Considerations

I am not sure if dealing with a doctor's appointment is what triggered an introspective mood, or if it had more to do with being near the beginning of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidental and reading references to being twenty-two, or if it was simply happenstance; but something led me to stay up until five in the morning yesterday, staring at what little streetlight got absorbed by my ceiling and working through the timeline of the past nine years with one of my oldest friends. And while it may seem like a trite conclusion to arrive at, one of the principal things I came to understand via that conversation was how fast life really moves, and at the same time how slow.

I don't mean in some pessimistic sense, with depressions and car accidents and cancers leaping down on you out of nowhere; just in terms of, really, how quickly a situation can develop, shift, and deteriorate. My first quarter of college was ten weeks long, and in that time I acquired, befriended, and lost someone I at the time considered my best friend; over the course of the next quarter I floundered through a deep depression and watched my social circle totally fragment.

When I assess when things occurred--this particular party, a LARP I enjoyed, a major argument--I am always mystified to discover that simultaneously, the event that seems so distant is only two or three years old, and is surrounded by a multitude of major events that all occurred so close together that my life feels prickly with steep highs and deep lows. When I analyze how one particular event or issue played out I find it was a matter of days, and within those days, single moments: an entire string of events starting with one email and playing itself overdone and mute within a week.

It stung here and there to discuss, and occasionally made me angry; but mostly it made me really consider how interesting my life has actually been, even if not full of the kind of travels and literary and fiscal successes I would like to have to my name. It also makes me (to tie this back to the point of this whole blog) think about the way plot flows, and wonder if this is what I sensed beneath the surface back when I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or perhaps more topically, if this is why I liked Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard more than I liked Last Call: The way that the stories in those two books flow is incidental, sometimes coincidental. Things start with a single action, not even deliberate and in one case not even informed, and balloon out into a a sort of conceptual beast that the protagonist can only tie a rope to and hope to hang on until the end. It makes me, unfortunately, turn an eye toward Eyes of Stone and its layout again; but perhaps fortunately, it makes me consider that the strange, sudden, sometimes chaotic way the plot seems to develop and spool out is exactly the sort of naturalistic anarchy that I see in works I appreciate. Much as it makes me anxious, I enjoy the way life will just keep throwing in twists; and I can't help but want literature to be the same way.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The Mythology of Cities

There are some levels on which I really, truly miss living in a big city.

It's not that Mountain View is bad, by any stretch of the imagination. My friends are here, I'm close to mass transit, I can walk to the grocery store and any of numerous wonderful restaurants, and the city really is just a train ride away, albeit about an hour's train ride. The problem is not that I cannot get to the city; the problem is that I am not in the city, and so I am lacking the vitality that the city brings to me.

I don't know what it is about cities. They're crowded, they're dirty, they're often polluted. And yet somehow, I think they're beautiful. Other writers have spoken about cities having lives and personalities of their own, and I used to think that was just an interesting take until I lived in San Francisco for five years.

San Francisco, as a city, was truly alive. At all hours of all days there was something happening. There were entire cultures and subcultures inside the city, strange shows and weird stores and ingenious little pockets of the human drive to invent and circumvent that kept me from ever being anything but surprised. The part of San Francisco where I actually lived was hilly and a bit desolate, its shops too small for me and its options too limited, but the rest of the city grabbed hold of me and never let go. Riding Muni to work was almost a religious experience for me; something happened on my way from West Portal to Powell that left me chilled and invigorated, and my greatest regret in working where I did was that I spent my entire day underground and in the blocks just off Union Square, where I couldn't see life happening. When I lost my job at the bookstore, I went surfing through interview after interview, and one of the selling points was always my ability to look down on the street: my ability to see the city.

A lot of stories talk about magic and civilization being somehow incompatible; the war between magic and technology is well-trodden, some might say eroded, ground, and the idea that logic and advancement hedge out the power of magic is certainly not fresh and new. Yet somehow, I feel like cities have a magic of their own, and when I write I have to speak to that: to the weird patterns in our buildings and behaviors, to the strange things I imagine happening in the dumps and shadows. Like any huge structure, there are things happening in a city's cracks, events too microscopic for the larger entity to keep track of or even notice. If San Francisco can host Ambrose Bierce, Bondage A Go Go, the Hip-Hop Chess Federation, the Living Dead Girls, the Grateful Dead, and the bartenders at Zeitgeist all inside seven square miles, why can't there be something even stranger lurking in the cracks? The city is alive even when humans aren't there to see it, and it's all too easy for a secret to get lost...

I love Mountain View, and I love Palo Alto and San Francisco and I love being somewhere that I am able to go to all these places. But as much as I felt hollow some days in my apartment in San Francisco, I feel stripped of something elemental when I walk by the shops on Castro Street. One of my first nights I was here, I walked down to Castro and El Camino as part of a bid for exercise, and I felt odd, off, somehow disrupted. I realized, as I stopped and wondered, that when I looked up and left, I could see the sky.

I'm here for now, and it's where I belong. But the city is calling; and I'm sure that when money, time, and fate all intersect, the city is where I'll live.