Ken Lizzi's Blog, page 82

The Entropy Shuffle

Entropy, all my cells diminish gradually. I’m not half the man I used to be. Oh, I believe in entropy.

sung to the tune of “Yesterday.”

It’s been the sort of month to make one think about entropy. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Or something equally Yeatesy and apocalyptic, but of lesser scope, fit to the scale of my life.

A few weeks ago I had to drive my wife and daughter to the airport. We woke about 3AM. I went out to warm up my wife’s car. At a quarter to four we went out, suitcase and baby in hand, to find the car had ceased running. And it wouldn’t start up again. I’d not fueled my car up the previous day because I’d anticipated driving my wife’s higher-mileage vehicle while she was out of town. There wasn’t enough gasoline to get us to the airport. The nearest station was closed. As was the next, and the next. Then, the next. Siri proved of no use, telling me no gas stations were within miles, even as I asked the question from the darkened parking lot of a gas station. Stupid Siri. We’d about despaired, planning to risk limping on fumes to the airport. Just as I drove out of the last gas station I saw the lights of another about a quarter mile down the road. Lights, meaning open. Saved!

I managed to get the malingering vehicle into the shop two days later. The mechanic couldn’t get it started the next day. The following day it ran. The mechanic declared it an insoluble mystery and threw up his hands. At least he didn’t charge me.

Can’t leave my family to the mercies of an intermittently feckless auto. So off to the car dealership. And entropy strikes my bank account. On regular monthly cycles. (Thus, probably not a good example of entropy. Orderliness contraindicates the second law of thermodynamics. But humor me. This is the theme.)

A couple of weeks prior to this adventure the washing machine broke down. A repair bill about the same size as the cost of the washer later, it is back in service, churning along on its daily duty. Two adults and a baby dirty an amazing amount of apparel.

Three days ago the dryer followed suit. Up and quit on us. The slacker.

Things fall apart.

Fundamental to story telling, I suppose. As a writer you set up the baseline state of a fictional world, then introduce elements that will tear it apart. Maybe by the end of the story a new baseline state is established, maybe not.

Fantasy does this well. Tolkien shows us the orderly Shire, then proceeds to swing a wrecking ball through Middle Earth, including the Shire. He even provides earlier examples, having the hobbits trek through ruins of prior civilizations. The center falls apart over and over again. Steven Erickson does this in The Malazan Book of the Fallen with an archaeologist’s eye for the cyclical nature of empire and civilization, the ruin and detritus of the ancient past shouting mutely about impermanence.

What do we do with this? We live with it. And live well, if we can manage it. Stuff breaks. It just does. Decrying the fundamental laws of the universe is an unprofitable enterprise. Accept it. And if you’re a writer, use it.

A Singular Birthday

I hoped to reflect upon today’s event of personal note, my daughter’s first birthday. But the first impression I can summon up is a feeling of deep weariness. This, I suppose, is the common experience of parents. Raising an infant is exhausting. This does serve to illustrate the concept that the more rewarding a thing is the harder it is to achieve.

So, we’re marking a momentous year. Victoria Valentina blossomed from just under four pounds to the vicinity of twenty. She’s been walking for several months now. I spend an inordinate amount of time chasing her from room to room. Did I mention that I’m tired?

But what if I am? She’s got a carbon arc torch of a smile. She’s smart and engaging. She’s already shown a predilection for books that makes this bibliophile happy, even while her habit for bending and spindling pages makes me cringe.

So to hell with my whining. I’ll chase her around as long as needed and enjoy the race, enjoy the growth. No question this game is worth the candle.

But I could use a nap.

The Elfin Ship

Feeling, as I did, a trifle lonesome with my wife and daughter out of town for the week, “The Elfin Ship” by James P. Blaylock provided the ideal anodyne. It’s a warm fireplace and mug of hot, honeyed tea kind of book. Literature as comfort food.

“The Elfin Ship” fits the tradition of the leisurely road trip filled with adventures and perils that feel at less-than-serious on the surface, but ominous beneath the light-hearted prose. The book would be at home on the shelf next to “The Wind in the Willows,” “The Hobbit,” and “The Face in the Frost.” It’s the upper middle-class Englishman analogue stirred from his complacency and sent on a colorful round trip. You never truly fear he’ll fail to return and get to enjoy every way stop, every pipe smoked and tankard of ale drunk.

It is not easy feat maintaining this tone consistently for the duration of a long narrative. Given that “The Elfin Ship” was Mr. Blaylock’s first published novel, my hat is off to him.

My apologies for the brevity of this post. I’ve got some house-cleaning to attend to. My ladies are due back home in a couple of days and I fear my short reversion to bachelorhood has left the place rather a mess.

Orycon 36 Wrap Up

Another Orycon recedes in the rear view mirror. My second as a panelist. I felt more comfortable in the role this year and had a good time. Whether or not the other panelists or the audience members enjoyed my participation remains an open question.

I met a number of talented and interesting individuals. I have a pocketful of business cards to prove it. Here commences the name dropping. The prolific and colorful Annie Bellet endured my banter. I purchased the “Shattered Shields” anthology, containing a story she wrote and met the editor Jennifer Brozek. I chatted again with the obliging Steve Perry. I shared anecdotes with Daniel H. Wilson. I met the writers Ksenia Anske, Leah Cutter, Jonathon Burgess, Clayton Callahan, Cody Barrus, Phyllis Irene Radford, and many others. I spoke with the artist and cartoonist John Alexander, artist Adrian Bourne. I bent the ear of filmmaker J.R. Ralls of “Dark Dungeons” infamy. I bored to tears, I’m sure, many others and handed out stacks of cards.

Ending the convention on the same panel with William F. Nolan, co-author of “Logan’s Run” counts, I think, as a high note.

I hopped from party to party Saturday night up on the 14th and 15th floor of the Doubletree. I learned quite a bit and I hope to employ some of the knowledge. For good or ill? We’ll see.

Transitions

The current work-in-progress, a short fantasy novel, looks to be near completion. First draft completion, anyway. I expect to write “End” by next weekend, in time for Orycon. We’ll see. The point is that the time has come to move on to the next project.

I don’t want to bore anyone with the sausage making aspect of writing, but I should probably explain why it is time to start something new. A first draft is far from a final manuscript. If you picked up a novel in the bookstore printed directly from an author’s first draft, you’d set it back down before you got through the first page, wondering how such crap could make onto the shelf. A novel requires several rounds of drafts and revisions before it is ready even for the publisher to see. More revisions follow.

Why not jump right into the second draft? Because I’m too close to the story. I know what I think the story is. I don’t have an outside perspective. If I started re-reading now I’d miss narrative problems. Plot holes might gape before me on the page, but in my mind the structure is solid and I’d read blithely on, pleased with my own writing. So I need to place this pie on the window sill, give it time to cool. A month or two later I’ll be able to approach it with fresh eyes, see it for the steaming pile it is. Then I’ll despair at my own ineptitude for a few minutes before I knuckle down and get to work fixing the problems.

In the meantime I don’t want to let the writing muscles atrophy. It’s important to move on to the next project. What’s that going to be? Well, I’ve got ideas. Unfortunately I’ve got too many ideas. So likely I’ll be spending much of the time reading, thinking, and taking notes. Once I’ve settled on an idea I’ll begin outlining. If I time it right I’ll finish the outline right when I’m ready to start the second draft of my current project.

But that’s looking too far ahead. I’ve still got a few thousand words to set down first.

Rainy-day Reading

The grey days are here again. The storms roll inland from the Pacific in succession, bringing the seemingly continuous rain. The temperatures drop and coats come out of the closet. The days grow shorter. The nagging bugs commence. My daughter has already picked up a cold from somewhere and has graciously shared it with my wife. I imagine I’ll get to join the fun soon enough.

Goodbye summer. Hello long hours indoors. Those with the time curl up under a warm blanket and read. For the purpose of this web log post I’ll pretend I’m one of those fortunate folks with time on their hands, and not someone with a full-time job, a wife and infant deserving attention, novels to write, and a home to keep clean and maintained. I’m going to pretend I can do more than snatch a few minutes here and there to read.

What then is on the shelf? Currently I’m near a third of the way into “The Elfin Ship” by James Blaylock. So far it is the perfect seasonal book, opening as it does with the sentence “Summer had somehow passed along into autumn, as it will, and with October came a good bit of rain.” How can you beat that for fall reading? Maybe a re-read on Halloween of “A Night in the Lonesome October” by Roger Zelazny.

Playing along with the scenario that I could actually while away the grey hours like a rainy-day reader and move along to the next book in short-order, next I’d pick up “Hawk” by Steven Brust. My guess it is more properly a summer book, but I don’t intend to wait that long to find out what happens next to Vlad Taltos. I suppose a massive, 1,000 page epic fantasy would be a more appropriate choice for the season. Does anyone have any fiction suggestions for my fictional self? What’s in your reading queue?

Peregrine: Primus, Philosophy and Picaresque

I’ve written before about Avram Davidson. Might he not have graced the list of an alternate Appendix N? If I recall correctly, Gary Gygax was a Christian. Whether observant or not. But it is possible that he might find Avram Davidson’s rather acid and frequent criticism of religion distasteful and thus did not consider him an influence upon D&D. Pure speculation on my part.

The point is, I’m writing about Avram Davidson again. I just finished “Peregrine: Primus,” a short novel by Davidson, published in 1971. It is an interesting and entertaining read. It is in part a bildungsroman and in part a picaresque. A picaresque as composed by James Branch Cabell and John Meyers Meyers writing in tandem, if that gives you an idea of the style and quality. Funny stuff, droll, learned, rife with wordplay and bawdy innuendo.

It is set during the decline of the Roman Empire, yet it must be classified as fantasy rather than historical fiction due to the occasional magical and mystical elements. It tells the journey of Peregrine, a bastard son of the petty king of the last pagan kingdom in the tattered remains of the Roman Empire. Peregrine has come of age, and by law and custom must quit the kingdom. He’s accompanied by the expected wizardly advisor and the expected smarter-than-he-first-appears servant. But this being Davidson, these stock characters are far from stock. Nothing follows the standard fantasy script, including the encounter with a fire-breathing dragon.

This being Davidson, the narrative spends a great deal of the word count poking fun at religion. I don’t have an ox to gore here, so I found the descriptions of the various heresies, orthodoxies, and non-christian religions amusing. This is also a book of its time. Davidson’s depiction of the Huns and of women would not likely have survived the PC sniff test of publishers today. So there’s plenty in here to offend just about anyone. Unsurprisingly – walrus-hided curmudgeon that I am –  I was chuckling through most of it.

The end, now, there’s something to chew on. You might hate it. You might consider it a fitting end for an unconventional book that frequently trafficked in the troubling side of fervent religious belief. You might wonder if there is a sequel. And there apparently are two. I’ll have to track them down.

Phoenix

Something you learn when traveling with an infant is that on any given day of the trip you can plan one thing. One event, one sight-seeing excursion, one (relatively) leisure restaurant meal. The rest of the day is governed by the baby’s sleeping schedule. Decent accommodations are vital. A pool helps. A television with access to children’s programming doesn’t hurt. A well-stocked refrigerator goes a long way towards easing the times spent in guest housing.

So many thanks to a generous friend for putting up with me, my beautiful wife Isa, and my rambunctious and rambling ten-month old daugher V.V.

And thanks to the greater Phoenix area for providing a thing-a-day for us to do during our mini-vacation.

Of course my usual luck had to assert itself at least once. We left Portland on a bright, warm October day to arrive in rainy Phoenix. So much for soaking up as much sun as possible in preparation for the commencement of Portland’s gray months. But the weather cleared by the next afternoon and we enjoyed the sort of hammering heat that allows we Portlanders to be grateful for our more mild climate.

The drivers of Phoenix also welcomed me to the continuous Phoenix Grand Prix, running 24-hours a day on the streets and freeways. Thanks, it was delightful, whether I was driving the borrowed Grand Cherokee, or as a passenger, clutching white knuckled at the ‘oh shit’ handle.

I can report that V.V. thoroughly enjoyed the aquarium, entranced by the strange creatures swimming by, above, below, or around her. The zoo was hit-and-miss. The orangutan definitely was a hit. MBW liked the zoo as well, though perhaps next time she’d prefer if we arrived at a cooler time of day.

Perhaps next trip we can spend more time at the Railroad Museum in Scottsdale. I did not see enough of it to form any particular opinion.

The two brew-pubs we visited met with my approval. I’m happy to report that you can get decent IPAs in Phoenix.

Visually Phoenix is an interesting departure for someone from Portland. There’s the obvious difference in coloration, red sand and blue skies instead of pervasive green. But other than a few visually striking buttes jutting up from the valley floor, the city and suburbs are remarkably flat. One doesn’t think of Portland as a particularly hilly burg – San Francisco holds that reputation – but frequent elevation changes are basic to the sightlines pretty much anywhere in Portland. So the grid of streets scratched in to God’s pool table is a notable Phoenix feature.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled months of cloud and rain.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I don’t write about comic book movies often. One reason is it’s too much like thinking about my day job. Another reason is I rarely see movies in theaters, so any review I might write would hardly be timely. Case in point: I finally saw “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” last night, on Blu-Ray, sitting on the couch.

The baby woke up early from her evening nap, necessitating about a two hour viewing hiatus after the opening action scene. Did I say I rarely see movies in theaters? I rarely see them at home either. Intermittent viewings of Netflix on my little Chromebook screen, one movie spread out over the course of a week when the baby and MBW* are asleep is usually the best I can do.

So, “The Winter Soldier.” Did it live up to the hype? Yes, I think so. I liked the grounded (for a superhero flick) feel, more like a Bond movie than a Marvel vehicle. Or, perhaps more like a Seventies’ spy film rather than a Bond movie, for reasons other than just the casting of Robert Redford (“Three Days of the Condor.”) I enjoyed the fact that a superhero movie was willing to raise the tough questions of freedom versus security, privacy versus safety. I think the choices the heroes made would have felt more consequential if some of the potential dangers that the security apparatus protects against were portrayed. But with HYDRA as a villain I suppose I should be glad the film indulged in as much nuance as it did.

The superhero comic book genre crossed-over well with the action/spy story. There is a lot of potential in genre cross-overs and I’m glad to see film studios taking the risk. The novel I’m working on this year crosses genres, giving me grounds for my pleasure in seeing that sort of gamble pay off. Though of course it does not always work, cf. “Cowboys & Aliens.”

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is an excellent rental, a worthy successor to the first film. Recommended. Rent it, if you haven’t already seen it. Then follow it up with the goofy Science Fantasy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” to wash away all that unpleasant real world applicability.

Though I admit I’m too out of the loop to get what the mid-credits scene at the end of “The Winter Soldier” was meant to foreshadow. Any Marvel Universe initiates care to enlighten me?

 

*My Beautiful Wife

Immortal Creations

I think the pages of Sherlock Holmes pastiche I’ve read equals or surpasses the volume of “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” I have on my shelves. And I’m certain I’ve barely scratched the surface of the short stories, novels, comic books, etc. featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation. I’ll be able to skip three of the stories in the anthology of Holmes stories I’m currently reading since I read them already in another anthology I own. Has anyone ever performed a count of non-Canon Sherlock Holmes stories? I imagine the tally would be obsolete by the time it was completed. And the number is even larger if we include anonymous appearances by the great detective, e.g., Roger Zelazny’s “A Night in the Lonesome October.”

It is a rare and wonderful feat for a character to outlive its creator. Few characters capture the imagination of large enough swathes of the reading public to inspire new adventures after the original author dies.

I’m not referring to retelling of legends. King Arthur and Robin Hood don’t count. I’m discussing only an author’s original creation. Mary Shelley pulled it off. Monsters seem popular with the reading public. In addition to Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula is the subject of frequent new stories. Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde also make the occasional appearance.

More contemporary examples include Robert E. Howard’s barbarian, Conan, and Ian Fleming’s dapper assassin, James Bond. Both have featured in multiple novels written by multiple authors after their originators died. Of course their name recognition is probably the result more of film fame than from the written word.

Movies seem an inevitable fruit of these characters’ popularity. Movie watchers vastly outnumber readers and thus the fame of the character outstrips that of the creator. Poll a hundred filmgoers after a showing of the latest 007 outing, ‘who wrote James Bond,’ and I imagine fewer than ten could correctly name Fleming as the author. How many who’ve watched Winnie-the-Pooh in any of a dozen movies or tv cartoons have ever read any A.A. Milne? Or how many have seen an Alice in Wonderland film but have read neither “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” nor “Through the Looking-Glass?” What would Charles Lutwidge Dodgson think if he could have known that not only would his pen name prove more memorable than his own, but that Alice would eclipse the fame of both?

My guess is he’d be rather pleased.