Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 17

More goodness

The Little Red Reviewer reviews THE TROUPE!

Compelling, heart wrenching, deep and beautiful, I didn’t want to put this book down. I lost sleep over it, I nearly missed appointments because I was so engrossed in the reading of it.

As does Fantasy Literature…

The Troupe is not just a good book for fathers and sons. This is a good book for people who grew up reading Ray Bradbury, Madeline L’Engle or John Steinbeck. It’s a good book for people who are looking for that little tingle they felt, years ago, when they read their first Stephen King book. Go read it. Then give it to your friends. Seriously. You’ll thank me.

And The Ritual of the Stones.

This book is big in scale and introduces dozens of fantastical creatures. Throughout it though the characters remain grounded, as the book hurtles along to a frantic and satisfying conclusion. I for one could read another book with some of these characters and Robert Jackson Bennett is definitely climbing on to the list of my must read authors.

So, good things! I’m terribly happy to read all this.

But you may want to keep an eye on this site in the next two weeks… Something ridiculous might just happen.

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Bookwork Blues interview

Since Sarah Chorn of Bookworm Blues liked The Troupe so much, she went and asked me for an interview, which I happily gave.

Another reviewer, Jason Baki, mentioned that your novels all focus so much on what he calls the "American myth," meaning your novels all focus on a piece of Americana, like the American entertainer in The Troupe, and he cites the Great Depression and American corporate power as well. When so many speculative fiction novels seem to have roots in legends, lore and cultures from other countries, your focus on Americana seems different than the norm. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why you focus on the "American myth" rather than other cultures. 

Well, I think most myths focus at least in part on creation – either the creation of the whole world, or creation of a part of it, like how we got fire, or where the rivers came from, and so on. There's an innate desire in us to reimagine or reexamine where we came from, to figure out how all this got started, and I think a lot of that is born of a need to figure out why we are where we are now. Myths often work off of features or qualities familiar to their audiences – fire and rivers, for example, would have been important parts of day-to-day life in the ancient world – so it seemed natural to me to reach into the big, rattling basement of the American subconscious, that huge collection of preconceptions we have about ourselves, and use those big, familiar stories and scenes to tell old myths. In a way, it's new myths bending to match old ones.

Bookworm Blues

And hot on the heels of that comes this review from Bookworm Blues:

If you can't tell, I absolutely loved The Troupe and I devoured every word of it. The Troupe was a breath of fresh air. It charmed me from the first page. In this book you'll find shocking depth, fantastic writing, loveable characters and even a bit of education. While it's nearly impossible for me to say if this would be classified more as fantasy or horror, that's also a great appeal. Who wants the same-old-same-old when you can have a story that blazes its own trail and will stick with you long after you finish its last page?

I guess I’d better say something about this

I get the best possible thing out of the circumstances – I was completely right, and I also got an award.

I say I was right, because I did not think I would win the PKD award – I’d looked at the competition, decided it was nice to have my name there next to them, and called that a win in its own right.

BUT, then comes the news that The Company Man received the “Special Citation of Excellence” award, which is, in effect, the runner up.

My publicist, the ever-capable Ellen Wright over at Orbit, tweeted a photo of the award:

So now I have to make room on the wall – I guess one of these velvet paintings of crying clowns has to go. (Congrats to Simon Mordern, too – a fellow Orbiteer!)

In the meantime, The Troupe got a good write up at Locus:

Bennett is telling us a story about grief and letting go that is lightly draped with the trappings of vaudeville, and Bennett’s imagination.

I do get a Stephen King comparison in that one. I haven’t been counting, but since Mr. Shivers, that’s a lot! For a bit with The Troupe, it was all Neil Gaiman. At first I didn’t know how to feel about some of these comparisons – particularly because I personally didn’t see the similarity in a few cases. But, you know, I’ve come around to thinking that when you have two such giants in the fields casting so much shadow, you can’t help but get caught up in a bit of it. (And Neil had this to say on the matter.)

The Troupe also made recommended reading over at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstores, which translated over into the UT San Diego:

If a world existed where Neil Gaiman and Erin Morgenstern got together and made book babies, the outcome would be something akin to The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett… This gaslamp-lit world is filled with eerie imagery, thrills, and eccentric characters, from Franny the strong woman to Kingsley the Ventriloquist, and all those in between. This book had a little bit of everything I love.

And it’s also received a good review from Whatchamacallit:

All in all The Troupe is magical. It is filled with excitement, intrigue, and will captivate readers to the end. But most importantly it is a beautifully written work of art that will grip your heart with its final words, tugging at the essence of your soul.

So, all told, very good.

BUT – here is a point to be made:

Some books get a huge, huge publicity push. These are very, very few. I’d guess less than 5% of all books get a large amount of publicity. This is because, due to the nature of publishing, publishers can afford to put their weight behind only a handful of books. I know this isn’t the way publishers want to do it, and they’d like to proselytize about every book they publish. They wouldn’t publish it if they didn’t like it, because that’s money down the drain. But they just don’t have the resources to do that.

So, I don’t think it’s going to be a huge surprise to anyone that The Troupe is not one of those books that has received a huge amount of publicity. It has had a great reception, and people do seem to love it, and forge a very close connection to it. But so far it’s just one book in a crowd, and it hasn’t quite gotten to that next-level of support that makes everyone sit up and take notice.

I’d like it to be there. I think most of you would. I like this book, deeply and personally, and I think a lot of its readers and supporters do too.

But since the book is just one of a crowd, the only thing it can depend on is the crowd. I hate to sound like a PBS fund-drive, but please, if you like it, tell people about it, review it, and ask reviewers to review it. There’s an indeterminate amount of momentum any book or piece of fiction needs – once it’s in enough hands and has gained enough weight, that sheer weight is enough to carry it the rest of the way. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re very close. At this stage, there’s only so much I and my publishers can do. But I’ll tell you this – there is no publicity gimmick that can possibly compare to word-of-mouth.

So if you like The Troupe ­– get talking!

I guess I'd better say something about this

I get the best possible thing out of the circumstances – I was completely right, and I also got an award.

I say I was right, because I did not think I would win the PKD award – I'd looked at the competition, decided it was nice to have my name there next to them, and called that a win in its own right.

BUT, then comes the news that The Company Man received the "Special Citation of Excellence" award, which is, in effect, the runner up.

My publicist, the ever-capable Ellen Wright over at Orbit, tweeted a photo of the award:

So now I have to make room on the wall – I guess one of these velvet paintings of crying clowns has to go. (Congrats to Simon Mordern, too – a fellow Orbiteer!)

In the meantime, The Troupe got a good write up at Locus:

Bennett is telling us a story about grief and letting go that is lightly draped with the trappings of vaudeville, and Bennett's imagination.

I do get a Stephen King comparison in that one. I haven't been counting, but since Mr. Shivers, that's a lot! For a bit with The Troupe, it was all Neil Gaiman. At first I didn't know how to feel about some of these comparisons – particularly because I personally didn't see the similarity in a few cases. But, you know, I've come around to thinking that when you have two such giants in the fields casting so much shadow, you can't help but get caught up in a bit of it. (And Neil had this to say on the matter.)

The Troupe also made recommended reading over at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstores, which translated over into the UT San Diego:

If a world existed where Neil Gaiman and Erin Morgenstern got together and made book babies, the outcome would be something akin to The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett… This gaslamp-lit world is filled with eerie imagery, thrills, and eccentric characters, from Franny the strong woman to Kingsley the Ventriloquist, and all those in between. This book had a little bit of everything I love.

And it's also received a good review from Whatchamacallit:

All in all The Troupe is magical. It is filled with excitement, intrigue, and will captivate readers to the end. But most importantly it is a beautifully written work of art that will grip your heart with its final words, tugging at the essence of your soul.

So, all told, very good.

BUT – here is a point to be made:

Some books get a huge, huge publicity push. These are very, very few. I'd guess less than 5% of all books get a large amount of publicity. This is because, due to the nature of publishing, publishers can afford to put their weight behind only a handful of books. I know this isn't the way publishers want to do it, and they'd like to proselytize about every book they publish. They wouldn't publish it if they didn't like it, because that's money down the drain. But they just don't have the resources to do that.

So, I don't think it's going to be a huge surprise to anyone that The Troupe is not one of those books that has received a huge amount of publicity. It has had a great reception, and people do seem to love it, and forge a very close connection to it. But so far it's just one book in a crowd, and it hasn't quite gotten to that next-level of support that makes everyone sit up and take notice.

I'd like it to be there. I think most of you would. I like this book, deeply and personally, and I think a lot of its readers and supporters do too.

But since the book is just one of a crowd, the only thing it can depend on is the crowd. I hate to sound like a PBS fund-drive, but please, if you like it, tell people about it, review it, and ask reviewers to review it. There's an indeterminate amount of momentum any book or piece of fiction needs – once it's in enough hands and has gained enough weight, that sheer weight is enough to carry it the rest of the way. We're not there yet, but I think we're very close. At this stage, there's only so much I and my publishers can do. But I'll tell you this – there is no publicity gimmick that can possibly compare to word-of-mouth.

So if you like The Troupe ­– get talking!

American Elsewhere cover

Over at the ol' Orbit blog, they've revealed a list of their covers for Fall/Winter of 2012. This feels ridiculously early for me to be talking about, what with my third book only out less than 2 months ago, but wheeeee, here's the cover for my fourth!

In case you've forgotten, American Elsewhere follows ex-cop Mona Bright, who, after a couple of rough post-divorce years, finds out she's inherited a house that once belonged to her mother in Wink, New Mexico. But though every map and every official says the town doesn't exist, Mona finds they're wrong – Wink is a curiously pleasant little town constructed around a now-defunct government laboratory, like Los Alamos. But when she comes to Wink, she starts wondering – Why does this place feel so perfect? Where did these people come from, and why do they stay? And why is it that she feels she's come back to a home she never knew she had?

On stuttering, and rage

Some of you might have noticed that on the Sci Fi Signal podcast, I kind of talk weird, occasionally. To some it's slight, to others it's moreso, but it's definitely there.

This is because I stutter. I have since I was about, oh, eight or so. Maybe earlier. Really, I can't recall a time when I didn't stutter.

Now, I hate that kind of shit when someone says a slight misfortune taught them resilience and made them who they are, and then they deliver this grand inspiring speech and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… Because we've heard it all before, and I mean, really, life hands you shit – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – and you deal with it, or you don't. Everyone's in the same boat on that one. Everyone's got scars. Don't proselytize about it unless you've got just an extraordinary amount of them.

But stuttering is, to me, a real pain in the ass. Because I have, unfortunately, by the grace of whichever god you like, chosen to enter a field whose entire focus is words. I'm pretty good at putting the words down on paper, a serene and silent process to be sure, but saying them out loud… that's a headache.

Mostly because stuttering is a dog you never really whip. It never goes away. It's like being an alcoholic – an alcoholic will, for the rest of their life, want a drink at any given point in time. In the same way a stutterer, no matter how well-trained and how zen, could remember mid-speech that they are a stutterer, and have a complete and total relapse.

That's not the tough part, though. Relapses are okay. I'm okay with screwing up readings occasionally (or a lot – I, personally, would never advise anyone to attend any of my readings, unless I've had the chance to get good and drunk beforehand). But when I was a kid – an overly sensitive, overly dramatic, truculent kid – I took it pretty rough. I was not just the kid who knew all the answers to the questions in class, and the kid who wanted to answer every question in class – I was also the kid who couldn't do that because his oral machinery was all fucked up.

It's the older I get, and the more I interact with my family, that I discover that I am an unusually angry person. I thought this was the norm, but it isn't. It's having a kid that's really brought this into focus for me – especially because my son, who's just a little past 1, is an unusually angry baby. He's usually extremely sweet and playful, but, God, if you piss him off… There's almost no calming him down. As my wife (who paid for a lot of college with babystitting) put it, "I have never seen a baby harbor such rage."

He's got the same damn thing I do. And like a lot of parents, I don't want him turning out like me. I want him to avoid things that will ingrain this in him. Because though I'm angry by nature, I'm also angry because ever since I can remember, my mouth doesn't work and I have a hell of a lot to say.

I'm wondering what this has done to me, and if it's made me write what I write.

Because I think a lot of my fiction is powered by rage. It's there in Mr. Shivers and The Company Man in plain view. And in The Troupe it's there in Silenus, most certainly. Sometimes it feels like my fiction is just a series of walls for my characters to beat on.

But I'm kind of getting sick of it. Because this isn't sustainable. Anger wears you out and burns you up. It fucks your blood-pressure and scars your hands. And it's a bad influence on the people around you, especially if you have kids. There's a vain self-righteousness rage grants you for the five minutes before and after it, but it rarely helps, and often hurts. It feels like power, but it's the opposite – because you have no power over yourself.

So right now I'm wondering just how in the hell I get around this, and how the hell I teach my kid to deal with something that I've never figure out how to deal with myself. Things you've lived with your whole life become a part of you – if you're not careful, they define you. And this would be a bad thing to define me. As a person, or as a writer. Because while it might have gotten me to write the things that got me here today, I don't know how much farther it can get me, and it's an unhealthy crutch to keep leaning on, for me and everyone else around me.

Anger's like a coal – it doesn't grow anything. It just sits there, burning.

So what’s been going on?

Well, it’s been a while since I posted here, hasn’t it? That’s largely because things got fairly crazy here fairly quick.

In the first week of March, I went to DC.

There, in what has to be one of the more completely random coincidences of the past few months, I ran into Justin Landon of Staffer’s Musings. I realize now that his blog is called this because he is, indeed, a staffer – in fact, a staffer to a congressman 1 floor up from the one I was visiting. I tweeted a photo of the building I was entering, and he answered immediately.

And from then on it’s been some insanely crazy work here, with a lot of sicknesses and sore throats and rain occurring, too.

While all this was happening, The Troupe got a write up in:

The Elba Sessions, by Chris Elba.

Kamvision – Jason Baki’s blog.

LEC Book reviews.

And The Troupe is maintaining really good ratings over at GoodReads.

In addition, I:

I wrote up a little piece on my drinking habits over at the Passionate Foodie.

I did a reading and signing at Houston’s own Murder by the Book. (I would check there for signed copies.)

I chatted on the SF Signal Podcast with Patrick Hester.

And a piece of mine on circus and performance fiction should be appearing shortly at A Dribble of Ink.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hack something up in a sink.

 

So what's been going on?

Well, it's been a while since I posted here, hasn't it? That's largely because things got fairly crazy here fairly quick.

In the first week of March, I went to DC.

There, in what has to be one of the more completely random coincidences of the past few months, I ran into Justin Landon of Staffer's Musings. I realize now that his blog is called this because he is, indeed, a staffer – in fact, a staffer to a congressman 1 floor up from the one I was visiting. I tweeted a photo of the building I was entering, and he answered immediately.

And from then on it's been some insanely crazy work here, with a lot of sicknesses and sore throats and rain occurring, too.

While all this was happening, The Troupe got a write up in:

The Elba Sessions, by Chris Elba.

Kamvision – Jason Baki's blog.

LEC Book reviews.

And The Troupe is maintaining really good ratings over at GoodReads.

In addition, I:

I wrote up a little piece on my drinking habits over at the Passionate Foodie.

I did a reading and signing at Houston's own Murder by the Book. (I would check there for signed copies.)

I chatted on the SF Signal Podcast with Patrick Hester.

And a piece of mine on circus and performance fiction should be appearing shortly at A Dribble of Ink.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go hack something up in a sink.

 

Steinbeck says it best

I am finishing up my fourth novel, and I promise you this letter by John Steinbeck summarizes things incredibly well:

THE READER

He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea.
He is so clever he will catch you in the least error.
He will not buy short books.
He will not buy long books.
He is part moron, part genius and part ogre.
There is some doubt as to whether he can read.