Steven R. Boyett's Blog, page 11

After Thoughts

In 2009 Borders Books asked if I would do a two-week (!) guest stint on their fantasy & SF blog. To be honest, I can't remember if they picked the topic of if I did. In any case, the posts centered around post-apocalyptic fiction and film.

Since these continue to flourish, I thought it would be fun to repost my Borders blog gig.  It's a look at my favorite post-apocalyptic books and movies, and an examination of why they're popular. (I didn't address the popularity of post-apocalyptic scenarios in Young Adult fiction a la The Hunger Games because I'm not familiar enough with the market to write about it with any real authority. But its increasing popularity continues to fascinate me.) Anyway, here's the intro. We'll dive into the meat tomorrow.

Not with a blog but a writer

My first novel, Ariel, and its sequel Elegy Beach a quarter-century later, are a bit unusual in that they're postapocalyptic fantasy novels. The Road Warrior of the Rings, or somesuch. Which was kind of unusual in 1983, when Ariel was originally published.

I grew up with a soft spot for postapocalyptic fiction & movies (and I suppose it's worth mentioning here that the post aspect has always interested me more than the actual apocalypse part, so I dunno about playing favorites with the how of it all), and I've done a lot of thinking about what the appeal is for an audience. I've written a surprising amount of fiction that could be classified as postapocalyptic, and a surprising amount more if I'm allowed to include stories featuring characters making their way through desolated landscapes. It's definitely one of my tropes.

I'm curious about the current resurgence of postapocalyptic fiction and films even as I'm clearly part of it. (Coincidentally enough my postapocalyptic zombie novella "Like Pavlov's Dogs," originally published in Skipp & Spector's Book of the Dead, has just been reprinted in John Skipp's magnificent Zombies anthology. So I have three postapocalyptic works in print at the moment. Hmm.) People always look for some deep sociological meaning behind such trends. Anyone want to theory up on this one?

Reading @ SF in SF

This Saturday I will be performing at the truly wonderful SF in SF series, along with writer Bruce McAllister (Dream Baby, Humanity Prime).

Mr. McAllister is a Hugo winner who has published in an impressive array of places, including Glimmer Train and the coveted Year's Best American Short Stories. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing him. The subsequent Q & A will be moderated by Terry Bisson.

The evening is to promote The Urban Fantasy Anthology. My story in the anthology, "Talking Back to the Moon," is an excerpt from my increasingly-long-in-the-making novel Avalon Burning. I'll be performing a different section from the novel on Saturday.

SF IN SF

Saturday, April 21, 2012

The Variety Preview Room Theatre

The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor

(Entrance next to Citibank on Market St.)

582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery

San Francisco, CA 94104 (map)

Doors open 6:00 PM; event starts at 7:00

$5-$10 donation at the door benefits

Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California

Cover Stories

One of the many great things about my experience with Subterranean Press regarding the publication of Mortality Bridge was the cover. Bill Schafer, Subterrranean's publisher, asked me to submit cover ideas. That alone was pretty damned cool, as writers don't get asked that very often. (To be honest, that's usually a good idea. One look at most writers' website designs is enough to verify this.)

I can't draw worth a damn, but I've done a bunch of graphic design work, and I worked in advertising for years (something I'm glad to have done, and even more glad to be no longer doing). Thank goodness that the spiffy magic of photo editing & illustration tools helps make up for a lack of drawing ability. I hunted around online for images I could composite, and I turned in two rough concepts:

And cover artist (and horror icon) J.K. Potter turned in this cover, which shows you what can happen when a real artist gets hold of an idea:

For the e-book & softcover, I was again asked to submit ideas. (Yay!)  Conceptually, it was really just going to be a reiteration of the hardcover image. I set a die-cast Checker Cab and a plaster gargoyle in front of a textured wall and took a bunch of pictures. I picked one I liked:

Then I made a ton of changes to it.  I matched light sources & shadows' replaced the wall with a rock cliff background and color-matched that; added a tunnel, shading, and rocky ground, and beat up the Checker Cab. (I use Paint Shop Pro X, which should make the spine of any professional designer curl like a question mark.) This is what I ended up with:

I really like it, and it's a total failure. As an image I think it's intriguing. As a design -- blecck. Everything's happening on the left side. Your eye goes straight to that huge flat blank space of cliff wall formed by the crescent of the inside edge of the gargoyle and the top right of the cab. Even worse, there's no way to design around it. Putting the title in that space is hideous (trust me on this). Moving the elements around destroys the idea or makes it confusing. Wahhh.

I worked with the cover designer to see if we could preserve the idea, but any kind of monster or statue proved hugely distracting. A taxi cab parked in front of the gate of hell is really intriguing. It poses all kinds of questions and implications. Put a monster in it and you totally lose that. So we worked on keeping the feel while emulating the hardcover. This was the final result:

I thought it was okay, but then I got the actual softcovers, and I thought it looked great.  There's still a blank space, but the artist made use of it by pumping up that white line of partly opened door, so that your eye follows it straight down from nicely art nouveau title to the cab.

Every book cover is a problem that someone found a solution for. The number of solutions is vast. I find this stuff fascinating for the same reasons I'm interested in logo design: How do you convey an idea, a story, a reputation, a service, in a simple and easily understood image? Art directors at major publishers have to do this dozens of times a month.

Audiobook as acapella

I was fascinated with certain sections of the audiobook of Elegy Beach because the narrator, J.D. Jackson, picked up on the rhythms, even while his interpretation was very different from my own. I've used a lot of spoken-word pieces in my Groovelectric dance-music series. They work really well over tribal, percussive tracks. I've used acapellas, movie dialog, poetry, etc. One mix, Body Slam, is devoted to slam poetry. So it's surprising that it took me this long to look at my own work as a resource for adding to mixes, especially since I tend to put some effort into writing in rhythm.

Since the latest Groovelectric mix, "Cave Paintings," was another tribal/percussive mix, I thought it would be fun to use something from the "vibe" section of the Elegy Beach audiobook. This is a kind of post-apocalyptic rave in which the narrative, at points, assumes the rhythms of the music at the event.

I copied out the audio sections I wanted to use and did some editing.  I finessed the phrasing to make it more on-beat. (It's not as if Mr. Jackson narrated with a metronome going.) Then I lowered the pitch a bit, for effect and because it works well with heavily percussive music.

I auditioned tracks until I found one that had a nice, dark flavor that was insistent but not too busy. I dropped a lot of other vocals throughout the mix -- gospel, chants, etc. I'm really happy with the result. It's funny, but after a decade of utilizing spoken-word pieces in mixes, it felt very different to use something of my own. It was fun.

You can play or download "Cave Paintings" below. The Elegy Beach section starts around the 31:30 mark. If you've read Elegy Beach, you might enjoy this, considering what's happening in the section of the novel that I used.

Download audio file (cave_paintings.mp3)

Download "Cave Paintings" [01:13:28, 69MB]

Cool Recent Stuff

I am a bad blogger lately, I know. I will be better. Soon. Yes, soon.

So John Scalzi, bless him and his legacy unto the end of the universe, recommended Mortality Bridge for the Hugo and Nebula award. I am deeply touched, and especially stoked because the novel has had a relatively low profile, and John's recommendation is enormously helpful in making it more visible, and hugely appreciated.

Last night I went to SF in SF, a monthly series of science fiction readings in San Francisco organized by Rina Weisman that is held in a wonderful venue, the screening room of the Variety Children's Hospital. Readers were Rudy Rucker, Jay Lake, and K.W. Jeter. Rudy read from his new memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (Tom Doherty Associates Books)" target="_blank">Nested Scrolls. Jay read from his Sunspin series, and Jeter read a steampunk fairy tale based on "The Red Shoes." Quite a lot of variety, and the Q & A afterward was lively.

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Rudy Rucker, Jay Lake, KW Jeter, Terri Bisson (photo by Dave Gallaher)

Dinner with the participants before the event was a terrific back & forth of good conversation. I had not met Jeter before, and I was impressed by how helpful and bolstering he was to writers just beginning to establish themselves. It was also wonderful to see Jay Lake's amazing upbeat determination in the face of chemotherapy. I wish him all the best.

The event was nearly at capacity, which is even more impressive considering that the Chinese New Year parade was going on at Market Street just outside. What I saw of the parade was pretty damn cool, and there was a wonderfully charged feeling in the air.

I've just finished the next round of  revisions on Avalon Burning, wherein I sprinkled magic adrenalin dust on the manuscript to amp things up a bit and set up the final act. I'll start making the changes on the computer tomorrow. I left myself a couple of [INSERT AMAZING SHIT HERE] spots, so there'll be more work on the computer than simply transcribing my handwritten changes. I tend to separate my current self from my editing self, so that when I'm entering changes I sometimes regard them as having been made by someone else, and it's not uncommon for me to stare at some note on the manuscript and say, "Why, you son of a bitch." Perhaps my process is unconventional. Or maybe a lot of writers do this. I dunno.

In any case, I was glad to see that the book doesn't seem the worse for the drastic cutting, which is the best evidence that it needed to be cut. A couple of scenes were too skimpy because I went overboard, but I left notes for the poor sap who follows me to restore some of the deleted material.

What I’ve been doing with my widdle self

Cutting 50% of Avalon Burning. Most pages look like this:

BEFORE

The revised page looks like this:

AFTER

Multiply by 430 (the number of pages written). Repeat as needed. Revise again. Finish novel. Shorten new material. Revise the whole book one more time.

How's your 2012 going?