Important things have a habit of happening on Thursdays. I may need to reconsider the day I'm supposed to post, if only as an experiment.

Today is a special day for one of my oldest friends, and while I'm happy it also leaves me sort of unable to post. So for now, take this little bit of real-life foreshadowing; I hope to have more for you later.

Take care of the Internet while I'm gone.

A Chaser, Hold the Unicorn

Because I really don't want this blog to devolve into "Tyler, the Bitchy Elitist"...and because my bouts of bitterness are nothing compared to my bouts of whimsy...

I am not the target audience for dragons. We established that. I am the target audience for swingy little songs about summoning primordial beasts.



And a fun fact that puts a whole different spin on this: "mzungu" is a Swahili* word that means "white man".



*or so says the Googletron, anyway.

No More Dragons

Nota Bene: Like all my denunciations of literary trends, I have to jump in and say this, lest I get even more of a flame war than I'm hoping for/fearing:

I exempt those who are writing for the purposes of irony, parody, metacommentary, and symbolic commentary on deeper issues, and I will always listen to an inventive application of an old idea.  After all, one of my favorite Neil Gaiman stories is about the Holy Grail.  And I exempt, too, my good friend (and Actual Published Author) Sara Harvey, who has gotten a story about dragons sold to a small press and should not take this as an attack against her story.  She had prose on her side.  Also, lest I be forced to eat crow, I may write a story about dragons some day; but I wouldn't really count on it.

Okay.  So, seeing as how I already posted some link salad today, I'll make this one brief.

Dragons.

It's more than a little astounding to me that I missed these guys in my discussion of fantasy tropes; looking back I think I was mostly focused on urban fantasy, but I'm 90% positive that shouldn't have stopped me.  This whole thing starts with an unfortunate contradiction, but one that I have to shore up in order to hold onto my Master's degree. 

I, like any red-blooded boy who wore glasses and defended the literary cachet of Piers Anthony, loved dragons.  I'll even go so far as to say I love dragons; I love what they symbolize, I love the imagery, I love their deep archetypal potency. 

That said, people of the world, fantasy authors everywhere: stop writing about dragons.

I'm not old; I'm not the pinnacle of literary experience.  Six years in college and I never read Proust.  But trust me when I say that I have seen dragons done to absolute death.

I have seen classic Arthurian dragons and wise Chinese dragons; I've seen dragons as fire-breathing lizards; I've seen dragons as genetic experiments; I've seen dragons as a joke and dragons as a linchpin in the idea that believing in something enough can make it real.  Heroic dragons, villainous dragons, stupid dragons, smart dragons.  I've seen dragons made of molten stone and lightning.  I've seen dragons who looked like silver-scaled cats.  I've seen dragons with spotlights for eyes.  I've even, and I don't recommend putting this into Google Image Search, seen a dragon made entirely of boobies.

(In fact, I think this might be a valid way to judge the remaining stamina of any fantasy trope: has it been converted wholecloth into science fiction?)

"But Tyler," you're asking, with a presumptuous familiarity, "why can't we use dragons anymore?  They're so symbolically potent!"

First of all, dragons are not that symbolically potent anymore; in a sense they've started more and more to represent themselves, and while you can get some mileage out of different cultural approaches to dragons, you can only get so far with that.  But to address the more important question, you can't use dragons for the same reason that you can't use werewolves, vampires, Cthulhu, or zombies: It's too easy to write a story that goes no deeper than "dragons and…".

What do I mean?  Take a book I picked up and put down last week, the currently critically-acclaimed His Majesty's Dragon.  It seemed well-written enough; the prose was good, though not really my thing, and it seemed like the 70 or so pages like there would be a bit of military politics and quasi-real-world nationalism, and that seems like it might be worthy of praise.  But in the same breath, you had a main character thrust into a life-changing situation for no apparent reason, and his new companion, a young dragon who [SPOILERS!]

 

 

 

is, of course, one of a rare breed of dragons who are Very Special and who have never been seen in England before.

 

 

 

[END SPOILERS!]

 

           

 

I read, as I said, about 70 pages; and then I was given the new John Hodgman book, and I switched over to that, because the truth was, it seemed like a lot was hinging on me being interested in a story that was, in essence, "dragons and the Napoleonic Wars".

Without being exhaustive, I've seen plenty of stories that have done this, and not often done it well.  I've seen "vampires and politics"; "zombies and corporate America"; "Cthulhu and Sherlock Holmes" (there's an entire book of that combination and I'd argue only half of it really works); and of course, like everyone, I've seen "dragons and spaceships", or even better, "dragons and a troubled assassin".  In other words, I'm not saying His Majesty's Dragon is unique, and I don't want to seem to be disguising a negative review as an essay.  I just think that it's one of the latest in a long line of books that are using the addition of dragons to carry something very  

I could just as easily try to claim that Dune is crap for expecting me to enjoy "politics in space", or that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is crap because it expects me to enjoy "vampires in high school".  And I'll admit, some of it is that my love for dragons is not as strong as it once was.  But some of it is also that dragons have a tendency, again like zombies or Lovecraftian horrors, to become a major force behind getting people to read a book.  Buffy used its vampires (and werewolves and demons and what-have-you) for more potent effects than just garnering viewers—in fact, most of the viewers I know love Buffy despite its use of vampires, not because of them, and I think that's ultimately the difference.

I go back to my point about their lack of symbolic cachet.  See, dragons have this problem: they're pretty god-damn distinctive.  You can put theoretically new spins on a dragon, but you're going to wind up with some variation of a flying lizard; nameless horrors from the depths and shambling animated corpses have at least a little more variation, though they're starting to wear out their narrative elasticity as well.  They have a tendency to crowd out other aspects of the narrative: people come to dragon fiction and one of the first things they want to know is "how do these dragons work?!"  Which of course forces the author to find some new way to portray their dragons; which means they spend time on that and not on, oh, characters or plot; and the downward spiral continues, all thanks to the addition of dragons. 

This is my complaint with dragons—they take over a story, and they do it so effectively that they have a tendency to receive a warm welcome when doing so.

Save narrative.  Don't write about dragons.

Witty Post Title 10/27

Worn-out apologies for not posting last Thursday; it was my birthday, you see, and one of my presents was an excuse. I will be making it up later this evening, but for now, I am at work, and it is beautifully foggy, and my eyes feel like bags of lead stuck to my face. My brain is not in a good state either; I suspect it has something to do with the decision of all machines to revolt against governmental machinations and pretend for as long as they could that it was already time for the Daylight Savings switchover. This morning was a long stretch of black, gray, and groaning. At least we got some fog and some cloud cover.

Later tonight, you will hear about computer piracy, or possibly dragons; but for the moment, it is time for some delicious link salad.

• Search engines savvy actually rewires brains. I offer this as a counter to the people who claim a technology-based evolutionary slow-down.


• Book of Mormon full of grammatical errors. I am not generally one to make fun of others' faiths, except in the same playful way that I am one to make fun of other people; but every time I think of this article I think of the phrase "Bible fanfic"...


• Horrifying Sex Toys from Beyond. This no way work safe; this is work genocide. It's rusty, it's dirty, it's been bled on by an armadillo with AIDS, and the worst part is, when you read it you will be laughing so hard that your co-workers will demand you tell them what's happening. Bonus points to my readers who understand the radio joke.


• Geoff Pullum rants about "mixed cardboard". This is mostly here so I can, in the future, use the term "nerdview".

Eyes of Stone, You, and Draft Zero Point Five

This is another process post; if you find those boring you are welcome to move on.

For those who don't know, I'm back at work on my second novel, Eyes of Stone, which I consider proof of both hubris and a strong streak of masochism. It's a rewrite of a novel I wrote when I was much younger (read: five years or so ago), which I realized had great potential but some elements that were, to put it bluntly, complete dreck.

To say the process is being beastly is an understatement; it has been a long time since I found myself working under this strong a mixture of confidence and doubt. I keep thinking I need to start over, and I keep telling myself I shouldn't; and rather than spiral downward I'll just be throwing this out here, because everyone knows that posting it on the Internet will make it real.

I am christening my current work on Eyes of Stone Draft 0.5. It's enough of change from the original to constitute a whole new draft, but it is not making the full jump from Draft Zero to Draft One that I had hoped for (and that, I am accepting now, it was ridiculous to hope for).

So the project now, to put it simply, is to allow the story to write itself out; to tell the story with all the characters, all the twists, all the turns and toils and triumphs; and to allow it to sit the way I let Draft Negative One sit for a while, before I bust out the bone-saw and the cautering iron.

I can do this. I mean it. I can really, truly do this. But as I will often say: this is why so many authors drink.

Canned Funny, Or, Why I Write Fantasy and Not Comedy

I adore Jasper Fforde; I think he is one of the greatest things to happen to fiction. I feel similarly about Douglas Adams, as well as Terry Pratchett, who I consider the most easily digested narrative theorist in human history. In non-fiction humor I have to give credit to Dave Barry, who has many times had me choking on my own spit, as well as the lesser-known Lore Sjöberg and the bigger, less bald juggernatus of David Sedaris and John Hodgman.

In short, I adore funny books.

I also adore Neil Gaiman, who sits somewhere between urban fantasy and modern horror's answer to Splenda (and who is, sometimes, quite funny). I love Mark Z. Danielewski's capacity for bizarre, existential creep, and I love Steven Hall's psychotropic The Raw Shark Texts, which genuinely had my pulse pounding. I love the creepy things John Carpenter can make happen and I love the gray-washed atmosphere of the early episodes of Heroes, before things took off into modern mythology (not that this is in and of itself a bad thing; it was just not the same thing that hooked me).

In short, I like scary books.

In the middle, I find many things Neil Gaiman writes, but also the work of Joss Whedon, who is a personal idol, and who has admitted quite plainly that he loves to intersperse creepy moments and funny moments as liberally as possible in his shows. One of my favorite books of the past year has been Résumé with Monsters, which as disturbing as it is very funny; and I would be remiss if I did not mention the entire genre now known as zom-com, from the better-known Shaun of the Dead to the older and more classic Evil Dead movies and Dead Alive (Braindead if you insist on being from other countries).

More than horror, in some ways, more than comedy in many ways, I adore the writers and filmmakers who are able to mix the two; who can take two genres which depend upon surprise and sudden swells of emotion to work their magic (the two that aren't porn), and combine them in ways that blend and enhance rather than neutralize. So then, the obvious question, hinted at in the title: Why don't I write that? I suppose there is a simple answer, but if it was really that simple, I wouldn't write a blog post about it, now would I?

First of all, comedy is hard. When I was much younger I had a dream of being a stand-up comedian; I worked on routines here and there, pecked at ideas, aped comics I saw on television in an effort to find what was funny. I suppose it left me with a good understanding of what is and is not funny (see below), but it also left me with the understanding that comedy is incredibly difficult. When I am funny, and I'll admit I am capable of being so, it comes effortlessly and suddenly; it doesn't take preparation, it just shoots out. When I prepare--when I analyze--it starts to lose its bite. Call it gonzo comedy if you want, or accuse me of being Tom Robbins or William S. Burroughs or someone else famous for odd editing habits; I just can't edit comedy and preserve its marrow.

Second of all, fantasy (or horror, or whatever you want to call my work) is not hard. Note that I do not say this other genre of writing is easy; it isn't, it is very challenging. But it flows out of me more easily than comedy does, and it is much easier for me to edit and still preserve its core. And what's more, it is something I can think about; it is something I can focus my mental energy on very easily, and as such, it is something that, while it challenges, does not run dry (save for those terrible times when I get stuck and can't get any words to flow from my hands to the screen, which is another, much darker affliction).

Also, and this is the nicest way I can say this: "Creepy" is almost universal; "Funny" is almost universally personal. To be slightly less diplomatic, I do not find most comedy funny. At all.

I don't like comedy that relies on the embarrassment of its main characters for its punch--I just end up feeling bad for the person, wincing when I'm supposed to laugh. I see right through comedy that depends on firing off taboo words and subjects as quickly as possible. I don't like comedy about having sex with fat people. I don't like comedy that depends upon enforced gender segregation. I don't like comedy about lying to people for the purposes of sex. I don't like comedy about bodily functions. I don't like stoner comedy. I don't like racial comedy. The list goes on and on.

And then, there are the exceptions. There's Superbad, which is about trying to get laid, and Arrested Development, which should be cringe-inducing but is hilarious. There's the stand-up work of Eddie Izzard and Robin Williams, both of whom make fun of, among others, the English, the Americans, most of the Middle East, and the French, as well as, in Izzard's case, the Holocaust (if Williams hit that subject I have yet to read it).

Comedy, for me, is in tone, delivery, facial expression, motion; it's the way a line is said and the flailing as a character falls. To this day, one of the most brilliantly funny moments in Whedon's seminal Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes during the seventh season, and takes place entirely in a speechless background shot; a similar Firefly moment sends me into giggle fits, because of nothing more than the look on Nathan Fillion's face. When I'm reading comedy, it's about timing; the way the writer controls the cadence, the twisting of words, the behind-the-scenes smirking and the implication. Terry Pratchett is a master of this--were there a just God this mind would be preserved forever.

I can do these things; I know I can. But the truth is, if I find most things that send the general public into gales of laughter to just be noisome or excruciating, how can I hope to know when I've got something that's funny?

I realize writing for oneself is important; if you don't love it, how an you feel good about foisting it on others? But even in that there is a trap, because I consider good comedy so rare and bad comedy so prolific and fecund that I don't want to risk adding more of the latter at the cost of the former. If I write comedy it gets dissected and reassembled and juggled about and analyzed; and then we run once more into the issues mentioned above. Again, comedy is hard--I want it to be perfect, more so than I want all my writing to be perfect, and I am liable to be destructively hard on myself if I try to write it.

This is not to say I never write comedy, or that I will never write a book that is entirely comedy; maybe I'll get incredibly lucky and some blow to the head will allow me to be the next Jasper Fforde (I would never, however, pretend to be the next Terry Pratchett; some lightning really does strike once). Maybe I'll even get there through hard work and a nice bolt of inspiration. But for the moment, I feel that what wit I can muster is best put into the mouths of my characters and the twists in my phrasing. I am at home with the creep and the mystery and the anomalies, and I prefer to stay down here playing with myth to going up in the light; up there, people might not be laughing with me.

Book Review: The Graveyard Book

I will confess without shame: I am a Neil Gaiman fanboy. I was introduced to him through the usual medium of The Sandman, then ate up Smoke and Mirrors shortly thereafter. In college I found my way to Neverwhere; then came American Gods, and the rest is really history. I have thoroughly drunk the Kool-Aid, and when I sit down with one of his books I expect nothing less than the superlative.

So please, hear me when I say how exceptional The Graveyard Book is.

The premise is simple, but where it goes is amazing. As Gaiman himself put it at a reading, The Graveyard Book is The Graveyard Book for the same reason The Jungle Book is The Jungle Book. In The Jungle Book, a boy's parents die and he runs off into the jungle, where he lives with the animals and learns the things animals know; in The Graveyard Book, a boy;s parents die and he runs off into a graveyard, where he lives with the dead people and learns the things dead people know. I cannot put it better than that, except to say that it is also about witches, and ghouls, and a man called Jack, and the difference, so rarely put down on paper, between the living and the dead. But more than any of these things, it is a return to stories we should have been reading all this time.

It is, in many ways, typical Gaiman: Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, lovingly acerbic and generally lyrical. Gaiman straddles the line between British comico-surrealism and Lovecraftian horror, and it is definitely in evidence here: every headstone the main character walks by comes with the dates and epitaph in parentheses, and one of the story's many monsters is a caricature of a foreign grandmother, right down to the horrid, ur-ethnic cooking. He uses the fantastic to talk about everyday life--Bod Owens' journey from 2 to 16 over the book's course will remind every reader, especially the men, of what it was like to be "that age". But what Gaiman has done here that I think is extraordinary can be encapsulated thusly: The Graveyard Book is being marketed as a children's book.

That in and of itself is not extraordinary, but one has to consider the content. Chapter 1 starts with both of the main character's parents dead. Not simply dead, though; murdered. By a man who, the story does not fail to tell us, plans to murder the little boy next. In fact, the initial hook for the story is the man Jack's pursuit of the little boy, along with some indications that the man Jack may be more than just a gentleman with black hair and a detached willingness to go about slaughtering little boys. From there, the story is wall-to-wall dead people, with a few stops in to introduce multiple sorts of monsters, the details of what happens during a witch trial, necrophagia, and incessant reminders that there is someone who very much wants Bod Owens dead (which launches some of the more interesting philosophy about why Bod should remain alive, a question that I'm sure the adults will ask).

And all this in a children's book; a genre that, generally speaking, has been a stomping ground for the most pernicious sorts of Moral Guardians, the people who seem to think that any indication the world is anything short of a perfumed Eden where we frolic 'neath candy-cane skies is going to turn the children out, in some way, "wrong"; people who, he said from a place of terminal education, have clearly never heard about what happened to Siddhartha. (Or maybe they have...)

What I am reminded of by The Graveyard Book, more than anything else, perhaps even more than the Kipling work it clearly takes its influence from, is the Brothers Grimm. The fairy tales with mild swearing and bits being chopped off; the stories that taught children that the world can be both bloody and fascinating, that the darkness is to be feared but also sometimes confronted. Stories about the real world and the really fantastic world; stories that don't always try to echo life, but that succeed at doing so a great deal more effectively than the spun-sugar creations of Disney and its various tendrils.

As should be obvious, I hate this. I hate how insipid books for young adults are; I hate this notion, in America at least, that children need their realities watered down for them, and that reading about anything more extreme than a slightly sped-up merry-go-round is going to leave them either shooting up drugs or knifing prostitutes at age thirteen. Not only does it leave children unprepared for some of the harsh truths of the world--though I know no-one likes to think their children will have to deal with those--but it leads to the conceit, pervasive even among the children of voracious readers, that reading is boring.

I do not think that Gaiman has solved this; don't hear me saying that; and I realize that the Brothers Grimm were themselves censors and bowdlerizers. I realize, also, that The Graveyard Book is to stories like the Grimms' Cinderella what Splenda is to a bag of Circus Animals. But in making this a childrens' book, Gaiman has gone a step farther along the path already laid out by writers like J.K. Rowling; a path which seems to lead, not to the pap that is "young adult horror", but to the idea that we can tell our children stories that don't shelter or condescend. To the idea that our children can handle some darkness, and the idea that reading about violence won't make a child violent.

It's a small step--the damage done by Disney, and yes, by people like Perrault and the Grimms, will take a long time to be undone. But in addition to being compelling, and poetic, and darkly charming, the thing which most touched me about the Graveyard Book is that it is what it is: a Neil Gaiman book for children, one that pulls no punches Gaiman didn't already pull, that doesn't hesitate to shine the flashlight on the icky corners of a rather unpleasant room. Kudos, Mr. Gaiman, on your success; may other writers, but no imitators, follow in your wake.

Orientation

I guess in theory tonight's the night I'm supposed to update. But like so many minds, I am allergic to routine. This Thursday like so many, I remember my promise and I find myself unsure of what to say.

The writing continues apace. Grows, even. I keep working my way toward a voice I love, a turn of phrase that makes me smile; that sort of lifelong work that I can't escape and don't want to, but the same lifelong work that makes a writer wonder if he's gotten "there", the "there" where you're happy and productive and wake up every morning and shake your head in wonderment at your success.

I have a lot of irons in the fire--a story I'm writing, two novels I'm editing, and another story waiting in the wings to sprout a plot. I have ideas that I discard and ideas that won't go away, and I have some queries sitting at magazines and agencies that I can only hope blossom into acceptance. More likely I'll have something else to hang on my wall with the other rejections, but at this stage in the writing game it's all about the dream.

This past weekend, I watched two writers get married. The officiant quoted Nathaniel Hawthorne, and while I know it was there to touch the newlyweds, it also managed to touch me: "Words--so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." I wish I could say it was my motto, if only because that would make me feel so very clever; but every time I consider that I imagine myself in an ironic outfit, smiling bitterly at the unclever little world, and I don't want to be that guy any more than I want to always sound like a cross between William S. Burroughs and a textbook.

So for now, that is your update, and I hope to have something more philosophical and polemic next time. But so you don't feel like all you've gotten is a glimpse into my life, I would like you to know that Warren Ellis has written the greatest recipe for sweet potatoes ever. I don't care how it tastes; this man manages to make cooking feel perverted.

A Link, to Cleanse the Palate.

xkcd, once again, tells the truth. I could add to this statement, but really, I'd just be gilding the lily.

The Middle and the End of it

Unless I'm mistaken, this is Banned Books Week. It is entirely possible I'm mistaken, as a week that takes place during "the last week in September" is frustratingly ambiguous as to when it should occur, so it's entirely possible I'm nine days late rather than two. Nevertheless, I have a few brief things to say.

One: I am a rabid free speech advocate. For all the terrible music I hear, for all the insipid speeches that get drooled all over the press, for all the pundits to the extreme right that make me want to tear my hair out, I love the First Amendment. I think that its exceptions as concepts are solid, though I do not always agree with the phrasing--because I think giving anyone more than the barest inch of latitude as far as declaring what is and is not harmful speech is asking for trouble. I defend the right to free speech of those I don't agree with, and hope they will defend mine. That is probably not the end of my statements on free speech, but it is definitely the end for now.

Two: If you're American, be proud--for all we've seen books challenged there has yet to be an official, government-enforced, nationwide ban (though the Post Office's issues with Ulysses come close).

Three: A sticky corollary to one: I don't think the ability to challenge books should exist.

That is not to say that I think parents should not have the right to restrict what their child reads, especially while young. In an ideal world, I do think parents should be allowed to see school reading lists and discuss the material with the teachers, and that books checked out from the school library should be cleared with parents before the student is allowed to get their hands on them. I also think that this level of interference should end at middle or high school when children are starting to become adults and we want to encourage independence, but that's an entirely different issue. But children, like adults, are individuals, and I don't think anyone but the child and the parents should be deciding what is and is not appropriate for the people around them, of any age; and I do not think the government should be doing our parenting for us. Naturally, I understand certain exceptions must be made--but when it comes to free speech I am the closest I get to radical.

So, in short, I do not think the banning of media of any form should be allowed, in any secular institution. It is a system that allows one person's opinion to interfere with mine, and is thus a system that, ultimately, puts one person's views about another. And much as part of me wants to silence some of the major public voices in this country, I don't like the concessions I'd have to make to do that.

There you go. Politics. Maybe next time we'll pretend this is a science blog.