- Wow, Marvel sounds like a lousy place to work:
It gets downright messy. Marvel’s new offices have only one restroom for each gender. In a company of hundreds of people. The post-lunch hour piddle line is said to be especially long and people actually stagger their lunches so as not to wait in it. There’s a human resources staff of one for the whole company. Review copies? You’ve got to be kidding. Editors have to purchase copies of the books they worked on. The precious archives of assets have dwindled over the years due to not spending any money to save them.
- Mark Bittman on why the demise (well, okay, just bankruptcy for now) of Friendly’s might not be such a bad thing. I have some fond memories of the chain, more for the ice cream than the food — and certainly not the ambiance or service — but I’m also not going to pretend like this is necessarily bad news.
- Emma to Charles Darwin. He nickname for him is…um…
- Noel Murray defends the Matrix sequels. I’m not sure I’m completely convinced, but he makes a very persuasive argument.
- And finally, how many books on Amazon.com are written by robots? More than you might think. [via]
writing
Sunday, or so they tell me
Not the most eventful of days, though I did cobble together this at my weekly writing group, based on a pair of picture prompts:
They called him the Frogman of Alcatraz, and although he was often tempted to correct them — it had been Pierpont Correctional, off the coast of mainland Florida, and the gear he’d kludged together to escape could hardly be called proper scuba equipment, had conked out less than ten miles down-river — Gilbert usually kept silent. Word was, he was biding his time until parole, and didn’t want the board or the warden catching wind that he was bragging about his early days behind bars. Or that he’d actually learned some kind of lesson — was, against all odds, that rarest of things, a reformed man — and didn’t want to give any of the younger cons any ideas.
And, of course, there was some truth to that; it could be another ten to fifteen years before they saw fit to release him, and Rockbrook wasn’t the kind of open-door that Pierpont had been — any ideas the young guys might take from his story would be tough to act upon here, in these landlocked Virginia hills — but Gilbert wasn’t looking to be the inspirational story for anybody’s daring escape. He was just biding his time, what was left of it, and he didn’t need to be anybody’s role model. But the real truth ran deeper, back all the way to those winding, dark rivers feeding out into the ocean or the Gulf Coast or — god, he really hadn’t thought that plan all the way through, had he? What would he have done if they hadn’t found him, if he’d been swept out to sea instead of being caught in the prison boat’s search lights? He couldn’t even have drawn a convincing map of Florida, much less navigated it. It was probably good that he’d been turned around, pushed back first by the current, then the darkness, and then finally by the real reason Gilbert didn’t talk about those days or correct the young guys when they spilled what little they’d heard of his story.
The real reason Gilbert didn’t say anything was because he knew it was crazy, and he knew he still believed it, and god only knew what the guys — or the guards, or the warden, or the parole board — would say if they knew about that. When they called him the Frogman of Alcatraz, even though it didn’t make sense and made a mess of his real story, Gilbert just smiled, said nothing, kept scrubbing potatoes or stocking shelves in the prison library or whatever work detail he’d been given that week. Gilbert didn’t say anything, because on that night he’d tried escaping from Pierpont, when he’d made it just a few miles off shore in that patchwork dive suit he’d stitched together — the one all the papers marveled at afterward, despite its never working properly, almost getting Gilbert killed all by itself, hoses snapping left and right — that was the night that Gilbert met the talking frog.
An improvised Wednesday
Today was interesting, although in much more pleasant ways than yesterday was, despite the rain.
At the office, we had one our semi-regular “brown bag lunches,” meaning not only free pizza (and not having to venture out in the rain for lunch), but a surprisingly fun interactive presentation on the basics of improv — what it is, how it’s done, and how it applies to business and life. I had some improv experience with the Penn State Monty Python Society, though with mixed results and more short-form games, the sort you’d see on Who’s Line Is it Anyway and the like. Today’s “class” was more about basics of movement and communication, and, as I said, it was surprisingly fun and only a little embarrassing. Despite my own limited success with it, practicing improv games with the Python Society in, I guess, the late ’90s, was probably some of the most fun I had with the group.
After work, I did eventually have to go out into the rain, to attend yet another panel discussion at Manhattan’s Center for Fiction. Tonight’s was “Big Read: The Wave in the Mind: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin,” with authors John Wray, N.K. Jemisin, Ellen Kushner, Michael Swanwick, and moderator David G. Hartwell discussing “Le Guin’s legacy from the Earthsea books to her influence on today’s new writers.”
“What is her influence in the field?” Swanwick mused at one point. “You might as well ask what is the influence of salt in the ocean.”
It looks like video from at least the first two talks I’ve been to have been put online, if you’d like to take a look. The utopia/dystopia one skirted a little too far afield of the topic, I think, but both it and the “why does fantasy matter” discussion were both quite interesting. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before last week’s YA talk and tonight’s Le Guin tribute find their way online.
YA? Why not?
Today was a pretty average day until this evening, when I attended yet another panel discussion at the Center for Fiction, this one on “Before and After Harry Potter: YA and Fantasy.” It was actually really interesting, possibly the most interesting of the three panels I’ve attended, even though young-adult fantasy is still somewhat under-represented in my reading, to the point that I’ve yet to read anything by any of the five panelists.
They were: Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Justine Larbalestier, Chris Moriarty, and Delia Sherman. And, more than either of the other two earlier discussions, this one felt more like a group of friends getting together to talk about the books they all love. It was an interesting discussion, and I left wanting to pick up copies of all of their books, plus lots of the other books they mentioned as influences or favorites, now and growing up. (Only Black and Larbalestier were previously on my to-read list.)
In many ways, J.K. Rowling’s books — and moreover their phenomenal, financial success — changed the landscape of YA. Even though, as the panelists pointed out, the Harry Potter books technically aren’t YA at all. They’re middle-grade books, aimed at a slightly younger age…or at least, they are in the beginning, when Harry’s younger. They do tend to blur the lines a little.
But then YA as a genre — or, rather, a marketing and bookselling category — blurs lines like that all the time. It’s a comfortable place if you love every genre and want to write in them all, said Larbalestier. The only things that it tends not to be, Black later noted, are elegiac and nostalgic. There are plenty of books that are sold as YA for no other reason than that’s what their author typically writes. Or aren’t sold as YA because the subject matter is considered too dark for young readers. Or were originally published as adult fiction, but later re-published as YA. In her native Australia, Larbalestier noted, a lot of YA is published in both categories. And, interestingly, here in the US (and possibly in Canada?), if you write YA, no matter the genre, your books will all be shelved together. So if someone likes your realistic fiction, they’ll stumble on your fantasy or science fiction, and vice versa, when combing the bookstore shelves.
Moriarty talked about reading fiction like Tolkien growing up, identifying with the heroes and then seeing the people who were really like her, seeing that they were not the heroes, and how her fiction now is often in conversation with what she read growing up, reacting to and putting her own stamp on it. She also noted one thing about Harry Potter that I’d never considered: it’s made teaching fiction writing to younger students much easier, since they’ve all read it — it’s as close to a book that everyone has read that we probably have — and you can you use it discuss things like plot and story that might otherwise seem a little obscure or esoteric to them at first glance.
Harry Potter‘s influence has definitely been felt financially, and in the decisions by publishers, who probably wouldn’t have taken the same kind of risks they’re taking now. Now they’re trying desperately to recreate that success, first with Twilight — which did something a little different, bringing paranormal romance into fantasy and YA — and The Hunger Games and the like. In the process, they’re throwing lots of things at the wall to see what will stick, including lots of weird new books and lots of older stuff in their backlists. A rising tide lifts all boats, and Harry Potter‘s success has brought older books back into print and brought new readers into the fold.
So, anyway, lots of food for thought, and a few books to remember to add to my reading list at some point. On the (very crowded, quite warm) train home tonight, I finished reading the not-YA, almost completely not-fantasy State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I liked it, and I liked the characters, but I wouldn’t rate it anywhere in the same category as her other books that I’ve read. (Maybe with The Magician’s Assistant, but not with either Bel Canto or Patron Saint of Liars, both simply terrific novels.)
Anyway, that was my Thursday. A pretty standard work day. A pretty blah dinner at an Italian restaurant I’ll probably never be back to. And lots of talk about fantasy and books.
Sun day
Less than a week ago, we turned on the heat. Today, I had the air conditioning back on. The weather has been weird, to say the least. Remember when we had those things called seasons? Fall and spring particularly seem like fond and distant memories.
Anyway, beyond spending a lot of the day watching Breaking Bad episodes and thoroughly failing at the Sunday crossword (so far), I spent a little time tidying up the layout and making corrections to the next issue of Kaleidotrope. I think, despite my best efforts at avoiding this, it’s going to be a Very Big Issue Indeed, maybe even 100 pages. That gets a little difficult when you start folding and stapling paper — at the zine’s trim size, 100 pages translates into 25 sheets, plus a card stock cover — but I don’t see how I can avoid it. And really, it’s the last print issue for the foreseeable future, as I make the uncertain transition into online zine, so is it such a terrible thing? Lots of interesting stories this final (printed) go-around.
I also wrote this odd thing:
This is the story of how Coyote tricked the world into never ending.
Once there was a time machine. The elders say that like it ought to mean something, and I guess maybe once it did, when there used to be things like machines, things like time. When there was some kind of real division between what is now and what was then. This machine opened doorways, but not just from one room to another like we see every day, doorways between the crowding dark outside and what life we have in here around the flame. These were doorways in the fabric of reality. That fabric’s grown tattered over the years since then, frayed so much along the edges that we don’t even realize, wouldn’t realize even if we knew how to look, those of us who came after it. These were doorways swung wide between what the elders call “the past” and what we, thanks to Coyote, know only as the now.
I’d like to say I’m getting ahead of myself, which is something that Chief Little Owl likes to say, when it’s him telling this story. But you and I, we know that isn’t possible. We both know we won’t remember this when the story’s done, not the way Little Owl and the others say they remember things, remember a world before the time machine, before the end of time itself. Before this living hell.
But is it hell? If you were born in hell, had known nothing else your entire life, would you know? Would you care? The elders tell us we should care, that time as we who were born after know it is deeply flawed, cracked and broken in Coyote’s fun. The world may never end, but neither will it ever begin. Nothing will ever… They have a word for it, one they say with hushed tones of awe like it means more than it seems, more than those few letters could ever mean.
The elders have a word for this thing that never happens anymore, and they call it change.
But once, they say, there was a time machine, built by a man who imagined himself a god, but whose plans Coyote thought to reveal as demonic. Coyote, the trickster, looked down on this man from the heavens, the black void that used to only be above, not all around, us, and then only in the depths of night. And Coyote grinned, for here was his chance to remake — or maybe unmake — the world.
It’s difficult to tell a story in a world with broken time. We have only the faulty and fading memories of the few who lived in a world before then. To even understand phrases like “before then” we need their guidance. We live in a world as constant as theirs was changing, and we maybe don’t have enough common vocabulary to bridge the gap.
So. Once, when there was a “once,” there was a time machine. It was made to see the world, or perhaps to free the world. What does it matter now? If stories are designed to teach us moral lessons and prevent us from repeating the mistakes of the past, do they have any use beyond a passing distraction in a world where those lessons can never be applied, where those mistakes can never be made anew? Once there was a time machine. Coyote stole it. And with it, he broke time.
The man who invented it, Chief Little Owl calls Smith, which sounds like a strange name in an already strange story. He worked for a man named Jones, but secretly wanted the time machine for his own. Coyote came to make an offer; he told Smith he could take the machine so far into the future that no one, not even Jones, would ever find him. And because Smith wanted the machine, because there was greed in his heart, which had turned twisted and ugly before Coyote even turned his attention to this game — because of this Smith believed Coyote, the trickster who walked amongst us once, and who now is all there is in the great dark that presses in from outside.
I never claimed this story would make any sense.
I’m really not sure what’s going on there. The Native American elements, inspired very directly by a writing prompt, feel like half-remembered window dressing. I took an English class my senior year that was, in part, about the trickster myths, and I find it interesting, but it’s not a tradition I’m heavily steeped in. (Nor would I necessarily recommend anyone reading that term paper I linked to above. I certainly haven’t read it in over ten years.) But, these Sundays are free-writing sessions, forty minutes of putting words to paper (or iPad) without really caring if they’re good or not.
I don’t know if that’s easier or harder since the three-day novel. I definitely had plenty of experience then getting words down without worrying if they were any good or not. (And knowing they probably weren’t but still going forward.)
Anyway, that was Sunday. I didn’t play a single level of Portal 2…though really only because I’m having an issue with my log-in credentials and need Steam/Valve to re-set them. (I love the games, and think I get why they’re on Steam instead of wholly downloaded to my computer, but it does make for some annoying moments like this.)
Yep, that was Sunday.