Reading Recommendation: In The Moon of Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke
I’m still on setting. Burke is one of my favorite authors for setting, and I’ve read many of his books that deal with the deep south. He also lives in, and writes about, Montana. In the Moon of Red Ponies is one of the Montana books. It has the same magical quality to it as In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, and I actually recommend them both. I can’t quote from it easily since I listened to it on CD rather than reading it. But the landscape is often describe memorably, and sets the moos. This landscape also often had creatures in it, which made me feel a bit like I was in Montana.
By the way - he’s pretty good at titles, too. I tend to remember his titles word for word.
William Gibson Interview
I’ve never understood why most lectures aren’t better attended. There were a hundred or so of us at the U last night listening to Nancy Pearl interview William Gibson, but in a city the size of Seattle, every seat should have been taken. The best news, is many that were taken were taken by my friends.
So the room is half full. We’re sitting in theatre-style seats, and on the stage - lit for video - are the diminutive and energetic super-librarian Nancy Pearl and the tall slender writer. Mr Gibson speaks in a slow drawl, with what is either an accent or a ghost of a lisp, and his words are carefully chosen. You can see he’s thinking.
A few of the high points (summarized, so my apologies if I don’t get it right):
As he’s talking about history, he mentions that sf did so well because at one time it was beneath contempt. “Eugene McCarthy didn’t know what sci fi was saying about him.”
Nancy asked if he wrote to make sense of the world, and he said he writes to find the questions, not the answers.
In line with a comment we often make over at Futurist.com, Nancy asked “Does the present change the past?” and Mr. Gibson answered that it does - that as we learn more about history, as we dig further, we learn more about the past. Our view of it changes, which changes us.
Two other concepts of interest: A novel where the novelist is in complete control of his or her characters is probably boring, and the most interesting contemporary science fiction is science fiction that could not have been written a decade ago.
You should be able to stream this for yourself on the Seattle Channel.
Studies in Setting
A few posts ago, I promised to discuss the outcome of reading three books and studying setting. As a reminder, this is associated with a group of writers I gather with to discuss bestsellers, so we pick bestselling work for a variety of genres and look at different characteristics, often following Zuckerman’s book, but sometimes using other criteria.
In this case, we read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Throne’s, Molly Gloss’s Hearts of Horses, and Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth. First off, I liked all of these. So what did I learn?
In the context I’m using, setting is description of place, and also the details of the world - so it’s what one traditionally thinks of as setting as well as information. That works with these three books since two of them are historical and one is fantasy: none of them is set in a place we recognize from our day to day life. If I presume most of you are science fiction writers and readers, you’ll recognize that situation. Science fiction is seldom set in a place and time we’re comfortable with.
Oddly, the best use of setting and world building for me was Molly’s work on Hearts of Horses. It’s set in historical Oregon, sort at the end of the Wild West and during the world war. She gets extra kudos for her world-building because it was so sure, so invisible, and yet so always present. Here is a small quote from her work that I loved. “Snow began to fall out of the darkness that night and fell straight down all the early hours of the morning, and by daybreak it stood about a half a foot deep everywhere in the lower valley, though the sky then cleared off and a pale sun lit up the newborn world.” I’m there. Are you? The whole book is infused that much deftness. Small details, confident prose that shows off the setting and not itself.
George R.R. Martin’s work is as good. It’s much showier — almost overwritten, but a good fit for his series. I’ve already posted on this one in detail. A simple setting comment like the Gloss above (and from the book I’m currently on having had to keep going with the series once I started it and even though I’ve read it before - if I was discussing hooks we’d have a book on them from this series). Anyway, “The walls were equal parts stone and soil, with huge white roots twisting through them like a thousand slow pale snakes.” Now, that does the job, right? And that’s a single sentence buried in a paragraph. Read it out loud and hear the sound of the line.
Follet’s work is about cathedrals, and the people who built them long ago, in the days when masons were learning to make more advanced arches. I expected a lot of setting. Especially since the book is almost a thousand pages long. Yet this was the sparsest on setting of the three. What’s there is done well, but Follet’s strengths as a storyteller are more in character and situation in this book.
Reading Recommendation: Good Daily Newspapers
The futurist and the writer in me adore the morning paper. Why?
It’s an industry that matters - read it online or get ink on your fingers. But we need a free press, and while the blogosphere is a grand part of that, we need press that has some funding and staff as well. Think of the blogs as our militia and our outcriers and the papers as the army. Try to find one with independent ownership and a good investigative staff. The Seattle Times comes to mind. But then, it’s my own local. There are surely other good ones out there.
We’re living in an age of science fiction coming true. Read the paper, and you’ll find it all around you. A few snips from today’s:
- “A Bellevue vascular surgeon dreamed up a vest that thumps and prods you when you’re playing video games.” Put a vest like that on a soldier in the real world.
- “Biotech and pharmaceutical industries … argue that anything short of financial capital punishment..” Financial capital punishment. That’s a term to re-use, and the article is lovely support for the scifi trope that big business in bad.
- “A defective tire-valve stem made in China killed a Forida driver.” Now make that designed to fail and stop America from driving for two weeks. Or , if you write humor well, make it hysteria with no substance, whipped up by media, and stop America from driving for two weeks.
- “The US military has disputed claims of detainee abuse, citing paperwork filled out by the [abusing] soldiers.” Any military sci fi story can use that. Or any contemporary military story. Or a contemporary literary fiction piece about a detainee’s family.
People who ask where writer’s get their ideas probably don’t read the paper.
The paper doesn’t make you wait until they’re good and ready to read the headline-teaser story. I refuse to WATCH news short of a major disaster or something else I really need the visual footage for.
My last reason for the day? I get exposed to news I wouldn’t hunt down on my usual trips through the world. I listen to NPR and read mostly liberal and writing blogs. I tend to sort for progressing views, and like libertarian and peace-loving and democratic viewpoints. It’s good to get exposed to all sides of an issue. How else are you going to make your villains seem real?
So I’m off to go read today’s paper.
Opening Chapters
A few years ago, after BUILDING HARLEQUIN’S MOON but before I finished THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, a fellow writer who was one of my first readers (Darragh Metzger) commented regularly on chapter openings. She took me to task everytime I opened with anything except specific sensory details. Well, for my writer’s reading group, we’re looking at George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series that starts with A GAME OF THRONES. As a side note, it’s quite fabulous, and well-loved. When I went to buy A STORM OF SWORDS the fellow who sold it to me at Barnes and Noble raved about the book and George R.R. Martin quite extensively.
My job for the group this time is to analyze setting, which is a treat for this book. I’ll blog a few lessons learned from that exercise after we meet this weekend. But I noticed I really, really couldn’t put these books down even though I’m not reading them for the first time (except A FEAST OF CROWS, which I still haven’t read - I put that off until I found time to read these things all again, since there as such an awful gap between release dates in the series at that point - side lesson: don’t do that to your readers).
One strength of these books is the opening of every chapter. It’s like Darragh’s voice in the back of my head saying “See? See?” I’ll reproduce a few below for illustration:
“The courtyard rang to the sounds of swords.” - sound, place
“Through the high narrow windows of the red keep’s cavernous throne room, the light of sunset spilled across the floor, laying dark red stripes gainst the walls where the heads of dragons had once hung.” - sight, place, mood
“The woods were full of whispers. Moonlight winked on the tumbling waters of the stream below as it wound its rocky way along the floor of the valley. Beneath the tress, warhorses whickered softly…” Sound, sight, mood again.
My personal favorite from this book:
“The heart was steaming in the cool, evening air when Khal Drogo set it before her, raw and bloody.” - how could you NOT read forward after that?
Darragh was right to chastise me. At that time, I was opening my chapters with things like catching the reader up - “For the last two days…” I’m better now, but not yet as good as George R.R. Martin, for sure. But if you have a few of those books laying about, pick one up and read the beginning of every chapter. Pretty impressive.
Hurray for the Elements of Change
I’m pleased with the price of gas. Change is already happening. Our Mayor came back from a climate conference where one speaker said the measured particulates in the air are already slightly lower since gas went up. He said people cheered. Elementary economics: Price changes behavior.
Global warming warning signs are coming faster and harder than expected. Alkaline seas. Record tornado season (already). Ice melts. Perhaps it will get our attention.
We’ve been singing silly ditties that go with YouTube videos all week. I’ve begun turning to YouTube for training videos for meetings at work, for kid videos about adverbs. There is always more at my fingertips. Yeah for the almost-broadband internet.
The political winds in the US are changing. People always want change in politics but they seem to want it even more than usual right now. Maybe because of all the other forces mentioned above.
A nice bumper sticker I saw on the way home form a manga-buying trip with the household child. America flag…in the blue field, the word “Think” and below the flag the words “…it’s patriotic”
This is not a particularly in-depth post, but sometimes I just have to be a little tongue-in-cheek. I’m working on something to go along with the release of READING THE WIND that I think will be pretty cool.
Stay tuned.
Reading Recommendation: The Noble Dead Series, by Barb and J.C. Hendee
To be honest, I’m getting tired of recommending vampire books. I had this series for a while, meaning to read it, because I’d heard it spoken highly of and I know people who are friends of Barb and J.C.’s. Then I met them at the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat, run by our mutual friend, Patrick Swenson. I like them. So I picked up the first book, DAMPHIR. I proceeded to read the first four in series (six books, I think), and the only reason I’ve stopped is because I have to read something else I have a deadline for relating to my writer’s reading group that’s studying bestsellers. At least I get to go off and read something I like (George R.R. Martin). But I already have the next book in the series, and it is burning a hole in my shelf.
Given that my love for these books isn’t the vampire bit (I really am tired of vampires), I had to sit back and think about the attraction in the books, which are page-turners, and series-turners. I burned right through from book to book - put one down, pick up the next. So, it’s not the vampires. It’s not the line by line writing, which is good, but largely an invisible style, so I wouldn’t be reading the book for the sentences (like a Neil Stephenson). The main characters, Leesil, Magiere, Chap, and Wynn, are all larger than life and they all have depth and back-story. There villainy is multi-layered. The information feed is good. The world is detailed. And that combination makes the books a real escape - I go there in the way I fell into books and stories as a kid.
A Sense of Place
I’m finishing up THE DOWNBELOW GIRLS this weekend so I can finally get it in the mail. A last step was getting a sense of place into the book. I set it in Seattle, which I live a five minute bridge ride away from in off-peak traffic. It’s seventeen years away (set in 2025), but that’s not far enough in the future that the city will be completely different. The final scene (and an important mid-book scene) both take place at Volunteer Park, where I’d been five or six times. When I was drafting the book, I pulled up the satellite imagery from Google to get a bird’s eye view. Two weekends ago I went to Volunteer Park and took pictures and added more depth of place to the middle scene.
Today, I went back to the park and sat right where I have my protagonists and their dogs playing in the story, took out my laptop, and fixed things like bad blocking and adding tiny but correct details. That’s not to say I added tons and tons of words - it’s the climactic scene, and wouldn’t benefit from long description dumps. But now it feels better. Maybe I needed a sense of the place!
Watching Recommendation: Orwell Rolls in his Grave
I watched Orwell Rolls in his Grave, a documentary made in 2004 about the media. What curious science fiction writer could ignore that title, right? The pointer I got to it was from Mark Anderson, of Strategic News Service, who is one of the brighter thoughtful futurists I know. It turns out that’s is a movie that everyone should see. A divided argumentative independent media is a critical arm of democracy. And we’re losing it. Media is VERY consolidated, and that consolidation in increasingly global. Diversity in ownership is almost zero. AOL/Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch own much of both the ways we get our messages and the content of those messages. If the big telecoms win in the Network Neutrality fight (and we lose the wildness and neutrality of the Internet, which just let me watch a bunch of homemade ads for Obama and earlier let me watch homemade video on Youtube) we will have almost no unapproved messages left.
How awful.
I want to hear messages people don’t want me to hear. That’s whay I read science fiction.
Watch the movie. Orwell Rolls in His Grave. By the way, the movie is a little scary, at least as much as information can be scary. But the creepiest part of watching it for me is that when I talk about things like this movie, I feel like maybe Big Brother is watching somewhere.
Writer’s Read Posted What I’m Reading!
Pretty cool. You can see the entry here.
I’m listening to Cabaret over and over, now on the Joel Grey and Liza Minelli version. Boy, when I get obsessed, I get obsessed. Jeez. I’ve even been listening to it on my walks and runs. In this case its the story - Cabaret has so much in such a small set of scenes and songs - it’s compact and powerful and nearly perfect.
Also I’ve broken 50,000 words on Wings of Creation, and I finally got a breakthrough scene last night on one of my characters…where she had a personal breakthrough AND it helped me see the shape of at least the next few scenes. So Chelo got a breakthrough, and I got a “me too” breakthrough!
