The Expected Violation

I had said in a previous manifesto that some few elements of my personal life would be allowed to intrude here; and one of those has reared its head, so allow me to say, briefly but loudly:

Congratulations to Matt Schwartz and Sara Harvey!

The wedding was beautiful. I had a smile stuck to my face the entire time. Even when I couldn't seem to keep my tuxedo from looking stupid.

Again, congratulations to both of them. The world needs more couples this happy.

By "Content-Rich" We Mean "Total Failure"; or, the issue of Truth in Biography

Saturday morning early, and a cup of coffee in my hand. Last night was the press and heat and crush of two good friends' rehearsal dinner, and today is the calm in the center of the storm before tomorrow's full-fledged ritual experience. And also, I have a post for you.

Like many people who fight for the title of "author", I subscribe to Publisher's Lunch. Some mornings it's just another piece of mail in my inbox, sad to say, and sometimes I just browse for a couple seconds to see if they've added California to their health care plan; but a few mornings ago, I received this, and immediately wished I had said it--if perhaps with a bit more flair.

Journalist Malcolm Knox--who uncovered the lies in Norma Khouri's book--worked with Sudanese refugee and one-time boy soldier Cola Bilkuei on his book COLA'S JOURNEY and was asked to verify the book's accuracy. (Just published in Australia, it is not available elsewhere for now.)

"So what are we left with? Aside from boy soldiers, a priest and a lawyer who knew Cola in Africa, we have the assurances of the Australian government, which gave Cola his first passport and checked on him through cousins who already lived here....

"Ultimately, though, between what could be verified and what lies on the pages of Cola's book, there will always remain a margin where we must simply take his word. Some will ask why any author's word should be trusted. My answer is that if we take such a hard line, we will deprive ourselves of all oral history, of every story that is one person's recollection.

"If we did that, winnowing history to what is documented on official records, swathes of human experience would be lost. What we must do is check what can be checked, then extrapolate from it."

So, I worked in a bookstore during the Oprah-fueled popularity of A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who weren't following, it was lauded as an amazing and disturbing little book, dealing with a man's recovery from multiple addictions. I have not read it, I cannot say anything else authoritatively. Oprah loved the book, and had James Frey on her show to promote it--when it was added to her Book Club it received the expected upsurge of rabid purchasing fever.

Then it came out that James Frey had made some bits of it up.

At this point it devolves into rumors and sound bites--I can't know for certain what is true, and my time in college keeps me from really wanting to stick my neck out on a spurious source. All I know is that the outrage became ridiculous--I remember being nearly slapped in the face with a copy of A Million Little Pieces by a woman shrieking at me, insulting my intellect and chanting "This is not a memoir!" with a variety of different enunciations.

And again, I leap to the defense of a book I haven't read and don't really plan on reading when I say: Please.

It seems certain at this late stage that James Frey embellished. But before we knew that everyone was talking about how vivid and brutal his prose was. And now, it turns out, some of it was fictional. So what?

He was an inspiration to addicts to get off drugs. That's truly wonderful. But I know people who have drawn inspiration from, among other things--Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I pray was fictional in places); the poetry of Emily Dickinson (hypnogogic even when you understand it); Tim Powers' Last Call (urban fantasy); and any one of a dozen classic and canonical texts. If someone falls back into their old ways because an author made part of their book up, how fragile was their inspiration in the first place?

I am primarily a reader of fiction--I break into little internal wars whenever I try to read nonfiction--so perhaps that is why I am having trouble understanding. But what does the grounding in total fact have to do with anything? Why is this applied to books but not to biographical films, which certainly dramatize aspects of the story (see: the presentation of John Nash's condition in A Beautiful Mind; the final scene of Man On The Moon)? Is this an outgrowth of the constant geek tap-dance of reality and physics equations that marks our tearing down of whichever Star Trek iteration we hated? Are we just a culture so divorced from the written word that we have to fact-check everything?

I for one go with what Mr. Knox had the courage to say there, but I take it one step further. Our oldest and most primal stories do not speak to a truth that can be checked; there aren't any footnotes for cosmogony. In an autobiography, you should be concerned about speaking truthfully--but you should be just as concerned about speaking deeply. Frey's story, from my encounters with it, touches the deeper truths of addiction and recovery--and gives us some ghastly little scares to boot; similarly, the story of a boy soldier has a right to focus a little more on the tragedy than on the minutiae. Journalism is, of course, a different animal--but that, like so many things, is for another post.

This Is Just to Say

That "Alpha and Omega" will not be appearing in the Selected Writings section just yet--because it will instead be appearing at Weird Tales Online. You'll see another post about this as soon as I know for certain that it is up and available for reading.

More content-rich posts to follow this evening.

Dirty Words and Dirty People

Raise your hand if you've ever committed an act of writing.
Good. Now, raise your hand if you've ever tried to write about sex.
Good. Responsive group here this morning. Now, if you've managed to write about sex and not get uncomfortable or embarrassed, reach over with both hands and grope the person sitting next to you.
Still in your seat? Thought so.
The topic of sex is one of my greatest hurdles as a writer, and I know I'm not alone in it being an issue or finding it hard to surmount (hur hur). Sex hovers in the wings in my stories--the purr in your voice or the sheen in your eyes or the crooked little smirk when you wake up the next morning--but it never comes (ha ha!) front and center. It's a lot of things: shyness, embarrassment, the fear I'll turn into low-budget porn. But mostly, it's an issue of a paucity of terms, and the terrible, inescapable reputation of the sci-fi porn kids.
If you're here, I'm willing to bet you've heard of Laurell K. Hamilton. Even if you haven't, you've probably read a short story or two in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. If you want you can call it a byproduct of the nerd mentality, but the truth is that it is all too easy for genre fiction writers to let their narratives become utterly consumed by sex. Hamilton is one of the most egregious examples, seeing as how her main character has historically slept with over a dozen men in a single volume and needs to have sex to recharge her werelion superpowers or some such nonsense; but one of my most distinct memories as a child was reading my parents subscriptions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and moving from prepubescent arousal to fundamental disturbance at the number of stories which featured graphic, in-depth sex scenes. I recall stories that were nothing but hardcore sex, with some level of sci-fi dressing put on them--the most egregious being a story set in virtual reality where a main character rewires their VR rig to think that their penis is a hand, so they can walk around and have people masturbate them. Yes. Really. It's an entire subgenre of so-called genre fiction: "People Fuck and Then Aliens Show Up". (or alternately, "People Fuck Aliens"; if fantasy, substitute "Shapeshifted Unicorns"; if urban fantasy, substitute "Vampires")

It is incredibly easy to fall down this slippery slope. I had to abandon a short story I wrote about five years ago when I realized that one of the climactic (ha ha!) moments involved my protagonist and his girlfriend having very graphic sex. Why? Because it was the easiest way to make the ghost possessing the protagonist present itself. I don't know either. So, I tend to be wary of addressing sex front and center, because it's too easy for it to go from an extended shot to a money shot.

And then...and then there is the schizophrenic train wreck that is the collection of American English terms for sex. I don't know if it's our Puritan cultural roots or just a lack of inspiration, but my native language, which I generally find lovely to work with, can't seem to find sexual terms that occupy a middle ground between the gynecologist's office and the poker table.

For instance, one of my favorite uncomfortable cultural minefields: the female genitalia. "Vagina" is generally accepted, but clinical; "pussy" is to some people totally acceptable but largely not; and the battle lines are ever more starkly drawn on "cunt". And don't get me started on the little romance novel kennings: there is nothing like the phrase "passage of love" to make me want to smash someone's face in with a hammer.

There is plenty of work being done to reclaim or co-opt terms--"cunt" in particular sees a lot of use among some people I know--but in the meantime, they remain either limp-wristed or charged, which means it's very hard to write a sex scene without devolving into either pretension or smut. Now, smut is all well and good, I mean, in many ways I'm a fan, but putting smut in the middle of a postmodern occult novel is like putting the opening of Metamorphoses in the middle of a detective novel--it makes sense with a little context, and it can be used to pull some interesting narrative stunts, but if used as a normal part of the narrative it can be jarring and abrasive.

It's no good acknowledging a hurdle if you don't make an effort to surpass it, and an effort, slowly but surely, is being made; but sex is a topic that I find very delicate, because it is a topic that I find very beautiful, and that makes the pitfalls involved in writing about it all the more spacious and harrowing. So for the time being, I have trouble writing about sex. I second-guess myself even more strongly when I talk about it than I do when I talk about anything else. I find graphic violence easier than graphic sex--a man can pistol-whip someone's face into a side of wet beef but I can't seem to capture a proper description for breasts. This probably says something about my cultural attitudes, but I feel best leaving that up to you. Call me postmodern if you like; but in the battle between smut and pretension, today's the day I let the latter side win.

Maybe I'm Wrong

I owe you all two apologies.

Apology the first: I have been remiss in my updating duties for about three weeks now. It's been a mixture of illness, a houseguest, and that most pernicious thing, "real life". Plus, I just have no idea what to say, because, as the "Grocery List" post probably told you, I assume you don't really want to hear about the minutiae of my writing life, given that there is so little of my actual writing circulating in the world at large. But regardless of any shield I might try to hide behind, I have slipped up on my update schedule, and sporadic micro-updates do not make up for that. So, I'm sorry.

Apology the second: I delved into a dangerous lack of irony, by posting a rant about how famous people can get away with posts full of links and very brief posts, and then had a gap in posting that featured only...a very brief post with a link in it. I'm sorry, I promise that the next time I do this it will be a deliberate parody.

So, the only thing I have to say here, is to tell you What I Am Working On.

The answer to that is all at once simple and complicated. I have a manuscript in the pipeline at Permuted Press right now, though a backlog has left their poor editor a bit swamped, so I won't be surprised if it's a while before I can either exult or gripe. I have another manuscript I'm currently tossing around in the backwoods of my mind, which is (a) for the Apex Digest Halloween contest and (b) very short. I try to write a story every Halloween, and given that this Halloween I'll be at a wedding I'm proud to be getting it out early, so I can polish it. Expect to see it online here if Apex doesn't pick it up.

Speaking of things no-one picked up, I expect you'll be seeing "Alpha and Omega" here very soon, since Weird Tales decided they were sans love. I'll let you know when it goes up in the Selected Writings section. Really, more than anything, this is my note to ensure I don't get lazy and pretend I've forgotten how to write Web code...

My big projects, as of now, are Done with Mirrors and Eyes of Stone.

The former is as edited as I can get it by myself, and is currently under scrutiny by one of my trusty Frontline Editors cum Best Friends who has kindly agreed to help me; the bigger issue there is my plot synopsis, which I simply cannot wrestle into any configuration I like. I'll spare you the rant about synopses; that's a post in and of itself.

Eyes of Stone, for those playing along at home, was called Ether Street until early this year, and I'm currently passing the time I probably should be spending on Done with Mirrors editing and retooling it. I don't want to betray too many trade secrets, but I will say this: when an author says "retooling", in my experience it means that the story had some core level of total, unrepentant suck, and they had to go at the story with a heated knife and a bone-saw to pull it out. It's a visceral, gory, and often painful process, and there will be at least one point at which the author Gave Up. There. There's your peek behind the authorial curtain for today.

My favorite thing about the writing I've been doing of late is revisiting memories for scenes. It's an enjoyable experience to dive back into a place or an event and try to soak up the vibe there and find a way to translate it into nothing but words. It makes me realize that my life has been more limited in scope than I'd like, but all at once much richer than many others. I think my next major expenditure in life is going to be to go somewhere very new for me--a trip to somewhere in the eastern part of the United States, maybe, for starters, since I've visited there very seldom, or perhaps a trip up to Canada if I start feeling rich.

And I'm afraid, as banal as this has been, this post has to be an experiment in people being curious about my writing life, because I honestly have very little else coherent to say. I am still full of illness and medicine, which are the enemies of writing to anyone who doesn't describe their writing with multiple instances of the prefix "post". I will endeavor to update more interestingly later this week, but for now, I bid you adieu. Adieu.

Not Quite Content

This isn't "the post for the week" by any stretch of the imagination, but I absolutely had to throw this out to the world (or this limited slice of it) while it was still logged in my memory.

Perhaps I am the last to know; perhaps not. All I can say is, if you enjoy a mix of wit and critical discourse, or if you've ever loved seeing a story laid out on a table and dissected, then I cannot recommend this highly enough: TV Tropes.

Lest the name fool you, the site is not just about TV--it's a total discussion of literature, anime, TV, movies, and every other form of narrative. It's a dissection and analysis of all the little things that make stories tick, and it comes with wit and not a small amount of open discussion. Enjoy it with my numerous compliments.

My Grocery List

New posts two days in a row. Must be a slow week.

So, I said, perhaps cryptically, that I would post today about perception and celebrity, and why it's so awful to not have the latter. I don't really have a witty preamble for you, so let's get started:

I do not react strongly to celebrities.

This is probably because my father is one, albeit not on the same level as a Sarah Palin or a (God forbid) Kid Rock; he was, however, a musician in a famous band, and that meant that my perception of the situation was different than others. To keep it simple and boast-free, I grew up around famous people--not as family, with the exception of my father, but as people who stopped by, who called on the phone, who we complained about at the dinner table the same way anyone else complains about their friends or their boss. The veneer of mystery was off them. They were just people.

Oh, sure, I get nervous around celebrities, but I don't know if my pulse pounds any louder than when I have to talk to a stranger that someone I know thinks well of; it's not so much the aura of Very Famous as it is the concern that I'm going to say something embarrassing to someone smart. If anything is different when talking to celebrities it's the desire to not appear to be just another fan; trying to find the point between complimenting and gushing, the place between being excited and being Screaming Fan #6,778. It's the desire to treat them like normal people with great talents, not gods, that drives any unusual chemical activity celebrities might conjure in my brain.

I say all this both to pad my daily word count, and as a lead-in to my real point, which is, basically, that it's harder to maintain a blog when you're not some kind of famous; and that in some ways, on some blogs, being famous can be a way of cheating.

Now, please do not hear me trashing weblog culture. I have Warren Ellis's blog on a feed; I read Neil Gaiman's blog with respectable frequency; I even check out what Wil Wheaton has to say now and then. And I doubt anyone has missed the link somewhere to the right advertising the Cabinet of Wonders. I don't think celebrities (or at least these celebrities) intentionally leverage their fame to allow themselves easy, content-free blogging. But I do think that fame, Internet-based or otherwise, makes the job of maintaining a blog much, much easier.

For instance, look at Warren Ellis. Alright, now that you're certain someone on this planet thinks you're a bit daft, look at his blog. Read what he posts there, and if you can, read it like it's something being posted by your good friend, rather than a Very Important Author you enjoy. What do you see?

Most likely, you see a few advertisements for his new creative efforts (especially Freakangels, though that may have disappeared of late). But then it starts to get pretty jejune. You see photographs of interesting places. You see compiled tweets. You see him asking you to turn him on to new bands. With the exception of his ads and his World Wide Week idea (which I think is pretty brilliant), his blog probably looks pretty similar to, oh, yours. Yet, Warren Ellis has something that, most likely, you don't:

Comments.

Maybe this is just because I tend to run pretty low on the comments on my blogs, but it seems to me like once you get to blogs being hosted by actual adults, the distribution of comments is dramatically uneven. Warren Ellis has no difficulty getting into double digits and often hits triple, and political blogs can get similar volumes. Even allowing for double posts and for the number of responses that are going to be "yeah" and "LOL" and "/signed", that's still a much higher volume than most. This is, of course, barring highly polemical posts; I got some pretty intense traffic when I was 20 and dumb enough to openly slam one of my friends on LiveJournal (let's not even get into it...).

So, what's the difference? Well, it's two-fold.

One aspect, to be perfectly honest, is that Warren Ellis is a good writer, and a good writer without a track record of writing abysmally. People read his posts because they can count on acerbic wit, news on works by a writer they love, and maybe even something new to read or see or hear. In short, his is a blog that does deserve traffic.

But the other aspect, and you knew this was coming, is that Warren Ellis (and Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman and whoever) is a Very Famous Man. People are tempted to comment on blogs by Very Famous Men, because (or so I perceive it) those comments are imbued with some greater potency because they stand a higher chance of being read by a Very Famous Man, or even (gasp!) replied to by them. Certainly, I was electrified the one time Cherie Priest responded to me, so I don't think I'm entirely off-base here. And it's not merely about wanting a pat on the head--plenty of people disagree with Ellis (Wheaton/Gaiman/etc. etc.) as well, but even that can be its own sort of attempt to garner social prestige: you could be The Person That Showed Warren Ellis What's What. And how cool would that be?

This is the thing I don't entirely get, even given my brush with Cherie Priest. But this is not the thing that bothers me. The thing that bothers me is something deeper that this is just a little glimpse into--the problem is closer to the surface here because the presence of a celebrity guarantees the whole situation greater exposure. And that issue is the desire to be Internet Famous, and the tendency to measure yourself by your comments.

People want comments. I want comments. Comments are what keeps a blog a live, because ultimately, a blog post is the opening of a conversation. Unfortunately, it's a conversation that is alternately much faster than a face-to-face, and much slower. Blogs and blog readers demand their own peculiar schedules, and if comments or new posts fail to conform, the comments will go unanswered, or even worse, the blogs will die. Most bloggers can't even get away with taking a hiatus without their comments vanishing into thin air--I admit I panicked a little when I realized I'd totally missed last week's post. So naturally, the desire is to find a way to (a) update on some sort of regular, relatively acceptable schedule, and (b) make your comment bucket overflow. Sometimes this desire just results in frustration; but more often, this can result in the manufacturing of Internet fame.

We've all encountered a blog that was clearly doing the moral equivalent of post-count whoring: the unnecessary misanthropy, or the constant link-spam with witty little comments, or the recycled political punditry without anything new in the way of viewpoint or research. Whether or not the people writing these blogs are doing so consciously, what they are doing is trying to be someone famous; to fake being famous, because on the Internet it's really easy for fake to become real. This isn't even one or two people, or a dozen people; this is a large percentage of blogs. Really, I think this might be part of the driving force behind the posts we've all been guilty of (including yours truly) that are basically just us rehashing our days and our grocery lists in a grandiose fashion; not that there's anything wrong with those blog posts, but unless your friends don't see you very often those are probably not the things people want to read. But then, Neil Gaiman manages to write about driving kids to school and beekeeping and get a lot of readers, so maybe our banal posts are the things that will win us some accolades...

Really, I have no conclusion here, except that fame does strange things, and even more so the desire to be famous. The Internet just accelerates the cycle, and probably makes it a little harder to burn out on drugs. If I were to conclude, it would be to wonder how to patch the gaps in my posting schedule and the times when I am not inspired to write anything that would make anyone think--and to wonder if by "make anyone think" I really mean "make anyone comment". Is it possible that even the Internet is being powered by the human love of being the one with the biggest (or at least best) number? Unfortunately, I think so.

"I'm Okay!"

Apologies for missing a week, my hypothetical fan base. And apologies for thus having to address this subject.

It is, to those of us in the United States, September 11th; and that's a day we aren't really allowed to forget about. I've sleepwalked through the majority of that day once or twice, realized what day it was only near the end; I've counted myself lucky that I didn't lose anyone; I've watched clips from media suddenly gone serious and I've remembered my "Where Were You on 9/11?" story, which mostly consists of IMs from my girlfriend and one of my closest to let me know they had survived. And I will say, somehow, be it miracle or just classy company, today is the first day I encountered a September 11th joke. It was topically good, but funny only for its horror; it was the sort of thing that cuts a laugh out of you instead of tickling it out.

I have my opinions about September 11th; they're not particularly frothing on any one political point except that I feel things like that shouldn't be turned to the kind of politics they have been. It's been used to divide where it should have been used to unite and that to my mind is unforgivable on all fronts. And on that subject, I have nothing more to say.

There will be a post tomorrow, about perception and celebrity. Possibly also some complaints about the instant-gratification, constant-stimulation culture of comments and me-toos that blogs spawn, and the less obvious and immediate reasons it sucks to blog without fame. But for today, I want to leave you with a prelude, because I just can't write anything about September 11th and then say "Anyway, here's what I really wanted to say". It's our involuntary national holiday; today we take a break from talking about other things.

The joke, by the way, was about World of Warcraft. And it's probably more tasteful (for molecular measurements of that concept) than admitting that makes it sound.