Tag: writing

Now this is a book review

Ferdinand correctly skewers the American literary establishment. And by skewers, I mean “prison rapes”:

The New York Trilogy is a encapsulation of everything I hate about modern literature. It’s turgid, condescending, obtuse, and pointless. But the sad thing is that Luc Sante got it right in his intro — Paul Auster is the poet laureate of New York City, though not for the reasons he thinks. The New York Trilogy is the perfect book for the New York of Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, a stultifying police state run by over-educated SWPLs who think All Things Considered is really deep and get the vapors whenever anyone says anything vaguely controversial. It’s perfect for the New York of the hipsters, pencil-necked dweebs from Seattle or Milwaukee thinking they’re going to be the next Thurston Moore or Lydia Lunch while they snack on artisan bread courtesy of their trust funds. It’s perfect for a New York defanged, declawed and stripped of everything that made it interesting and unique, made safe for underemployed Midwestern brats and bored Australian tourists. The New York everyone romanticizes— the New York of danger, intrigue and passion — is dead and buried.

And this neutered New York has produced a literati that spends all day sniffing its own farts. Jonathan Safran Foer, Colson Whitehead, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace (actually wait, he’s dead — I’ve never derived so much joy from a suicide in my life), and all the rest: worthless hacks devoid of curiosity, humanity or talent. There’s more merit in a single Roosh Tweet than in the entire American literary establishment.

As Camille Paglia anticipated, the removal of religion from art has all but destroyed it. Although this is more visible in the visual arts, such as painting and sculpture, the disease of secularism has absolutely ravaged literature. Even the viciously anti-religious artist at least had something against which to posture. The philosophers may have foreseen the ghastly, soulless consequences of secular meaninglessness, but it has taken the artists to truly drive the ugly point home.

Seriously, who actually reads this tedious navel-gazing shit anymore? I don’t think even those who pretend to like it do.

The long slog

Some of you have wondered why I haven’t gotten around to X yet, for varying values of X. The answer is that I’ve simply been very busy with a number of projects, including writing manuals, assembling legal documents, writing game designs, and working on the first novel in the Arts of Dark and Light series. In other words, in the last 200 days, I have cranked out more than 200,000 words that no one has seen in addition to all of the various blog posts and columns during that time.

I’m about 20 days behind on my original schedule for the novel, so I’ve got to increase my average daily production from 725 to 945 words the rest of the way. That won’t have any impact on the blog, but it does mean that I’m not likely to do much else until I get the first draft done within the one year I allotted for it. This isn’t an apology, I’m simply letting you know that if it’s not related to the novel or the game designs, it probably isn’t getting done in the near future. And if I don’t devote much time to a comment or an email, well, you can probably figure out why.

Ebook edits

We’re getting closer to putting the three Eternal Warriors ebooks up on Amazon. They’ll probably be sold for $1.99 each, as that appears to be Amazon’s preferred price. However, while the cover for Shadow is being prepared, it occurs to me that it might not be a bad idea to use the time fresh eyes to check for typos and formatting mishaps in the epubs that have been prepared, so if you’re interested in reading through one of them and taking the relevant notes, please let me know and specify which book you’d like to check, The War in Heaven, The World in Shadow, or The Wrath of Angels.

Winter is waning

Scott Taylor explains why what was bad in A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons is very likely only going to get worse, assuming that George Martin manages to publish another book in A Song of Ice and Fire:

Writers have a window of ‘perfect’ production, and although it’s much more forgiving than the 4 years of an athlete, it still exists. I mean, there’s a reason you know famous works by authors and yet don’t know what they’ve done in the past 20 years of their lives until their obituary is plastered all over the internet.

There comes a time where you need to retire, you need to hang up your cleats, or in this case, your keyboard, and sail into the sunset. It sucks for everyone, sure, and it’s sad to see them go, and yet isn’t it more horrible to pick up an author’s latest work and think ‘wow, what happened?’ Wouldn’t you rather remember them in the light when their words could do no wrong and each sentence was linguistic gold?

I’m going push my argument with some stats and let you be the judge. Inside these stats you’ll see I’ve included a defining award, and I’ve done this because typically an award showcases the very best of an author’s work, thus, that should be the barometer for the high point of a career.

Let me give some examples:

Michael Moorcock [Born 1939]: Definitive series Elric 1965-1979, Nebula Award Behold the Man, 1967. Prime writing years Age 26-40.

Orson Scott Card [Born 1951]: Definitive series Ender 1985 – Ongoing [but can you name a book after Xenocide, 1991?], Nebula Award Ender’s Game, 1985. Prime writing years Age 33-40.

Stephen King [Born 1947]: Definitive series [Fantasy] Gunslinger 1982-Ongoing, Bram Stoker Award Misery 1987. Prime writing years Age 30-50 [ending with The Green Mile].

Piers Anthony [Born 1934]: Definitive series Xanth 1977-Ongoing [I dare you to name all 36 current volumes!], Award Nebula Nomination A Spell for Chameleon, 1978. Prime writing years Age 32-52.

J.R.R. Tolkien [Born 1892]: Definitive series Lord of the Rings 1940+ [written], Published 1954, Award International Fantasy Award 1957. Prime writing years Age 40-57.

Arthur C. Clarke [Born 1917]: Definitive series Odyssey 1968. Hugo Award 1956 ‘The Star’, Prime writing years Age 40-55.

Robert Jordan [Born 1948]: Definitive series Wheel of Time 1990-Ongoing [Jordan died in 2007 at age 58], Locus Award Nominee Lord of Chaos, 1995, Prime writing years 40-50 [before the wheels came off Wheel of Time].

Isaac Asimov [Born 1920]: Definitive series Foundation 1942, Award Nebula The Gods Themselves, 1972, Prime writing years Age 22-65….

This could go on until the cows come home, but the essence of it breaks down to a set of years that ‘most’ great writers produce their best work, which is typically sometime between age 35 and age 55, a very comfortable twenty year window. Yes, yes, all points can be argued, all dates debated, but remember I’m talking as a whole.

The above is an average, but I believe my point is sound, that being that A Game of Thrones was written in Martin’s prime. Martin was born in 1948, so in 1994 he was 46 which pretty much puts him smack dab in the middle of his prime years. You add 17 years to that publishing figure for the release of A Dance of Dragons and all of a sudden you’ve slipped WELL past your golden creative window to the age of 63 [even the great Asimov was just doing novellas at this point in his life].

It’s hard to argue with his conclusions. There are the occasional exceptions, but I remember being simply confused when I read Caesar’s Women by Colleen McCullough, the fourth in her Masters of Rome series. While I enjoyed the first three, the fourth was almost as if it was written by a different writer. I never read Caesar, the fifth book, and while I did pick up a copy of The October Horse – great title, incidentally – it was almost unreadable from the start and I put it down almost immediately. McCullough was born in 1937, Caesar’s Women was published in 1996, three years after Fortune’s Favorites, when she was 59 years old. This suggests that somewhere between the age of 56 and 59, she lost her ups. Or her fastball, if you prefer baseball metaphors. Regardless, it’s quite in keeping with Taylor’s theory.

This is discouraging as a reader of Martin’s work, but I actually find it somewhat encouraging since the first volume in Arts of Dark and Light will be published while I’ve still got another 15 or 20 years left.

Amorality is not a moral position

On the one hand, I’m pleased that people outside the coterie of Black Gate writers are interested in the question of morality and the new nihilism within the SF/F genre. On the other, I’m a little disturbed by the way in which so many people with opinions on the subject appear to have an amount of trouble grasping some of the most basic issues involved. While we can certainly agree to disagree when our opinions on the subject happen to diverge, we can’t even manage to do that when there are fundamental misunderstandings about the issues being discussed. To explain what I mean by this, it is first necessary to quote the German writer Cora Buhlert’s recent post entitled Morality in Fantasy – 2012 Edition.

And even the defenders of morally sound fantasy have often no qualms with a piece of morally questionable fantasy, as long as they enjoy it. Remember Theo, who was involved in last year’s nihilism in epic fantasy debate and felt that morally ambiguous epic fantasy was not just fiction that was not to his taste, but apparently heralded the decline of the western world itself? Turns out he’s still blogging at Black Gate on occasion. What is more, he takes Mur Lafferty to task for not wanting to read supposed genre classics, because the racism and misogyny and the prevalence of violence against women puts her off. So Theo ranting against Joe Abercrombie and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a sign of his moral superiority, while Mur Lafferty ranting against The Stars My Destination and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a sign of her lack of education and moral flatness? Sorry, but this doesn’t work. If Theo enjoys Thomas Covenant, more power to him. But that doesn’t change the fact that Thomas Covenant is a rapist and no more moral than the protagonists of the Joe Abercrombie novels he singled out for destroying western civilization. But since Thomas Covenant is really sorry for what he did, spends much of the series wallowing in self-pity and finally apparently redeems himself, at least in the eyes of Theo (I can’t say if it would work for me, since I never got that far), that apparently makes The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant okay. Though I guess what really makes Thomas Covenant okay for Theo but not Joe Abercrombie is that he enjoyed Thomas Covenant but didn’t enjoy Joe Abercrombie. Which is a perfectly acceptable aesthetic judgement, but does not automatically make one book morally superior to the other.

If you’re interested in my response, you can find it at The Black Gate.

The best of Stupefying Stories

The Original Cyberpunk provides a complete list and asks for everyone’s favorites from the first three issues:

During 2011, STUPEFYING STORIES published twenty-seven stories and two poems. Which were your favorites, and why? Considering the contents of our first three issues, are there any contributors from whom you would particularly like to see a return appearance?

Speaking only for myself, I would have to say that the two best stories were “The King of Ash and Bones” by Rebecca Roland and “The Window” by David Yener Goodman. But then, I haven’t read the third issue yet; it is next on my list after I finish the Brandon Sanderson novel I am currently reading.

The epic cometh

I’m pleased to let those who are interested know that Marcher Lord and I have agreed upon terms for the publication of the first book in the forthcoming Arts of Dark and Light series. I won’t say much about it now except to mention that it is set in the world of Summa Elvetica, Marcus Valerius is one of the protagonists, and it is going to be one big fat fantasy novel of more than 700 pages. It will be available in print and ebook format, and I think I can just about guarantee that the cover art will be even more spectacular than SE’s. We anticipate its release in October next year.

We’re also looking at a re-release of Summa Elvetica with the inclusion of an additional novella which concerns Lodi and one of the protagonists of the aforementioned novel.

Stupefying Stories 1.2

The Original Cyberpunk and team today released the November issue of Stupefying Stories, which features short fiction from various Friday Challenge stars and others, including Aaron Bradford Starr, Clare L. Deming, Anatoly Belilovsky, Sarah Frost, Rebecca Roland, and Henry Vogel.

I didn’t contribute to this issue, but as keen observers of the reading list may have already discerned, I have been working on a story that will appear in a future issue. Or rather, giving the amazing number of stories from very recognizable names now being submitted every week to the fledgling e-publication, may appear in a future issue.

Juxstaposition

It makes no sense, but I somehow feel as if I wrote the story just in time. I was reading the news when a pair of familiar names leaped out at me.

FINO A IERI Monterosso era una delle perle della Liguria. Case colorate incastonate tra le montagne e il mare nel territorio delle famose Cinque terre. Meta preferita di tanti vacanzieri che oggi guardano increduli le immagini di un paese semidistrutto, tagliato in due un fiume di fango e detriti.

Until yesterday Monterosso was one of the pearls of Liguria. Colored houses set between the mountains and the sea in the territory of the famous Cinque Terre. A preferred destination by many vacationers who today looked on with incredulity at the images of a half-destroyed area, cut in two by a river of mud and detritus.

Villages all but wiped out as storms batter Italy’s ‘Cinque Terre’. The walking trails and picturesque fishing villages of the Cinque Terre attract hundreds of thousands of international tourists, but two of them – Vernazza and Monterosso – were severely affected as rivers of mud poured down from the hills behind them. The mayor of Monterosso said the fishing village had all but been wiped out.

“Monterosso no longer exists,” Angelo Betta told an Italian news agency.

From “The Deported”, published in the October 2011 issue of Stupefying Stories:

“It was the fourth day of our summer holiday in Vernazza, a little fishing village in the Cinque Terre. We had spent the morning on a charming hike through the hills, lunched in Monterosso al Mare, then enjoyed a languid afternoon in the sun on the beach there. After hiking back and taking a brief but restorative nap, the six of us had reconvened for the evening on the terrace overlooking the sea. We were well into our second bottle of prosecco as Francois attempted to convince Bertrand’s wife, Michèle, that one could not genuinely claim to be an atheist and yet still believe in ghosts.

What a tragic pity. I’d merely intended a homage to Maupassant, but I fear it turned out to be far more of a ghost story than I’d ever intended. Prega per noi peccatori.