Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Mmm.


Teddy is still bitching about me on his blog. He's so cute! It'd be a damn shame if he found something to bitch about a little closer to home. So much bad shit happens in Isreal that it makes me wonder why he doesn't spend any time on that. I mean, if I kept a blog, and I had to choose between writing about some twerp that annoyed me, and the angry people with bombs that wanted to kill me, I think I'd go with the immediate threat, and perhaps give the twerp some sort of dishonorable mention.

Oh well. A long as Teddy-poo is going to harp, I'll humor him.

In far more important news, I've met an awesome girl. Her name is Angela and she's amazing. She plays the pennywhistle, likes books, and has an amazing sense of humor. We've been going out for a few weeks, and she hasn't brought up any of those awkward things the last few girls I've dated have. And she's not a member of any white supremacist groups, unlike the last one. Madre de Dios, what a nightmare that was.

Anyway, we're going steady now and I'm actually OK with it. I don't miss dating Anna, which surprises me. If I can only figure out how to not flirt with everyone.

Oh.

And I've actually been writing between my hellish load of schoolwork. Gasp! I started a new novel which, for now, I am calling S-S.

I'll come up for air again after finals.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I think I've figured something out.

Stupid people--not the people you feel sorry for, stupid, or the merely unfortunate, but genuinely stupid people have two horrible tendencies. The first is that they don't listen.

Ever.

Any point of contention you make, and any contribution to a conversation is, to these stupid people, as lost as if you'd flung your words into the galactic core.

And the second tendency?

They don't shut up, particularly when they look like fools.

The owner of the above blog, by the way, is also a liar. On many counts, but the only one I'm 100% (as opposed to 98% or 99%) certain about is this: he contends, as he defaces with his presence the Absolute Write community page on livejournal, that he has not censored the comments on his blog posts.

Which is why you can go to his wonderful blog and read my comments, and his responses to them.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Oh mighty Blog-Gods, keepers of all that is altruistic and odd, please grant me the power to rise from my slumber on the morrow and attend my 8-AM class.

Amen.

Saturday, March 3, 2007

I'm back.

Sorry for the giant gap in my posts.

Aside from having an amount of homework I can swim through, I also had to bury my father. Well, cremate him. In any case, he's dead and I'm trying to deal with it the best way I can.

Some bozo wrote this huge blog entry about my signature over on absolute write, which contains a swastika. It is not a hate symbol, nor does it signify anything else malignant. It's a symbol of good fortune, something I really need right now. I've always been a blunt person; if I don't like someone, they hear about it. Just ask Dclary, who has been a victim of my temper more than once.

Mac and the other owners, bless their hearts, stood up for me--god knows I'm no good at internet arguements. Generally I ignore internet spawned attention whores like that, but this is the second or third post this guy has made, specifically about me. It's so cute. He always puts my name in quote marks, as if I'm actually named Jed and just prefer Bartholomew. I love people who fiegn intellect. If I had any desire to be anonymous, I'd use the computers on campus under my other accounts.

Speaking of good fortune, my mother won $350 on a slot machine tonight. I think that's the first time she's ever left a casino with more money than she came in. Go mom!

I, however, spent the evening with my new roommate, Tressie, and my friend Alberto. We attacked a DDR machine with gusto and then bowled beneath AMF blacklights while horrible rap played in the background. Tressie doesn't speak Spanish and Alberto doesn't speak English, so I ended up translating all night. It was fun.

There appears to be some general confusion amongst my inner e-circle about how old I am. I've been called a teen five or six times on public venues. I wouldn't bother to correct anyone, since its almost true, but a certain bozo (who shall remain both nameless & linkless) is making me out to be some creepy 50 year old who sits around roleplaying a teen. I am 21, and will be 22 in November. For all the ladies out there, I am a Scorpio, and I like long walks on the beach. Erm, you know, the giant stretches of beach we have here in Balmy Kansas.

(20 inches of rain a few nights ago; there was flooding and, I believe, a few tornados. Gotta love Kansas.)

Spanish test on Tuesday. I only pulled an 83% on the last one, which is definately not up to snuff. I dropped one of my music classes. I needed the extra time for homework in the others, and I really wasn't clicking with the professor. Life is about 76% smoother now.

Ninja Vanish!

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Augh!

I'm behind a deadline, or you'd have heard from me again.

I did have time this week for a few riproaring edits and a couple of games of Go.

Aside from that, practicing my woodwinds has been a bit of a priority, seeing as how they're such an awesome way to fill in 3 minutes of free time.

Monday, January 8, 2007

Pumped out a new short story.

I'm calling it Captain Richelieu's Escape and its the first finished thing out of my Skies over Europa world. Its a little over 1,000 words; if you're curious, leave a comment with your email address and I'll let you see it over google documents. I'm a bit iffy on the ending, but then, I always am.

Over and Out,

von Klick

-1:59 PM-

I've submitted this story via snail mail to Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine.

Sunday, January 7, 2007

The Swan

I've just submitted The Swan (Not Two Sisters, which is now something completely different) to Shimmer.

Wish me luck.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Woo!

I finally pounded out an ending to The Swan. And I've renamed it Two Sisters.

This is a huge victory for me. That story has been mocking me for a good, solid month.

I'll babble more when I start shopping it around.

Thursday, January 4, 2007

Speculative what?

Speculative Fiction.

What does that even mean? Fiction doesn't speculate. It can't wonder or dream.

Oh, but it can. It is as alive as you or me, with a beating heart and a thinking brain, and it is growing, always growing, right along with its creators. Speculative Fiction is the youngest, brightest, stuff you can read. It comes from the minds of authors who've shrugged away the chains and tethers of convention and advanced into the dark unknown. Sometimes the fiction fails and dies. I've read stuff by brilliant minds that just doesn't work. And that's okay. It's healthy. If stuff didn't die every so often, nothing else could appreciate being alive.

The cyber-punk genre used to be "Speculative." It came from the minds of authors who dreamed of the grit and grime of the not-so-distance future. It merged today's gutters with tomorrow's space stations.

And then a hundred others fell in step and made it a convention. Again, this isn’t bad. People embraced the look and feel of the genre, they explored it and made it their own. They established it. Now it's a niche of the sci-fi genre that is distinctly its own. Those stories are about the criminal underground of Jupiter's moons with their cybernetic limbs and super drugs. These stories are roped in; unchangeable.

The concept I'm talking about doesn't, to my knowledge, have a word. Fiction settles in. Look at Bram Stoker's Dracula. That was speculative fiction, once. It was unprecedented, unique, and the high-brow reader of the time considered it trash. (Authors: when the elite of society call your work garbage, but no one else does, take heart. It means you've done good.) From Dracula was born a new genre of horror. The Vampire Tale. Sure, vampires existed before Dracula. Stories of vampires can be traced well into the fourteenth century, but it was a piece of speculative fiction that made the idea of vampires real.

And it was the natural evolution of things for authors to explore this genre and make it their own. And in the process, the genre settled. Stories about vampires became trite: they were always about the sexy undead, and today everyone knows certain things about vampires. They can't step into the sunlight, they can't cross running water, they can't face the power of a cross, etc, ad nausium, and these rules shaped the genre. It became so popular that the whole idea of the sexy undead is now a cliché. So Dracula was a piece of speculative fiction, but Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was merely genre fiction, and if I were to write a novel about vampires, it would be pigeonholed as a cliché before I could even finish typing the query letter.

And yet, vampire fiction can still be speculative. The right author with the right idea can still breathe life into this old concept and make it dance for us, just as Bram Stoker once did. Don't believe me? Go pick up Salem's Lot by Stephen King.

King. There's a name that gets a lot of different reactions. But the fact is, like him or not, he writes one "genre" and one alone. Speculative Fiction. He's written westerns with magic in them, horror about clowns, he's taken the mundane and made it terrible, he's breathed life into the vampire, and everything he's published has been its own unique thing, its own organism. He even delved into Sword-And-Sorcery fantasy and wound its handle up until its springs were reloaded, and the whole thing moved again, alive.

Speculative fiction.

What does that even mean?

It means that the genres are alive, but dying, and that the authors of the future will make their own genres. That first shovel of dirt is the speculative fiction. Everything after that is reinforcing. Building on someone else's ideas. Adding cornerstones and cement and bricks until you have a finished building. We can always go into a building for shelter, but we can't call the building alive. A construction site, though? That's alive, and breathing, beyond any doubt.

That first shovel of dirt is what makes fiction grow. It's what kept people writing and reading long after the days of Dickens and Melville. It is the infinite depths, unexplored and dark, where we can always find new fiction. It is the stuff of dreams.

It is what makes the Coyote Wild.

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

The Slush of Coyote Wild

I'm officially working for Coyote Wild, reading slush and doing a few other odd tasks that haven't been pointed out to me yet. I'm super excited. With obvious emphasis on the 'uper.'

I just finished wading through my very first slush pile. I feel so… so happy. And at the same time, I want to kill every writer that ever lived. A lot of the stuff I looked at was really good. A lot of it really wasn't. I feel a lot better about my own writing now, though. I'm on par with the best stuff I saw in the pile, and heads & shoulders over the stuff that was bad.




Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Clive Barker's "Abarat"

I just finished reading this little gem for the second time. It's such an enchanting tale that I couldn't resist a second deviation into the grim shadows and deep waters of The Abarat. I wanted to see what makes it tick. Masterful fiction isn't an accident: it is not some happy coincidence of verbs crashing into nouns. It is a very deliberate thing--a series of purposeful images compiled to create one beautiful image. Modern fiction is often shunned for… well, for being modern--but I am a strict adherent to the belief that Classics are something that everyone wants to have read, but that no one wants to sit down and read.

Beyond this point, I am talking about the meat of the book--its blood, bones and bile. If you haven't read it, don't go any further down, because I'll likely ruin the whole thing for you. Just take my word for it. The book is delicious: an absolute embodiment of Yum.

"The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning."

That's the first sentence. It breaks every arbitrary rule of thumb I've seen about fiction. It's in a prologue (a thing generally shunned by writers) and it is describing the weather. But the weather is not a passive entity here--it is a fiend and it stalks and it has legs of lightning. The line is magic, and it sets up the very premise of the prologue--that certain characters on a certain ship are having a rough time at sea. We're shown that the storm is a hostile living thing, and it becomes the antagonist of the scene.

Beyond that, though, The Abarat is an odd place. The opening region--a dull slice of hell called Chickentown, which I more or less relate to, living in Kansas--is described to us in grim detail, not through visuals of the place itself, but of the characters. Candy's father is an abusive drunkard, her mother a passive, beaten wife, and Candy herself is at the very bottom of the town's social order. We're given a dreadfully clear view of this town, but at the exact same time, we know that something wondrous and fearful is skulking just at the edge of the shadows. There is the ever present mystery of the hotel-room suicide, and the strange tower lurking at the far side of town. And seashells. How on earth did those get there?

Barker presents a brilliant sepia photograph of small town America, and then, without taking a breath, thrusts the reader across a full color ocean into a world of that can only be described as queer. It's not the world itself, though; it's how he describes it. Never, at any one point, does he sit down and describe the world. His main character is always rushing through it, taking in sights as she goes. And without the reader realizing why, he has a picture perfect view of the Abarat and the Great Head and the Midnight Isle. "Less is more:" it's an old cliché, but a true one.

Barker builds his world with characters. Even the most miniscule of people in The Abarat is full of life and color. Officer Branx, for instance, who gives the Johns chase. His flustered way of speaking builds his image in our minds immediately. And it doesn't just build him--it builds the entire dockside area. Subconsciously, seeing the infuriated police officer screaming, trying to remember John Mischief's name(s), we also are given an idea as to why he is so frustrated. The captain of the fishing boat that refuses to let his ship be commandeered; the mob of people milling to the dock to see what's wrong--Officer Branx's world is one of irritations and setbacks, and Barker shows this to us with a handful of well chosen, active sentences, and delicately crafted dialogue.

For every detail we're given, our mind creates a thousand more. But if we get caught up in reading details, we get bored quick. World building is an art. The sky above the Abarat is shown to us in vivid detail with a few quick words. Candy looks up and notices that it has a different night-sky than the one she's grown up seeing. That’s all it takes for each individual reader to generate their own sky for the Abarat. A great glowing cosmos appears before the minds eye, and all Barker did was show the significance of the detail, and relate it, subconsciously, to his reader.

Candy notices that the sky is different. That's something you and I would likely notice, and we don't have to be told how it's different in any detail. Our brain does it for us. We explore this sky through Candy's emotions in relation to it, not a description of stars and constellations. We're shown a new world with a handful of simple sentences.

Clive Barker would be a good author to study. He's full of tricks--and they aren't cheap ones. When Shape is reading the strange little nursery rhyme from one of Carrion's books, the rhyme seems a natural progression. Most poetry in novels falls flat, but not here. They're simple poems with a pulse that jumps out at you, and the one Shape is reading in Carrion's study is a decidedly grim one.

We're reminded that life does not wait for the end of poems, though. When Carrion interrupts the rhyme, clearing his throat, it jars Shape from the nostalgia of his childhood back to the present moment, and it jars the reader from the almost lulling rhythm of the poem, to a nightmare reality where the cold calculations of Christopher Carrion are law.

I don't have enough good things to say about this book, but I do have one complaint. However creatively Barker used it, the word "Fat" appeared as a descriptive word for how things looked or felt once too often.

If you don't go read Abarat--at least the first one--you're truly missing out.

Monday, January 1, 2007