Thursday, December 31, 2020

2020 in Review

 I more or less stopped being a writer in 2020. Yes, there were demands on my time, particularly online teaching and the adjustments it necessitated; yes, there were occasional distractions in my personal life and other excuses. The reality, though, is that I crossed a line at some point at which fiction writing stopped being a stress reliever and became a source of stress.

I've written about this before. The main factor involved is that I have become a better and more professional writer through the last few years of polishing my craft, and the knowledge I've gained has become an enemy to productivity.  At the outset, before I knew what I was doing, I could eagerly plunge headfirst into a story concept, driven by unrealistic expectations of what I might achieve at the end, and by unrealistic assumptions about the amount of work involved.  I know better now.  I am capable of creating a high-quality short story, yes; but doing so requires weeks of painstaking work and editing.  This labor may well result in a story that I am not proud of. If I am proud of it, I will likely spend months accumulating dozens of publisher rejections before seeing it in print. Even after it makes the grade, it will be ignored by most reviewers and possibly actively scorned by those who do bother to write about it. All of this has put me in a position where story ideas have come to feel more like obligations than sources of joy. And, as I promised myself at the outset that I would never allow creative writing to become a chore, this means I take the plunge very seldom these days.  I last finished a short story this summer; I have one in process at the moment but it's proceeding in spastic fits and does not have the look of quality about it.

That said, the thing about fiction writing is that there's a huge gap between the process of creation and eventual publication, so a lot of the material I produced during my salad days is still emerging into print for the first time. In addition to a pretty substantial number of reprints, I put four new pieces of fiction out into the world in 2020.

The first of these was arguably the weirdest thing I ever wrote, the gonzo grimstick weird western "The Professionals".  The story, which reimagines modern professions as tabletop RPG character classes, appeared in the final issue of Broadswords and Blasters in January:

The Googlers came rolling up the road with rage in their eyes, fleece vests zipped tight and keyboards raised for combat, the wheels of their electric scooters bouncing over the cracked and rutted pavement.  One of them hurled a slide rule, and Hektor brought his badge up just in time. The badge pulsed, and a blue disc of translucent force—the heritage of two hundred generations of cops—intercepted his assailant’s weapon and jolted it aside. As the mounted tribesman went skittering past, Hektor brought his baton in beneath in a sweeping arc; it caught the Googler in the ribs with a sickening crunch, and he lurched aside just in time for Maxx’s axe to cleave his skull in two. The firefighter yanked the axe free with a grunt, a patter of blood droplets cascading in an arc up across the chest of his yellow rubber coat and spattering the ruggedly handsome features of his half-shaven face. Beside him, Smoky, his Dalmatian, was tearing out the throat of a second adversary. 

Two months later, my wayward son finally made it home.  After 50 rejections and two full years on the shelf, the Space Amish tale "Prodigal" landed at Planet Scumm in March:

My faith was imperfect.  But my memory was excellent.  My eyes returned to my husband’s panicked and palsied countenance.  I returned the favor he had once paid, and read aloud.
“The quality of mercy is not strained,” I intoned.  “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”  I paused, rubbing at his feet.  “On this world, husband, the rains come infrequently.”

In April came one of the more substantial successes of my writing career, as Baen FA finalist "The Laughing Folk", with its insidious cabal of drug-addicted demihumans, made the grade at On Spec. The story wound up being one of the most widely-read pieces of work I ever produced, and was widely and favorably reviewed.:

The stage had been set. The old stories of unfathomable and sinister faerie folk had been cast aside, replaced with popular fiction that portrayed the humanoid races as stalwart allies against dark forces.  From the moment they announced their presence, people rushed to embrace them: elves and dwarves, gnomes and pixies, sprites and sylphs and legendary creatures of all kinds. Or, for collective reference, the name they used to refer to themselves: The Laughing Folk.

Their propaganda had preceded them, setting men against one another in virulent factions. In retrospect, we should have recognized their advance agents. The disguises were weak, the glamours paper-thin. The political commentator, her books screaming “Treason!” at the party opposite--her long blonde hair, thin bony features, and icy demeanor all clearly characteristic of an elf.  The Congressman, chirping endlessly about how gold would solve every economic problem—his wizened face and stooped posture unmistakably gnomish.  The designer of tabletop roleplaying games, assigning noble motives and “good” alignments to non-human races, subtly encouraging young people to respect them--his squat form and long white beard notably dwarven.  

Also in April, JJ Outre Review found room for "Shift", an alternate history of the Apollo program with a lycanthropic twist:

The tiny vermin of this planet’s material plane came in endless, swarming multitudes, burying themselves in Ark-arr’s pelt, biting and sucking, sampling her rich, foreign blood. Scratching did little good. Shifting did better. When the itching and the irritation grew too much, Ark-arr flexed her mind, and changed, the blue skies and odd wildlife fading, replaced with a stark, sandy waste under a black sun. Ark-arr’s biology Shifted with her, her blood and breath adjusting automatically to the new atmosphere and environment. The alien parasites, she had discovered almost immediately, could not Shift. It seemed that all this world’s creatures were confined to the material. They had never known the darkside, the mirror reality to which the packs of Luna were native, and which housed the shattered remains of the voidship in which Ark-arr had traveled here. So she stepped outside of these lands, as into a cleansing bath. And under the dancing light from her still-blazing vessel, she found herself purified.


And then came May, in which I actually published, of all things, a poem; "A New Arrival's Guide to the Bottomless Pit" made the cut at Red Planet.

Were you a careless tourist, leaning on wobby railing?

Did a villain push you?  Were you are a villain yourself, pushed by a hero?

Were you overcurious?  Adventurous?  Merely clumsy?

It makes no difference, now that

the

plummet 

is underway.

A new adventure! 

How wise you were 

to bring this guide along.

 

For all my unproductivity, there's still more in the queue.  In January comes my Coleridge/Joe's Apartment mashup "Warlord" at Flash Fiction Online. This will be my third credit at pro rates, and offers me the opportunity to apply for full SFWA membership, which was the goal I set for myself when I started writing short-form fiction in 2016. I'll return once again to the Australian markets in February, when Aurealis publishes my soccer ghost story "The Redemption of Declan Callahan".

And after that...silence.  I have a pretty lengthy fantasy piece which I consider to be one of the best two or three things I've ever written which is still wandering the wilderness, seeking a home.  I'm engaged in the research and drafting phase on a piece for an upcoming Ramones-themed anthology; this is pretty much the opposite of "write what you know" for me, as I enjoy the band but have no idea how music works and am pretty much the exact diametric opposite of "punk rock" personality-wise.

So a fallow period looms. But the thing about this game is, you never really know when you're out of it. The Magic Brain Elves are ever looming, waiting to descend with glorious concepts that demand to be written. Perhaps someday soon they will pay me a visit. If they do, I'll let you know.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

An Appreciation of Matthew X. Gomez's "God in Black Iron and Other Stories"


 

DISCLOSURE:  The author has, in his capacity as an editor, purchased and pubished my work in the past.

New Pulp features a number of gifted writers and—for now, at least—not as many enthusiastic readers. This results in an inevitable competition for attention. In some cases a writer who works to bring other contributors’ work to the public eye will pay an unfair price, as they’ll have less chance to bring attention to their own work.

Such is the case, I think, for Matthew X. Gomez. Widely known as half of the editorial team behind the celebrated periodical Broadswords and Blasters, he has also been carving out a niche of his own through stories published in Pulp Modern, Storyhack, Switchblade, and elsewhere. His richly entertaining first collection, God in Black Iron and Other Stories, demonstrates that Gomez’s gifts as a writer deserve wider acclaim.

I’ve previously encountered some of these stories in isolation, and I’d come to appreciate Gomez’s skills in terms of plotcraft and ability to establish a sense of place. Seeing his work gathered together has a different feel. Patterns emerge, and additional skills surface.

First, there’s the sheer genre range on display. From classic high fantasy to modern grimdark, light horror to weird western, cyberpunk and steampunk and whatever the hell “The Mead Trap” is, Gomez never comes across as an interloper treading cautiously in new terrain; his extensive familiarity with genre conventions not only to walk sure-footed down familiar paths, but also to make judgments as to when to most effectively break the rules and subvert reader expectations. “Comes a Slayer,” for instance, has the imaginative setting and trappings of magic you would expect in any dragon-hunt, but throws those features into sharp relief with a protagonist who’s all hard-headed practicality, obsessed with outfitting and provisioning, shunning a shining white charger in favor of a mule which he pointedly refuses to name. Paradoxically, a dragon hunter who cares nothing for style points makes for a more stylistic story.

I have also been underrating Gomez’s talent for portraying violence, and the attention he pays to detail in doing so. His characters go to war with pistols and polearms and crossbows and beer steins and axes and stun batons and scimitars and sixguns and spears both short and long and fists both fleshy and cybernetic. There are few "swords" here; instead, there are gladii, and zweihanders, and rapiers, and broadswords, and each is wielded with distinctive purpose. It is immediately apparent in every instance that Gomez has done his homework. His combatants—both heroic and villainous--have chosen their tools with care, they are familiar with the details of their use, and that their fighting styles are crafted to suit their strengths. There are no “hit points” here; each blow is calculated with anatomical purpose.  Every feint and positional gambit matters. Mistakes are punished, and expertise doesn’t grant you iron skin; Gomez’s heroes get hurt. This is handcrafted, artisanal violence, and it’s preferable to watching bladed supermen wade unscathed through scores of jumpsuited henchmen, or watching an expert marksman pick off targets while enemy stormtroopers fill the air with errant ammo (well, usually preferable; more on that later). I read this book immediately after Nicholas Eames’ Bloody Rose. And hell, I like Eames, for a variety of reasons. But strictly in terms of the texture of combat, I have no qualms about saying Gomez is better.

In terms of individual stories: “Crystal, Brass and Copper” was one of the best stories I read in 2018, either in or out of the confines of New Pulp, and if I’m picking the standout story in terms of craft, I think this is probably it.  The Saladin Ahmed-meets-steampunk aesthetic works brilliantly, but I also think this one features two of the author’s standout characters in the thief Bahar, who navigates believably from tragedy through trauma to triumph, and the inventor Ardeshir, who may or may not have a heart of gold, but is certainly capable of fashioning one on consignment. One of the best things you can say of a story is that it leaves you asking “and then what happened?” at the close. CBC has that effect.  I’d be glad of more stories involving either character, though Ardeshir seems to me to offer particularly interesting opportunities.

But “best” is not necessarily “favorite,” and my pick in that category has to be the final story, “Ashton and Marcus: The Mead Trap”, in which a couple of inter-dimensional roustabouts seek a break from their chaotic lifestyles, and don’t find it. I’ve spoken earlier about Gomez’s usual careful attention to the mechanics of violence and the importance of tactics. Ashton and Marcus represent the author reflecting on that talent, tossing it over his shoulder with a shrug, and Getting His Mayhem On.

And I’ve said I’m not generally a fan of that, but I think it might be more fair to say that it’s something I think an author has to earn. By all means, give me Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness, wading waist-deep into undead hordes, but give me Evil Dead 2 first, so I can see the price he paid to wind up with that chainsaw prosthetic. Matthew X Gomez spends this whole book showing me an understanding of relationships, nuance, and battle planning. So, yeah, at the end, it’s OK for him to stuff Sam Raimi and Joe Lansdale and Larry Correia and HP Lovecraft into a blender and serve them to me in a bucket with a little paper umbrella on top. It’s fun, damnit. Ashton and Marcus’s interdimensional travel, and probable inability to learn from their mistakes, offers potentially infinite replay value. I could see this becoming a franchise. Think Hap and Leonard meets Bill and Ted.

So, yeah, you’ve got a tall stack of stuff to read and a limited amount of time to spend in fantasy universes at this point.  But I do believe that God in Black Iron and Other Stories is good enough that you’ll find your time well spent.  Here is a New Pulp author worthy of your attention.

Monday, June 1, 2020

The Privilege of the Anarchy Tourist

I have seen the sentiment expressed that the people who show up to protest police violence and the people who show up to break shit and steal things are two different groups. It's difficult to make an accurate assessment based on anecdotal incidents recorded on shaky cell phones, but it does seem to me that there's some truth in this claim. We've all seen the clips of white kids in masks wrecking stores while African-Americans beg them to stop.



So: if we act on the assumption that the looters are one group, and protesters are another, let's discuss how they became conflated. Because I think this is in large part the legacy of a specific kind of online commentator whose work I've encountered all-too-frequently this week. I call this person the "anarchy tourist."

The anarchy tourist sits in a quiet home, miles away from the action, raising a fist in proletarian solidarity as black communities burn. The anarchy tourist fills my social media feed with Langston Hughes poems about exploding raisins and references to "the language of the unheard" in between snacks purchased from a supermarket that the anarchy tourist knows will still be there tomorrow, and next year, and in a decade.

The anarchy tourist is the biggest badass in the world while sitting behind a keyboard. But he (it's ALWAYS a he) is behind that keyboard for a reason. Because if ever confronted by the realities he cheers on--a tear gas cannister, a burning building, an angry man wielding a fist full of rebar--the anarchy tourist would curl up in a little ball and cry.

The anarchy tourist believes property destruction is a distraction, a red herring offered up to distract us from the loss of Black Lives. Indeed, the anarchy tourist might well go further, and say that property itself is theft (this is a popular idea among those who've never lost everything).

But we have fifty years of hard-won experience with riots and their aftermath. And we've learned the hard way that a riot never really ends. Communities which experience rioting experience long-term economic devastation. Businesses that burn don't grow back, and new ones don't take their place.

The anarchy tourist doesn't like it when people talk from the perspective of the owners of these businesses. They are usually invisible victims. But many of them are people of color, and whatever their ethnicity, they lose their livelihoods, their dreams, and decades of effort and capital. Imagine serving a community for twenty years, building up networks of human connection--learning your customers' unique quirks and foibles, their hopes, the names of their children--and having it all snuffed out in seconds some pasty-faced undergrad in a black bandanna with a bottle of jellied gasoline.

But of course, it's not about the owners of the businesses primarily. In many cases we're talking about remotely owned chain stores. In these cases, when the business burns, dozens of local residents lose their source of income, and enter into the nightmare of unemployment during this second Great Depression. And their customers, many of whom lack reliable transportation, have to find new places to obtain their diapers. Their meals. Their insulin.

The owners matter. The employees matter. The customers matter.  These people matter. The anarchy tourist would likely acknowledge that, if pressed. But what matters more, to the anarchy tourist, is signalling his support for the struggle. There's no currency to be gained online through concern about property crime. So when he sees businesses and lives destroyed, the anarchy tourist screeches that it's a distraction from what really matters.

Or...what matters this week, anyway. Because last week, the anarchy tourist was up in arms about some other Greatest Outrage Ever. And next week, something new will be.

My friends on the left like to talk about "privilege". And when I watch the anarchy tourist, I think I understand what they mean. Privilege is watching somebody else's community burn on your TV, and taking pleasure in it as a necessary and desirable thing. Privilege is being able to make the carnage disappear with a flick of your remote control. Privilege is being warmed by the fire and not having to live in the ashes.

I watch those chains of African-American protesters standing between the stores at which they work and shop and a bunch of white kid cosplayers carrying garbage cans, and it seems like they maybe have something to tell me. I'm trying to listen. What I'm NOT trying to do--ever again, if I can help it--is sit behind a keyboard showing how "down with the cause" I am by playing anarchy tourist.

Anarchy tourists actively propagate structural racism under the banner of anti-racism.

Don't be an anarchy tourist.

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Faces


Faces are difficult.

I teach teenagers the art of public speaking. Most of them can, with prodding, master the fundamental mechanics of putting a speech together—assembling an argument, enhancing its credibility and clarity with supporting material, designing a “hook” at the beginning, and so on. Delivery of the speech is another matter. They’re perfect little chatterboxes in social situations, but when placed at the front of the room, with all eyes on them—no more eyes than they’d encounter at the lunch table, really—they often clam up and dissolve into squirming jelly.

It’s the faces, of course. The way a person narrows their eyes, a tiny flare of the nostrils, a tightening of the skin around the cheekbones—every little shift and twist conveys new information, and we’re trained from birth to recognize and react to it. And for someone who’s at a vulnerable age, terrified of the judgment of their peers, to have to deal with all of the difficult mechanics of giving a speech—and then to look up and see dozens of faces, each one projecting data with the intensity of a high-pressure fire hose—it’s often too much to bear.  No wonder they retreat behind their scripts! Much safer to smoothly read meticulously-crafted sentences off a notecard than to live in that terrifying moment of seeing and being seen!

I was a pretty decent public speaker even in adolescence, and developed rapidly once I made it an area of specialization. I’ve come to believe that may have something to do with my apparent position on the autism spectrum. I have always had a great deal of difficulty with faces—recognizing them, correlating them with names, understanding when they send me cues that I’m being offensive. I now think that this was my superpower as a developing public speaker. I never feared to look people in the face because I was largely blind to the sentiments those faces were expressing. I could just focus on getting my message across.

And yet, I came to realize as time went by that the ultimate goal of any really good public speaker was to achieve a sense of genuine connection with the audience, and to move past the process of “performing” into one of sharing genuine meaning. At its top level, public speaking isn’t about projecting information, it’s about exchanging information. The speaker initiates the conversation, yes, but is also receiving continual nonverbal feedback from the audience. Unspoken questions are asked. The best speakers use their eyes to listen for those questions, and seek to and answer them. Audiences broadcast emotions, and the speaker seeks to surf those emotions and to guide them. The audience’s faces are both a map of the terrain the speaker is traversing and a scoreboard assessing the speaker’s performance. And the “boss mission” of public speaking is to learn to love those faces—to look people in the eye not because you have to, but because you want to, because that is what makes the experience of speaking enjoyable.

Which brings me to the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the weirdest situations I’ve faced (ahem) as a teacher.

Like thousands of other schools throughout the world, mine is moving classes online. Teachers are learning to master the use of new remote-learning technologies that allow us to teach kids who aren’t physically proximate to ourselves. There are some disciplines, particularly lecture-intensive ones, where this will probably work pretty well. Others, maybe not so much. God knows how phys ed is gonna operate.

Speech education, though, is going to a uniquely weird place.

As I write this, I’m sitting in front of the desktop computer monitor from which I will be teaching next week. The setup isn’t meaningfully different from your cell phone, I suppose; my web camera is positioned directly atop the monitor. So, when I teach, I’m going to be looking at the faces of my students on the screen, and they’ll be looking at mine, and those of their peers. But here’s the rub:  in order to maintain the appearance of eye contact, these quaran-teens will need to be looking not at the faces on the screen, but at the camera lens above them.

A paradox: the moment the speaker dares to look the listener in the eye, the listener sees the speaker look away.  After spending the first nine weeks of the semester training students to look at, and to enjoy looking at, the faces of their audience, I will now have to train them to specifically avoid that habit.

And I find myself wondering about the long-term consequences of this kind of social distance. I wonder what sort of speakers we will become if we learn that communication is the art of dodging the listener's face. I stare at the future through a glassy lens, and I worry. For all my lack of social aptitude, I have thrived in the proximity of my audience, in the realization that they are, like me, beasts of temperate flesh. I fear a world in which they devolve from that form into shapes on a screen, blobs of color in a black expanse.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Four Novels that Shaped Me

I've been invited by the prominent poet and editor Cameron Mount to share four novels that shaped me. He made the offer in a tweet, and I gather that the idea was that I respond in the same channel. But I'm me, so I'm choosing to overthink the question.

The first thing that I'm overthinking is what question I'm actually being asked. It would be easy to identify four favorite novels. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that most of my favorite fiction hasn't influenced my own in any meaningful way. I adored the work of Douglas Adams as a teen, and I would love to be able to write like him, but I know damn well that I can't.  (And neither can anyone else; people need to stop trying.)  I made a conscious effort to write a story like Terry Pratchett at one point--the story is "The Rule of Three", and was published in the anthology Strange Economics--but his wry sensibility and subtle profundity doesn't infuse my work. I admired Catch-22 but I have no particular gift for nonlinear narratives or for portraying the inhumanity of bureaucratic processes. I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress but I never developed the balls to pursue moral libertarianism to the extent Heinlein does and I don't have his imagination for alternative social systems. I don't have the capacity for the world-building of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire or the epic sweep of Stephen King's The Stand, though King's novel The Long Walk, which he wrote as a teenager, narrowly missed this list.

Yet even after recognizing the difference between "enjoyed" and "was influenced by" doesn't quite address the question.  As Brad Porter points out via Twitter, "shaped" is not quite the same as "influenced". The former term goes deeper. It implies that the novel didn't just inspire imitation, but fundamentally affected my worldview in ways that were later reflected in my work.

With those precepts in mind, here's my best shot at answering Cameron's question.



1.  Thieves of Light (Photon:  The Ultimate Game on Earth) by Michael Hudson

I have been a milquetoast since early childhood. Even so, every adolescent seeks to expand his or her horizons to some extent. My version of an "adventure", in my pre-teen years, was to walk a mile or so from my suburban home to Brookwood Shopping Center. I would, of course, do it the dangerous way, abandoning the paved sidewalks in favor of the dark, wooded area surrounding the Shunga-Nunga Creek.  I'd pick up a pack of mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and a glass 16-ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper at Dillons Supermarket, then head for the stationary store, where I would purchase pretty much any piece of paperback fiction they happened to stock on the shelves that day; I think my primary purchasing criterion may have been brightness of the colors on the cover.  I'd then proceed to the creek, where I'd lay out on the bank, chow down on candy, and read my book in the mid-afternoon sun.

I am confident that at least 50 of the books I read were Choose Your Own Adventure mini-novels (or the inferior "Which Way" knockoffs), but those mostly blend into an indistinguishable morass in my memory. Sorry, Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. Then as now, there was a buttload of cheap pulp to be experienced; I dived in head-first, indulged in some pleasant escapism, shoved my purchase into a cubbyhole in my bedroom, and in most cases never thought about it again.

One of the many, many books with which I spent an afternoon was Michael Hudson's Thieves of Light. I do not remember it well, and in order to write this piece I had to do some digging even to figure out what the title was. As best I recall, it was sort of a laser-tag version of The Last Starfighter--teenager discovers that the combat game he's super awesome at is actually training for a real galactic war, and his Mad Skillz identify him for recruitment as the new Chosen One, selected to go to war for the fate of the Earth.  We've seen it before and we'll see it again; even Ernest Cline recently and regrettably chose to walk this dark path.

I'm sure the book was fine. I have only one solid memory of it, though. I opened the front cover of the book thinking of writers as some sort of exotic species of alien experts, practitioners of a wonderful art which was impossibly remote from the little stories I sketched out in class.  By the time I closed it, something had changed.  There's a lot of stuff like this on those shelves. Most of it's more fun than it is brilliant. Somebody's producing it. There isn't any real reason that somebody couldn't be me.

I didn't come back to that idea for about three decades. But this is the first distinct memory I have of experiencing it.


2.  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

This was probably the single work of fiction I enjoyed most between the ages of 10 and 18. It's possible that, in terms of pure joy, it's still #1; we never quite commit to fiction with the same intensity once we reach maturity, do we?

I re-read it a couple of years ago while waiting for Ana Duvernay's ill-considered movie adaptation.  It was, of course, a completely different experience as an adult. And I discovered, as I read it, that I had picked up more from L'Engle than I realized.

People: this book is a justly celebrated masterpiece, but we have lost track of the fact that it is also crazy batshit insane.

I did not remember Meg Murray--the viewpoint character--as being so violent that she had to be removed from school for the safety of the other students.  I remembered Charles Wallace as a bit of an odd duck, not as this bizarre amalgam of borderline-scary cognitive capacity and Christlike kindness.  And Calvin--well, I remember him as being sort of there, but I think that must have been mental scar tissue, because from a writing perspective Calvin is just plain broken. He speaks sentences that no human being in history has ever spoken, or ever would speak; the closest syntactic equivalent is probably the Leonardo DiCaprio version of Jay Gatsby. These three heroes are then plunged into a universe full of winged centaurs singing gospel hymns, mystic teleporting crones one of whom used to be a star (not a celebrity, but an immense ball of incandescent hydrogen in outer space), furry tree-things named "Aunt Beast" bearing bowls of healing porridge, and disembodied throbbing brains operating evil Stepford Civilizations which can be overcome only through the Power of Love.

Folks, this book is off the charts nuts, an impossible synthesis of hippie sentimentality, ludicrous pseudoscience and unmistakably and overwhelmingly Christian cosmology--it borders at times on being a religious tract. And, folks: it WORKS.  It WORKS LIKE ALL HELL.  And the reason it works is that Madeleine L'Engle commits to the whole thing one hundred percent, and doesn't back away from any single one of her bizarre characters or plot decisions. Having a rational person try to "edit" this book would utterly ruin it--as indeed it did when Duvernay and Disney tried to update and improve the story by making it a paen to self-belief featuring the loving guidance of Oprah Winfrey.

And you know what?  I write like L'Engle.  Not as well as L'Engle by any stretch of the imagination, but she and I do share one positive quality: shamelessness. Like L'Engle, I will write the story I wanna write, without regard to whether there is the slightest chance of a publisher picking it up or a reader considering it comprehensible or sane.

And so you WILL get stories from me about Amish space colonies, and Benedict Arnold fighting Genghis Khan and Rasputin in a sword-and-planet afterlife, and magically-enhanced urban professionals escorting a Kennedy baby to Dallas to be inaugurated as God-Emperor, and sentient treasure hoards and corrupt corporate elves who snort gold dust like cocaine and books that turn people gay and all kinds of other madness that takes weeks to write and months or years to sell, if it sells at all, when it would be much, much more rational of me to study up on functional metanarratives and write my stories using sane, functional mechanics.

I could be a better writer, but I'm not. Madeleine L'Engle broke me.



3.  The Book of the SubGenius by The SubGenius Foundation (primarily Doug Smith writing as Ivan Stang)

We all get a little bit unhealthily sure of ourselves in college, and paradoxically, we also become amenable to persuasion by people in authority. I suppose it's part of being a New Adult. We spent fourteen years or so in awe of grownups, with their vast and unfathomable knowledge of the world, which we sort of assumed that would magically be instilled in us via osmosis at some point prior to our eighteenth birthdays.  Then we spent four years being increasingly disappointed by, and angry about, the fact that these people in fact had access to no hidden store of knowledge; they'd been making it all up as they went along.  And now WE'RE the adults, and we know goddamn NOTHING, and that's terrifying, because if we don't know, maybe nobody else does either, and there's no sane force behind the steering wheel.

So: we become attracted to certainty. Maybe it's the certainty of our college professor railing about the evils of capitalism.  Or, in some cases--though not as often as used to be the case--we do a deep dive into religion, either that we grew up with or some newfound alternative. Or maybe adopt some kind of political orthodoxy. Or maybe we just flat-out join a cult. Anything to avoid the terrifying prospect of universal incompetence; there's got to be some solid rock somewhere that we can cling to.

As a freshman in college, I ran across The Book of the SubGenius in a Borders bookstore in a shopping mall in Des Moines. I'd had a glancing interaction with the teachings of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs prior, but I'd considered them juvenile.

And I wasn't wrong, exactly.  Because there's plenty of sardonic, too-cool-for-school smirking at True Believers within the teachings of Ivan Stang's pipe-smoking guru, and a fair amount of stuff that's funny at the level of a fart joke. 

But here's the thing, though: farts are funny.

Farts are damned funny, and people really DO commit themselves 100% to doctrines that are at best 2-3% more insane than SubGenius doctrine, and those people really DO gain meaningful power in society and enact policies that really DO immiserate and kill thousands or millions of people, and that isn't funny at all.  And "Ivan Stang's" response to that wasn't to critique it directly, but instead to lean into the madness.  He built a pseudo-comic, pseudo-serious Frankenstein's Monster out of bits of Scientology and Christianity and Lovecraft and Jim Jones and 1980s New Left politics, and he incorporated it and called it a religion and gave it its own pipe-smoking Christ figure and a sci-fi cosmology and creation myth and a set of religious principles that celebrate a sort of enlightened laziness called "slack" and demand that true believers schism at the first opportunity.

It is the single most impressive work of fiction I've ever encountered.  My young adult novel borrowed from it, up to, and perhaps past, the point of plagiarism.

I sort of flabbled and wobbled my way through a brief infatuation phase with SubGenius philosophy during which I was pretty insufferable, in the way college kids often are.  I bought the ordination card and everything, and declared myself capable of performing weddings (with or without the consent of the participants; indeed, without even their knowledge. A great many of you are going to hell for adultery.). I stopped talking about it so much after a while, but that ordination card is still in my dresser drawer somewhere, and it's presumably as valid as it ever was.

And now I write fiction.  And recently, when I was asked to finish the sentence, "All my stories have...", I struggled mightily for an answer.  And I think the truest conclusion I can offer is, "...a problem with consensus."

I have always been contentious; being in a room where everybody agrees sets my teeth on edge, because people who agree get self-righteous, and self-righteous people do that whole "certainty" thing that college kids do, and that "certainty" ends up directed at the people who reject the conclusions of which the self-righteous are certain. And then people end up dead. And so my stories, and the characters in them, test ideas, and the consensus that forms around them.

This is not the wisest approach for a working writer. A professional will always, by definition, be better served by catering to a consensus than by attacking it. Consensus is where the money is. But I fear consensus, and what it can do. I learned that from J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, and from Ivan Stang.



4,  The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

I think it's fair to say that our most recent literary influences exercise disproportionate impact, isn't it?In my case, I started writing at just about the same time I started reading Joe Abercrombie.  I haven't realized, until very recently, how this has created some problems for me.

I don't apologize for being an Abercrombie fan.  The so called "King of Grimdark" is just flat-out awesome, providing the most complicated and nuanced characters I've encountered in contemporary fiction, regardless of genre.  Moreover, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I think the bleakness of his work is somewhat overstated by critics. The claim that his characters never learn or grow is simply factually untrue; Jezal dan Luthar and Caul Shivers both walk away from their character arcs as wiser men, if not happier ones.  Nor does virtue (always) go unrewarded; look at the Dogman, who is arguably the most sympathetic character in the First Law trilogy and eventually prospers thereby.  Even Sand dan Glokta (a reprehensible human being) and Ardee West (a broken human being) achieve what is probably the greatest happiness of which they are capable when they change their behavioral pattern and make a pivotal decision with someone else's interest in mind.

That said:  yeah, Abercrombie's pretty damn grim.  His work involves people with profound character flaws acting on those flaws, thereby producing horrible results for themselves and others.  And I admit that I find this grimness pretty fascinating. I dug George R.R. Martin's subversion of fantasy tropes in A Storm of Swords and elsewhere, and found it interesting to see Abercrombie double down on his work, and in his quest to show how unhappy people end up unhappy.

And so, I wrote a whole bunch of stories involving some pretty wretched people, and some other people who were maybe pretty okay but made some bad decisions and had awful things happen to them. And after a while, I started to wonder why nobody wanted to read my stuff all that much, and why I couldn't motivate myself to write more.

And here's the thing.  It turns out that, mostly, people don't enjoy reading work that makes them miserable!  I know, shocking, right?  And it wasn't until I started lining my work up with a possible collection in mind, and assigning it a rating between 1 (grim AF) and 10 (zip-a-dee-doo-dah), and looking at those strings of low, low numbers all in a row, with no relief, that I began to realize just how dark I had allowed things to get.

So: Abercrombie shaped me, no doubt. But maybe I needed to learn that you can't really please readers being Joe Abercrombie unless you have the psychological insight of a Joe Abercrombie.

So perhaps I'll be looking to produce work that doesn't make the reader want to slit their wrists. Next time you see me discuss my inspirations, you might find work of a different tone.

Monday, January 6, 2020

The Glory That Was Broadswords and Blasters

Broadswords and Blasters is probably done. Editors Matt Gomez and Cameron Mount have announced a hiatus following the release of issue 12, and indications are that the stresses of putting out a quality magazine, on top of their other full-time jobs and family lives, have proven too much of a strain to endure.

We're losing a lot of fiction markets these days. A lot of ink has been expended on pro markets like Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Compelling Science Fiction, and Apex, which went under as their editors faced the same brutal grind--and unworkable balance sheets--that Matt and Cameron did. But the loss of BS&B hurts more, at least for me.

Matt and Cameron were rare among editors in that they always went out of their way to make writing fun for everyone who came into contact with them. Facing down the usual barrage of hundreds of submissions per issue, they prided themselves on offering actual reasons for rejection to everyone who didn't make the cut--a standard which virtually NO market meets. Their social media feeds, both as individuals and as the BS&B entity, were always full of appreciation for authors and for other markets, as well as grim honesty about the downside of the job--the scads of submissions from people who plainly didn't read the guidelines, the impossibility of meeting Amazon's formatting requirements, the pain that comes from laboring mightily to put out a quality issue and seeing less than a dozen people pay for it. Following their feeds was an education, and a reminder that I would never have had the gumption or the work ethic to do what they did.

But following them was also a joy. There were the Follow Friday promotions, with shout-outs to their published writers that sparked weekly GIF wars.  There were the posts on the magazine's blog celebrating the best of mass-market pulp. And there was that greatest of all joys for a writer-seeing one's work in print, seeing the quality of the other stuff that made the grade, and knowing that keeping company of this quality meant you'd achieved something.

I reviewed a couple of initial issues of BS&B because I felt that was an appropriate gesture of thanks to a periodical that had taken a chance on my work. I liked those issues. I liked them so much, in fact, that I ended up purchasing, reading, and reviewing them all, except for the ones in which my writing appeared. It was a market marked by rock-'em sock-'em action, stylistic experimentation, diversity of setting and concept, and often by just full-on WEIRDNESS. I think I was the first reviewer to call Matt and Cameron the "mad scientists of modern pulp," and they were that in the very best sense of the word.

The high points for BS&B were very high. If you want an introduction to the mag, I'd recommend Issue 5, which includes L Chan's "Petals, Falling Like Memories," one of the best stories every to appear in New Pulp, along with several other excellent stories and what was probably my favorite of the trademark cover illustrations created by the talented Luke Spooner.  A second high point is, actually, the new issue, number 12.  Although I can't post reviews of it as per my personal policy, there's some STOMPIN' pulp herein, including J. Rohr's magisterial "Riding The Rails", a mortal lock for my year-end best-of list.  You'll find my own work in Issues 4, 8, and the aforementioned Issue 12.

The mad scientists will be moving on now to other pursuits.  But in our hearts, and on our shelves, the beautiful monster they created shambles on.