Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 56

In praise of short novels

So Lucky is a short novel, so the other day when I read a list in LitHub of the shortest novels by writers we should, apparently, all read, I paid attention.

Some of those twenty short books I immediately assumed I had read—Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Ernest Hemingway—but on reflection it turns out I haven’t. So now I think I might, certainly Woolf. After all, at 176 pages, even if it sucks I wouldn’t have wasted much time.

However, on the basis of the five I have read:

Sula, Toni Morrison 192 pp

Train Dreams, Dennis Johnson 116 pp

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin 159 pp

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen 220 pp

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien 300 pp

I’d say the odds are good that the short work of the three I mention could be as good as or better than their longer work. Short packs a powerful punch, and no matter how different from the rest of the author’s ouevre the book may seem, I think you still get a taste—an echo, if you like, or maybe a harmonic—of that writer’s concerns.

So Lucky is short (192 pp) and I designed it as a spear-thrust of a novel rather than the learn-by-immersion of, say, Hild, or the cool, machined elegance of The Blue Place. But several people have already said they see echoes of both Hild and Aud in these pages. So I’m looking forward to finding out what others think.

For those of you who like audio here’s an extra incentive: I’m narrating it myself. Macmillan Audio has booked me in at Clatter & Din in SoDo where I started on Friday. I have a dynamite engineer, Eric (and Sam when Eric can’t be there) and very clear, very helpful producer/director Matie Argiropoulos. I’m having a blast. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the high-tech, high-rent, loft vibe of a downtown studio—though I’m getting a wee bit tired of chamomile tea and the taste of honey…

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US: Indiebound | Amazon | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Google Play
UK: Amazon | iTunes

 

A piece in Catapult about representation

Out yesterday, an interview I did with Marian Ryan for Catapult in which I chat about the importance of seeing characters like ourselves in fiction.

“It helps to see someone else coping,” she told me. “We all borrow from fictional characters. But there aren’t enough good crip characters to borrow from, so we’re all learning on our own. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

Women with disabilities barely seem to exist in fiction, let alone queer women with disabilities or women of color with disabilities or queer, non-binary or trans women of color with disabilities. “You only seem to be allowed one degree from the norm,” Griffith said. “If the norm is straight white rich boys, then you can be a woman, you can be queer, you can be crippled, but you can’t be all those things.” In other words: You have to fight to be seen as a normal person living a normal life.

Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

I wrote a remembrance of Ursula Le Guin. It’s up at the Seattle Review of Books.

For centuries the gatekeepers have been building that wall, designed with a single aperture to let through one woman writer at a time. I like to imagine Ursula would snort at this giant game of Highlander, in which There Can Be Only One, and call for us to tear that wall down. To paraphrase her speech at the National Book Awards in 2014: We live in patriarchy, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Resistance and change often begin in art, the art of words.

March events

So Lucky is out 15 May, so I’ve started to add things to my calendar.

March 13, Orlando, FL. ICFA: Marriott Airport Hotel, Vista A, 4:30 pm
March 27, Kirkland, WA: SFWA Reading Series, Wilde Rover Irish Pub and Restaurant, 7:00pm.

First up is the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, in Orlando, FL. As the first event of the conference I’ll be doing a reading with the fabulous Maria Dahvana Headley and Bryan Camp. Maria just gave me a lovely blurb for So Lucky:

“Nicola Griffith is a brilliant creator of fierce female protagonists. With So Lucky, she fires a gritty, scary, wrathful, sometimes blisteringly funny broadside at the monsters of ableist culture.”

We’re all represented by the same agency, The Gernert Company, and we’re hoping to serve monster cocktails (when I know for sure I’ll talk more about that). It’ll be my first ever reading from Lucky. The first is always special. So if you happen to be at ICFA, do drop by.

My second reading will be here in Seattle. Well, okay, actually Kirkland, when I join Nancy Kress and Cat Rambo for the SFWA Reading Series at the Wilde Rover Irish Pub and Restaurant. And, hey, it’s a pub! With beer! It will be awesome!

There may be something in the midwest in April (not sure yet) and of course there will be many things in May. The rest of the summer is in flux. When I know, you’ll know.

 

OtherLife has a movie trailer!

I know: the trailer is supposed to come first. Kelley’s film OtherLife started streaming on Netflix in October but for a variety of reasons the trailer was delayed. But now it’s finally here:

And just in case you need to persuade someone else of the niftyness of this fabulous film, see Kelley’s 10 Reasons to Watch OtherLife…

2018 Reading

I’m hoping this will be the first of a semi-regular discussion (once a month?) of books I’m reading/have read/plan to read. Some will be old friends, some new to me, and some not yet published. In January so far I’ve read these novels:

Running Dark, Jamie Freveletti
White Houses, Amy Bloom
The Dry, Jane Harper

I liked them all well enough to finish them, but I found White Houses mildly irritating, partly because I did not find the characterisation (Lorena Hickok and Eleanore Roosevelt) interesting and partly because the narrative chronology felt choppy and unfocused—to no narrative purpose that I could divine. I finished it because many years ago I fell in love with Blooms’s A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories, and so keep picking up her books. I’m just not sure how much longer I’ll force myself to finish them. The Dry was a pleasant surprise. I knew nothing of book or author but found this crime fiction set in Australia energetic and engaging. I can recommend it and will watch for Harper’s books in the future. I knew nothing of Running Dark, either, but discovered it as a bargain on Book Bub (where books are promotionally priced for a limited time, usually $1.99 or $0.99 or even free). For the price it was a perfectly adequate Somali-pirates-are-after-dangerous-experimental-drugs thriller, remarkable only for its protagonist, a woman who is essentially a thrill-seeker in low-key, ultra-fit-ultra-smart mode. If you’re looking for a few hours of untroubling entertainment, again, I can recommend it. (Apparently there’s now a whole series of Running books.)

Fiction I’ve just started:

Madame Zero: 9 Stories, Sarah Hall
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Hot Zone, Steven Konkoly

Sarah Hall is an amazing writer, but something about this particular collection is not grabbing me; when I’ve read more I might be able to articulate my problem (and it might just be my problem). Machado reminds me of a North American version of Ali Smith: occasionally astonishing but not quite in my ball park. Again, I’ll be more articulate when I’ve finished. So far, though, definitely worth reading. Hot Zone is a B-level thriller about viral outbreaks and the apocalypse; I’m about a quarter of the way through and it’s chuntering along satisfactorily.

I’m also reading Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander aloud to Kelley which is enormous fun. O’Brian is so very fine as a writer, an absolute joy to read aloud. But I’ve talked about O’Brian before, and at length.

In terms of non-fiction, a photo speaks a thousand words:

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As you can see, queued up is a mix of

Hild research (including Hild itself—fiction, yes, I know—because Menewood has taken an interesting turn and I need to remind myself of people and places I didn’t think I’d need for a few hundred pages)
Babylonian/Akkadian research related to a notion I have about the literature of climate change
Disability lit. Kenny Fries coined the Fries Test, and this anthology was one of the first by, for, and about disabled writers and readers.

I have zero idea of when/if I’ll get to these (one is an Inter Library Loan and my time is almost up). I also subscribe to a few periodicals:

Economist
Poetry
London Review of Books
Paris Review
New Yorker

plus two daily newspapers, Seattle Times and New York Times. Added to that are all the journals that come attached to membership in professional organisations, such as GLQ, Historia, Journal of Historical Fictions, HNR, DSQ, Writing in Education, The Writers’ Chronicle, ISLE, etc.

Seeing all this written down makes me realise how insanely and hugely over-subscribed I am. Huh. Okay, I’m going to cancel a bunch o’ subscriptions and get more writing done!

And then there were two: Stay is out of stock

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My stock of Stay is all gone. Now there are just a handful of The Blue Place and Always remaining. So if you snap up a copy of Stay second hand you can still make an Aud trilogy but I wouldn’t like to stay how long that will remain true.

On the other hand, Phinney Books has just got in fresh shipments of With Her Body (now with a green cover!) so all my other books, including the memoir, are available for signing and personalising.

Why not ring in 2018 with a good book?

2017 blog stats

2017 was an interesting year. By interesting I mean amazing, appalling, exhausting, exhilarating, awful, and astonishing. Sometimes all on the same day. Politics (US, UK, and global) loomed over much of it. More than once my rage at the malignant and overweening children who are breaking beautiful-if-far-from-perfect systems in our countries, just because they can, made me weep. Rage can make it hard to find the still, quiet place I need to create things. Nonetheless, I wrote and sold a book no one was expecting (including me). I got a PhD. I won a four-year fight to get the Aud book back. I’m pleased with the progress of #CripLit. I’m pleased at the private response I’ve had about writing-programme access: although it’s slower than I like, there is change coming.

The hardest thing about 2017 for me was that I could not focus on Menewood, as I had hoped. I will do that in 2018; I will finish the book.

I spent huge chunks of time away from social media a) for my sanity and b) because I was engrossed in the book and PhD. Not surprisingly, visits to the site were way down this year: 45,692. I don’t know how accurately that number reflect readership. The blog is followed by about 2,000 who read daily via email; they don’t show up in the stats. Nor do the readers on three other platforms where these posts repost automagically. The actual readership could be far larger; it’s difficult to tell.

Of the ten most popular posts, four (marked *) were perennials:

The Fries Test for disabled characters in fiction
Books about women don’t win big awards: some data*
An open letter to all writing programmes
Lame is so gay: a rant*
Punching Nazis
Huge news: multiple sclerosis is a metabolic disorder*
The story of my PhD Part 1: Opportunity
Coming out as a cripple*
My new book, So Lucky , out May 15 2018
The Aud novels are mine!

The top ten countries where my readers live haven’t shown much change except for the last two, India and Spain, who edged out New Zealand and the Netherlands, respectively. Here’s the list, in order:

US
UK
Canada
Australia
Germany
France
Ireland
Sweden
India
Spain

I was a bit surprised by how readers were referred to the blog. For the first time in three years search engines took the top spot, and by a wide margin, followed by Facebook and Twitter (though there’s not much between the two).

Again, my old blog was in fourth place, so, again, I’ll probably leave it up for a while.

What’s in store for 2018? Menewood, mostly. There are a handful of other biggish things (some important only to me) in train that I’m not ready to talk about yet; hopefully I’ll be able to next year. But I’ve learnt that plans and reality are not always in sync, so we’ll see…

Happy dancing reindeer

Every year, in a happy orgy of destruction, I destroy the Christmas Tree. A dragon roars fire. A huge rocks drops on it. The Enterprise takes it out. Or Darth Vader.

This year I’ve done something different: dancing reindeer. Enjoy.

And, ah fuck it, because blowing things up makes me smile, here you go:

So Lucky available for pre-order!

[image error]I’ve just found out (thanks, Kelly Robson!) that So Lucky is available for pre-order. It won’t be out for five months, it doesn’t yet have a cover, and I’m still going through the proofs, but it’s real, it’s happening, so I thought I’d put together a post of links that I can point readers to closer to the time—and just in case any of you want to buy Lucky as a holiday gift.

If you’re in Seattle and environs, I’d like to suggest you order pre-order from any of the following:

Phinney Books
Third Place Books
Island Books
University Bookstore
The Elliott Bay Book Company
Eagle Harbor Book Co
Queen Anne Book Company
Secret Garden Books

Elsewhere in the US, and in the UK, try:

US: Indiebound | Amazon | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Google Play
UK: Amazon | iTunes

For Hild, I put together a gigantic list of independent bookstores recommended by readers from 5 countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And I mean GIGANTIC: in the UK, 81 bookshops; in the US, 76 bookstores in 25 states. So you could try one of those, too.