of order, like, says, a Slaughter-House Five or a Pulp Fiction.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that kind of storytelling, in fact, it can be very effective. I'm just not personally interested in doing that in my writing. 

Why? I don't know. As I go further into my career I notice habits and rules I've adopted kind of without thought, maybe especially because I'm mostly self-taught and never went to school. When I was younger I experimented more with storytelling and structure, but now I like to keep my structure neat and tidy, but the story I'm telling and my characters a little insane. 

 

New Crumbling Sky book coming very soon!

That's as much as I can say! Cover reveal soon!

Atwood

I'm reading Margaret Atwood's (The Handmaid's Tale) book on writing and finding it very interesting. But she says something really interesting that struck me - that despite claims of Modernism, Post-Modernism, etc. we're actually experiencing the tail end of Romanticism. Now, I don't know a LOT about romanticism, but I've studied Modernism a lot. Atwood is an incredibly smart woman though, and I can accept she might know what she's talking about. Personally, as a big believer in pluralism, I love the modern age's niche oriented landscape for writing and books - if you want to write literary, there's a place for that; if you want to write about vampire espionage, there's a place for that; if you want to write Young Adult fantasy, there's a place for that, etc. I was arguing with my brother the other day, and I was saying this is the best time for writers and readers than any other time, but he had nostalgia goggles on and couldn't see it. THe simple fact is there's more people reading, and more people making a living as writers, as ever before. However, going back to Atwood, I can see what she's saying as most of our characters in our books are 'heroic' in one way or another, at least in how they see themselves. I think that's just the nature of how we human beings see ourselves these days. Maybe Atwood is right. But if we're still in Romanticism, and this is the tail end, what's next????

Rise of the Empathy Machines

I'm not afraid to write female characters. Or black characters. Or gay characters. Or Muslim unicorn accountant characters. I believe that a writer should be able to inhabit the soul of anyone, and write about it. Does that mean I do it well? Who knows! Who cares! Either way, I learn something, and maybe the reader does too.  

There's a quote by someone saying that books are empathy machines. I think this is true. Novels and fiction are one of the few ways we can ever really get a peak into the mind and soul of other people. We can watch people talk and take action on television, but we don't look into their minds. This is what fiction is for. 

If you look at history, you see the actions and words of people. But that is only a fraction of who we are. We live our lives in the interiors of our hearts and brains. People may experience our actions and words, but they may not understand them. We might know what happened in history, but we can only guess why.  Some people think history is the resulte of external causes and movements. I don't think so. History is people acting on their impulses and their judgments, and the resulting morass is our world. 

So through fiction we learn the minds and souls of others. And hopefully, gain an understanding into why other people do what they do, and what they're experiences are like, and how they are different than we are. 

My father thinks that children should study hard sciences and applicable skills in school. I think it's more important children are taught literature. Maybe if people could look outside themselves a bit, we would live in a better world. One can only hope. 

Efficiency

It wasn't until I read (and re-read) the work of French modernist Gustav Flaubert that I really came into my own style. Even translated into English, there is a an efficiency and elegance there
that really speaks to me. I continue to read his books, trying learn what I can from a true master. 

As I've said I'm also inspired by Wide Screen and decompression from comic books in the late 1990's and early 2000's. I like focusing on my characters thoughts, actions, and speech, and nothing else. I don't like opining too much, and prefer my stories to speak for themselves. Like a great musician, it's not what I'm playing what I'm not playing. I want the reader to make their own decisions. 

I have nothing against ornate writing, or stuff that tells rather than shows. In fact, I read a lot of stuff like that. It's just not what I want or am capable of doing with my infinitesmal attention span. 

Why I Write About Batman-Like Characters

for a couple reasons. FOr one thing, I see Bruce Wayne as Nietzsche's "Ubermensch", the superman, the ultimate human being. His superpower isn't money (Fuck SNyder) but his will, and his discipline over himself. HE is the anti-Hamlet - and while Hamlet is unable to act until it's too late, Bruce Wayne acts without hesitation, considering everything, but never doubting. So many people these days are helpless, cynical, nihilistic people who things there's no point in doing anything - Bruce Wayne is the opposite. Luckily, he has the immense wealth and power to actually do something.  

However, does he accomplish anything? That is the question. If we take his opposite, the random, anarchist Joker, whom he is locked in eternal combat with, and pit them against each other, their two concepts will battle until the end of time. 

A lot of people think Batman isn't the interesting character, but his villains are, or Bruce Wayne isn't interesting - but to me, Wayne is the ULTIMATE character, perhaps one of the most complex in modern mythology. He's just often not written very well. Same deal with Superman, but Batman is a little easier to write. 

Like Nietzsche said, it's all about will, and Wayne has the ultimate will. He makes the world around him - not just because of his wealth, but in his worldview, and in taking action where so few of us do.