Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 81

Tonight: Port Townsend!

Tonight at 6:30 I'll be at the Port Townsend Library Learning Center, 1256 Lawrence St., to talk about Hild, and read a bit--and talk some more, and answer your questions, and sign books. This is both a celebration of libraries and my last public Hild event before I devote myself full-time to Hild II.

These things are enormous fun for me; I love to talk about my work. I'm especially pleased to be helping Port Townsend celebrate their library's 100th birthday. Libraries, especially inter-library loan, are what made Hild possible. Without them I would have been able to do much less research, which would have led to a lesser book. So much less, in fact, that I don't think I would have felt able to stand behind it. No libraries = no Hild.

So come and help me celebrate the wonder that is free information delivered expertly, that is, libraries. More info on the event here.

Mountain passes in December

I'd never been to Central Washington before, never been through the passes in December. We were ready to do the tire chain thing. Here's how it looked on the way in:
As you can see, the road was pretty good, but I wouldn't have wanted to drive it two weeks ago, or two weeks from now (look at those ice cascades on the right). We were lucky.
After my first event at the Wenatchee Public Library, we found a lovely wee Italian restaurant. Wenatchee isn't very big, but they managed to provide us a delicious '96 Barbaresco! The next day it was the Leavenworth Public Library. Leavenworth is, well, it bills itself as a Bavarian village. In Washington State. They have lights...  The next day we went back to Leavenworth and spent a couple of hours in their wonderful bookshop, A Book For All Seasons, where I chatted to customers and signed books.
Then it was time to head west through the passes again. And again, we were lucky. The chains stayed in their bag. Tomorrow: Port Townsend! (Ferries, not mountain passes...) Hope to see you there. It's going to be a faaaabulous event!

This week: Wenatchee and Leavenworth

On Thursday we venture through Snoqualmie Pass and head east: Wenatchee and Leavenworth. Here's the plan:

Thursday 4 December
Wenatchee Public Library
7 pm
FREE

Friday 5 December
Leavenworth Public Library
7 pm
FREE

Saturday 6 December
Leavenworth Christmas Lighting Festival
1pm
FREE

Do join us. I've never been to either Wenatchee or Leavenworth before, so I hope you'll show up (bring friends, bring family! get a book! get several--signed books make great gifts) and help us feel welcome.

Baby it's cold outside...

It's a cold, cold morning. But bright. Happy Sunday! Perhaps you'd like to do some armchair shopping?

How to get signed and personalised HILD for holidays, 2014

This year I'm teaming up with a new bookshop, Phinney Books, on Greenwood Avenue, Seattle to bring you signed books for the holidays. Why Phinney Books? Well, because it's right next door to the pub! Which makes it massively, convivially convenient for me.
Here's how it works.You phone (206 297 2665) or email (info@phinneybooks.com) the lovely people at Phinney Books. Have your credit card handy. Tell them what you'd like, e.g. Hild (paperback or hardcover; they might be able to get hold of the audio book, I'm not sure) or another of my books. (See below.) Or, hey, another book by somebody else--lots of books, any books! It's the holidays. You (and your friends, your family, everyone you've ever met) deserve something nice.Tell them whether you want the books by me personalised (to you, or to someone else; if so, who; and what short thing--short is easy; long might be ignored--you'd like me to add).Give them your mailing address and payment info.Beam, sit back and relax: you've done your holiday shopping!I don't know what the deadline is to order to ensure delivery for the holidays. For now let's say Friday 12th December--but if I'm advised that's too late I'll change it.
So basically you have two weeks. Go for it. I'll do my best to mostly sign your books before I go to the pub..._________________My books (all paperback unless otherwise noted):
Novels:Hild (hardcover, paperback, audio CD)Always (Aud III)Stay (Aud II)The Blue Place (Aud I) Slow River Ammonite
Stories: With Her Body
Memoir: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party (collector's boxed set)
Please Note:
The audio CD may take some time to order; I honestly don't know how these things work. And if they come shrink wrapped like other CDs, then I'll have to open them to sign them.The memoir is difficult to find. I don't know if Phinney Books could order it or not.Always can sometimes be hard to pin down (though it's out there); ditto the tiny wee paperback With Her Body

Thanksgiving

My thanksgiving started last night with a fig. Just an ordinary fig, snatched from its bowl as I made a mental list of All That Must Be Done. Only when I bit into it, it turned out to be heaven in my hand. The best fig I think I've ever had. Practically perfect--no, better than perfect: the Platonic Ideal of a fig.

The colour was deep and rich. The taste sweet and aromatic. The weight on my palm just right. Figs have been around for much of human history. They are symbolic, for me, of life lived one step beyond survival. They haven't changed much in thousands years. They don't need to.

So I immediately set my To Do list aside, and sat, and enjoyed that fig. And that's when I started to feel very glad to be alive, very consciously thankful for so much.

This is my first (non-doped up) Thanksgiving as a US citizen. It seemed worth writing down my top three gratitudes:
Kelley. Always Kelley. We've had a hell of a year, good and bad, but even the good bits--and trust me, there were many good bits--were tremendously hard involving mountains of work. And Kelley has been right there at my side, and I at hers. We've travelled more this year than I can remember--including four transatlantic flights and more transcontinental ones than I can shake a stick at.Systems. One of the reasons all that travel didn't send us to the hospital (well, no more than a couple of times) is that airlines and airports seem to have smoothed out many of their practical and administrative systems. Our bags didn't get lost once. We miss any planes due to waiting for wheelchair service. We didn't get bumped off any planes. We were mostly on time apart from (several) acts of weather. Thanks to ubiquitous GPS we didn't get lost in any strange cities and thanks to ubiquitous credit card service we didn't have to keep hoofing it to the ATM. The hotels always ended up giving us what we wanted. The hospitals and clinics, too, have been jaw-droppingly efficient. So compared to how this kind of travel could have gone: amazing.Family and friends. We hit some serious bumps this year (you know some of the health stuff). And friends and family were magnificent. We couldn't have done any of what we did without help, and lots of it, and you offered it not only without a murmur but with active pleasure. You know who you are. Thank you.I'm grateful for much more, of course: for the kindness of strangers, for the magnificent summer and autumn weather in all those places we visited, for the booksellers and publishers and readers who helped made Hild such a success, for our neighbours, for my phone, for Dropbox; for the delicious Rioja I'll be drinking this afternoon, the chocolate cloud cake I can smell baking as I type, the wonderful story I'll be treating myself to reading this evening.

I could go on. Later, over dinner with Kelley, I will. But for now I'm grateful to you, dear reader, for being on this planet and taking the time to occasionally privilege those troublesome little things called words. Thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Two more unprocessed pics of me

Yesterday's photos are black and white, which covers a multitude of sins. Here, for the sake of truth-in-advertising, are two full-colour shots, again untouched by Photoshop. This first one is by  Christopher M. Cevasco, taken at my panel at World Fantasy Convention in Washington DC. Cropped, to remove a distracting stripe at the bottom. Note the red eyes.

And this one is by my friend Mark Tiedemann, taken at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. Mark tells me it's lightly tweaked. In what way, I don't know. But, eh, here it is anyway.
So that's it, that's how I look right now. And let me tell you, I am now determined to show only seriously processed photos in the future! I don't like having red eyes and dark circles! I don't wear makeup in real life, so I reserve the right to remove blemishes in post. I suspect you'll be happier with that, too...

Recent photos: tired but relaxed

Two photos of me from my last Seattle reading of Hild at Third Place. Unretouched, according to the photographer (Jennifer Durham). Her verdict: tired around the eyes but happy and relaxed.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in how I look after a gruelling—but fun (otherwise I'd be neither happy nor relaxed)—travel schedule. Having said that, I suspect unretouched to a professional photographer means what first draft does to professional writer. That is, all truly obvious infelicities removed in one fast smoothing. (To give you a notion of what I mean, a quick read-through and tweakage of a blog post—like this one—might take me about five minutes.)

Hild is a #1 bestseller!

Hild is the PNBA's number one bestseller. That means that for the week ending November 16, it's the overall top-selling paperback at independent bookshops in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and Alaska. Which means: Wow! and Bloody hell! and Woo hoo!

Hild is also number 7 on the Southern California list, and 5 on the Northern California list. Aaaand...number 19 on the national list.

So I'm going to take this opportunity to remind you that books make lovely holiday presents, that buying from your local bookshop is a Good Thing, and that, well, I've never been a national bestseller before and it would add a serious glow to my Christmas to be able to add National Bestseller! to the next printing of Hild.

Anywhere I've been in the last month will have signed copies. But if they don't, or if you want one personalised, I've been thinking about establishing a relationship with a new, local bookshop that just so happens to be right next door to the pub... So if you're interested in being able to get something signed, personalised, and shipped to you, let me know and I'll set it up.

Immersive storytelling: are books better than film?

After a recent post on Hild's film/tv rights, I started a conversation in the comments with my friend Brooks, posting as Myseyeball. I thought it sufficiently interesting to pull part of it and turn it into a standalone post.
_______
Brooks
One of the things that interests me about your novels, Nicola, is the way in which a form of technology will become a metaphor that not only informs the way your protagonists move through life, but also the structure of the novel. In Slow River , that technology was sewage treatment, of all things. In Hild the technology is the making textiles. Not only does it become a metaphor for the way that Hild and her associates see life, but the book itself seems to be woven — a very tight and intricate weave.

In that context the more sensational aspects of the book, the sex and violence and whatnot, are like silver, gold and crimson threads, thrilling and beautiful in their ornamentation, but inadequate in describing the core experience of reading a book woven from the change of seasons and the changing of life in a time so far away from ours.

To adapt Hild into a TV series the whole beautiful tapestry would have to be unwoven and then re-weaved as a series of smaller cloths, all somewhat different in appearance and touch, yet congruent enough to be stitched back together in an approximation of the original. The ideal way do do that would be to conceptualize Hild as a series of short films, all a little different in effect. The big battle that gives Hild her butcher bird reputation. That's one film. The later chapter in which most of the men have gone off to some battle and Hild notices how more relaxed things seem in their absence. That's another movie, totally different style-wise but just as important.

Only a very powerful producer could pull something like this off. Not only because she or he would have to somehow keep the whole thing unified, but also because he or she would have to be confident enough give the writers and directors just enough slack to make something unique.

One other thing. If I was the megalomaniac producer of a Hild series, I'd also make the directors, writers and a lot of the producers go to linen boot camp.  I'd have people spinning and weaving in the writers room and during downtime in the fiilming.  I'd engage their competitive nature to see who could produce the best cloth.

In doing that, they'd almost involuntarily weave the feel of textiles into the weave of the film.

Do all that and stitch the pieces back together and you'd have Hild as a quilt instead of a tapestry. Not as elegant, but it would get the job done. Unfortunately getting someone to bankroll a project like that would be only slightly easier than funding Jodorowsky's Dune.

Or you could just make a big budget film starring Jennifer Lawrence as Hild, George Clooney as Edward, and Johnny Depp as The Beaver.

Nicola
Metaphor-as-structure: one step beyond metaphor-made-concrete? This is something I'd love to talk about another time. But for now I want to focus on this notion of how to recreate an immersive novel on film.

Hild as a series of short films... I don't see it happening. For one thing, as you point out, it would require extreme amounts of Hollywood juice on somebody's part. For another, I not convinced it's possible to create a film, or even series of films, as immersive as the best fiction.

With Hild I set out for the reader to experience the seventh century, to see, smell, hear, taste and feel what Hild does; to gradually adopt her mindset and worldview; to think as she does, to learn her lessons, feel her joys—to be her, just for a little while. My goal was to run my software on the reader's hardware: for them to recreate Hild inside themselves and know, not just think but know, what the early seventh-century was like.

To do that I honed my prose to trigger not only the reader's mirror neurons but something called embodied cognition.

There's now a reasonable amount of experimental data (though I admit I don't know how often it's been replicated and confirmed) to indicate that certain written words can trigger the memory of scent and touch. For example, if you write the word 'lavender' a functional MRI will show the areas of the brain relating to smell lighting up. Similarly, if you use the word 'leathery' instead of 'hard' or 'tough' it stimulates your brain in the same way that actually touching leather does. So if you describe a character running a discarded lavender leather glove drenched in lavender scent under her nose, the reader can actually feel the cool-warm of the leather against her skin, hear the faint creak of the leather, smell that lavender: we are there.

However, unless you elaborately set up the same shot—show the glove's owner dipping the glove with liquid from a bottle labelled Lavender, show her leaving the glove, show someone else picking it up, running the glove under her nose, closing her eyes and sniffing deeply—I don't believe film can't do that. (Even with the elaborate set-up described I'm guessing the viewer would have to really work to put themselves there.)

This belief could, of course, all be a function of my bias: film and TV for me are two-hour thrill-rides. They don't exist to make me think, or to feel subtleties. My favourites are blunt-force roller-coaster rides with perfectly matched music and a few witticisms. Think Jaws. Think Die Hard. Think Galaxy Quest, and Independence Day (okay, not the ridiculous computer virus, but everything else), the Star Trek reboot, Iron Man, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (except for the idiotic adolescent 'fun' hobbit scenes, and those interminable ents). The films that work best for me, in other words, are spectacle, Woo Hoo Let's Blow Some Shit Up! movies, not Serious Films About Anguished People.

And what you say about having to send the actors to weaving boot camp: yes. Because they would have to move as people who had been producing textiles—and milking cows, and sheathing swords, and ploughing fields—all their lives. The viewer would have to see them do something and believe it, feel it, understand subconsciously the thousands of hours, the expertise, that goes into the simplest movement. You can always tell in film someone who knows how to use a gun, or ride a horse, and someone who doesn't. And don't get me started on the women they cast to play martial artists/killers. (There are always exceptions. I believed Gina Carrera in Haywire: she is, in fact, a fighter. And Tom Cruise in Collateral did an excellent job of playing a man for whom such things are second nature on what I'm guessing was limited training.)

Video is a visual medium. It can trigger a viewer's mirror neurons: a woman on the edge of a cliff with the wind in her face might tickle our own sensory apparatus enough for us to feel a faint echo of that wind on our own skin, if it's acted and shot well enough. But it can't get us to smell the sea, to feel whether that water is hot or cold, except by two-stage inference. It is much better at what people do and say than what they think and feel.

Prose, on the other hand, can do it all. But as I say, I'm perfectly prepared to admit I might be biased.

Thoughts?