Stephen Weinstock's Blog, page 7

Kindle Sale: 1001 for .99

In honor of 1001‘s birthday of 10/01, all week The Qaraq is on sale at the Kindle store.

 

Reframing Literary Genres

The book business is radically changing with self-publishing and online platforms, so I propose we look at how genres are changing as well.  Many authors’ ideas outrun their genres, especially self-published writers working outside the box.  For a more expanded view, check out my post on Jessica Bell’s fun, informative The Artist Unleashed, on her blog The Alliterative Allomorph.

Visionary Fiction, a new genre

Introducing a new, and ancient, literary genre.  New, in its delineation for fiction authors. Ancient, as part of a lineage from Plato to Jung to Castaneda.

I’d like to share the work of the wonderful and profound group, the Visionary Fiction Alliance, announcing the genre’s appearance on Wikipedia.  An explanation of the process by Victor Smith, with a link to Wikipedia.

 

 

Fashion Week Flash Fiction

Every day as I arrive at Lincoln Center on my way to LaGuardia HS, I welcome the sight of fashionistas by the fountain, models in line at Starbucks, and crowds lining up for the runway shows.  In honor of Fashion Week 2014, here’s a little ditty (destined for Book 7 of 1001), about the pre-historic origins of fashion.

Phöng-Tsüng-Chäng’s Tale (The Dawn of Fashion Sense)

             We have observed these humans for as long as we can remember.  Even in latter years, when this tribe stood up a little taller, or that tribe had slightly larger foreheads, the process took forever.  I feel like I’ve been waiting for them to emerge since the dawn of Time, since the first hydrogen twins went down on the first oxygen atom, since the first eukaryote wagged its tail, since the first dragonfly spread its wings, and since the first mammal coughed up a fur ball.  We are deeply concerned for their progress, and I care for them like my own cloud offspring.

            We were delighted when something besides flints and clubs sprung from inside their brains, something to explain the mysteries of the world, something imaginative.  I was flattered when they created a deity to explain the terrible shifts in the weather.  They named me Phöng-Tsüng-Chäng, onomatopoeic symbol of lightning and thunder!  I was so proud, I felt such connection to them, I wanted to bathe them in sunlight.

But as we all know, our chaotic interactions up in the atmosphere made that impossible.  We have to follow a low pressure day with a rainstorm, a bout of rain with a drying wind.  The humans were ungrateful: they stopped praising Phöng-Tsüng-Chäng; they behaved rudely at the stone shrines; they cursed the best of me, the sleet and hail and snow.  And they hid in their caves and tents, refusing to look up in adoration at the sky.

Then something wondrous happened: the first man, after carving up his prey for dinner and drying out the hide, wrapped his mate in a fur.  The mates, thrilled by this act of love, took up the practice and expanded it.  Using her new imagination, a female without enough yak material to cover her head used tendon and a bone needle, and stitched a bear cowl on top: I called it The Hot Hood.

A new line of Spring frocks appeared, the grass skirt and bosom laurel look: Fig Leaves to Die For.  And for that sultry style beside the fireplace, she tanned skins for weeks to achieve that diaphanous mode: Come Hither, Caveman.  I loved each and every new vogue trotted out from the cave, as a paean to womankind, as a creative act of the new human mind, and as pure Beauty: Twig Envy, The Long and Short of It, Fall From Grace, My Little Henna Thing, Wraparound Gal, Big and Tall Fertility Goddess.

Why did we keep pelting them with hail and ice?  Do you think I still played the Angry Goddess for their insolence and rude behavior?  Do I bring up the fashion craze to whine that they were more interested in hemlines than Phöng-Tsüng-Chäng?  Just the opposite!  I was never more in love with our humans, and I never wished them (too much) harm.  But when the sun came out, and the ground warmed up, and everything human heated up, the males went on a frenzy, and the grass skirts came off.  We thought centuries of warm weather aided the growth of their brains, but it enflamed the growth of other organs.  All the beautiful styles disappeared; the inventory gone, the rack empty.

After all my waiting, after my celebration of human imagination, I would not stand for it.  So even on the warmest days, I send them a shower or a breeze, in hopes that someone will invent the parasol.  Now that it’s cooling down again, and multi-beast furs are all the rage, let them freeze, let them accessorize.  It’s good for their smarts.

Immortality, Anyone?

I was surprised by this compelling article on npr.org about Soft Immortality.  It moves back and forth between how our longevity is improving, to the consequences of living for a long, long time.  It’s worth checking out if you muse about your lifespan (who doesn’t), or wonder if, at age 737, you’d still find something good on TV.

1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles takes immortality for a given.  When I was first working on it, I read The Eight by Katherine Neville, one of the great pre-Da Vinci Code Historical Information thrillers.  At the end there’s a huge reveal that what was driving the action was the secret to eternal life.  There’s tons of books with this shape, Harry Potter and The Sorceror’s Stone to name a second.  I thought: what if immortality was assumed from the first pages of a book and not kept a precious mystery?

Then the interesting question for me became: if my characters learn their souls are immortal, and that they keep experiencing life after life, how do they deal with the knowledge in their everyday existence?  How do they cope with making the same choices repeatedly throughout Time, while going to work and taking out the trash on a regular basis?

The npr article implies questions like: would you get bored?  Would you get uber-frustrated with making the same mistakes over and over?  Would the image of never dying drive you insane?  My characters wonder the same things, while marveling at the novelty of discovering new past lives as Malagasy priestesses, Higgs boson particles, and opabinia from the Cambrian Explosion (they have five eyes — I’m writing about them now, with the draft of Book Four).  At least the variety of their lifetimes distracts them from the angst of Hard Immortality.

Science Made Me Do It

My guest post on Sandra Ulbrich Almazan’s wonderful science/speculative fiction site explores how my family’s science background influenced my books.  My parents met working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos: we’re a nuclear family.  My brother George is searching for every species living inside of us in the Human Microbiome Project.  I’m only trying to come up with 1001 past life stories, but theories and marvels from the science world sure help out.  I may be the white sheep of the family, the sole artist, but I have not escaped science’s clutches.

Check out the full article, and/or sample one of the science-based stories from the series, about a prehistoric possum who intuits Einstein’s famous equation.

 

Elephant Tale for World Elephant Day

The Tale of the Oldest of Worlds

            There, snacking on the abundant plant life with their frontal feeders, the “pro-boscis” that much later classified them as Proboscidians in our prehistoric eras, we find a beloved sight.  “Front feeder” earned them that name, but they were the First Feeders, too, the Proboscidiant Aleph, known variously in the thousandfold Piwican dialects as Aleph Proboscant, Eleph Boskantukh, Oleboscidiant, the original feasters who by their immense eating habits seemed to have invented the whole idea of eating, the Alephoscidiant, called commonly by the Central Mesa Plantmen as alephobuskant and alephuskant, by the Southern Mengalese as alephusk, the jungle Tenga peoples as elephosken, the Shrikeen as elophoscant, the Beenbaai as elephscant.  You will have recognized the name by now.

Our little hero was born into a family living near the edge of the Nijwi Tablelands, so to honor those tribes that co-existed peacefully there, we will call his kind El’a’Phantoosk.  The Phantoosk were not immune to names themselves, for each new calf was given a name based on the first sounds it uttered.  Our hero came into the oldest world complaining and moaning his fate, so his Phantoosk mother named him Gronz.

Gronz hid under his mother’s belly until he could no longer fit there.  He stayed near the other females long after his brothers and father had drifted apart from the family, as is the natural course of events.  Something kept him back, which no mother understood, a deep set fear of the world.

The Phantoosk of that time and place were even larger than the huge African variety of our planet.  They weighed up to ten tons and ate five hundred pounds of food daily, chasing their vegetation down with sixty or seventy gallons of water.  So when Gronz became too big to continue living off his mother’s milk, his hunger drove him out into the world.

Where, to his greatest joy, he discovered food.

The first time Beeewle led her nephew out to the grove of loconut trees, Gronz could not believe his fortune.  The leaves shooting up from the ground were a new taste sensation, waking up his tongue for the first time.  When Gronz discovered the chocolate colored nuts the size of basketballs under the leaves, he was dumbfounded.  His aunt demonstrated how to knock a nut from its cluster, pick it up with the tip of his trunk, and feed himself.  The thrill did not end here.  Gronz accidentally crunched a loconut under his huge foot, splitting it in half.  New wonders waited inside the nut: a much chewier and tastier white meat and … milk!  Gronz would have spent the day consuming the contents of the entire tree if Beeewle had not encouraged him to move from tree to tree, leaving portions untouched for others to enjoy.

In the days after, Gronz fed on bambu stalks, sukre cane, newberries, cornreeds, dates, pommes, plommes, and bushels of leaves, vines, and flowers.  He learned to dig up delicious top leaves with his tusks (more food hidden under the ground!), pull down high dangling roots with his trunk (no food is out of reach!), and harvest the underwater plant life in the river (eat while you enjoy a swim!).  He saw a wild gnashi feeding on a half-eaten carcass, but his mother prevented him joining in; as he watched a sickness grew in his belly at the sight.  He happily returned to his trees, roots, and fruits.

Fully grown, Gronz spent over twenty hours of the thirty-hour solar day eating.  In between he slept, swam, cooled off in the shade, and visited his family.  No predator threatened the outsized Phantoosk, and the Nijwi lived side by side with them, praising the El’a’Phantoosk as children of deities.  The shouts and bellows of the Nijwi during their rituals never frightened Gronz, for he knew it meant a gift of mounds of onanas and braidfruits in the morning.  Drought never diminished the abundant growth in his lifetime.  Fire never menaced the fields and groves.  Pickbirds lazily cleaned Gronz’ wrinkles as he grazed.

Even if you spent the first third of your life living with the most loving and nurturing of families, the second third dazzling the world with the most acclaimed of careers, and the final third peacefully settling in with the most beautiful of spouses, surrounded by delightful children and grandchildren, and, at the end of this time, even if Poacher Death was so impressed with your life that he granted you another share of time to leave a legacy of elegant poetic and philosophical writings for the world, even if you had all this — you could not understand the depth of Gronz’ satisfaction with his life as an elephant.

Scheherazade Meets the Karate Kid

Here’s a taste of my guest post on Fiona Kernaghan’s lovely site about magic realism, Create An Enchanted Life.  It deals with how my past methods as a composer have (un)consciously influenced my writing habits.

“I play piano for modern dance classes, which means that I must improvise everything, although within a fixed structure.  Being a self-taught musician, accompanying for dance was my daily practice, my piano lessons, and my performing opportunity rolled into one.  When Martha Graham says “And!” you play whatever’s in your head.  You trust your first instinct, and build on whatever comes out.  Being an organizer and a structurer from my other endeavors, dance exercised another part of my creative brain, and taught me to take whatever material you start with, and elaborate, energize, and make it work.  To bring everyone to ecstasy.

For my series, I have to come up with 1001 stories.  I have a simple rule: any idea that pops into my head is welcomed and put into the series somewhere.  There’s no time for picky judgment.  Even if it’s a ‘mediocre’ idea, like a seven-inch plant squashed into a chunk of coal, I can use it somehow, elaborate, energize, and make it work.  Hey, where did I learn that?”

For the full article on how years of ‘wax on and wax off,’ to quote the Karate Kid, in one discipline prepared me to write 1001 Scheherazadian tales in another discipline, check out the article.

Why 1001?

In Medieval Arabic lit, the number 1001 was not always literal, but suggested a vast amount, or the Infinite.  There is actually an academic debate about whether The Thousand and One Nights contained the literal amount of ‘Nights,’ that is sections of stories that Scheherazade told the King night after night.  Given that the oldest known manuscript only contains 284 Nights, and then ends, suggests the actual form of the original might have been smaller.  And it was European editors and translators, following up a Western craze for exotic tales, who padded manuscripts with all kinds of stories, just to satisfy our Western need for literal, complete consumerism: we must have all 1001!

In the above paragraph, there are three great reasons why I chose to embrace this magical number for a series of books about people recalling their incarnations.  First, I loved the idea of a book where from chapter to chapter you got wildly differing styles of stories, as the memories passed from historical anecdotes to sci-fi encounters to romantic dalliances.  I became thrilled when I realized that The Thousand and One Nights was the perfect model for such a sprawling form.  In her desperate attempt to keep the King entertained and save her neck, she bounces from recounting a historical epic to a romantic fantasy to a fart joke.  Everything and the harem sink.  It was exactly this literary sprawl that pulled me toward 1001.

As I researched the Nights, I discovered a second reason to relish 1001.  Because of the history and debate about the correct form of the Nights, and the fact that the original version has been lost for over 1000 years, no two editions of the work are the same.  The choice of which stories to include, what order to put them in, and how many to include varies from scholar to translator.  What other book is like that?  What a unique concept for a literary endeavor.  The more I read, the more fascinated I was with the history and substance of the Nights, and not just its form.  Although, my 1001 is super-controlled and full of hidden structures that make only one version possible, I embraced the unique story of the Nights by using much of it as actual material for my characters’ lifetimes.  They learn that they were behind the creation of the Nights is some fashion.

Ultimately, my main reason for delving into the number 1001 is because it does represent the Infinite.  Whereas many fantasies lead the reader to a climax revealing a great secret involving immortality, The Reincarnation Chronicles starts with the assumption that the soul is immortal.  It asks: “What if you knew you lived forever and could remember your past lives?”  How would that effect your daily perceptions?  How would it change your choices and values?  And — would it drive you nuts?  How we protect ourselves from the Infinite, and how we might face it, is the subject of 1001.  The number means that for me.

But then why am I so fascinated with the Infinite?  That will have to wait for another post…

The Blue Alhambra Photo

Happy New Year, and Happy New Blog!  Coming off the successful 1001 Kickstarter campaign (thank you, mighty friends), which they call a blog of sorts, I can call this a new blog kicking off the new year and the publication of the book this month.  Being my first created blog, I had to add some visual flash to it, so I turned to my son Gabe’s beautiful photo of the Alhambra at dawn, which is on my Kickstarter and FB page, also.  Why am I so attached to this image?  Because my child made it?  Because I’m extremely limited visually?  Yes, but here’s the real story.

My wife Sarah, Gabe, and I visited the Costa del Sol in Spain one winter (off-season cheap timeshare deal).  The one thing I was determined to do was see the medieval Islamic fortress, The Alhambra, in Granada.  I knew its history would show up in a later book of 1001, and I wanted to take in its magical atmosphere.  I was told you could get same-day entry tickets if you went to the gate well before opening.  We camped out at a hotel at the foot of the huge hill The Alhambra sits atop, and before dawn I walked up, waited in the bitter cold for an hour, and proudly faced the Spanish ticket seller.  He told me the early tickets were only good for the first entrance of the day – in less than an hour!

Miraculously, a taxi pulled up out of nowhere.  With barely enough money left, the cab crawled (!) down the hill, waited at the hotel while I terrified my family into getting dressed and racing back up to the Alhambra.  Worried about my sanity, they jogged along with me as we entered the grounds, huffing and puffing toward the main palace that had twenty minute entries.  We got there just as the guard was about to let in the next group, staggered into the first room, just as the sun started rising and the moon began to set.

At this moment, Gabe calmly snapped this beatific picture out the portico pillars, framing the dawning azure sky with the moon above and the old palace walls in the distance.  It meant so much to me that we made our victorious entry into the palace that I have treasured this image always.  And now it adorns the entry into the 1001 series.