Tag: writing

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.

An alternative market

Since the estimable editors at Black Gate have managed to attract such a crowd of high-quality submissions that the soonest a newly submitted story can reasonably expect to be published is sometime around Issue 47 in the year 2026, I thought it might be of interest to the various writers who follow this blog to know about an alternative that pays less and is presently less prestigious, but has a more pressing need for publishable material.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Publishing update

First, The Deported has been accepted for publication in the Halloween edition of Stupefying Stories. This actually marks my third-ever submission of a short story for publication and my first-ever acceptance, as I had a (dreadful) story rejected by Asimov’s in 1989 and a (pretty good) novella rejected by Black Gate in 2009. (In fairness to John O’Neill, it was a bit of a stretch for BG.) Ten points to the first one to guess what literary lion’s style is being imitated in the story; if you are one of the few who happen to know already, do keep your mouth shut!

Second, I’ve been informed by a publisher that they would like to publish the first book in the Arts of Dark and Light series. I sent them a sample and they particularly liked what they termed the rich depth of the world. Nothing is final yet, but I see no reason we won’t be able to work things out shortly; I was completely surprised to hear they were interested in publishing such a monster. Arts of Dark and Light is set in the same world as Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy, but is more accessible and vastly larger in scope. Translation I: No more untranslated Latin or structural limits set by 700-year old theological treatises. Translation II: we shall see if I can do any better in producing a work of epic fantasy than the authors of the various works I have criticized in the last few months.

So, if it turns out well, I shall owe a debt of gratitude to Messrs. Abercrombie, Bakker, Erikson, and Martin, as it was reading their work that first caused me to begin thinking “Sweet Silmarillion, I could do better than this.” And by Martin, I expect you understand that I am referring to the last two books only, which are significantly inferior to the first three. Robert Jordan doesn’t count, as I would rather read Jack Torrance’s epic seven times than subject myself again to the deplorable Wheel of Time. I like to think that the name was a result of Jordan being a sadist who gave fair warning; that series should have been listed in an addendum to the Geneva Convention.

Anyhow, if nothing else, we already know Arts of Dark and Light will have a gorgeous cover. So we have that going for us….

Umberto Eco on literal readers

Credulity and identification

In the preceding “Bustina di Minerva” I wrote that many readers find it difficult to ascertain, in a novel, the reality of the fiction, and they tend to attribute to the author the passions and the thoughts of his characters. To confirm this, I found a site on the internet that records the thoughts of various authors, and under “the quotes of Umberto Eco” I discovered this: “The Italian is unfaithful, a liar, vile, treacherous, he is is more comfortable with the dagger than with the sword, better with poison than with medicine, slippery in negotiation, and coherent only in that he changes his flag with every wind.” It’s not that there isn’t something of the truth in all this, but it appears as if it is written by a foreign author. In my novel, The Cemetery of Prague, this sentence is written by a gentleman who in the preceding pages has manifested a racist compulsion making use of all the most hoary old cliches. From now on, I must be sure to never place banal characters in fictional scenes, otherwise one day they will attribute to me philosophies such as “one has but one mother”.

Now I read the last “Blown Glass” of Eugenio Scalfari, which reprises my previous “Bustina” and raises a new problem. Scalfari agrees with the fact that there are people who confuse the fictional narrative for reality, but retains, (and rightly retains that I retained), that the fictional narrative can be truer than the truth in order to inspire identifications and perceptions of historical phenomenons, to create new modes of thought, etc. And we must consider if one cannot be in accord with this opinion.

It is not only that the fictional narrative also confirms aesthetic conditions: a reader can very well know that Madame Bovary never existed and yet enjoy the style with which Flaubert constructs his character. But here the aesthetic dimension can be seen to be in opposition to the “aletic” dimension, (that which has to do with the notion of the truth shared with logic, the sciences, or the judges that make courtroom decisions about the veracity of testimony declaring how a certain thing took place.) They are two diverse dimensions; there are problems if a judge makes his decision based on how aesthetically a defendant lies to him. I was occupied with the aletic dimension. It is for the most part true that my reflections were born of an internal discourse on falsehood and the lie. Is it false to say that a Vanna Marchi lotion will regrow hair? It is false. Is it false to say that Don Abbondio met two bravos?(1) From the aletic point of view, yes, but the narrator does not want to tell us how much of the story is true or false, he pretends it is true and asks us to play along. He asks us, as Coleridge recommended, “to suspend the disbelief”.

Scalfari cites Werther(2), and we know how many romantic young men and women identifying with the protagonist committed suicide. Did they perhaps believe that the story was true? Not necessarily, just as we know that Emma Bovary never existed and yet we are moved to tears on her behalf. One recognizes a fiction as fictional, even as we immerse ourselves in the depths of a character.

It is that we intuit that even if Madame Bovary never existed, there exist many women like her, and it is perhaps as if she is also us to some extent and from her a lesson can be derived of life in general and of our own selves. The ancient Greeks believed the things that befell Oedipus were true and reflected his fate. Freud knew very well that Oedipus never existed, but read those events as a profound lesson on how the aspects of the unconscious operated.

What happens instead to the readers of whom I speak, those who don’t absolutely distinguish between fiction and reality? Their situation does not have aesthetic validity. To the extent they are inclined to take the story so seriously that they never ask if it is told well or poorly, they are not looking for instruction and they do not identify with the characters. They simply manifest that which I will define as a fictional deficit; they are incapable of suspending their disbelief. Since there are more of these readers than we think, it is worth the trouble to consider them because we know that all the questions of morals and aesthetics will elude them.

(1) The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni
(2) This must mean The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe rather than the opera entitled Werther since the opera premiered 118 years after the book was published and well after the wave of the suicides it inspired.

Bias in book reading

Is science fiction sexist? Is adventure fantasy sexist? Without bothering to go through all fifteen issues of Black Gate, I’m going to guess that there is not a perfect statistical match between the population demographics and the contributors to Black Gate. Which, by the metric suggested by the woman horrified that Guardian readers have the sexist audacity to prefer male SF writers by a 24 to 1 margin, is ipso facto evidence that Black Gate, too, is a bastion of male privilege.

Is science fiction sexist? A bald, potentially divisive and rather emotive question, there. But increasingly, science fiction and its close cousins, fantasy and horror, are being accused of an inherent downer on the female practitioners of the genre – and the latest offender appears to be the Guardian’s recent online poll to find readers’ favourite SF novels. Earlier this month Damien G Walter asked guardian.co.uk/books users to suggest the best novels in the genre, following on from the Guardian’s special SF-slanted edition of its Saturday Review supplement.

The results went online last week, and displayed a great love for science fiction: more than 500 books, classic and contemporary, were suggested for inclusion. However, according to Seattle-based author Nicola Griffith, who did a bit of number-crunching on the stats, there’s an overwhelming bias towards male authors.

My response to this shocking non-news can be found at the Black Gate. For those who are interested, the column to which various SF/F luminaries such as the Tor editors and the present of the SFWA took such exception can be found here.

No need to tweet

Unlike the hapless ex-Rep. Weiner, I can demonstrate that I am a man merely by flexing my text. I submitted my most recent column, sans the Schumpeter quote, to the Hacker Factor’s Gender Guesser.

Genre: Formal
Female = 638
Male = 1377
Difference = 739; 68.33%
Verdict: MALE

So much for my budding career in chick lit.

They were right after all

The media is disappointed to discover Sarah Palin isn’t actually illiterate:

AOL Weird News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor’s emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said.

“I’m a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate,” said 2tor Chief Executive Officer John Katzman. “However, the emails say something else. Ms. Palin writes emails on her Blackberry at a grade level of 8.5.

“If she were a student and showing me her work, I’d say ‘It’s fine, clear writing,'” he said, admitting that emails he wrote scored lower than Palin’s on the widely used Flesch-Kincaid readability test…. [Editor’s Note: In the interest of fairness, the writer submitted his own work for scrutiny. His recent piece, on a New York man trying to row across the Atlantic Ocean is on the 8.8 grade level, Payack said.]

Out of curiosity, I popped my most recent column into the Readability Calculator: “Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 13.10”. And my recent email to KW came in at 14.74. How fortunate that so many more Americans are now attending college, otherwise I might fear for my mass appeal. Still, I am forced to conclude that the newspaper editors of America knew precisely what they were doing when they uniformly, (with the sole exception of the Dallas Morning News), turned down my column during my brief, but glorious career as the UPS-designated heir to WFB.

But there are less accessible writers out there. I was a little surprised that Joseph Schumpeter scored only 13.35, as I’d have assumed he was over 15 at a minimum.