New Forms of Reference?

These posts keep getting shorter; I wonder if perhaps we are approaching some sort of blog singularity here, where eventually the novels I hope to post will just start magically appearing here for you all to read. The things men dream before their coffee...

What brings me here is actually a Saturday morning breakfast scan of the wonderful and illuminating Cabinet of Wonders. Her recent topic of focus seems to be menageries, and that in and of itself is wonderful (though I shouldn't view pictures of strange animals first thing in the morning, it leads to visualizing how they'd each feel crawling across my bare feet). What really riveted me, though, enough to warrant a post, was a single footnote in the second paragraph: "'the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.' [wiki]" (emphasis mine).

[wiki]. Thrown out as simply and as casually as [3], or [Atlas Shrugged, pp 87-91]. As though this were a thoroughly legitimate bit of academic annotation.

A Google search for "[wiki]" is fruitless, of course, given that the engine won't pay much attention to the brackets; and I don't know enough about Heather MacDougal to know if she's fully plugged in to current mainstream academic endeavor. But nevertheless, she is an eloquent and clearly educated writer, if not necessarily formally so, so I don't think this is necessarily random chance. The reference made by the footnote is relatively clear, if in need of more specification in a bibliography, and the information is exactly the sort one would quote from another source.

Is the war beginning to go quiet? Have mainstream intellectuals begun to accept wikis as a source of real and verifiable data? I'm not wholly overjoyed at the prospect--wikis are a great launchpad, but need at least as much if not more verification of sources to be solid points of reference--but I do love to see this sort of cultural progress in action. Maybe next we'll be seeing it in scholarly essays published online. Or maybe Ms. MacDougal is a fluke, and we'll be going right back to the same internecine war about what should or shouldn't constitute a primary or secondary source. Either way, I'm excited to see what happens next.

Resting on My Laurels

The latest submission call has been answered, and the next one has a head start that I'd disbelieve if the story length weren't so minuscule; so tonight, I honestly have very little to think about it, narratively speaking. Instead, I'm wondering about Standard Manuscript Format.

Everyone who's submitted to a magazine has encountered this concept; a set of rules and regulations that govern how you present your story. Most magazines, even most online magazines, follow this rule. And to a certain degree, it confuses me.

Disclaimer: This is not a rant against the "hoops" of publishing. While I'd prefer it if a bit more pap were caught by the standardization nets I understand that the rules of the publishing industry exist for much the same reasons rules of etiquette exist: to ensure everyone is (theoretically) working off the same base assumptions. I even understand it more than social etiquette, because publishers, unlike most conversationalists, are risking a great deal of money on the endeavor, and it pays to have some methods of filtering out flukes, flakes, and the other detritus that tends to coalesce around the edges of the population that terms itself "writers". What makes me wonder isn't the hoops themselves; what makes me wonder is that the hoops regarding Standard Manuscript Format seem so strangely backward.

Google "Standard Manuscript Format". Most of the top hits will use some variation on this sentence: "Standard Manuscript Format is meant to make your manuscript look like it was typed on a typewriter".

Obvious Question Time: Why?

I understand wanting standardization, and the double-spacing and wide margins makes perfect sense, as, after an explanation, does the use of underlines rather than italics; but it strikes me that, barring nostalgia, Times New Roman is a far less eye-tearing font than Courier, and it comes loaded standard on nearly every word processing program you will find on a modern machine. Why on Earth don't we use that instead? Is it because print magazine editors are concerned about excluding those who still use typewriters, and online magazine editors want to emulate print magazines so as to avoid an (understandably problematic) cultural divide? Is it just moribundity at work?

I'm not ranting; I'm asking. I'm thinking that perhaps in all this, there is some aspect of the typesetting and printing world that I am not understanding here; that there is some way in which what we are doing is making life easier for the editors, who are in turn working to make life easier for the typesetters, who are in turn making mechanized life easier for the printing presses themselves.

Can you enlighten me? If so, please do. I'm terribly intrigued by this mystery.

A Recommendation

I told you I'd write more often if not as voluminously, and here you are--the vague sense that sometimes I deliver on my promises.

That said, I have a book recommendation to make. It puts me behind the times, certainly, but Amazon.com just recommended a book to me that I read three years ago, so I'm not the only one.

It is possible that some of you here may have heard of Neil Gaiman. Of that subset, some of you may have heard of The Sandman, widely considered Gaiman's opus. What you may not have heard of is a short story collection called The Sandman Book of Dreams.

I don't generally go for spin-off short story collections; my tastes there range either to authors I already know and love for their longer works, or what I can only term "high concept" collections whose themes are, shall we say, slightly eclectic. But this past week I found that linguistic history, while interesting, was making my brain bleed, and that I needed something wonderful to read, something that inspired me to play more freely with prose, lest I miss a call for submissions that I've been trying to address for most of the month. But I was broke, and so I hunted through the books I had, wondering what I could read, or re-read; and I found this, and thought "Huh. Well, I liked The Sandman; maybe it's time to abandon the snobbishness and see if a spin-off collection can work".

It can.

The book is old by most modern standards--the edition I have was printed in 1996. It has one or two authors in it you may have heard of: say, Gene Wolfe. Or John M. Ford. Or Susanna Clarke*. And like any collection of this nature it has its weak moments (or at least, I think so, but it's been a decade since I liked anything written by Nanci A. Collins). However, it also has its strong moments, and they are strong not just for spin-offs, not just for short stories, but for literature. There are stories in here that I would not hesitate to say were pure magic.

Gene Wolfe's "Ain't You Most Done?" is hallucinatory and transcendent. Tad Williams' "The Writer's Child" is one of the only stories about child abuse that I've read that has not been trite--and it's got a couple wonderful bits of literary trivia in it, to boot. Will Shetterly takes us back to one of the more awful and blackly humorous Sandman moments from the The Doll's House era. And then, there's Delia Sherman.

I had never heard of Delia Sherman before this collection. Turns out she's been around for a while and I'd just managed to avoid colliding with her prose. Her contribution is entitled "The Witch's Heart", and when it started I was ready for this to be the first real, true weak link, ignoring that I'd thought the same thing previously in the collection. What I got, after I took a deep breath and started her story over with a fresh mind, was one of the more astounding moments in my career as a reader.

I pride myself on being difficult to shock. I read Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts" while I was eating lunch one day. I made it through most of a Saw movie with a disdainful smirk, barring a now-passed phobia of needles. I could paint more examples but I'm afraid they'll make me sound like some sort of ghoul; the truth is, violence in media doesn't bother me. If anything it prevents me from being bothered. But there is a passage in "The Witch's Heart" that had me crawling up against the window next to my train seat, filled with sympathetic pain and sorrow for the main character. I had to put a hand over my mouth so I didn't shout out "No!". Well done, Ms. Sherman.

"The Witch's Heart" is near the middle of the collection. I have to assure you: it only gets better from there.

If you're here, you've probably read my writing, and I dare to think you might have enjoyed it. So here's my suggestion: Go out. Read this collection. You'll see reflected here the land I've been trying to write my way into for a very, very long time.

*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in case you weren't sure.

Fleeting

I've just finished a story, and right now I feel like I'm made of cocaine.

The feeling will fade, of course, and the worry will set in. Plot threads left dangling, adjectives misplaced. Factual paradoxes it would take a laser-focused narrative snob to notice, little mistakes that leave my new baby broken and full of holes. And after the worry must by necessity come the editing.

But for now, the moon is full behind my brain, and I'm happy to be alive, and so I want to go enjoy it, in my own exhausted, Thursday-night way. As such, I am afraid this week's post is not very substantive, and I am afraid that the best thing I can offer is a more frequent posting schedule--a promise to update once a week but a plan to start ;posting a bit more piecemeal here and there, to share little ideas and wonderful links and all the detritus of the Internet that writers with blogs seem to work with when they aren't sifting through comments and letters. Perhaps even tomorrow, I'll dig something up in my RSS feeds that raises my wonder, or my ire, and leaves me wanting to post about. Perhaps even tomorrow, I'll do that.

"Perhaps Even Tomorrow". There's a story title in that.

Anyway, I'm off. Don't wait up. I've got a sense of completion on the brain.

Disarray

This one is a bit less essay and a bit more chaos than my typical posts; if you don't like the format I can assure you we'll be back on whatever passes for course next week.

I did not, shock of shocks, get chosen as one of the top three entrants in the Spam Fiction contest. Unfortunate and sad, but I had to expect that, really.

Except of course, now the Doubt Monkey is gnawing at my brain, and I am starting to wonder if this piece of post-zombie political fiction I'm working on is at all going to pull its weight. My goal: to grit my teeth and make myself finish this draft so I can pull out the boning knife and the cauter-saw and spend next week making it into something I'm proud of.

Love. Hate. Excess. The words a writer lives by.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the issue of narrowcast culture. Science fiction and fantasy are the genres that are famous for the problem, but every facet of culture has people whose social lives and leisure time, and sometimes even time outside that, entirely revolve around one core concept. Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons are infamous examples, but the same issue crops up with reality shows (one or all of them), professional wrestling, soap operas, etc. etc. For every cultural phenomenon of moderate weight there are people who hang their lives on it: watch the movies, watch the shows, read the books, buy the t-shirts.

None of these things are inherently bad, unless you are concerned about social cache in the world at large, but it's common for these hobbies to become exclusionary: people who read only Star Trek novels and spend their downtime at work practicing Klingon; people who invest massive amounts of money in putting a wrestling ring in their backyard, and whose every conversation contains the phrase "The Rock says". People will focus some or all of their energy toward one single thing, a thing which they did not create and which, while it may enrich their lives, is being spread over far more of their lives than it should reasonably be expected to cover. Narrowcast culture: the rejection of all aspects of the human experience that do not relate to a single, specific concept, generally some set of connected media artifacts.

Personally, I find this repellent. I understand some degree of focus--I am, after all, spending at least some part of the majority of my days writing, and even more of it embroiled in words. But narrowcast cultural thinking is like societal inbreeding; it separates people into groups even moreso than they already are and it snuffs out ideas, ideas with the potential to cause very big change.

What sort of brain finds this acceptable? What sort of person doesn't go exploring, even in their head? I doubt it is that commonly-cited issue of social rejection and subsequent embrace of a sense of belonging, only because people who are part of the "in-crowd" do this, too. I don't think it is low-income people, because plenty of people who don't ever shut off World of Warcraft make sensible and more-than-sensible money as tech workers. Is the need to belong really this strong? Do people really feel so incomplete and scared that they only want to explore along one well-trodden path? People, to my mind, are machines for making ideas; and it bothers me that so many of them, sci-fi nerd and jock alike, are happiest when they are only regurgitating ideas handed to them by others.

And Twilight Creeps In

It's happened. Inevitable and inexorable, it's happened.

I'm going to touch on a major, mainstream cultural phenomenon (one apparently equipped with stealth technology, given that it's being likened to Harry Potter and I only actually heard about the series two weeks ago). I'm going to talk about the Twilight series, by one Stephanie Meyer.

(There are some spoilers in here, folks, here and there; I apologize, but they just flowed naturally.)

I should stop here, and say, I'm not going to discuss the books. I haven't read the books, and given what I've seen of the plot summaries, I have less than zero interest in doing so. The phrase "half-vampire fetus" is one that would morbidly attract me in a low-budget film, not a novel. I will be fair, and make that the last actual comment I make on the content of the books--I don't want the terrible karma that could result from denigrating a book I've never even tried to read. Doing so, in fact, could get me in deep philosophical trouble, given that this entire post is born of my feelings about the reactions of Meyer's readers.

You see, for those (like me) who did not know, this young adult series has just ended, wrapping up in the fourth book, Breaking Dawn. Like any series--any single media artifact, really--it has its detractors. It would seem that several of Meyer's "true fans" did not like her last book. That they are in fact incensed about her last book. So much so that they have decided the best way to express their extreme displeasure is to start a campaign to return all copies of the book.

Yes, you read that right (after viewing the somewhat cringe-inducing picture of two people dancing all over the gothic subculture). There is a campaign on to return all copies of Breaking Dawn to the stores where they were purchased.

Yes. That will definitely show her.

But my problem is not with the somewhat strange, perhaps even desperate way of "getting back" at Meyer; no, my problem, and the entire point of this post, is this statement, levied at Meyer as it has been at a great many writers, to be found at the end of the first page of comment on that site: the idea that in some way, Meyer was "not true to her characters".

I'm going to go ahead and gloss over the disturbing and all too real possibility that this statement is born of the idea that the characters of the Twilight universe are somehow real enough that Stephanie Meyer could be inflicting her narrative on them, like lashes to an innocent back; while it's a possible avenue it's not one I think I can usefully address. I'll start prepping arguments for it now, in a separate document, in the vain hope that maybe someday I'll have to deal with that for myself.

Now. Allow me to drop my veneer of intellectualism long enough to say: horseshit.

I will agree that from what little I understand of the series (thanks to the masterful wit of Cleolinda Jones), Meyer threw the audience quite a few curveballs. Maybe even stupid curveballsm though the idea of cursing a werewolf to fall madly and irreversibly in love with a newborn is so stupid that the implications for the character it affects drown in the moron-static.

It is true that ultimately, a writer without an audience isn't much of a writer at all. Writing requires readers, if for no other reason than to provide the money that allows a writer to keep eating and drinking long enough to write some more. But there is a terrible tendency, particularly among the young adult novel set (both young adults themselves and those who get into the books), to mark a series as in some way the "fans' territory"; to make the assumption that in some way, the fans know the characters of the series as well as, if not better, than the author in question.

Let me make this clear: You don't.

I get imprinting on a character; I really do. I quit reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy for over five years (around about ages 9-14) because I couldn't stand what Tolkien did to Gandalf. (No, no-one told me.) I spent most of George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords periodically shouting "Hey!" at the naked page. But I never once felt that I somehow knew better than Tolkien or Martin as to how their characters should be handled, and that's because I knew I didn't have the first clue how those characters should be handled; all I knew about them was what those authors had told me.

If a writer seems to have thrown a huge, rusty monkey-wrench into their portrayal of a character, the truth is that there are two basic options.

The first option is this, plain and simple: the writer isn't very good (or at least, isn't any longer). Inconsistent characterization is not an unusual problem--even great writers can have trouble writing a solid character, and very few writers get to be great. In this scenario, there are no characters to know at all, let alone know better or worse than someone else.

The second possibility is that there is something going on you don't see. The plot twist, the double-cross, the apparent double-cross that's really a triple-cross, the sudden deep fear of lemurs; you know, the things that keep literature spicy and interesting? These are born of characters behaving in unexpected ways, i.e. in ways that aren't in keeping with the characters we "know" so well. And in this case, by definition, that means that the reader does not know the characters better than the author.

To boil it down: You can lambaste an artist all you want. You can hate them, you can return their books, you can even sell a t-shirt cleverly spurning their mythology for another. But do not for a second presume knowledge of a setting, a plot point, or a character that is greater than that of its creator.

Or, to put it another way, please consider this. Have you ever listened to two people debate the particulars of how a Jedi Knight (Luke, Anakin, Obi-Wan, take your pick) used the Force in a particular scene? Have you ever listened to them debate why that should or should not have made the Jedi in question fall to the Dark Side? I'm sure you have, and I want you to understand, that is what you are doing when you assume knowledge above and beyond that of the writer and creator. It may be about vampires or wizards or Victorian girls instead of Jedi, but it's the same basic concept.

Though I'll be fair, George Lucas is a bit of an exception. He did come up with midichlorians.