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Even in a little thing  It doesn't matter how many stories I edit, I always have four stories to go. Sometimes it's six, but just when I think I've got it below four, another story appears in my in-box. This last month, only one of those stories has been mine. Not everything obeys this strange little law. I don't have four reviews to go. Only three. I don't have four books to read, either. I have three piles. Or rather, I had three piles. The pile in my bedroom toppled and is creating modern art on my floor. I picked up the top book and ruined the work of art, but it was worth it to find good reading. I just realised. I tend to read four books at a time. Lots of good things come in fours. I'm not a well person and the unwellness means I can't sleep. The doctor doesn't open for four hours and I'm wondering how much work I can get done in that time. Tomorrow I get Life through Cellophane back for selected edits and I'm hoping that the final edits for The Art of Effective Dreaming will appear shortly, so clearing the decks is not such a bad thing to do. Getting well would be an equally good thing to do, but it appears my body doesn't want to do that by itself. One thing I promised (not work, but still, I promised) was the fourth of Angry Robot's new books. It's Chris Roberson's Book of Secrets. We're besotted with books that contain secrets, whether they be of the Albertus Magnus variety or the Deathnote kind. It makes it rather dangerous to use 'Book of Secrets' as the title of a novel, because we carry so many expectations with us of what we shall find in that novel. I'll get back to that thought. Not tonight, though. It's tough on a book to have a title that carries so many burdens, and so I didn't worry about whether the book matched my expectations of it from the title. Roberson's writing flows out sentence after sentence, practiced and mellifluous. Very easy to read, but also very even in tone. Almost lulling. I need to be occasionally shaken to wake up so I pay attention to the story. It's an easy read. A very good book for a lazy day. The fact that I want to shake up Roberson's prose means it's not my style. The themes and storyline aren't quite my style, either. I can see that it would suit a bunch of other readers: a touch of noir, a touch of bad boy dealing with a rough world will work for quite a number of people.It's a superhero comic of a book, with a vast amount of explanation and backstory. It's a careful book, a structured book, with just the right amount of surprise in just the right places. And as I typed this from the notes I took when I read it last month, I realised that I didn't make many notes of the contents. I had to open the file up and remind myself. This just goes to show that even a very good book - with just the right amount of surprise in just the right places – won't work for all readers. With all the other books I've taken notes of things that delighted me or horrified me. My notes are mostly to do with Roberson's craft. I want to apologise to it, for not falling in love with it. Reading it was like a first date where we each see how very worthy the other is, but ring up our friends when we get home and say "There was no spark between us. None at all." I do recommend it, especially for the beach during summer, but not to those whose book tastes are precisely the same as mine. I promised more comments on new Angry Robot books this week. Just two comments on two books. This is the first (and aren't I impressively good at stating the obvious?). Nekropolis was not what I expected. I've got to stop expecting things, I think. I thought it would be dark fantasy or evil horror, but it's something quite different. It's an addictive kind of different: I started reading and couldn't stop. Not fine writing, but fun writing. Tongue-in-cheek and zombie-centred, Nekropolis is a noir story set in a place where humans are rare and probably on the menu. Nekropolis is an overwhelmingly odd place. A zombie detective plays Virgil and leads us through it, his own life being a very intimate part of what we see. There are bunches of danger and swathes of trouble. There is whimsy; there is quest; there is heart; there is severe weirdness. The misbegotten lovechild of Chandler and Baudelaire? No, that doesn't describe it. Chandler fits, but Baudelaire is not right. The drugs that Baudelaire took might fit, though. Maybe what it reminds me of is the Wizard of Oz written by Chandler and Anne Rice on Baudelairean drugs. Tim Waggoner has invented a city that owes a debt to a great deal of literature, both high and low, and influences are easy to see but hard to summarise. For me, anyhow. I keep thinking "That reminds me of this," and "Oh, I like how he used that bit of vampire lore!" The book is a warped tribute to many stories and writers. I don't have a fine, funny line to finish on. I want to contemplate the sub-genre that Nekropolis is part of. There is an increasing number of noir-ish dark fantasy around. Even Charmaine Harris' work fits. So, wile you think of a nice parting quip to end this post, I'll think about genre and sub-genre and why vampires are more often depicted as love interest than, say, fieldmice. It's so important to watch Harry Potter films. Of all this and next week's courses, the school for wizards one is the only one that has enough enrolments to go ahead so far. People don't want to learn about heroes and writers are very confident about their capacity to have and hold an audience. Kids, however, want their own wizardly schools. I'm really not sure the confidence in public speaking is well-founded, so I'm hoping that the speaking course will get a few people by the weekend. It makes such a difference for an audience if the writer actually knows a bit about what they're doing. It's so disconcerting when a writer has no idea about using their centre of gravity and sways back and forth for ten minutes, or if they focus on a pen rather than on their listeners, or if they can't tell how far their voice is projecting. That's why I'm teaching this particular course. There are many and many new and emerging writers in Canberra right now, and all of them have the capacity to fascinate a crowd, but have no technique. It's a sad by-product of recession that people don't have money for studying their heroes. I'll spend those evenings writing novel. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have more school novels to read. July is advancing apace and I haven't put out a How To Avoid Gillian bulletin recently. This is not a good thing. People are in danger of running into me by mistake. Next Saturday morning I teach writers how to use microphones, speak confidently in public and other handy things. In the afternoon I'm teaching the youth of Canberra how to write their own school for wizards. Between the two, I shall be enjoying the Gorman House markets. Details of all this (except for the Gorman House markets) is on the ACT Writers' website. There's more youth writing inspired by the Harry Potter universe from 22 August, too. This could be a Harry Potter year, if the youth of Canberra like him as much as they did last film and the film before. From 20 August you should avoid the ANU once a week, in the evenings, for I'll be there to teach people (teachers, writers, general public) how to bring the Middle Ages to life in their projects and classes. Actually, I'm there earlier than that, to teach a course about some of our heroes and their origins (called Finding Heroes) and on 25 July doing a one-day course on writing articles for the web. Yes, I'm going into uni on a Saturday. That's all my teaching in the immediate future. If all the courses go ahead, I'll be busy and have enough to live on, which is good on so many counts. The canny will have noticed a blank though, in the second week of August. This is the moment when all Melbourne people should avoid Continuum. I shall not be a big presence, or important, but I shall be there, rejoicing in friends and speculative fiction and good conversation and Melbourne food. How many books I buy will be in direct relation to how many students I have in the preceding weeks. And today? I spent the morning with Kate and am spending the rest of the day working madly. Go anywhere you like except my living room: you're safe from me. Everything happens at once in my life, always. I should assume this. Some of the 'everything at once' is cool (the novels progress towards publication, as does the next anthology), some is less cool ('health' is the operative word here) and some distinctly worrying (my family insists on doing exciting stuff). The most interesting news is, as ever, not my own, and you have to wait for my news. This is why I write fiction, I suspect. It all behaves so much better than real life. Why is sleep so important? Because when I sleep, I sort out the big things, the stuff that's too hard to deal with when awake. Last night I dreamed a dream about my family. I hugged my great-aunt. The last of a big family - she's grudgingly alive and I saw her at Les's funeral. It hurt her when I held her hand. In the dream I gave her a hearty hug. In my dreams she's not as fragile as a piece of Queen Anne's lace. When I woke up, my head was filled with music and I suddenly realised that neither father had appeared at that family function. "They're both dead," my half awake self said to my dreaming self. "That's why they weren't there." And that's the moment I finally accepted that Les is gone. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes weeks. This time it's taken months for me to reach a deep acceptance. I'm still angry: parents aren't supposed to die. I should be able to ring him and ask about my front door and about the lighting in my lounge and to gossip with him about the grandchildren. Instead I give cheek to his grandchildren on Facebook and just let the draught at the door remain unblocked. Right now the grandchildren and I are deciding if Mum is cool or ubercool. I know he's gone. Just now I put some scented geranium in the pot-pourri bowl at the door and it will mingle with lavender and his warmth and wonderfulness will greet friends at my front door. Les was well-known for his amazing pelargoniums and geraniums and this comes from the biggest and best of them all, the one he planted at the driveway. It has a mixed flower scent, like an old-fashioned pot pourri. He was an old-fashioned father and I miss him. It's good I can let him go, though. Parents shouldn't have to remain that long, unreleased. My life is still full of the "I must remind people about this" stuff. I keep forgetting things, so I'm going to remind anyone who may be in Canberra for Conflux that they can help decide the workshop I'm giving, just this once. There are only 2 more days for suggestions, though, so you may want to speak up soon. The good thing about bad health is when you get to the "it doesn't hurt as much" stage the brain kinda kicks into gear. I had worked out that gentle movement was what my skin needed to not be as bad and I have gone through many seasons of Star Trek as a result. After my night with only a half hour sleep, my brain resturned a little and I read Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller (and I now know what's wrong with my novel-in-progress and why it doesn't have the tension the plotline says it should, which makes that whole horrid night worthwhile), and I'm in the middle of some Carol Emschwiller and Kim Westwood's The Daughters of Moab. By shifting between them I can fit my mood and legs and brain all at once. It's my second pair of books this week, Monday to Friday was a book sandwich buttered with Star Trek and with a Kate Wilhelm filling. I'm still in catch-up mode with other work, but it's beginning to happen. I'm getting a big kick out of readers enjoying the guests visting my food history blog. It appears that many food history buffs are just as interested in the food lives of writers as I am. I also got a big kick out of actually sleeping last night. My skin is still a mess and life is still painful, but last night my bed actually behaved like a bed rather than as an irritant and I got a full night's proper sleep. A few more nights like that and the annoyingly irritated soul you're getting used to will fade into the nowhere she came from. kitzen_kat gave me another five ideas to play with.speculative fiction To me, all fiction is speculative. This makes it hard to answer someone who demands to know what speculative fiction is. Bad novels are ones without solid worldbuilding, whether the novel is mimetic, romance, fantasy, mystery... and if you're worldbuilding, you're creating realities and if you're creating realities then the fiction is speculative. Having carefully spelled that out, I also feel that there is 'genre' speculative fiction writing where tales are told using specific tropes and patterns and plot arcs. This genre is one of my major forms of fun and my world is richer from it. Now for the bottom line. When I say that I write spec fic, I may be referring to one definition or to the other. It all depends on what I'm writing. cooking I'm no clearer with cooking. I can cook. I could cook (as I love to tell people) 3 course meals for 8 by the time I was twelve. I use historical recipes, international cuisines, unusual ingredients. I'm not a gourmet cook. I suspect I'm not even a food snob. What I am is someone who loves understanding how people see the world and interpret it and one of the best places to understand this is in peoples' relations with food. empathy A real gift. A lot of people think they have it and are wrong. Every single person I've met who really has a sense of others is someone I value very much. Very special and rare, these folks. laughter I couldn't live without laughter. I'm not someone who laughs aloud easily or often, but I often have a quiet chuckle underneath a sober surface. intelligence Intelligence is a complicated beastie. Too much of one variety or another can lead to great loneliness. Every ounce of understanding one can bring to the world, however, is wonderful. Thank goodness some forms of understanding don't require genius. I wish that all forms of genius carried understanding, empathy and compassion. |
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