Michael Montoure's Blog, page 18
June 21, 2011
Mutual Admiration
I think I've run across this anecdote before, but it still made me laugh:
The author Shirley Jackson had just published her story The Lottery in the New Yorker, and caused a storm of controversy (which she describes in her essay 'Biography of a Short Story'). In amid the ton of hate mail, and the hundreds of letters asking where in the US this tradition happened (no, really) was a rare letter of praise.
Jackson knew she recognised the name, but she had no idea where from. After trying to remember without success for a few days, she wrote a "complimentary but non-committal" [...] reply and posted it. A few days later she was talking to some friends from California (where the letter from the mystery correspondent had come from) and mentioned the name. Really they said, you had a letter from him? His name had been all over the press for weeks; he had been been acquitted on a technicality of murdering his family with an axe. With a horrible sense of realisation, Jackson went and looked at the carbon of the letter she had written; the last line was:
"Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story. I admire your work, too."
June 20, 2011
Redesigned
Oh, I forgot to mention — I did end up giving the site a minor facelift Friday evening. If this is your first time visiting the site — or if you've been here lots of times, but you have the short-term memory of a goldfish — the site used to look like this:
…. Except, you know. Bigger.
The site isn't hugely different now, except:
I removed the podcast section, since I don't seem to be getting around to doing another podcast any time soon. I'm not even sure at this point if I still want to; I'm going to have to give that some thought.
I got rid of the old header completely, and the new one now has my name instead of the name of the site. I'm thinking that, really, it's my name I want you to remember when you leave here.
I got rid of the red-and-cream color scheme. The red is a motif I've used since the earliest versions of this site, because of the name. The cream I added because a lot of book sites and literary sites seemed to use a similar color scheme, and I liked that similarity, but …. I dunno, the whole thing together just wasn't working for me.
Just a few tweaks, really, but I think I'm a lot happier with it now. It looks cool and distant and creepy and elegant. I hope you like it, too. Let me know what you think.
Famous Opening Lines from Novels Updated for the Modern Age
I'm not always a huge fan of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, but when they're on, they're on:
"Alice was beginning to tire of sitting by her sister on the bank. She took out her iPhone and played Angry Birds for the next three hours."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an internet startup to call his own."
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. Not literally, obviously. He was playing an MMORPG and this was his avatar."
– Famous Opening Lines from Novels Updated for the Modern Age.
June 17, 2011
Never Finished, Only Abandoned
Hmmm. I've only had this site redesign live for, what, a little over four months? And I'm already completely tired of it. It just feels like it's missing something and I just don't know what.
What horror writer's websites do you particularly like looking at? What do you like about them? I need some inspiration.
Books Aren't Furniture — Are They?
This headline at The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog — "Spotted: Books in a Furniture Store" — made my heart sink. But then I followed the link and found the situation was exactly the opposite of what I thought:
One of my favorite things to do is window shop in furniture stores. And of course one of my other favorite things to do is browse in book stores. So imagine my excitement when I visited The West Elm furniture store and discovered that they were selling books (lots of books) between the furniture.
– Spotted: Books in a Furniture Store
Oh! They're actually selling the books as books! Well, that's all right, then. I've just heard so many times over the years about interior designers buying used books in bulk just to line shelves as a decorative element, I assumed that what we had here was a furniture store just cutting out the middleman and selling them that way directly to the public.
It's always nice when my most cynical and jaded assumptions turn out to be wrong. Rare, mind you, but always nice.
Books do, as they say, furnish a room. But as lovely as shelves full of books can look, I always hope that those books will be, you know, taken down off the shelves and read every once in a while. If not …. Well. It's like the difference between a house full of pet cats, and a house full of taxidermied cats. The latter is nice if you like that sort of thing, but I hope you don't mind if I think you're a little bit creepy.
June 15, 2011
Arthur Conan Doyle's First Novel to be Published
I was pretty damn excited to see this:
[...] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first novel, The Narrative of John Smith, is about to be published for the first time this fall. The novel was reconstructed by Doyle after it was lost in the mail, but was never finished.
Man, I thought — a "new" book by the man who brought the world Sherlock Holmes? And Professor Challenger? That's amazing! What's it about?
The Narrative of John Smith is about a man, John Smith, reflecting on life, politics and religion, after he is bedridden because of gout.
– Previously Unpublished Conan Doyle Novel to be Published
Ummm. …. No, really, that sounds great. I'm sure it's the most riveting story about an introspective, bed-ridden, gout-stricken man ever. I can't wait for the movie version. *laughs*
June 8, 2011
Re-Kindled
I keep meaning to mention — remember how I said I bought a bunch of books for my Kindle just before I had my surgery, so I would have enough to read while I was laid up in bed for a couple weeks while I was recovering? Well, on day one, I apparently managed to crack the screen and render it unusable. Kind of like that Twilight Zone episode, "Time Enough at Last."
It was all right. Turns out I mostly had enough brain-power during that time to watch movies on Netflix and faff about on the Internets, anyway. But still, I missed my Kindle — more than I thought I would, even. I was a little surprised at how quickly it had become indispensable to me.
I shouldn't have been that surprised. In a lot of ways, the e-readers are exactly what I'd been wishing for ever since I was little. There are so many books that I haven't finished, or never even tried to start, because they were literally too big — too unwieldy to lug around with me, too tiring and awkward to hold on to when I was actually reading them.
A tiny little pocket-sized flatscreen device that could contain a library's worth of books — hell, I've wanted that ever since I read about the titular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And now that I actually owned one, I'd been tearing through books faster and more voraciously than I had in years. No wonder I was so heartbroken the moment I broke it.
Even though it was still under warranty, I was a little worried that Amazon wouldn't be willing to replace it — after all, if I'd managed to break it somehow, surely that was my own damn fault? But all it took was one phone call, and less than five minutes later, they'd put an order into the system to ship me a replacement, and it reached me the next business day. I'm very impressed and happy with their customer service.
(Oh, and this time, I ordered a cover case for it.
No use tempting fate.)
June 7, 2011
Ten Tips for Writing Horror
While it might not be the most in-depth, insightful look at the writing process you'll see all day, these tips from In Darkness may at least be some of the funniest:
3) Profanity.
When confronted with unspeakable horror from the depths of time, the last words your character speaks before parting ways with his sanity will NOT be "Golly, that thing's gonna bite off my buttocks and swallow my gosh-darn soul!"
[....]
9) Hope.
Characters need it. Readers need it. Give it to them. Then fill it with zombies and set it on fire.
10) Borderline insanity.
Not the characters… YOU. If you've never considered the idea that, at the very least, you might be "slightly disturbed"… pick another genre.
June 6, 2011
From the October Country to Neverwhere
I'm sure there are a lot of writers of my generation — and there will be for generations to come — who claim Neil Gaiman as an influence and an inspiration. If you're one of them, you might be just as intrigued as I was to see him talking about one of his big influences, the incomparable Ray Bradbury:
I fell in love with Usher II, in which Martian settlers, representing the repressive anti-fiction movement on Earth that Bradbury had created in his novel Fahrenheit 451, arrive at a scary house on Mars and are murdered by robots controlled by an aficionado of horror and the fantastic. The murders were in the style of the Poe stories The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and culminated in The Cask of Amontillado. It was after reading this story that I resolved that I would one day read Poe, become a writer, find a Scary House, and own a robotic orang-utan that would do my bidding. I have been fortunate in achieving at least three of these goals.
[....] Bradbury at his best really was as good as we thought he was. He built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a wall, I think of Ray Bradbury . . .
With joy. Always with joy.
June 1, 2011
The Price of Getting Paid
Everyone who wants to be a professional writer has had this drilled into their heads by now — if you want to be treated like a professional, you need to treat yourself like a professional, and that means you get paid, son. You don't write for your friend's newsletter, for charities, or worst of all, just for the "exposure." But what's the psychological side-effect of all this? Could it turn writing from something you enjoy into just a job? Wendy Palmer wonders if that might be the case. She quotes cognitive psychology author Richard Wiseman:
"The effect has been replicated many times, and the conclusion is clear: if you set children to an activity that they enjoy and reward them for doing it, the reward reduces the enjoyment and demotivates them. Within a few seconds you transform play into work."
She goes on to point out other studies that have been carried out on adults that show the same effect, and is concerned about what that might mean for us:
It should be stressed these are unconscious effects. And it made me wonder about the effects of insisting on being paid on the enjoyment to be found in writing, especially for new writers. I'm not advocating that just because we like writing, we shouldn't be paid a fair compensation for it, of course. I'm just wondering whether, in the early stages of establishing the writing habit, for the sake of discipline and motivation, writers should focus on the intrinsic rewards of writing itself, and worry about publication and payment down the track. Maybe the mantra shouldn't be "don't write for free" but "don't publish your writing for free"…
– "I do not write for free" — counter-intuitively damaging? « Wendy Palmer
