M.R. Graham's Blog, page 24

Going to Aggiecon!

Yes, indeed I am.

It seems that there was some speculation as to whether I am a human being or a phantom of the internet, so to put those questions to rest, I will be appearing in a fleshship person at Aggiecon, March 22-24.

So, some background:

Aggiecon is the largest student-run scifi-fantasy convention in the United States. This year, it will be held March 22-24 at the Hotel Hilton in College Station, Texas. Badges are $35 for full con, $20 for students (if you register before March 1). At-the-door badges are $40, $25 for students, or $15 for a one-day badge.

I’ll be hanging out in the dealer’s room with a big honking banner that says “THE BOOKS OF LOST KNOWLEDGE.” With vampire teeth and stuff. And books, wonderful books! I’ll be selling and signing those books, as well as a few assorted odds and ends tangentially related to the series.

By happy coincidence, I’ll also be hanging out with Noree Cosper, author of the really awesome A Prescription for Delirium. She’ll be selling and signing copies of her book, and I understand she has a few tangentially related odds and ends of her own. I anticipate shenanigans.

So come by, say hello, support my writing addiction and such

Free Sherlock!

Free Sherlock!.

Lenten Commitments

WARNING: RELIGION STUFF

(if you couldn’t tell from the title…)

I don’t do very well with New Year’s resolutions, but I’m pretty decent about keeping my Lenten commitments. It seems to be easier to keep myself in line for a religious obligation than for some strange new-beginnings ritual that everyone knows pretty much exists just so you can forget about it by mid-February.

Thus, when I’ve got some self-improvement project in the works, I usually kick into high gear at the beginning of Lent, when I’ve got forty days to turn it into a habit that (hopefully) can last the rest of the year. (That’s what Lent is about, by the way. Giving stuff up for the sake of sacrifice is all well and good, but without delving into too much theology, the real point of preparing for the coming Kingdom and stuff is to make yourself better in some way. So unless chocolate is a damaging vice for you, giving it up doesn’t produce much result. Far better to adopt a new habit that helps instead of giving up one that doesn’t make much difference either way. It’s a mindset that truly doesn’t have to be confined to Catholicism.)

This year, part of the self-improvement project is writing speed. God gave me some moderate skill with words, and I’ve worked hard to bring that moderate skill to its full potential, but I’m still slow. It took me eight years to get through In the Shadow of the Mountains, and I feel like that was more than a bit of a waste. It produced something I’m fairly proud of (with some reasonable reservations; I have no illusions), but getting stuck on the same thing for eight years limited my improvement and expansion.

So my goal for this Lent is to push out a first draft of The Sparrow’s Fall. I have 25,000 words written, out of an anticipated 80,000, and I mean to have it completed and published some time in May. In more specific terms – because I will procrastinate otherwise – the goal is at least 2,000 words per day.

In fact, that’ll be my big goal for this year. I’ve got way, way too many projects collecting dust, and I had better pick up my pace, or they’ll never get finished. Wish me luck.

Concentrated awesome

Yep, it’s pretty cool.

I invite everyone to go check out this page and listen to the awesome recording. The words are mine, but that gorgeous, silky voice you hear belongs to the fabulous SilverInkblot, of the Elocutionists group. Their snazzy, snazzy thing is doing these awesome spoken-word renditions of literature. Mine made the cut, which is pretty darn cool. Much love to the Elocutionists.

In other awesomness, I went to a pretty spiffy event on Friday. It took place at J’aime les Livres, a wonderful local used book store that merits my seal of approval. (That is to say, I’m probably going to be hanging around and making a nuisance of myself and driving the poor owner absolutely nuts). If anyone hangs around Deep South Texas at all, do swing by

1219 N. Main Street

McAllen, Texas

and buy some books. There is also pretty sweet jewelry, snacks, and drinks.

If you don’t hang around Deep South Texas, swing by their Facebook page anyway.

Next Big Thing Blog Hop

It seems I’ve been tagged again! My dear Peter Dawes has invited me to participate in this fun bit of self-promotion for writers. Dawes’ own work in progress, a  detour off his Vampire Flynn series (highly recommended), centers around a seer called Julian, and sounds pretty badass.

On second thoughts, don’t click that link, or else I fear mine may pale in comparison. Or at least, click it after reading mine. Yeep.

 

What is your working title of your book?

At present, I’m calling it The Sparrow’s Fall, but I’ve almost settled on the final title – tricky, since it has to fit in with titles for a number of other books in its subseries. The subseries title is currently The Books of Lost Knowledge: Books of the Veil, but it will ultimately be shorter and less repetitive.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wanted to go somewhere different with the vampire genre. TSF is not about vampires falling in love with humans, vampires seducing humans, vampires going through an existential crisis, vampires killing things or being political or having their own civil rights movement. TSF is about a weak and flawed individual struggling to find the strength to cope with his own outrageously bad fortune. The fact that people assume he should be strong and ruthless only makes that harder.

Of course, I haven’t read everything in the genre, so I don’t know whether something like this has been done before, but I know it hasn’t been done in the big time, so I think I’ve effectively escaped being compared to Twilight or True Blood or the Vampire Diaries. I just wanted to shift away from the idea of vampires being inextricably tied to dangerous sex.

What genre does your book fall under?

Paranormal or urban fantasy, though it does contain elements of horror.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, hell. It’s hard to find a good match for some of them, though I’ve had others in mind for years.

Lenny, my protagonist, absolutely must be . (Lenny is also known as Hugo, for anyone who has read In the Shadow of the Mountains.) Though I have to admit, that choice might have been influenced by the fact that the first time I saw him was in Venom, and he was being torn limb from limb by a Cajun voodoo snake zombie. Torture! I was reintroduced to his work via my Andrzej Wajda kick a few years back, and loved him to pieces in Tatarak.

Sebastian, the villain, is a little bit trickier, but I can see him as . (Also shows up in Shadow of the Mountains.)

I hadn’t put much thought into casting Kim, but if someone pinned me down and demanded to know right now, I’d say . I’m really only familiar with her work in her capacity as bouncy Firefly mechanic, but I can easily see her as a bouncy research assistant wizardlette.

Zebedee and Deaf Coyote would have to be and , respectively. Crook because it’s awesome when Englishmen play surly cowboys, and Stewart because you have to have a sense of humor to play some guy pretending to be a Native American shaman. Also because Patrick Stewart in a long wig.

Daniel is almost impossible. In my head, he is kind of a mashup of , , , and , doing ’s voice. If it ever did come to filming this, I’d probably drive a casting director to the brink of homicide.

(Also, I’m not real clear on the laws governing the use of publicity photos for the purpose of slingshoting folks back to an IMDB page, so I hope just linking back works okay. If someone knows how this stuff works, do let me know so I can leave them up or take them down as needed.)

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A shy physics teacher is tormented into insanity by a sadistic vampire with abnormal hypnotic abilities.

(Book one of several, thank heavens, or that would be one sucky plotline.)

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published. While there’s still quite a market for vampire fiction, the fad is old news, and agents seem more interested in finding whatever comes next.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Still working on it. I’d say I’m about a fourth of the way through, but I hope to have it done within the next month. Onward, Sancho Panza!

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m not sure I would. Poor Lenny isn’t the usual sort of hero.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

All of this was actually supposed to be backstory, with some of it going on in the margins of other plots. Full blame for the actual writing of it goes to my friend Maddie, who has alternately used Lenny as a teddy bear and punching bag in the roleplays we’ve conducted.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Squishy vampire who sees ghosts? Bouncy wizardlette? Immortal cowboy? Fake shaman?

… Psychological torture?

Or is all this just driving people away?

I’m afraid I haven’t been in the blogging scene long enough to know five more blogging novelists.

Thus, I will chuck it at:

Renee Melton

Jodi Lamm

The Aforementioned Maddie

(Also cross-posted to Books of Lost Knowledge, because it was relevant.)

Fantasy is not serious literature.

Apparently.

The conversation went something like this:

“Oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”

“Lots of stuff. I’ve been writing poetry for a while, and I’ve recently published two volumes of a fantasy series. There are several more coming. I’m also half-working on a piece of literary fiction that touches on women’s issues of the first half of the 20th century. It’s somewhat based on Pygmalion, but with a dark twist.”

“Oh, I see. Pumping out the fluff while you work on some serious writing, huh?”

 

Of course, those weren’t the exact words. Or actually, they might have been. It’s hard to hear well when smoke is pouring out of your ears. I swear, if I could reach through a computer screen and flick a moron on the forehead, I would have. Fantasy is not serious writing. Fantasy is fluff. This story I’ve been working on for eight years, in which I have invested countless hours of research and revision, stress and tears, is somehow less serious than my unresearched side project that may or may not ever see completion.

Bollocks.

Literature – all literature – is a vehicle for meaning. That meaning is not lessened by its setting any more than an actor’s skill is diminished by the transition from the big screen to cable. If there is a strong message, deeply considered and skillfully presented, why the hell should it matter that the message is couched in terms of magic? Fantasy is a medium of symbols. The threshold, hospitality, duty, deception, faith… Symbols within words, which are themselves symbols, the most self-conscious of literary genres.

No one calls the Arthur legends “fluff” because they lack the grit of modernity. No one suggests that Mordred’s betrayal could have cut deeper if he hadn’t had the help of spells and trickery. Those stories mean something. They have stayed with us, not because they are light fare anyone can consume, but  because they are deep with layers of meaning, with lessons, and with parallels that continue to touch us. If your wife cheats on you with your best friend, that hurts, and it doesn’t matter she does it clad in samite or cutoff shorts. If the emotion is real, and the reader feels it, the literature is pretty damn serious.

I know that some fantasy writers do write fluff and intend their work to be consumed only as fluff, as something to entertain. I’m good with that. I put entertainment pretty high on my own list of priorities, because I want people to enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. I also want people to hate reading them as much as I hated writing them, to know these characters like I do, and to hate me for some of the stuff I put them through. I want these stories to make people feel, yes. But I am, at heart, an academic, and I also want these stories to make people think. If I did my job right, everyone will get something concrete out of my books, and everyone will get something different.

And truly, I don’t even mind if people don’t like them. I knew when I decided to write fantasy that I was writing to a niche market, or at least to a market that popular media and culture has been trying to keep in its niche, despite its best attempts at escape. I know that fantasy doesn’t float everyone’s boat. But anyone who gets hung up on vampire fangs and wizard circles and calls it “fluff” based solely on those characteristics does not know how to read.

I didn’t put any less symbol or meaning or allegory into my Books of Lost Knowledge than into my unnamed, half-outlined litfic piece. They are not less serious because they are fantasy, or because I chose to touch on a wide range of issues rather than focusing on one. I did not put less of myself into them. I did not incorporate less of my experience of reality. I did not hold back on pain, or love, or rage, or peace.

My fantasy is serious freaking business.

I am absurdly inspiring.

Oh, look at that! I’ve been tagged. “Very inspiring.” Considering that I’m not sure whether the nomination comes from Peter Dawes or his, er, friend, Flynn, this could be either touching or ominous. I mean, they’re both okay chaps, assuming one likes guts with one’s poetry.

Anyway, I’m not sure what exactly they think I inspire, but it apparently obligates me to share random facts about myself.

The Rules:

Display the award logo on your blog. (Check)
Link back to the person who nominated you. (Check)
State 7 things about yourself. (In Progress)
Nominate 15 bloggers for this award and link to them.
Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements.

Thing One:

I used to be in a string orchestra in middle school and part of high school, and that is the reason I despise Pachelbel’s Canon. The viola part was the same eight quarter notes ad nauseam, which I was forced to practice at home, against my will, when I had far more difficult and interesting pieces waiting for me in my music folder. The result is that my fingers still twitch when I hear that damn Canon piping in through tinny department store speakers every holiday season.

Thing Two:

I collect cultures.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what that means, but it sounded good. In practice, though, it means that I devour ethnographies and histories, pick up useful phrases, and dabble in potentially hazardous culinary experimentation. I am an Anglophile, a Scotophile, a Polonophile, a Russophile, a Philosemite…

Anyway, it’s good for a writer to enjoy research. The Wailing takes place in wartime England, and Scotland shows up quite a bit in Daniel’s angsty backstory, which will eventually be written down. I don’t feel as though I’m spoiling anything when I say that Poland will be playing a big, big part in the next book over, the one that follows The Sparrow’s Fall. And of course Aaron, of In the Shadow of the Mountains, is nominally Jewish, though more in a religious than a cultural sense.

My current big side project is teaching myself Polish.

the hat collection

Thing Three:

I collect hats. Most of my collection is currently in storage, but I’ve got all of my most awesome ones stacked on top of my chest of drawers. It sort of reminds me of that old children’s book, Hats for Sale. The gems of my collection include a 1911 fur felt bowler, unfortunately a bit frayed around the band; a genuine Indiana Jones fedora that actually says INDIANA JONES on the inside of the crown and which I pointedly wear on digs; two deerstalkers, one in black and cream houndstooth and the other in lovely brown Harris tweed; and a lovely Dickensian bell-crown topper in pecan-brown felt. I do indeed wear these in public, and they have the remarkable effect of rendering me totally invisible to the mundanes.

Thing Four:

It is my ultimate life goal to live in a house with a rolly-ladder bookcase, a la Beauty and the Beast.

Thing Five:

I have lived pretty much everywhere in the state of Texas. San Antonio, Houston, Huntsville, Amarillo, Lubbock, College Station (whoop!), San Angelo, and now I’m down in the Rio Grande Valley, where it is too hot for me to wear sweaters. Seriously, it’s 90* right now. In January.

Thing Six:

I have recently begun to learn line dancing. You know, that bouncy thing they do at Texas Roadhouse. It’s fun, but I think it’s going to kill me. I like self defense a lot better.

Thing Seven:

My luck is never mediocre. I either have exceptionally good or exceptionally bad fortune.

Vehicles don’t like me. My grandfather used to have a Hobie catamaran, and I was on it all three times it capsized. A year ago, I was in a rollover accident involving black ice in New Mexico. The pickup spun out 180*, rolled twice, and came to rest in three feet of snow. My Doom Jeep used to stall whenever you put it in reverse. Now it stalls at random intervals, usually when you’re going 70 on the highway. I still don’t dare learn to ride a bicycle; something awful would happen.

Sports equipment doesn’t like me. If a ball goes in the air, it comes down on my face.

On the other hand, I have some pretty darn good luck in other areas. I got into the first university I applied to, I’ve won some very spiffy stuff in the past, and I once got a fortune cookie that said “You will always get everything you want.” This last was after I had made a big stink when Mom took my fortune cookie. She capitulated and handed it over, and it decided to be ironic about things. In my defense, I was perhaps seven at the time.

The Chosen Ones:

The Postmodern Bluestocking

Butterfly Tales

Renee Melton

The Novel Reviewer

Out of Place, Just in Time

Thousand Single Days

SuperKaterina

BronteHeroine

Jodi Lamm

Viva Victorians!

Sarah Stanton

Autumn Brontide

Proof: A Short Tale of the Undead

Just a wee little thing, available exclusively for Kindle,(Now a functional link) for the time being. It’s not actually a part of my Lost Knowledge series, but does take place in the same ‘verse.

The day Connor cornered me in the library, I thought he was cracked. The day he covered my walls with crosses and filled my apartment with garlic, I thought he was psychotic. The day he killed someone on the floor in my living room, I had no choice but to believe. This is my last confession, the story of the years we spent hunting Them and the mistakes we made. This is my memorial to the people we lost. This is my realization of the importance of Proof.

They have been lurking in the shadows for untold years, waiting for the chance to burst free. Only the ragged few, held together by the charismatic Connor, have seen the signs and dare to stand up against Them, the undead. In this battle, no one leaves unscathed.

Also on Goodreads.

The Zombie Apocalypse is coming – a few useful ideas

Are you prepared?

The first thing you will need is a tolerably badass outfit (or just a really crummy outfit with tolerably badass boots) and a convenient closet door in front of which to photograph yourself. Plastic weaponry from the Dollar Store helps, also.

No, seriously. I am being completely serious about the zombie apocalypse. Yes, absolutely. No tongues in cheeks, over here.

Actually, while my tongue is firmly in my cheek, it’s true that I have been watching a lot of Doomsday Preppers recently, which could easily have been called the Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Show, and no one would have argued. There is a lot to be said for preparedness, though – not that I’m stocking up on canned food and machetes, or anything, but it is a good idea to have an emergency plan outside of the fun “First Five People on Your Friends List are Your Survival Team” meme.

Now, my specialty is vampires, but it seems to me that zombies pose no lesser threat, since they tend to come in hordes. Obviously, your plan of action is going to depend on the kind of zombies you’re dealing with, but there are a few things that occurred to me as potentially useful, that no one ever seems to mention.

1. Tree houses

Seriously, there are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies, but I have never seen a flying zombie. Get the high ground, and you stand a fighting chance. Of course, lugging all of your canned food and ammo up into a tree poses a bit of a logistical problem, which is why you need to start early. Get into your tree, cut a trap door, and scrape those suckers off as they try to climb up. Deal with the corpses immediately, though, because you don’t want them building a zombie staircase.

Mountaintops are another alternative and provide the added benefit of freezing cold temperatures. Not only will your food not spoil, but you’ll be able to go hack up frozen zombies from time to time.

2. Styptics

I don’t know whether zombies can smell blood or not, but it’s never a good idea to sit and bleed in a survival situation. That should go without saying. Interestingly enough, cayenne pepper is an excellent styptic, and it’s also darn good for covering the taste of questionable meat – because we’re totally not fooling ourselves about the availability of good steak, in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.

So pull a Sam Gamgee and tote your spices. They are useful.

3. Journal

Pretty much just for posterity. If there are survivors, you can bet their descendants will be interested in an eyewitness account of the cataclysm. I know you’ll have more important things to be doing, but trust me: boredom kills. Plus, if you do get out of this alive, and the world’s infrastructure isn’t too badly damaged, you’ve pretty much got a guaranteed book deal. This will also require pens.

Plus, one should always have something sensational to read on the train.

4. Crock Sticks

This is what you use to sharpen your machete. Everyone is always carrying blades around, but blades get dull, and a dull machete is slightly less useful than a heavy tree branch. Trust me, I’ve done this. The weeds laughed at me.

If you don’t like crock sticks, you can try that whole sharpening-blades-with-a-rock thing they do in movies, but I’ve never been able to get that to work. (If it does work, and there are tutorials, SHOW ME, because it’s so darn awesome.)

5. Anti-diarrheals

You will be eating things you would ordinarily never have considered eating. You will be eating things that, truly, are not food. Fuzzy bunnies, at first, and then grubs, and then tree bark and pond scum. When pursued by zombies, it is not advisable to stay in one place long enough to deal with a bout of dysentery.

6. Skills

Everyone knows you should be good with a shotgun and be in good physical shape and know which mushrooms will kill you, but it’s amazing how many people are unable to pee in a bush. As you flee through the wilderness, pursued by hordes of the undead, I can guarantee there will not be a rest station handy. No matter how many of those anti-diarrheals you take, you will eventually have to go. There will not be porcelain. There will not be paper. You do your thing, leave it there, and keep moving. This is especially important for women, who don’t have it quite so easy in the peeing department and may require some practice.

It’s also good to know how to whistle REALLY loudly. I don’t know how smart these zombies will be, but they might not recognize a whistle as a sound attached to brains, so you can signal to your fellow survivors without bringing the horde down upon yourselves.

Storytelling. Or harmonica-playing. Or something else that can entertain you and your survival team during the long, dark hours of the night and doesn’t require hauling anything large. I mean, that journal will only last so long, though it’ll last longer than reading a book, and your friends will be more likely to stick with you if you’re useful and entertaining. Like me!

So, what about pen names?

I’ve recently run up against quite a lot of articles and persons who seem dead-set on authors finding a genre they’re good at and then sticking to it. As far as I can tell, this is partly because it’s hard to be good at disparate genres and partly because it’s hard to convince the reading public that you’re good at disparate genres.

I have no idea whether I’m good at disparate genres (yet), but I have no intention of limiting myself to one. Anyone who’s been to my About page knows that I putter around on a couple of different blogs, Always 1895 and my new Lost Knowledge blog, and those clearly represent very different interests. I mean, I know that people have pasted Sherlock Holmes and fantasy together before, but it’s still an unusual combination, and I have no intention of messing with both in one book. Even if I did, some people deny that paranormal mystery is even a real genre, because clues and magic are hard to mix.

So, if you can’t mix mystery and paranormal (completely disregarding my interest in sci fi and historical fiction and spy thrillers and high fantasy), and I refuse to pick one and stick to it, at least until I’ve tried a few and discovered that I really am only good at one, what’s the solution?

Well, apparently, that’s what pen names are for.

Author names are kind of like file names; I’ve heard this, and when I think about my own home library, I have to admit that it’s pretty true. My library looks a lot like my laptop, in some ways. I arrange my books by genre, and most works by any given author are grouped together, because they’re all in the same category. When I consider purchasing more books to expand my library, I look first for new work by authors whose work I already have, because I know they write things I like. Occasionally, I pick up a book expecting it to be like the author’s other work, and it isn’t, and I’m disappointed. That has nothing to do with the new book being bad; it just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. And nobody likes being wrong.

This is especially problematic on sites like Amazon, where one can click on the author’s name and find a complete list of works by that individual without any immediate indication of which are different. I mean, yes, one could go through and check the genre on each, but genre can be flexible. I happen to like all of Laurie R. King’s work, and it all fits rather neatly into the mystery genre, but her Kate Martinelli series is very different from her Mary Russell series, and I can see someone with more specific taste than mine liking one but disliking the other. The settings are different, and different themes are addressed, and the tones of the mysteries are different… What would happen if King wrote a space opera? Her mystery fans would probably object, and sci fi readers probably wouldn’t pick it up in the first place, because she’s known as a mystery writer. (I use King as an example because I don’t actively internet-stalk many other writers, and most of my favorites were dead long before the internet, anyway.)

Pen names are not necessarily aliases. Sometimes they are, of course. A second-grade teacher may or may not want anyone to know that she writes steamy romance novels in her spare time. She may also be afraid that her educational children’s books won’t sell, if they come with a romance novelist’s name attached. Maybe lots of different people are contributing to the same series, all of them under the same name.

But at the same time, writing under a different name is not necessarily the same as writing under a fake one. Most people have middle names. I can be AB Smith, or I can be Andrew B. Smith, or I can be A. Bernard Smith, or I can be Andrew Bernard Smith, and each one is real, but each one can serve as a separate file name to keep separate things separate. (And to Andrew Bernard Smith, whoever you are, I apologize for singling you out.)

So the options are:

- pick one and stick to it OR

- create a new file folder

New file folder, of course, means new name. Someone toodling around Amazon who clicks on “MR Graham” will find the Books of Lost Knowledge and assorted similar fantasy stuff. Same person clicks on the new name and finds something different, something they don’t automatically assume will be similar to that fantasy stuff. I haven’t disappointed anyone or accidentally tricked a fantasy buff into reading Holmesian pastiche they really didn’t want.

I hope.

And I realize this is not one of my better-organized posts, and I realize there are a number of issues with using pen names (such as making it hard for readers to find your other work when they would actually be interested in whatever you throw at them, regardless of genre). If I missed something significant, do let me know, but it seems to me that pen names are helpful organizers, at best, and only inconsequential at worst.