writing

A night at the library

I spent another day wrasslin’ with a manuscript, taking all my corrections and putting them back into a Word document to send to the authors. We’ll see how quick they can respond, and if they agree to all my changes.

A few other e-mails aside, and a quick escape for lunch, that was pretty much my day. My evening was spent at an event called Speculating on Fiction at the New York Public Library. The guests included John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, Cat Valente, and of course my favorite author, Lev Grossman. Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press emceed, and Brian Slattery and friends provided music.

It was a lot of fun. John Sclazi was quite entertaining, essentially just repeating the story he tells here about The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Cat Valente was maybe the best reader of her work, making me wonder what’s wrong with me that I’ve never read any of it yet, and Scott Westerfeld not for the first time made me want to read his Leviathan series. And even Grossman was good, reading from the forthcoming Magicians sequel, which, at least in the section he read, focuses more closely on one of the first book’s most woefully mistreated characters, Julia. It wasn’t good enough to convince me to actually read the new book — I don’t think anything could do that — but he didn’t seem out of place on the stage or anything like that.

(I did note that only one person had a question for him during the Q&A, about how he manages being a full-time critic for Time with writing a novel. But the man’s not tedious idiot. Anybody can write a lousy book. A really, really, really lousy book.)

Some day

What did I do today? I had my ass thoroughly kicked by the Sunday crossword. I went to see Thor, which I quite enjoyed. And I wrote this in my semi-regular writing group:

The prophet killed the poisoned man, but the poisoned man refused to die.

Every schoolchild knows the story, has heard a thousand times how the poisoned man tricked the prophet into revealing his false god’s name and, through his magics, how evil came to be exiled from our land. There are some texts that still name the man by the old traditions, Ibrahim el Fadil, although the name of the god, whatever it might have been, has long been lost to the dusts of time. Scholars have long debated and conjectured, but, then, that is the nature — is it not? — of scholarship. You and I have no need to know the name, my little one, or in the end even to believe in the stories of the poisoned man. The shipwreck in the guarded wastes. The seven demon brides. The slaying of the giant’s sister. These may all be true, or they may just be parables, more fancies for a young mind like yours than the true history of what once was. We have no need to know the truth, so long as the laws that have grown out of those traditions continue to keep us safe. There is your truth, young daughter, the only truth you will need upon your long journey. The knowledge that, if given law, men can be good; moreover, men will strive to be good, will seek out law even as the other half of their nature may seek to undermine and escape from it. Even if the poisoned man is just a myth and you do not, as your grandmother has suggested, encounter his spirit upon the road, take comfort and strength in the existence of the law he has bequeathed to us. It is durable stuff, that law, and it is the wall that keeps evil’s exile still in place.

Though I would be remiss if I did not instruct you in at least a few additional magics…

All in all, not a bad Sunday. Though no fortune cookies.

Tuesday is as Tuesday does

Nothing much happened today. It rained until it stopped, and that’s about it. My first train this morning was late, and then the connecting train at Jamaica was flooded. Not exactly underwater, but it’s one of those double-decker trains, and I was on the bottom level. Luckily the seats themselves are elevated off the floor, because the floor itself was one giant puddle.

Oh, and it turns out I didn’t win the Geist Literary Postcard Story Contest. That’s too bad, as I really liked the piece I submitted. I definitely think I’m going to rework it a little, expand it just slightly from the contest’s (maddening) 500-word limit.

And, yep, that was pretty much my Tuesday.

Tuesday various

  • Zadie Smith’s rules for writers:

    When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would. [via]

  • “All these worlds are yours except Europa…and possibly Titan.” [via]
  • The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

    It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think. [via]

  • So long and thanks for all the fish: Underwater Translator May Finally Let Us Talk to Dolphins. [via]
  • And finally, My Little 11th Doctor [via]: