Category: Journal

Four updates in one post (warning: some updates my be really short)

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I just finished reading Andy Weir’s The Martian and, on the off chance you’re in to hard science fiction and you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you pick it up. It’s breezy and funny and it moves along briskly and there are tons and tons of math! Don’t worry, though, because Weir does a great job of keeping it at a level that I found easy to follow. I’ve no clue if the movie will be any good or not, but the book’s a keeper. Now isn’t this interesting? New Orleans is making a bid to host Worldcon 2018? There are worse places to visit, and there are worse reasons for visiting a place. 2018 is far enough away I can’t even think about making concrete plans, but wouldn’t it be fun? Speaking of New Orleans, this arrived in the mail yesterday.  It’s beautiful, it’s raw, and it’s special.  I’m home alone this weekend. You’d think I’d be out doing wild, bachelor things and so forth. Well, you might think that if you didn’t know me. I’ve done a lot of work (because hey, that’s what you do on labor day weekend, right?) and some reading and a little, but not nearly enough, cleaning. The only bachelor thing I’ve done is restrict my meals to “things I can prepare easily and clean up afterwards easily.” That name would look terrible on a label, wouldn’t it? Someone smarter than me will probably come up with something better… That last flash fiction story was a bear. It was a two-part prompt: The previous week, we created a character. Then, last week, we wrote a story using someone else’s character. I selected a fellow who didn’t say much other than a few prophetic in brief spasms. Then I got to work on the story. I had a setting, I had other characters moving around the main character, I had  a basic plot outline and even had it halfway finished when I noticed that I hadn’t really done anything with the character himself. Uh oh. This was the point at which I noticed that it’s tough to write essentially mute characters. In theory, I would have recognized this at the outset, but I’d somehow missed out on this vital realization.  Four hours, a complete shift in POV, and an kind of a cop-out of an ending, I had it done. Not great, but a terrific exercise and that’s what these prompts are all about. It did, however, lead me to ask myself a question. Let me put on my toga and you can pretend I’m speaking in the voice of some Greek philosopher: “Is it better to tell a great story adequately, or to tell an adequate story skillfully?” Ok, I’ll take the toga off now.* Ideally, of course, you want to tell a great story skillfully. For the sake of practice, I feel as though I’ve been spending too much time and effort trying to come up with a great story and not working as hard at telling it well.  So, for the next prompt, my goal is to pay more attention to the technical side of things, the mechanics of it, even if that means I’m not particularly “inspired” by the story. Does that make sense?  * Don’t flinch; I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt underneath it.

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Because What We Really Need Is More Hugo Awards Drama

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The Sad Puppies are going to make another go of it next year. My understanding is that they are not planning on slate voting this time around, and if that’s the case, I wish them well. A group working to bring more awareness to science fiction and to highlight works that might not otherwise get much attention strikes me as admirable. I feel for the Sad Puppies, because they’re in difficult-bordering-on-hopeless situation. Let’s say that you’re taking a poll of the “six best songs of the summer!” If fifty one percent of your voting population like opera and forty nine percent prefer rap*, then there is a very good chance that every song on your list is going to be an opera song. This is a feature of how some voting systems are set up. Please don’t make me link the “Spider Jerusalem on voting” rant. Another thing which may be working against them is the inertia of familiarity. If a reader likes a particular author’s voice, they will probably prefer that author’s work and cast their vote for that author even if the objective “quality” of that work, however you can objectively definite it, is not equal to that of other works. I am reasonably sure that, if a Terry Pratchett novel were nominated for literally anything, it would take a massive gulf in quality to get me to vote for other works. That’s my own subjective bias. I won’t argue that it’s a good or a bad thing, but it is a real thing and I am certain I’m not alone in this. To me, these two factors are a reasonable explanation of why certain authors and types of books continue to be nominated and win Hugo awards. It strikes me as far more plausible than a cabal of liberal insiders gaming the system. I’m not saying it can’t exist, but rather that I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect. Those were the two problems the puppies faced at the outset. There are now two more, and they’re going to turn an uphill struggle into one that I can’t see them winning. Sorry. It’s impossible for me to think of “rabid puppies” and not think of Old Yeller. The first problem, obviously, is that their name has been soiled. The puppies brand is associated with slate voting, an association that will not serve them well (see below). Even worse, they’re associated with the rabid puppies, and that’s poison. The leader of the rabid puppies has an enormous amount of personal baggage and he has a history of taking groups with a legitimate beef and turning them into frothing partisans. Even if sad puppies 4 try to distance themselves from their earlier tactics and allies, I don’t think people will swift to forget. The bigger problem, and the one which I believe probably dooms the puppies, is that the massive uptick in voter participation at Sasquan was ruinous for their slate. While many of those voters certainly had reasons other than “not liking the books” for voting against the puppies (see above), this suggests very strongly that the puppies do not represent a silent majority. Based on the numbers I’ve seen, I’d expect the puppies percentage of support to scale inversely with the number of voters. Some people have suggested that the puppy slates losing to “No Award” is incontrovertible proof that the puppies claims are objectively correct and the Hugo awards are run by a clique hell-bent on ensuring the political correctness of award winners.  That’s not merely hyperbolic; it’s simply not true that the voting results prove anything of the sort. It’s not helpful to anyone to distort the truth in that fashion, and if this kind of rhetoric is indicative of what we have to look forward to for the next twelve months, it’s possible that “No Award” will be the big winner again next year, and no one who cares even a little bit about science fiction wants to see that. Please do not interpret this as an anti-puppy statement. I just happen to be a cat person.

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What I’m reading; what I’ve read

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My train book this week is Greg Graffin and Steve Olson’s Anarchy Evolution, and it’s turning out to be a very different beast than I expected. I’ve been a Bad Religion fan ever since a co-worker told me he thought I’d really dig a band called Christian Death. I mis-remembered his recommendation and picked up a copy of Bad Religion’s Suffer instead.  It turned out to be a very fortunate accident. I wasn’t used to punk albums being so thought-provoking and catchy. For whatever reason, I never got around to checking out Christian Death. Anyway… This book is mostly about Dr. Graffin’s explanation of why the modern synthetic model of evolution is inadequate to explain what we see in species today and in the fossil record. Instead, he proposes the idea that the role of genes has become overblown in explaining how traits are inherited and distributed within populations. His writing is clear and his ideas are intriguing enough keep me turning the page. Turns out he can write, too. Graffin leans heavily on personal experiences in laying out his case. Many of the stories concern his musical career, but it’s the personal stories of his home life as a child and of scientific fieldwork that I find the most interesting and sometimes touching. I’m enjoying this book immensely,even if it hasn’t turned out to be exactly what I imagined it would be. ———————– I’ve also recently finished reading a book I can’t tell you much about at this time. What I can tell you is that it’s good, and even if it never sees the light of (published) day, I expect some parts of it will live on in the future in other works. It’s exciting to be in on a project like this, even as an observer. It’s exciting to get a little peek behind the curtain of where creative people produce honest-to-goodness creative work. Inspiring, too, which isn’t doing my productivity at the office any good, but I’m not at all sure that’s a bad thing.

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Answering a question and thinking out loud

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A friend of mine recently posed a series of interesting questions on his blog and, rather than hijack his space, I want to take a look at the big one in some detail (spoiler alert: don’t expect any definitive answers): “Am I really asking what makes great literature great and, if so, what makes great literature great?” What makes literature great? That’s a heck of a question. It’s not a new one by any means, but that does’t mean it’s not worth reconsidering from time to time. My knee-jerk reaction is that you know it when you see it, but that’s a cop-out. How do you know it? What about it makes you recognize greatness in literature? Thinking about this has led me to wander over to Wikipedia, where I ran across the idea of “literary theory.” I’ll grant that my understanding of literary theory is shallow beyond measurement, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not an approach I want to take when addressing this question.  Instead, I’ll start with looking at a list of great literature. For no compelling reason other than the fact that I need to start somewhere, let’s look at The 100 Best Novels Written in English, as per Robert McCrum. At this point, there is a pause in my writing as I’ve gone off to look over the list and then look over it again. Thanks to the magic of text, you won’t actually experience this pause, but I wanted you to know that it exists.  Ok, now that I’ve gone over the list, I’m not certain that it gets me any closer to my answer. I’ve read a reasonable number of the books on the list, but most of them I read decades ago. I hope that they’d make more of an impression on me now because, honestly, while all of them may qualify as Literature-with-a-capital-“L”, they didn’t leave much of a mark on me. That’s good, though. For something to qualify as great literature, at least using my proto-definition, it needs to leave a mark on the reader. Fortunately, McCrum himself addresses the question as to what make literature great in a related article: “Calvino’s definition – ‘a classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say’ – is probably the sweetest, followed by Pound’s identification of ‘a certain eternal and irresponsible freshness’…Thereafter, the issue becomes subjective. Classics, for some, are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from.” A little romantic, and I’m not sure it’s useful if one’s looking for a systematic approach to answer the question, but still, it’s not bad…until he continues with: “The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic.” And now we’re right back where we started.  I’ve tried to make a list of the books which I’ve read and consider great, and then list out the defining traits of those books. I won’t both sharing that because it was a fruitless approach. Have you ever tried to decided if you should stay with a romantic partner by listing out their good and bad traits and then adding them up? This exercise worked every bit as well, which is to say, not at all. If I were a literary theorist, I’d suggest that the greatness of literature is an emergent property, but I’m not, so I won’t. So, after all of this, I’m just going to take a stab at what establishes the greatness of literature in my opinion. The book in question is great literature if… * The book sticks with me. If I can’t remember reading it, it may be literature, but it wasn’t great to me. * The book changes the way I look at the world or broadens my perspective in some way. I learn something of value from it. * I enjoy reading the book. This may seem like an extremely lowbrow way of looking for greatness, but it’s hard for me to consider a book great literature if it’s an outright chore to read, no matter how innovative the structure or clever the prose or intricate the plot. * The book is novel. Yes, I did that on purpose, but I mean it. If it seems new and fresh, I’m more likely to regard it as “great.” * Finally, the book needs to end well. The ending seldom saves a poor novel, but if the ending isn’t up to the quality of the rest of the novel, or if the it doesn’t “fit,” it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These generalization are how I recognize greatness in literature…at least, that’s how I do now. The whole thing is subject to changes. I may someday read something that doesn’t tick any of these boxes and I still think it’s great, which will mean I’ll have to reevaluate the whole thing. Which is fine. I expect defining greatness in literature to be a work-in-progress for as long as I have the wits to consider it. Now, what good is a list like this? For me, it’s a target. When I write, these are the impressions I’d like to leave on the reader: That the work is memorable, that the reader learns something from it, that they enjoy it, and that it offers something different than other things they’ve read.  Of course, I’d like to stick the landing as well, My personal example of an ideal ending is Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods.” I doubt I’ll ever land as gracefully as Sir Terry did with that one, but if I come close, I’ll be more than satisfied. -RK Image from lydiaoutloud.com because it is the perfect image for this post, don’t you think?   –

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Post-mortem on that last story

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I remember writing a paper for my high school creative writing class which should have been the best thing I wrote all year. I don’t even remember the specific subject, but I recall being extremely familiar with the material and instantly had an outline of what I wanted to write spring into my head. Only..this assignment had a particular format we were required to use and I had far more information than would fit. Not that it stopped me from trying. I wrote and wrote and wrote until my paper was more than twice the length my teacher had requested. Most of the time, when I overshot like that, my grade improved. It was, after all, a creative writing course and if I wrote more than the minimum requirement, that tended to be a good thing.  That was not the case with this particular paper. I remember even being vaguely aware that what I was writing was kind of lousy while I was writing it, but I just had so much to say that I couldn’t stop myself. In the end, it was probably the worst thing I wrote during my senior year and, while I received a passing grade, it was a richly deserved “C.”  This is a long way of saying that I’m not especially happy with Texoma by Torchlight. The assignment was to mash up two randomly-selected pop culture properties and I wound up with “Snow Crash” and “American Gods.” I know and love both of these books and feel like I have a pretty good handle on the core ideas contained within them. So, I had an unusually good handle on what the assignment required, but my end product isn’t as good as it should have been. Where did I go wrong? 1) The gimmick of trying to write in third person present didn’t suit the story. It might have been a good ploy for one of the two story lines, but it was confusing and awkward the way I wrote it. So, while it was a good exercise, I’d change it if this were work product. 2) The story leans way too much on dialog. I can hear the conversations in my head, and I know who is saying what. I am not reading my own work for the first time, and while there’s some nice dialog in there, there’s too much of it and it’s confusing.  3) This is a constant problem of mine: Stop trying to shoehorn a 10,000 word idea into a 2,000 word story. I’m very pleased with the ideas behind the story. However, the execution was a compromise between what was asked in the assignment and what the ideas really needed to be fleshed out properly. The story may have had an ideal length, but 3,500 words most definitely was not it. 4) Make sure the idea actually involves a story. I love writers like Warren Ellis and Larry Niven who can take one exceedingly weird idea and spin a story out of it. Simply having a good idea isn’t enough. Again, I am very pleased with the way I combined the ideas of “Snow Crash” and “American Gods,” but I’m not sure I actually wound up with a story. 5) Finally, this is supposed to be flash fiction. It might be a good idea to treat it as such rather than agonize over it all week. Writing quickly and instinctively rather than working it all out in advance is an opportunity to work on a different skill set and it’s one I’m going to need in a few months. I know these assignments (and really, there’s not assignments, but it helps me to think of them that way) are really just suggestions to get my creative juices pumping. I’m not required to follow the rules and I don’t mind going way over my word count if the story requires it. I’m writing these for myself as practice, and if the story requires more space, then I’m going to give it more space. What I don’t want to do, though, is to stretch or truncate something to make it fit. That’s the biggest problem I see with “Texoma by Torchlight.”  Let’s see if I can do better, or at least avoid this particular pitfalls, next time. -RK

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New car, caviar, four star day dream

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I feel as though half my weekend was spent inside car dealerships. In truth, it wasn’t quite half, but it certainly felt like it. We wound up trading in the beloved but not-especially-wonderful-for-long-road-trips Miata in for a new Mazda3. It seems like an awful lot of car for the money. I have long enough legs that buying pants can be a problem sometimes, and I can’t reach the pedals on the new car with the seat pushed all the way backs. The ride is smooth, handling precise, and moves along nicely. It still feels a little bourgeois to buy a new car, but given that our payments are well south of $300, I don’t feel like it’s too much an extravagance.  I’m not going to go in to it too much right now, but football season in England has started and I’m going to be unreasonably obsessed with soccer for the foreseeable future. I’ve been a Leicester City fan since the last millennium and we’ve turned in to one of the most interesting, if not the best, clubs in the Premiership. While basking in the glory of a dodgy-but-satisfying win over West Ham, I wore my #9 Vardy shirt to the market. For the first time since I’ve been supporting the club, someone who was clearly from the U.S. of A. recognized the crest and engaged me in conversation. I get the impression this might happen a little more often in the coming months.  I expect I’ll be writing a lot of football this year, but I’ll try to tag those posts in case footie isn’t your “thing.” Now I’m wrapping up the weekend watching the X-Men and Speed Racer animated series. Nothing calms me down like trying get my head around why you’d have a car race through the middle of a mountain to determine whether or not your Aztec-ish nation will open their borders to the rest of the world. It still seems more plausible than Interstellar. -RK   

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Struggling with the “flash” part of “flash fiction”

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This week’s prompt seems straight forward enough: Write a story based on a mashup of two randomly-selected pop culture properties. This one ought to be in my wheelhouse, but I’m having trouble getting a foothold on my story. Part of the problem is that, when I look at the list, I can see where some of these mashups already exist in one form or the other. ‘The Terminator’ meets ‘Toy Story?’ Let’s see, the essence of ‘The Terminator’ is that its a cautionary tale of machines rising up to destroy their creator. ‘Toy Story,’ of course, concerns it self with childhood playthings come to life. So, throw the two together and you get…’Child’s Play,’ right? The two I got with my first roll of the dice are ‘Snow Crash’ and ‘American Gods.’ At least I’m familiar with the source material in both cases. It does feel kind of like smashing them together might result in something very close to ‘Neuromancer.’ So, I feel like I need to avoid what I think is the most obvious direction for the story.  Which ain’t necessarily a bad thing. It is, however, a difficult thing and one which is not coming to me easily. Two glasses of cheap but very drinkable red wine and Genesis’ ‘Selling England by the Pound’ didn’t help at all.  Great album, wrong sound track for this story.  My hope, as you may have sussed out for yourself, was that by writing this in my journal, I’d nudge the story into existence. I don’t think my cunning plan is going to work. I don’t think this one will be nudged. Excuse me while I go get my sledge… -RK Seriously? Someone went to the trouble to make a Lego version of the costume Peter wore when singing “Dancing With A Moonlit Knight?” Wow…

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The Future, Not-Terribly-Distant

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A few of quick note since I’m awake: 1) My wife and I have booked a vacation next month. It’s a little on the short side, but I expect Denver is lovely in September. We’re both the sort of travelers who find making too many plans for a holiday more stressful than making too few, so we are a good fit in this regard. She’s never been to Denver; I’ve only passed through, so this will be a new thing for the both of us. 2) I had an Idea yesterday which means I have a starting place for this coming November. Where I wind up may be some place very different, but at least I have place from which to begin. Of course, now I have one hell of a lot of research to do… 3) In the future, I will attempt to refrain from posting after midnight unless I’m drunk enough to be funny when I do it.  -RK

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Heroes

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You all know Plato’s famous Euthyphro dilemma, but it’s worth re-printing here: “Is the pious loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the Gods?” Plato’s always a good place to start when discussing the touchy subject of personal heroes, and the Euthyphro is how I like to frame the discussion. I know people, friends and family, who don’t have any heroes because these are people, hey, we’re talking about, and people are flawed, people let you down, people have grey areas and are, in short, not worthy of being put on the Hero pedestal. That’s a point of view I can understand, but it’s not one I subscribe to. For me, a person doesn’t have to be perfect or even exceptionally virtuous to be a hero of mine. My heroes have one or more traits I find exceptional and admirable, or they’ve done exceptional and admirable things. In a more Platonic formulation, I might say “These ideals are heroic, and Bob is my hero because he does them,” as opposed to “Bob is my hero, so the things he does are heroic.”  Anyway, this is a long way of getting to saying that Neil Gaiman is a personal hero of mine. It’s not because he writes terrific stories, stories which inspire me and I find myself re-reading over and over. What makes him a hero, to me, is this: He has the extremely rare ability to speak about ideas the sort of ideas which tend to provoke strong, emotional responses in a way that is calm, thoughtful, and definitive in a way that defuses rather than escalates. Here’s Neil Gaiman discussing “political correctness” a couple of years ago: I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.” Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.  You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening. I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!” In a sense, it’s the opposite of trolling. I admire that and recognize that it’s a lot more difficult than it looks. I try to make my point and still be above the fray the way Mr. Gaiman can be, but…well, I’m a bit of a work in progress in that respect. So, count me in the pro-hero column. I admire John Steinbeck and Warren Ellis and Sarah Vowell and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Greg Graffin and many others. I admire them for what they do and say. They’ve all given me something to aspire to be. I think that’s a fine thing so long as I don’t stick them up on a pedestal and say that everything they do is heroic just because they’re the ones doing it.  -RK Pictured: Not heroes of mine, but funny.

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Sometimes, the spirit can be too willing

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For someone who has read, and re-read, every issue of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman,” I don’t know very much about dreams. I know that I have them, and that I seldom remember them, and with one notable exception, they don’t seem to have any literal relationship to anything going on in m life. I guess I know about as much as anyone who dreams. I did have one awful dream when I was going through my divorce, and by “awful” I obviously mean “wonderful.” I dreamed that my soon-to-be-ex-wife had gathered all of my friends and family together and, in front of them all, begged me to take her back. It was an unsually vivid dream and as I was waking, I remember mentally trying to take hold of it and make the dream real. It’s the only dream I’ve ever had that made me cry when I woke up. I’ve been dreaming more vividly lately than any other time I can remember in my life. The dreams haven’t been so obviously tied to any event in my life as the one during my divorce. They tend to involve friends or family in odd contexts doing even odder things. For example, last night, I dreamed that my best friend was taking his dog to visit all seven continents. He took the dog to the continental (and fictitious) “four corners” where four continents met at a single point. It never felt real, and I can’t imagine why I had this dream specifically, but this sort of thing is happening almost every night these days. My wife mentioned that she understood dreams to be how your mind “unpacks” the days events, like running a defrag on a hard drive. I haven’t done enough research on my own (which is kind of embarrassing, really) to know the state of current study on the subject of dreams, but her suggestion made sense to me. I know I’ve written more than once about reading “Against The Day,” but it’s long, it’s a slow read, and it’s engrossing as anything I’ve ever picked up, so of course I’m going to be writing about it for a while. It’s a strange and challenging book, as one might expect of Pynchon, and I think it’s what’s causing me to dream so much. The dreams certainly picked up in frequency when I started reading it, and while they’re not related to any of the characters, the tone of the dreams, as well as the geography, is in keeping with the novel.  Now I’m curious: Have any of you ever experienced anything like this? Has a novel ever caused you to dream more often, or more vividly? It seems like the sort of thing that would happen, but like I said, I haven’t done my home work so I’m dealing strictly with the anecdotal at this point. While we’re at it, are there any particularly good books about dreams that any of you would recommend? -RK Of course, the only question was “Which Sandman image would I choose?” I’m partial to this version, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single subpar artist who ever worked on the book.

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