The Silence Has Been Fed

It's been four years since I started up Feeding the Silence.  At the time, I found that my primary means of talking to the world was via a blog.  First was Infinity Ranch, of course, and when it seemed I couldn't keep my mouth shut for very long, along came Feeding the Silence.  As you'll notice, the post count has dipped pretty severely from that first year.

Is it because I don't have as much to say?  Doubtful.  I'm still as full of opinions as always, although when you've been blogging as long as I have you start to repeat yourself.  The more I tried to make sure I was saying something original and meaningful, the more things slowed down.  Make of that what you will.

Having said that, I've also been doing a lot more off-the-blog writing.  Fiction is just more fun than real life, and at least there I control what happens to people.  The worlds I create in my head might not be any more just than this one, but they're a little more interesting.  I hope.

When I started writing fiction, I did it just to do it.  I wasn't thinking at the time, "I'm writing a best seller!  Look out George R.R. Martin!  Let's get Hollywood on the phone!"  To be honest, I wasn't thinking anything at all, aside from, "can I really do this?"  After some successful NaNoWriMo years, I had to start wondering what I was going to do with these books I've been writing.

Long story short - I've decided to publish them myself.

Technology has changed the way books are published and distributed.  It's given me a chance to do it on my own terms in my own way.  First up, in March, will be a collection of short stories.  If that goes well, things will snowball from there.

Which is all to say that, going forward, I'm not going to worry so much about the stuff I've been writing about here.  I'll keep blogging, but probably with a focus more on artistic and cultural things.  And my own writing, of course.

So, the silence has been well and truly fed.  Thanks to everybody who stopped by.

If you're interested in my newest adventure . . . follow me.

Reading Shouldn’t Be Work

We’ve all been there.

Deep in the bowels of a book – fiction or non, it doesn’t matter – getting through that vast middle between the beginning where you get hooked and the end where everything (hopefully) pays off, and it happens.  Something in the back of your mind, or maybe the front, says, “what the hell are we doing wasting our time with this shit?”

OK, so that’s what my mind says.  Your mileage may vary, as they say.  But everybody who reads is eventually faced with the question of whether a book is worth finishing.  Whether it’s the slimmest of novellas or a door stopper like the later volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, you start to wonder if your time might be better spent elsewhere.  Like, say, reading a better book.

Writing at The Atlantic, Juliet Lapidos argues that you should stick it out to the bitter end, regardless of how much of a slog things become.  This isn’t just a matter of trying to ensure you don’t miss out on something that comes good at the end, it’s a question of morality:

This behavior, common though it may be, seems lazy to me. Wrong, even. Once you start a book, you should finish it.

That being said, she begins her case for always finishing a book with the most obvious utilitarian one – it might get better.  She gives examples (classics, naturally) of books that aggravated her to no end, but finally got around to a “transcendentally good scene” that made it all worthwhile.  This is true of anything, of course, and doesn’t really support the charge that bailing at some earlier stage is “wrong.”  Short sighted, maybe, but not wrong.

Her other reasons don’t fare any better.  The first is “fortitude,” which is essentially the intellectual version of being made to eat your vegetables.  Slogging through a boring book (to be fair, she names names – hello Ian McEwan fans!) steels ones resolve to deal with real life.  Which, conveniently enough in Lapidos’s case, involves . . . slogging through lots of poorly written verbiage.  I suppose there’s something to admire in that, but I don’t think anyone would begrudge her some editorial control over the reading she does on her own time.  I sometimes read court cases for fun (pathetic, I know), but only so long as they’re actually interesting.  I save the slogs for the office.

The last reason, is, I have to say, one that gets a little closer to why it’s “wrong” to step away from a book early – respect:

it is one thing to start writing a novel and another thing entirely to finish one. Many would-be authors simply cannot bring a work of fiction to completion, which is part of why publishing houses, as a rule, won’t enter into contract until they see an ending. The difference between being able to write 50 pages and being able to write a whole novel is the difference—at least, one major difference—between a professional and a dilettante.

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully.

As someone who has gone the full nine yards and finished a couple of manuscripts, I appreciate the sentiment.  But, ultimately, it pains me to think somebody would someday buy one of my books, start it, think “this really sucks,” but decide to finish it out just so they can support the cause.  OK, maybe I expect my wife to do that, but not strangers!  It’s less a sign of respect than a symbol of your own better nature as a human being – “hey, this novel really sucked, but at least I’m such a good person that I read all of this shit!”

Where any argument that a book, once begun, requires the reader to finish it fails is in what economists call opportunity costs.  Opportunity costs are, basically,, the things you could otherwise do with your time while you were doing something else.  Some people read entire novels in a day.  For others it takes weeks.  If you’re in the latter camp, aren’t you going to lose large chunks of your life reading stuff you don’t like just to say you could?  Reading other books in the time you would have spent slogging through (insert favorite horrific tome here) just makes sense.  We’re all gonna die at some point – life’s too short to read stuff you don’t like.

Which is why books are different than other forms of entertainments.  I’ve never walked out on a movie, although I’ve bailed on a couple while watching at home.  Regardless of how bad a movie is, it’s over in a few hours.  And, for the first reason Lapidos lays out, I tend to want to see if it gets better.  But a few hours is quite different than a few days or a few weeks.  Like I said, life’s just too short.

I am, perhaps, the ultimate subjectivist when it comes to art.  There is no bad or good, only what people like or don't like.  A slog that is redeemed for Lapidos by a single transcendent scene will be, for others, merely a slog.  Nobody should be guilted into consuming art because it's "good" for them.  They should be encouraged to develop their own tastes and interests.  If those don't include seeing every book through to the end, regardless of how much enjoyment the reader gets from it, so be it.

Returning Like May Flowers

How's that for a metaphor, eh?

Hey, everybody - did ya' miss me?  It's been one of those months where I ran out of worthwhile things to say (it happens), found other things to do with my time, and slowly spiraled into not blogging for a month.  Silly me - I'll try to do better next time.

I have not been idle, lest the quiet blog suggest otherwise.  I finished the first draft of The Endless Hills, which is the sequel to The Water Road (the second book in a planned trilogy, of course).  That one has been put aside for now, to molder a little bit until I can come back with fresh eyes and tear it apart.

As for The Water Road itself, it's ready to be loosed upon the world.  Sort of.  I've done all I can do with it and am now polishing a query letter (email, actually) to send to literary agents in hopes of finding someone to represent it and me.  It's a frustrating process, but one that, I hope, will have a happy ending.

Another of my NaNoWriMo projects, Moore Hollow (which involves zombies, politics, and family strife), is at the same point in the process.  That is, I've just about done all I can do with it, save for one final round of critiquing.  Once that's over, I plan to shop it directly to some smaller (probably regional) publishers.  With any luck, it will find a home sometime soon.

But, anyway, that was then, this is now.  On to new things!

How to Pull a Town Out of Thin Air

One of the cool things about writing fiction is you get to make up stuff as you go along (it's sort of the nature of the game).  Not just characters and what they do but, often just as important, where they do it.  You can build entire worlds and nations in your mind, not to mention cities.  I've even made some maps (crude, but effective - I'm not a cartographer, after all) of the world in which my Water Road books are set, as well as another world I've yet to write in.  It's all quite fun.

But imagine that you could create a town out of thin air, as a fiction, only for it to pop up in real life?  Now that's really cool!

Consider the strange case of Algoe, New York (not to be confused with the planet Algon, where an ordinary cup of drinking chocolate costs 4 million pounds).

Back in the 1930s, it wasn't unusual for mapmakers to steal each other's work.  After all, if a map reflects realty and someone copies the map, don't they have a defense to plagiarism by arguing that both the original map and the alleged copy accurately reflect realty?  How can that lose?

Turns out, map makers got savvy and began including some fictional places to trap would be copyists:

That's what Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co., and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, did in the 1930s. They were making a road map of New York state, and on that out-of-the-way dirt road, they created a totally fictitious place called 'Agloe.' The name was a mix of the first letters in their names, Otto G. Lindberg's (OGL) and Ernest Alpers' (EA).

The trap set, it appeared to work, when the town of Algoe appeared on a map made by none other than Rand McNally a few years later.  Case closed, right?  Big check from Rand McNally to Lindberg and Alpers.  Not so fast - Rand McNally offered a defense: there really was a town called Algoe.  In fact, the official county map showed an Algoe General Store in that location.  Checkmate, cartographic honey pot.

But how'd that happen?

Good question. Here's the ironic answer. The owners had seen Agloe on a map distributed by Esso, which owned scores of gas stations. Esso had bought that map from Lindberg and Alpers. If Esso says this place is called Agloe, the store folks figured, well, that's what we'll call ourselves. So, a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed. Rand McNally, one presumes, was found not guilty.

Then the store closed. It isn't there anymore.

Having said that, according to the NPR story, Algoe held on for years on Google Maps until it, again, vanished into thin air recently.

So, want to have an impact on the world?  Make a map and give it a fictional town.  It might come to life without you even knowing about it!

What's the Point of a Review?

My Friday Reviews are the descendant of one of the features of my original, hand crank operated, web page I had while I was in college and law school.  There I'd do reviews of just about every album I got, as part of a regular process of listening and figuring out what I thought about it.  I stopped doing those, largely because my reviews were winding up in one of two formats - gushing praise or harsh scorn.  If I didn't really "feel" one of those, I didn't even write up.  I'd like to think I do better now, but it's helpful to be able to pick and choose.

I bring all this up because of an interesting two-person article in the upcoming issue of the New York Time Sunday Book Review which asks the question, "do we really need negative book reviews?"

Now, as a struggling writer, I kind of like the idea of doing away with negative reviews. Who wants to see their work torn to shreds, after all?  But I'm not certain that would really be the best thing.

Francine Prose makes the case for not writing negative reviews.  It's pretty simple:

Even so, I stopped [writing negative reviews]. I began returning books I didn’t like to editors. I thought, Life is short, I’d rather spend my time urging people to read things I love. And writing a bad book didn’t seem like a crime deserving the sort of punitive public humiliation (witch-dunking, pillorying) that our Puritan forefathers so spiritedly administered.

From my reading of professional critics, that seems to be the best part of the job - when they find something in need of a champion, a book or film that won't reach a wider audience without some cheerleading.  It must be more rewarding that writing what shit the latest Transformers movie is or whatever.  So I see the point.

On the other hand, however, that seems a bit too touchy-feely, doesn't it?  To be fair, Prose (good name for a writer!) doesn't argue for lying about the quality of books, just not writing reviews of bad things at all.  Which, come to think about it, might be even worse - being ripped apart is one thing, being ignored quite another.

Zoe Heller makes the case for negative reviews and it is, as well, pretty simple:

most writers do not write merely, or even principally, to escape from or console themselves. They write for other people. They write to have an effect, to elicit a reaction. That is why they scrap and struggle, often for years, to have their work published. Being sentient creatures, they are often distressed by what critics have to say about their work. Yet they accept with varying degrees of resignation that they are not kindergartners bringing home their first potato prints for the admiration of their parents, but grown-ups who have chosen to present their work in the public arena. I know of no self-respecting authors who would ask to be given points for 'effort' or for the fact that they are going to die one day.

Part of being an artist, at least one who shares his work with other people, is the need to deal with criticism.  My father is a first rate grammar-Nazi.  I have him read my fiction, even though it's not the kind of thing he normally reads, because he will be precise and vicious with a red pen.  When my mother asked if I really wanted him to do that, I said, "because editors and agents will be kind and not point out those things?"  Being criticized is part and parcel of being a creative person.

Further, as Heller points out, reviews come with bylines and, hopefully, supporting argument as to whether a book is good or bad.  Real criticism goes miles beyond "it sucks" or even "it's great!"  Critics who are savage just for the fun of it won't garner a lot of respect or readers.

After all, as Prose admits, trying not to write a negative review is like trying not to eat too much at Thanksgiving.  You're bound to find something that rubs you the wrong way, doesn' work, and compels you to write about it.  Even if, as she also points out, in the end, nobody will really pay attention to what you have to say.

These days, when I write a review, I try to have something interesting to say about whatever the subject is. That's why there isn't a review posted every Friday.  Something's got to strike my fancy somehow, either by being brilliant or flawed, but I won't think twice about saying I think something sucks.  I just hope I have good enough reasons to make somebody else think, "yeah, all right."  Agreement, of course, is not required.

So I think the answer is yes, we do need negative book reviews.  Whether we need "bad" reviews is, of course, a completely different question.

What I've Been Up To

Hello again, gentle reader(s). In case anybody's wondering where I've been and what I've been up to the past couple of months, here's the info.

Largely, things have been quiet here at FTS because I haven't had a lot to say about what's going on in the world. There's only so many times you can look at political bullshit going on in the world and say, "is't that some political bullshit?" The powers that be provide us with lots of said excrement, but its not really worth talking about.

For the past month I've largely directed my creative energies toward National Novel Writing Month, as usual. This year was different because my project for Nano was a sequel. The Endless Hills is book two of the trilogy that began with The Water Road back in 2009. That tome, along with last year's project, Moore Hollow, are both to the point where I'm ready to do something with them, but I'm not sure what that something should be.

When I started writing fiction in earnest several years ago I never really gave any thought to what would happen when I had a "finished" product.  I didn't do it to find a new career or seek stardom, although it would be nice for people (aside from my lovely, supportive, and insightful wife) to read the stuff.  To the extent that I started with short stories the process there is pretty straightforward - finish story, polish 'til it gleams, submit it directly to magazine/website/anthology. No muss, no fuss, but plenty of rejection.

Speaking of short stories, I've joined an online critique group, Critters, that caters to writers of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.  The deal is that in return for reading and critiquing the work of others, they do the same for you.  I've found it extremely helpful, particularly reading what other people are writing.  It forces you to think critically about a story, what its trying to do, how it might do it, etc.  That really carries over to your own writing.  The feedback I've gotten on a couple of short stories has been very helpful.

I also got a chance to take in my first West Virginia Writers conference up in Elkins. It was a good chance to hang out with like minded folks and learn some good stuff.  It certainly won't be my last.

But back to publishing novels, which is a whole different story from shorts. If you want to publish with one of the big houses, you need to get an agent first. That means sending queries and manuscripts out all over the place and hoping they connect. If you are interested in working with a smaller press you can submit directly to them, but the query/manuscript process is largely the same (frustratingly, just about everybody does it a little bit differently). Either route will give you what most people think of as "real" publishing - an editor, cover designer, layout specialists, and all that. It's the gold standard.

On the other hand there's the increasingly respectable avenue of self publishing, particularly in electronic (Kindle, etc.) format and particularly in the sci-fin/fantasy ghetto in which I live. The author retains completely control (and a bigger cut of sales), but you have to either contract out all the work a publisher normally does or do it yourself, which opens up all kinds of potential problems. In addition, marketing primarily electronic books seems like a real effort. All in all, I'm not sure I'm up for it.

Regardless, any decision on which way to go (or to go one way with one book and another with the other) is put off until the first draft of The Endless Hills is done. It's a bit more complex than The Water Road. That book only had two main characters with stories that paralleled each other. This one's got about eight "main" characters, many of which converge at one point, but many others don't. Lots of plates to keep spinning!

Musically, I've got a song in the can that needs mixed and given a new name. The working title is too stupid, even for me. It starts out heavily indebted to OMD's "The New Stone Age," but then goes in a different direction. I've also embarked on a cover of "Kashmir," so we'll see how that goes.

That's it. Regular service (or semi-regular, at least), resumes next week.

I've Been a Bit Busy

Ahem.

50,317 words for November. If it's predecessor was any indication, there's about 85,000 words left to go before a first draft is done.  Nonetheless, it feels good to set a goal and meet it.

More details on this project, and others, in a few days.

Until then, hooray for me!

Quick Hits, of a Mostly Familiar Nature

Here are a few brief stories that caught my attention while I was away getting’ matrimonyed. A couple of them tap into things I’ve written about before, so they’re a bit familiar. I’m working my way back into things, obviously.

Public Art for Fun & Profit

Back in April I wrote about the latest example of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t public art that was creating a stir. In that case, it was a Banksy mural in the London neighborhood of Harringey that appeared, as much of his stuff does, overnight. Several months later it disappeared just as suddenly. At the time, there were issues over who removed the mural and what it’s fate might be.

Flash forward to last Sunday, when “Slave Labor (Bunting Boy)” fetched a cool $1.1 million at a private auction in London. That came after an initial auction in Miami was scuttled at the behest of the Harringey town counsel. Not surprisingly, the ones selling the mural were the owners of Wood Green Investments, who owned the building upon which it was installed. They were entirely within their rights to do so.

Art Is Not the Artist

I’ve argued before that it’s best to separate an artist from his art. I don’t really begrudge people who can’t or won’t do that, but I think it’s a bit short sighted. You cut yourself off from a lot of interesting art if it all has to pass through some kind of ethical litmus test. Besides, on a practical level, I’d rather you not read what I write because it sucks instead of the fact that I’m a Democrat/atheist/prog fan/DC United supporter.

Here’s a recent example of where getting up on your high horse might not be that good of an idea. A grad student at Northwestern, a member of the University Chorale, objected to being required to perform a particular piece, Howard Hansen’s Song of Democracy. Not because it was too difficult or aesthetically poor, but because the lyrics for that piece were taken from a Walt Whitman poem and Whitman, as were many of his contemporaries, was a big-time racist. The professor threatened to fail the student, but it’s unclear how the dispute was resolved.

It’s one thing to object to performing something that in and of itself is racists, sexists, whatever. But backing up further and requiring ethical purity from the original author is composer is really asking for trouble. As my friend who was recently-doctored in conducting pointed out, such a litmus test would eliminate most of the cannon of established Western music.

I’d go on to argue it would do the same with art, literature, and nearly any other endeavor. And while nobody can take away your right to take umbrage at such things, aren’t there more important things to worry about than whether the lyricist of a song you have to sing in class was a douchebag a century and a half ago?

Oh My, Sexy Werewolves! In Prison!

Finally, here’s a fun story that actually raises important issues of free speech and criminal justice. An inmate in California has won the right to possess (and read, presumably) a book called The Silver Crown. Why did he have to go to court in the first place?

The 262-page novel tells the story of Iris, a werewolf hunter who ends up falling in love with one of her prey. The book contains ‘a great number of graphic sexual encounters, one per chapter through most of the book, including detailed descriptions of intercourse, sodomy, oral-genital contact, oral-anal contact, voyeurism, exhibitionism and ménage à trois. Semen is mentioned,’ Richman wrote.

The judge also notes that the book doesn’t advocate or advance violence and the sex isn’t really all that weird and doesn’t include, for example, bestiality (unless, the judge explains, you include the werewolves!).

Prisons generally aren’t keen on letting inmates have possession of sexually-related materials. The wife used to tell me about dealing with those kinds of regulations during her days at Borders. So it’s a bit of a pleasant surprise to see a court not simply bow down to the prison’s regulations.

But what’s really amusing is that you can tell the judge wasn’t all that happy about having to deal with The Silver Crown in the first place:

’Personally, we would be hard-pressed to say The Silver Crown has ‘significant’ literary value and is a work ‘of great import,’ Richman wrote. But, he concluded, ‘we cannot simply dismiss the work as nonserious literature because it deals with werewolves and other paranormal creatures and activities. For better or worse, some segment of the population is fascinated by werewolves and other mythical beings. ... Werewolves, in fact, have played a role in popular fiction for centuries.’

I’m not sure anyone who writes about himself in the third person gets to knock anybody else’s literary choices.

Keeping Copyright Meaningful

Over the weekend, Scott Turow had a column in the New York Times about the “death of the American author.” Although it begins with a jab at the Supreme Court for its recent decision strengthening the first sale doctrine (link), his broader point is that various forces – illegal downloaders and pirates, in particular – are weakening the real value of copyright. In baser terms, the situation is making it harder and harder for authors to get paid.

I’m sympathetic to Turow’s larger point. I dream, someday, of actually getting paid for writing fiction, so I’d like to think the legal apparatus to ensure those (equally fictional, at this point) payments will roll in. But I’m not sure the targets of Turow’s ire are quite correct. He points to various search engines that, when you search for an author or book title, will pull up numerous places to illegally download said titles. That’s troubling, but what else do you expect search engines to do?

The bigger problem is that there’s a market out there for people who want to access books (or other copyrighted materials) without paying for them. Putting aside cheap bastards who will always take a free version of something rather than paying for it (and who will always find a way to do it), why are people willing to go through the hassle (not to mention the legal exposure) or downloading something illegally from the Web rather than pay for it?

One reason might be that when the general public hears the word “copyright” they don’t think of the authors or other creative types whose income is tied to the protection of their intellectual property. More likely, they think of huge faceless corporations who wield copyright as a sword, not to protect the creative types, but to boost their own bottom line. Think of the old Napster lawsuits by the RIAA, bringing down the full force of the law and the Lord God on teenagers and college students who downloaded a few songs.

Or, consider the tale of Jayne’s hat.

Even in the world of sci-fi fandom, Firefly – a show that only produced 13 episodes, only nine of which were ever broadcast – has developed a fierce, loyal following.* That following has never particularly liked Fox, the network that originally aired it and, in the eyes of most, handled it in a way to ensure its early death. That the show is even talked about today, 11 years after broadcast, has nothing to do with Fox’s bungling and everything to do with the cast and crew that produced the show.

In one episode, Jayne – a gun thug with a heart of tin – gets a package from his mom. It’s not the most interesting package in the episode (two other character are gifted with what appears to be a dead body), but it’s a nice character moment. Jayne’s mom made him a hat:

Nice hat, yes? Many fans of the show thought so. As a result, after the show went off the air and the film sequel Serenity came and went, various crafty people made some and sold them on the Net (for a very detailed explanation of all this, see here). Everything’s good, right?

Except that Fox, after years of doing nothing, has allowed a company to license the hats and sell them. As a result, the DIYers have gotten nasty letters from Fox lawyers:

Turns out in the last few weeks many of them have received cease-and-desist letters or have simply been banned from Etsy for producing DIY Jayne Hats. This communal endeavor, it seems, is coming to a close, and fans of the show are asking themselves why. Isn't the whole point of the Jayne hat that it be homemade? Doesn't it mean anything that the hats are often auctioned off at charity events? After 10 years of nothing, isn't it unfair for Fox to suddenly force lifelong fans to cease production of something they love?

It’s all perfectly legal, of course:

And the answer, for now, is that Fox owns the license and that's that. The fans who are mad that the hat was licensed for mass production are the ones who are closest to hitting the nail on the head. The fact is, Fox now has a legal obligation to its shareholders -- they have to chase down anyone producing and selling a licensed product without permission. Ripple Junction holds the license, the fans do not.

But isn’t it kind of a dick move? Here’s the megacorp that killed the show in the first place, showing up a decade after the fact to capitalize not on its own success, but on the cult that thrived in spite of Fox’s neglect.

For most people, most fans, most consumers of entertainment products, that’s the face of modern copyright law. It’s not about authors, musicians, or artists trying to get paid for their work. It’s about corporations like Fox cracking down on fans and Disney lobbying Congress to extend copyright terms every time Mickey Mouse nears the border of the public domain. Is it any wonder that they see finger wagging about illegal downloads as more of the same?

One of the things I learned in laws school – I assume Turow did, too – is that sometimes the best advice a lawyer can give his client is to not fully pursue their legal rights. Sometimes there are other concerns – public relations, long-term planning, just plain doing good – that weigh against treating every problem like a hammer that needs to be relentlessly pounded.

Maybe Fox and the other corporate copyright holders should play a longer game and worry about what they’re actions do to the public’s perception of copyright. Ultimately, that may do more good than inveighing mightily against overseas pirates and the potential customers who frequent them.

* That’s because it’s fucking awesome!

A Rose By Any Other Name? Sadly, No

As a frustrated writer of short fiction, I’ve become all too familiar with the form rejection. It’s frustrating. It’s also par for the course for an (essentially) unpublished writer. Everybody has to start somewhere, right?

Still, it can be awfully compelling, when receiving the dozenth rejection of a particular story, to think that maybe something else it as work here. Surely, the problem isn’t that your writing simply isn’t good enough. It’s because you’re not a big name, right? It’s enough to almost make you want to buy into this “experiment” reported over at Slate.

Writer and editor David Cameron (not the British Prime Minister, for the record) came up with a clever ruse:

I grabbed a New Yorker story off the web (no, it wasn't by Alice Munro or William Trevor), copied it into a Word document, changed only the title, created a fictitious author identity, and submitted it to a slew of literary journals, all of whom regularly grace the TOC of Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, O’Henry, etcetera and etcetera. My cover letter simply stated that I am an unpublished writer deeply appreciative of their consideration.

The result shouldn’t be all that surprising – Cameron’s story got summarily rejected:

Dear reader, every single one of these journals rejected my poor New Yorker story with the same boilerplate ‘good luck placing your work elsewhere’ auto-text that has put the lid on my own sorry submissions. Not a single personal pleasantry. What’s more, the timeframes tracked perfectly. For example, if the Beavercreek Fucknut Bulletin (not a real journal, but representative) generally takes thirty days to relegate my stuff to the recycle bin, then our New Yorker story—which must have been thoroughly confused at this point—fared no better.

For the record, I’m giving serious consideration to starting the Beavercreek Fucknut Bulletin, or at least printing up T-shirts.

The ultimate insult, however, was that even the New Yorker itself rejected the story, without any hint that the rejection was due to the fact that the story had, in fact, already been published.

As the Slate piece mentions, Cameron’s experiment is not exactly breaking new ground:

There was the guy who sent Jane Austen novels to several U.K. publishers five years ago, as if it made sense to write 19th-century-style fiction in 2007. (Even assuming that some of the publishers did not recognize, e.g., Pride and Prejudice—which I doubt—it would still read like pastiche, and not very interesting pastiche.) There was the other guy who sent part of a lesser Jerzy Kosinski novel around [more on that here – JDB]. That same guy (and they are all, for some reason, guys) submitted the script of Casablanca to a bunch of movie agents—as if the movie business had not changed a whit since 1942, and those agents who were foolish enough not to recognize the classic dialogue were proving some point about how the people at the top have no idea what they’re doing.

Thus, it’s hardly news that the name attached to a story might help it find a publisher. After all, what’s going to sell more copies or trigger more downloads, a fresh story by Neil Gaiman or John Scalzi? Or some story by a schmuck lawyer who writes fiction in his spare time that nobody’s ever heard of? After all, most markets I’m familiar with want to know what other publishing credits you’ve notched up. If the pure merit of the story was enough to get it published, why should they care?

The bigger issue, of course, is why a name is so important when it comes to art? Why doesn’t the work itself stand on its own merit? Consider the saga of Teri Horton.

Horton, a retired long-haul trucker, bought a painting for $5 in a thrift shop as a joke gift to give to a friend. It was too big to fit into the friend’s house, however, so it lived in Horton’s garage until an art teacher spied it and wondered if it was a Jackson Pollock. Horton’s response - “who the fuck’s Jackson Pollock?” – gave the title to a documentary about her later crusade to establish the painting’s authenticity and, more importantly, it’s value. If it’s really a Pollock, it’s worth millions. If not, it isn’t.

But here’s the thing – either you like the painting or you don’t. I happen to like Pollock’s style and those who followed (K, the fiancé, most definitely does not – can this marriage me saved?). While there’s something to be said for going back to the source, at the end of the day the quality should stand on its own. Right?

Of course, I’m guilty of this myself. Take this, from my review of the latest Marillion album, Sounds That Can’t Be Made:

Sounds That Can’t Be Made is a pretty good record. Admittedly, I’m a fanboy, so even bad Marillion album (I’m looking at you, Holidays in Eden) ranks pretty high compared to the rest of the world. But it’s not amongst their best work and, in 2012, that means it’s pretty far down the table.

In other words, had a band other than Marillion (say, maybe, the Beavercreek Fucknut Bulletin) made that album I’d have liked the album better. That’s the flipside of blessing it with higher esteem because of the name attached to it. I’m no better than the slush pile readers Cameron was trying to tweak.

Which should not be a surprise. We all try and make a “name” for ourselves, after all. Writers are no different. Heck, I pimp my one measly credit for all it’s worth. Not because it’s required or expected, but because I want to suggest that, just maybe, I’m not full of shit with this writing thing. Unfortunately, the nature of the business means that the only way I’ll ever find out if that’s true is if someone out there looks past the name (or lack thereof) and falls in love with something I’ve written.

Hey, a guy can still dream, can’t he?

Every Ubiquitous Tool Starts Somewhere

Anybody else remember Bank Street Writer? It was the first word processor I ever used, way back in elementary school on my Commodore 64. It had a few menus and was kind of WYSIWYG, but only in the most generous sense. Nonetheless, I knew enough about typewriters from playing around with my grandfather’s to realize that this was a step in the right direction.

At least Bank Street Writer fit on the desk in my room, though. That was not always the case:

Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. ‘Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,’ the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. ‘I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.’

Len Deighton was already a best-selling author in 1968 when an IBM tech, who repaired his typewriters, suggested he try their new contraption. It was just barely a “word processor” – when the technology was being developed it was labeled Textverarbeitung (“text processing”) by a German IBM executive – but it was pretty impressive, recording keystrokes on magnetic tape and replaying them at a rate of 150 words per minute.*

Not surprisingly, the first to master the MTST was Deighton’s assistant, Ellenor Handley:

In an email, Handley, now 73 and retired, detailed her role in Deighton’s writing process. ‘When I started Len was using an IBM Golfball machine to type his drafts,’ she wrote. ‘He would then hand-write changes on the hard copy which I would then update as pages or chapters as necessary by retyping—time-consuming perhaps but I quite liked it, as I felt a real part of the process and grew with the book.’

And, thus, the first novel written on a word processor, Bomber, about a World War II bombing raid, was born (the technological equal to Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, the first book submitted in typewritten form).

What’s amazing is not just how far the actual technology has come since the MTST was hauled up through Deighton’s window, but how ubiquitous word processing is. I write for a living and for pleasure, so I spend more time in Word than just about any other program (Word Perfect is a tool of the devil!). But even if you don’t write for a living, you use it all the time. The conventions of word processing software have even seeped out into other applications, such that we don’t give much thought any more to changing a font or running a spell check on an Email.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine what the next leap in technology could be that would sweep the word processor from the scene. Maybe some kind of neural link where the writer could simply download the contents of his mind to the page? No typing, no shuffling the mouse about. I might be down to try that, so long as I don’t have to take out a part of my house to fit it in.

* Interesting “small world” note: Deighton later wrote another book about World War II, specifically the Battle of Britain, called Fighter. Said German executive had fought in that battle, for the Luftwaffe, of course.

How Not to Make a Point

I’ve never heard of writer Akram Aylisli, nor do I know whether his books are any good. But I want to go buy one, just to honk off the authoritarians in his native Azerbaijan.

Aylisli’s latest work is a novella called Stone Dreams, which deals with an uncomfortable part of Azerbaijan’s recent history, it’s war with Armenian over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the country (in which a majority of folks were ethnic Armenians). The war was bloody, lasted more than six years, and led to allegations of atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

Aylisi’s novella examines the issue of atrocities and shows some sympathy for the Armenians:

Aylisli, who could not be reached Tuesday, told Radio Liberty two weeks ago that he dwelt on Azeri atrocities in ‘Stone Dreams’ because that was his responsibility as an Azerbaijani writer. Let Armenian authors, he said, write about the atrocities of their side — notably, a 1992 massacre in the town of Khojaly, the memory of which has become a major rallying point for aggrieved Azeris.

Sounds reasonable to me. After all, art is frequently about confronting people with the uncomfortable parts of their past, not just to make such things known, but to force people to think about where they came from and what they’re doing going forward. People may not want to read it, of course, but that’s the market for you.

Not in Azerbaijan, however, where Aylisli has had a price put on his head, or at least one part of it:

Azerbaijan’s troubled efforts to portray itself as a progressive and Western-oriented country took a beating this week with the announcement by a pro-government political party that it will pay $12,700 to anyone who cuts off the ear of a 75-year-old novelist.

But wait, as they say – there’s more. Aylisli has been stripped of the title “People’s Writer,” his books have been burned, and his son lost his job. In addition, the parliament has called for a DNA test to see if Aylisli is really Azerbaijani. None of those things screams “civilized,” but for pure tone deafness, this is hard to top:

But on Monday the head of the Modern Musavat party, Hafiz Hajiyev, told the Turan Information Agency that the time has come for Aylisli to be punished for portraying Azerbaijanis as savages.

‘We have to cut off his ear,’ Hajiyev said.

‘cause nothing says “we’re not savages” like cutting of some guys ear because he wrote a book you don’t like.

Make no mistake, if you don’t like something a writer says, by all means, say that. Organize protests. Hell, organize a boycott for all I care. The correct response to speech you don’t like is more speech, not cutting off body parts. That should go without saying. That it doesn’t in the 21st Century makes me want to crawl into a fetal position and weep for a bit.

Changing Facts, Not Changing Histories

This will not come as a shock to most people, but things change. More than that, our perceptions of things change. That’s particularly true of historical events, things that happen at a particular point in time. First impressions are often shaped by incomplete reporting, faulty eyewitness testimony, and the modern journalistic need to get the story right the fuck now, before the bastards down the street get it. It’s only after some time has passed, when the situation is examined comprehensively and with more distance that we get a better idea of what actually happened.

Take, for example, the unfortunate fate of Kitty Genovese.

In the early morning hours March 13, 1964, Genovese was returning from work in New York City. She was attacked, raped, and stabbed to death near her apartment building. As sad, brutal, and horrific as Genovese’s death was, that’s probably not why the name means anything to you these days (if it does at all).

Genovese’s name became widely known thanks to a reporter named A.M. Rosenthal:

It was a gruesome story that made perfect tabloid fodder, but soon it became much more. Mr. Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who would go on to become the executive editor of The New York Times, was then a new and ambitious metropolitan editor for the paper who happened to be having lunch with the police commissioner 10 days after the crime. The commissioner mentioned that 38 people had witnessed the murder, and yet no one had come to Ms. Genovese’s aid or called the police.

Mr. Rosenthal quickly mapped out a series of articles centered around a tale of community callousness, and then followed in June with his quick-turnaround book, published by McGraw-Hill. National and international interest in the issue spiked, and soon the Kitty Genovese case became a sociological phenomenon studied intensely for clues to behavioral indifference.

Rosenthal turned his reporting into a book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, which was published only three months after the murders. It was a hit and became the go-to reference for information about the case.

Over the years, as we’ve learned more about the Genovese case, we’ve learned that a lot of the initial sensational claims about the “38 witnesses” probably isn’t true:

But over time the basic facts were called into question. As early as 1984 The Daily News published an article pointing to flaws in the reporting. In 2004 The Times did its own summation of the critical research, showing that since Ms. Genovese crawled around to the back of the building after she was stabbed the first time (her assailant fled and returned) very few people would have seen anything.

The article quoted among others Charles E. Skoller, the former Queens assistant district attorney who helped prosecute the case and who also has written a book on it. ‘I don’t think 38 people witnessed it,’ said Mr. Skoller, who had retired by the time of the interview. ‘I don’t know where that came from, the 38. I didn’t count 38. We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use.’ There were other mitigating factors as well; it was a cold night, and most people had their windows closed.

‘Maybe only five people were in the position to hear her calls, if even that many, and knew what was going on,’ said Kevin Cook, an author who is currently researching the case for a book of his own and trying to determine exactly who knew what.

In and of itself, that’s no problem. Our understanding of history changes all the time, revision in light of new evidence is a good thing. But in the modern era, it brings to mind a potential problem – what should be done with books like Rosenthal’s when they are reprinted?

The issue arises because Rosenthal’s book is being reissued in digital formats without any kind of correction or updating:

Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House, said he knew about the controversy but decided to stand behind Mr. Rosenthal’s account. ‘There are, notably, works of fraud where revising or withdrawing the book is possible or even recommended, but this is not one of those cases,’ he said. ‘This is a matter of historical record. This is a reprint of reporting done for The New York Times by one the great journalists of the 20th century. We understand there are people taking issue with it, but this is not something we think needs to be corrected.’

I tend to agree with Johnson. There’s no need to change books, particularly nonfiction ones, simply because the information in them becomes outdated. Not only does that carry some nasty Orwellian overtones, but it also ignores the value of such books as historical and archaeological objects. Future readers, whether amateurs or scholars, need access to original works in the state in which they were originally consumed in order to assess their impact on a particular time period or to use as a case study in how the understanding of an event changes over time. It’s worth noting, as Johnson hints, that regardless of whether Rosenthal’s initial reporting was wrong, it wasn’t fraudulent in the sense that he made it up out of whole cloth. He used imperfect information to produce what is, in hindsight, an imperfect work.

So I don’t think publishers have an obligation to make changes to an outdated work. It would be helpful to new readers and the general understanding of the public if, perhaps, a foreword or afterword were added explaining developments since the original book was published. After all, nobody who went out to buy a copy of Plato’s Republic would spend good money on one that just contained the original text, or even an old translation. You’d expect some context and analysis, apart from the work itself.

It’s an interesting question, but hardly a new one. We don’t expect the works of Josephus to be as accurate as more modern works on the same subjects written with two millennia worth of new information. It doesn’t mean they’re worthless. But it does make the artifacts and readers need to realize that.

Bottom line – always check the publishing date. You never know how much more you have to learn about something if you don’t.

How Not to Promote Your Book

Hopefully, at some point, I’ll get to the point where I have a novel completely finished, polished, and ready to be published. Then will come the time to promote it, which I’m sure will be hell. How does one bring attention to their work in the 21st Century? History shows us that presidential assassination is no way to promote the sales of your book. Now my colleagues over at the Ninth Circuit Blog have helpfully pointed out another unacceptable means of promotion.

In the wake of 9/11, Mark Keyser wrote a book about the dangers of anthrax called Anthrax: Shock and Awe Terror. Unable to find a publisher, he went the DIY route, putting together a CD with his book on it. That’s when things got weird. As the Ninth Circuit explained:

In an attempt to secure publicity for the book, Keyser mailed a package to the Sacramento News & Review in 2007. The package contained a letter, a CD containing Keyser’s book, and a small spray can with a label stating ‘ANTHRAX’ and displaying a biohazard symbol. The package prompted employees to call 911 and to evacuate the building, and numerous emergency agencies responded.

It worked, after a fashion. The incident got the attention of the FBI, which sent agents to talk to Keyser and explain to him the trouble it all caused and told him not to do it again. Keyser agreed that he wouldn’t.

But you know where this is going, right?

The next year, Keyser sent out approximately 120 packages to various news outlets, elected officials, and businesses. The materials sent to news outlets and elected officials were placed in business envelopes. They contained a CD printed with a picture of Colin Powell, the book title, and Keyser’s name. The CD contained over half of the contents of Keyser’s book. He attached a white sugar packet to the front of the CD with the sugar markings covered by a label stating ‘Anthrax’ in large letters, ‘Sample’ in smaller letters, and an orange and black biohazard symbol.

The materials sent to businesses were placed in purple greeting card envelopes. They contained a card with the same Colin Powell picture and ‘Anthrax’ sugar packet on the front and a short blurb about the book inside. The card directed recipients to visit a website to learn more about the book.

This time, Keyser was charged criminally as a result of packages sent to a California Congressman, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks. He was convicted on five counts and sentenced to 51 months in prison. His convictions stood on appeal, although the court vacated his sentence due to a miscalculation of the Sentencing Guidelines.

Keyser’s most novel argument was that his promotional scheme was protected by the First Amendment. The court disagreed, finding that the mailings constituted true threats and that Keyser at least knew they could be interpreted that way:

We also conclude, after reviewing the record as a whole, that Keyser had the requisite subjective intent to threaten when he mailed the packages to McDonald’s and Starbucks. At trial, Keyser testified that he was not trying to scare the people who received his packages and letters, and that he did not want people to believe the packets actually contained anthrax. However, he did agree at trial that he knew that some people ‘might at least briefly be concerned that maybe this is real anthrax.’ He also stated that he intended the packets to be ‘provocative’ and wanted people to have ‘a reaction’ and be ‘concerned about the danger we’re in.’ He testified that he was not trying to cause a panic, but agreed that attracting attention to the book ‘was definitely worth it even if people were frightened.’

One of the agents who interviewed Keyser after his arrest testified that Keyser said, ‘Well, I did want it to cause concern. I wanted to cause a buzz.’ Keyser also told him that ‘[h]e wanted people to believe they had received a sample of Anthrax; that they wanted him [sic] to have the visceral reaction to seeing it so it would drive his message home.’ The same agent reported that Keyser expressed that he expected the FBI to contact him after he sent out his 2008 mailings.

He was certainly right on that score. Regardless of what sentence Keyser ultimately receives on remand, one would think he might have learned his lesson at this point. But as the Ninth Circuit Blog points out:

Quoting Protestant reform leader Martin Luther, Keyser refused to recant: ‘I neither can nor will make any retraction, since it is neither safe nor honorable to act against conscience.’

Presumably the sequel to Anthrax: Shock and Awe Terror will be nailed to a set of big wooden doors somewhere. That would not be the worst promotional idea I have ever seen:

The Narrow Margin

I’ve done NaNoWriMo* five times now. The goal of NaNo, of course, is to produce 50,000 words in a month, either as a complete novel or as the sizeable beginning of one. In prior years when I’ve won, I came to December knowing that, while NaNo was over, the draft wasn’t. One pushed on to over 85,000 words, another to 135,000 (another still crashed and burned shortly after NaNo ended).

Going into NaNo this year I knew it would be a bit different. My project for this year, Moore Hollow, began as a short story idea that quickly spiraled into something bigger. I figured it would be complete at about the 50,000 word mark, but didn’t quite realize how close it was going to be:

. . . by 306 words! And that came only after I went back and punched up a scene with a little more detail. I actually considered calling it complete just shy of the 50,000 mark. It still would have been a novel, for SFWA purposes (which makes 40,000 the Rubicon), but I’m glad I went back. I think that scene works better now.

So what is Moore Hollow about, anyway? It’s about a British investigative journalist, fallen on hard times, with family ties to West Virginia. He heads down into the coal fields to investigate a story about a local election in the early part of the 20th Century in which, well let’s just say, some strange things occurred. What he finds out and, more importantly, what he does with that information, is the heart of the book.

Is it any good? Hard to say. I should have a better idea when I whip through the second draft early in 2013.

* AKA National Novel Writing Month

Check Your Calendars

Yes, friends, if you’ll look to your monthly time keeping tool of choice, you’ll see that it’s almost November. In addition to the thankful end of the interminable election campaign, that also means it’s time for . . .

That’s right, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, during which intrepid souls like myself attempt to produce a novel (or at least the first 50,000 words of it). This will be the fifth year I’ve taken part.

Which means that, like last year, Feeding the Silence will essentially go dark for the month. Focusing on the novel writing last year got me to the NaNo goal of 50,000 words, even though the project cratered shortly thereafter. As it happens, the idea I was working on last year was really more of a short story thing than a novel. I still need to go back and salvage the good parts.

Ironically, this year is flipped around, with my NaNo project being something I originally tried to flesh out as a short story. I think it will work much better in a longer format, so we’ll see.

What’s it about? Let’s just say it plays on the idea that, historically, many West Virginia elections have involved the participation of the dearly departed. But that’s just the underlying idea – we’ll see how it all pans out.

Wish me luck and I’ll see y’all in December!

On Genre Snobbery

Stephen King certainly doesn’t need defending by the likes of me, but sometimes the guy doing the attacking is flailing so miserably that you just can’t help but join the fray, even belatedly.

I should start out by saying that I’m not a particular fan of King’s stuff. My initial exposure to him was the bad movies that were made out of several of his books while I was around high school age (Cujo and Pet Sematary, for instance). They all seemed so stupid (full disclosure – horror’s not really my bag to begin with) that I couldn’t imagine the books were much better.

In college, however, a couple of friends who were fans suggested I actually try reading some of his books. So I scarfed down Misery and The Stand and a few others. I quickly figured out why movies based on King’s books turned out so lousy – his strength as a writer was in description, set up, and cultivating a powerful feeling of dread. You just can’t take that kind of thing, plop it on the big screen, and expect it to work. It’s probably not a coincidence that my favorite King on film work is Kubrick’s version of The Shining, which King himself disliked so much he made his own TV version many years later.

That being said, back to the flailing lashing out man. In this case, it’s Dwight Allen, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books back in July (via). It’s a long, tragic tale of how, after decades of not reading any of King’s stuff on principle (Allen litters the piece with the names of the literary gods whose work he does read, don’t worry), he finally gave in and picked up a few of King’s lesser works. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t much care for them, although I’m not sure how anyone going in with this kind of attitude would have reached a different conclusion:

I thought I’d try another King novel, a later one, to see if his writing had changed over the years. I was avoiding, I admit, what was then King’s very latest, 11/22/63, in part because it is so long (more than 800 pages) and despite the praise it had received in, for instance, the New York Times Book Review (the editors decided it was one of the five best books of fiction of 2011) and The New Yorker (‘a deeply felt and often well-realized work, which extends King’s dominion over fantasy to the terrain of the historical record,’ Thomas Mallon wrote).

So I went to the library and took out The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), which ran to a mere 220 pages. I liked the title — I am a baseball fan — though I wondered how many readers (diehard Red Sox fans aside) picking up the book in 2012 would recognize the name Tom Gordon (a.k.a. Flash Gordon, a relief pitcher who thrived in the nineties)

To be fair, Allen eventually does get to 11/22/63, but by that point the damage was done. It’s a bit like saying “I really ought to give Beethoven a try, but those symphonies are so gosh darned long. Maybe I’ll try a piano etude.” You’re setting yourself up to fail.

Which would be perfectly all right, if Allen was content to say, “this isn’t for me,” and walk away. Instead, he loudly protests that he’s not really a snob about this stuff, when he pretty obviously is. Thus, we’re no longer dealing in matters of taste, but in metaphysical battles of quality. Any doubt is wiped away in the last paragraph:

My son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

See, unlike you, dear reader of genre fiction (or, horror of horrors, purveyor of it!), George has evolved to a higher state of being. He no longer reads for the joy of it, but only to uncover revealed truths about life. He is, along with his father, a better class of human than the rest of us.

Buried deep in the piece, we find that Allen’s problem with King may stem from the fact that King tends to write genre fiction. We can assume Allen is not a fan:

I dabbled in science fiction, if Stanislaw Lem and Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood can be counted as science fiction writers.

Oh, yes, why would an author whose best known work is about scientists exploring a distant planet that appears to be sentient qualify as “science fiction?” Or whose best known work involves time travel and alien abductions? Or even one whose best known work is a vivid portrayal of the kind of dystopian theocracy that seems to shape so many modern right-wing fantasies? As I’ve written before, it’s sci-fi, deal with it.

I think that, at bottom, is what wound me up so much about Allen’s critique and others like it. As a genre writer myself, I’d like to think that anyone reading my stuff doesn’t give it two strikes out of the gate just because of that fact. If it’s not your thing, that’s fine. Just don’t shit on others for whom it is. Or worse, try to redefine the stuff you can’t avoid liking as something that it’s not.

Besides, if you only read stuff that is “sentence by sentence, a revelation about life” how do you get around in the world? Aren’t you too busy being transformed to actually, you know, work for a living?

Bloggus Interuptus

As you’ve no doubt realized, things have been a little slow ‘round these parts the past few weeks. In large part, that’s because I’m nearing the end of the second draft of The Water Road (which has sprouted several thousand more words in the process). I’m pushing to finish that and turn around to immediately begin a third draft, the hard red-pen-in-hand phase.

As a result, I’m going to step away from the blog for a few weeks, at least until that process is well underway. Plus, I’ve got some other business to focus my attention on in the next couple of weeks.

Be back soon!

Theft, Homage, or Just Business?

Sometimes, a piece of genre fiction is just so damned good, it forces the snobs in the wider world to take notice. 2001 is recognized as not just a great piece of science fiction, but as a great film. Likewise, Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is such a landmark in that genre that it gets props from those who would never otherwise dare to talk of superheroes and comic books.

Which doesn’t mean it exists outside the demands of commerce. Earlier this month, DC Comics announced it would release a series of “prequel” issues, several for each of some of Watchmen’s main characters – Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan ,and Rorschach, for instance – none of them written by Moore or with art by Gibbons. The artist, at least, is on board:

The company has also enlisted the blessing of Gibbons, a move that should mollify many fans. ‘The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire,’ he said in his statement.

As for the writer, Moore? Yeah, well, not so much:

Mr. Moore, who has disassociated himself from DC Comics and the industry at large, called the new venture ‘completely shameless.’

Speaking by telephone from his home in Northampton, England, Mr. Moore said, ‘I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.’

He went on to explain that he didn’t want money, what he wanted was for the prequels not to happen.

I can understand Moore’s position. After all, when you create something and see it as a whole work, and later on somebody comes along and adds to it, it must chafe a little bit. Still, does Moore really have any basis upon which to get pissy about it?

One of the writers involved in the prequels is J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame. He makes a very good point about Moore:

it should be pointed out that Alan has spent most of the last decade writing very good stories about characters created by other writers, including Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz), Wendy (from Peter Pan), as well as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde, and Professor Moriarty (used in the successful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I think one loses a little of the moral high ground to say, ‘I can write characters created by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frank Baum, but it’s wrong for anyone else to write my characters.’

Indeed, the characters of Watchmen itself did not spring from Moore’s brain fully formed. They were based on characters DC had acquired when it purchased a defunct competitor, Charlton Comics. Moore took them and twisted them beyond recognition, but still, he wasn’t exactly writing on a completely blank slate.

Moore has an answer for Straczynski:

In literature, I would say that it’s different. I would say, and it might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon’s Mines. What I am doing is stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing the characters, which, as long as everybody’s dead or you don’t mention the names, is perfectly alright by me. I’m not trying to be glib here, I genuinely do feel that in literature you’ve got a tradition that goes back to Jason And The Argonauts of combining literary characters [...] It’s just irresistible to do these fictional mash-ups. They’ve been going on for hundreds of years and I feel I’m a part of a proud literary tradition in doing that. With taking comic characters that have been created by cheated old men, I feel that that is different.

On the one hand, I see Moore’s point. Writers, and other artists, have pilfered past works for their own creations since the beginning of time (well, right after the beginning of time), after all. And, as a writer myself, I like the idea of other people keeping their hands off until I croak. On the other hand, that sounds more like a rule of etiquette than a hard ethical precept. Let’s face it, once the original creator is dead, he or she is much less likely to complain about appropriation.

In the end, it’s all moot. Neither Moore nor Gibbons control the legal rights to the work, sadly. Which means that DC is free to do whatever the hell they want to. Given the nature of the comic book industry, with its endless series and countless reboots, getting some other big names to play in that sandbox is hardly a unique move.

So let’s hold off until we see whether they fuck up the legacy of Watchmen. And how badly.

Beware the Flying Snowman

There’s a scene in Dogma, Kevin Smith’s religious satire, where Rufus, the overlooked thirteenth apostle, explains to Brittany, the film’s heroine, that she is the last descendent of Christ. She objects:

Bethany: Jesus didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Mary was a virgin.

Rufus: Mary gave birth to Christ without having known a man's touch, that’s true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he'd have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn’t getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that’s just plain gullibility.

That’s the first thing that popped into my head when I read this post by John Scalzi. It stems from the kind of argument only a geek could love – whether the way Gollum dies in The Return of the King lacks realism because the lava that consumes him doesn’t work the way physics says it should. Scalzi makes the reasonable objection that, in a movie filled with fantastic elements that don’t exist in our world, what is it about lava that goes too far? He calls such moments The Flying Snowman (for reasons you’ll have to read the post to understand).

Scalzi is not arguing that just because a story is fantasy (or science fiction, for that matter) that you just switch off your brain and ignore things that don’t seem quite right. Rather:

if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.

I think that’s a fair demand, so I’ll deploy it to analyze one of my personal Flying Snowmen – vampire sex. Regardless of whether we’re talking about the dark brooding Angel type vampire or the sparkly douchebag variety, everybody agrees that vamps are dead. Or the “undead,” whatever the hell that means. As a result they have no pulse. Blood does not circulate through their veins. Yet this seems to not put a damper on their sex life (other things do, but that’s not relevant to the point). So my question is, how they hell do undead beings with no pulse or circulation manage to get erections? It just doesn’t make sense.

Until you apply Scalzi’s analysis. After all, by digging into a story about vampires, you’re already buying into a lot of stuff that’s simply explained by some magical hand waiving. If they’re dead, how do they move at all? How does an inert digestive system evolved to subsist on regular food make energy out of blood? What’s with the no reflections in the mirrors and such? By the time you get to undead boners, “magical Viagra” really isn’t that much of a stretch.

Everybody, I suspect, has their own Flying Snowmen when it comes to fiction. The question becomes whether it’s something that just makes you snicker or completely throws you out of the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy speculative fiction. It also asks broader question about how readers should approach fictional worlds that are clearly not our own.

One approach is to assume the world is like our own, except when specifically shown otherwise. That’s easier said than down when dealing with modern urban fantasies (like the aforementioned Angel) than heroic or high fantasy, since we know how the world around us operates, but it’s possible. For example, the medieval world into which the heroine of Doomsday Book is dropped behaves just like our own, although she got their via time travel. With such an approach you wind up looking for oddities and things unexplained by the narrative.

The other approach is to say that since we’re in a fantasy world all the rules are off the table, unless otherwise demonstrated. Assume you have a world populated by non-human sentient creatures. One gets hurt, maybe thrown from a great height onto solid ground, in a way that would render a human out of commission for a long time. This creature recovers quickly, however. There’s nothing “wrong” with that, assuming we haven’t learned somewhere else in the story that these creatures are as frail and breakable as humans. Maybe that story element doesn’t work on its own merits, but that’s a different issue.

Which approach works best? It depends on the story, of course. I’ve got one epic fantasy kind of thing with no humans at all (ready for a second draft in 2012!).  It’s a completely alien world.  I’ve got another one percolating that will have exclusively humans involved.  It’s different, but it looks a lot like what we know of the world. I’ll think about those differently as a writer. I’d expect a reader to do the same.

In the end, everybody’s Flying Snowmen moment is different. It’s impossible for authors or directors to be able to anticipate every area of expertise that a reader/viewing might be able to bring to bear on a story. Difficult as it can be, perhaps it’s best to heed the words of the MST3K theme song

repeat to yourself it’s just a show / you should really just relax

Although, in the case of Gollum’s fiery demise, I suspect it has less to do with worldbuilding or the mystical nature of Mount Doom than it does with a very real phenomenon: artistic license. Sometimes, you don’t let the real world get in the way of a good story.