Return of the wizards

Let me get this up front – I'm not a big fan of Harry Potter. I read the first book, and enjoyed the Dahl-like ideas of living under the stairs and moving to tiny islands to avoid owl-mail. But it never really gripped me and it remains the only book of the series I've read. I dutifully watched the first four films with my kids, who grew up enchanted by Harry and his pals. But I only really enjoyed the one with the werewolf and grew tired of the bloated attempts to compress entire novels down to screenplay-size.

But I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night and, dang me, I really enjoyed it! I liked the straight-line story unencumbered by too much baggage from previous plots. I liked the teenage sexual politics. I liked the smart camera work. I loved Jim Broadbent to bits. And I find myself keen to find out what happens to these memorable characters in the final story.

At the same time, I've picked up my first Pratchett for a long time. I'm proud to have read Sir Terry from the start, enjoying The Colour of Magic when it was on its first print run and nobody had heard of Discworld. But, having devoured all those early novels, I peaked and my appetite for turtle-based fiction dwindled. Now I'm reading Interesting Times, not a particularly recent one but an apt choice as it reunites Rincewind and Twoflower, who kicked the whole thing off for me.

I always find Discworld books a bit hard-going at the start – the earlier ones at least, the later ones are structured a little differently. I find the choppy scene-changes, well, choppy, and get impatient for the strands to start knitting together. Then, just when I'm feeling at my most frustrated, I realise I'm reading a clever story that's character-driven as much as it is artfully plotted, and that goddammit I really do care deeply about these absurd people on their absurd flat world.

You'll have gathered from some of my previous posts that there's a fair degree of nostalgia running through this blog. I make no apology for that – you'll get the new stuff too, as and when it turns up. Right now I'm just tickled to be seeing wizards again.

Addicted to six

More Edwards microfiction hits the web at Six Word Stories. I could stop if I wanted. Really I could. (Note to self: get on with the damn novel!)

Numinous? You what?

Jo Walton has written a nice piece over at tor.com entitled Fantasy and the Numinous. Go and check it out. She's elaborating on an earlier post, essentially talking about definitions of magic in fantasy fiction. She says, "By 'the numinous' I don’t mean magic as it can be codified in a magic system, I mean the kind of thing that genuinely makes you feel awe." It's a debate close to my heart, the same thing I was talking about in my earlier post Where does the magic live? ... but I think Jo's more articulate than me on the subject!

The weight of the word

I make the occasional visit to local primary schools to talk about creative writing and my experiences in the publishing industry. Halfway through telling the children about my first novel Dragoncharm, I bring out the original typescript and drop it on the table. At 798 pages it makes quite a bang (and raises plenty of nervous giggles). It's a good icebreaker.

When I reveal that the first draft handwritten manuscript was even bigger, they gasp. Of course, my humble offering is nothing compared to some. Check out Neal Stephenson's picture of his Baroque Cycle manuscript here. If you dropped that bad boy it would fall through the floor!

Apart from creating a bit of theatre, dropping the pages sets me up to make a particular observation – namely that seeing your work in print after slaving over a manuscript can be a bit weird. You pick up the book and think, 'This isn't what I wrote – what I wrote weighs the same as a small child and can be reduced to chaos by high winds.'

Of course, when you write – as I do these days – mostly on a laptop, it flips to the opposite extreme. 'What I wrote' is now a scrollable string of virtual words I can carry around on a USB stick so small I have to be sure not wear the trousers with the hole in the pocket. Yes, I print it out (it always reads differently on the page) but the principle holds true: compared to the original, the paperback version feels like something from another planet.

When your work's published online it's a little different. In some ways the text looks much the same as it does on your laptop. On the other hand, I still don't feel too comfortable reading on screen, so I'll most likely print it out anyway!

So when I'm asked, 'Do you read your own work?' the answer is, 'Yes, I do.' Because, however familiar it may be (and however sick of it I may be!), it always looks different in its final form. So reading it gives me a chance to (a) get an idea of my audience will perceive it and (b) read it with a fresh eye. Trust me, that's often no more fresh than a month-old kipper, but it's as close as I'm going to get. The only alternative is to bury the thing for years and only disinter it when it's started to turn green and move about of its own accord.

I do that too.

Now SFSignal is Six

Another birthday: SF Signal is six today. Many happy returns!

Best Horror TOC

Nightshade Books have just announced the complete table of contents for The Best Horror of the Year, Volume One, edited by Ellen Datlow. It's great to have my story Girl in Pieces in such a meaty anthology, and especially to be in such esteemed company. While I'm on the subject, all hail Tony Shasteen who created this awesome illustration for the story's first appearance in Realms of Fantasy.

Here's the TOC:

Cargo — E. Michael Lewis
If Angels Fight — Richard Bowes
The Clay Party — Steve Duffy
Penguins of the Apocalypse — William Browning Spencer
Esmeralda — Glen Hirshberg
The Hodag — Trent Hergenrader
Very Low-Flying Aircraft — Nicholas Royle
When the Gentlemen Go — Margaret Ronald
The Lagerstatte — Laird Barron
Harry and the Monkey — Euan Harvey
Dress Circle — Miranda Siemienowicz
The Rising River — Daniel Kaysen
Sweeney Among the Straight Razors — JoSelle Vanderhooft
Loup-garou — R.B. Russell
Girl in Pieces — Graham Edwards
It Washed Up — Joe R. Lansdale
The Thirteenth Hell — Mike Allen
The Goosle — Margo Lanagan
Beach Head — Daniel LeMoal
The Man From the Peak — Adam Golaski
The Narrows — Simon Bestwick

Forgotten books emerge from slow glass

Just discovered a heap of Bob Shaw books buried in a forgotten corner. Ah, the joyful anticipation of rereading some old favourites!

Bob's concept of slow glass is still one of those ideas from heaven - a dream of an idea that gets right under your skin and just wriggles there. In case you don't know, slow glass simply transmits light at a slower rate than usual. The thicker the glass, the slower the transmission. Bob teases a wealth of material from this apparently simple concept, from streetlights that use 12-hour slow glass to store up sunlight and let it out at night, to a piece of glass through which a murder may be observed ... when the light finally comes through.

Another of his ideas that always tickled me (I think it was in Who Goes Here?) was his FTL drive that involved a teleportation transmitter at the back of the ship and a receiver at the front. The ship teleports itself in a series of jumps, each one exactly the length of its own hull. Like a cosmic inchworm. And since each individual jump is pretty much instantaneous, so's the whole journey. That story was played for laughs but Bob was mostly a serious writer. And without doubt the master of the high concept from left field.

Finding these books again is a bit like watching something come through slow glass. Nice to have them in the light again. Orbitsville here I come!

Happy birthday tor.com

tor.com is one year old today. Head on over there to join the fun (and celebrate moon-landing day to boot!)

Three out of three of six

I'm on a roll over at Six Word Stories! The third of my recent three microfiction efforts made it through the net and on to the site here. This one's the best, in my humble and arguably skewed opinion.

Worldcon Writers Workshop

Via Doug Cohen's blog, I see Gregory Frost is struggling to get word out about the Anticipation Montreal Worldcon Writers Workshops, so do please check out this link. Here's the blurb about the sessions:

"The Writers Workshops at Anticipation are small session workshops for either experienced or beginning writers based on manuscripts submitted in advance. These workshops provide Anticipation members the opportunity to have their manuscripts evaluated by selling writers and industry professionals who enjoy helping them grow as writers. Many of these professionals have taught at residency workshops, such as Clarion, or in creative writing programs."

Dig the monoliths ...

... in the curiously compelling 1957 movie The Monolith Monsters, in which your average American B-movie desert burg is threatened by, well, rocks. That's inexplicably self-replicating rocks from a meteor, naturally. Great miniature work.

Short short

Six more of my words have hit the big time over at Six Word Stories. For narrative pared to the bone, go check out my latest short story here. And I really do mean short.

Joe Lansdale on publishing (and other things)

I just caught up with the Reading and Writing Podcast 008, a great interview with Joe Lansdale. As well as spilling a heap of good stuff about his writing, Joe also talks at some length about the current state of the publishing industry. He's got an interesting argument: that publishers always used to be small family businesses, and it's only since the 70s and 80s that the 'blockbuster mentality' crept in, much as it did in the movie business. The resurgence of small presses is evidence that things are levelling out again. Turbulent times, and bad news for the big boys, but maybe good news for writers like me (and thousads of others) who don't attract big advances and tend to fall under the radar of those aforementioned big boys. There's more, but you're best listening to Joe, who tells it far better than me. Oh, and if you haven't read Joe's work, go out and find yourself some right now!

Made-up people to the rescue

I'm writing book two of a fantasy trilogy to a tight outline and an equally tight deadline. The up side of that is there's no time to mess about, and certainly no time for self-indulgence. I'm also free to enjoy the prose and the story-telling, without worrying too much about plotting, because that's mostly done. The down-side is I run the risk of writing mechanically, just trotting out the text by the numbers. There are ways around this, of course, all of which I'm trying to employ. But the best bit of all is when the characters themselves come to your rescue and start talking in their own voices instead of parroting what the plot requires them to say. Sometimes that happens from the get-go, however with this project it's taken a little while for them to wake up. But, about half an hour ago, that's exactly what they did, and suddenly I feel a whole lot better because from this point on I think the book will pretty much write itself. Thanks guys. You may only be fictional, but I'd trust you with my life any day.

Ishi, Ish and Earth Abides

There are a few books I come back to over and over again. One of these is George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. You've probably read it, but if you haven't I can't implore you enough to find a copy. It's probably the best post-apocalypse story you'll read. In it, Californian Isherwood Williams wakes from a snake-bite-induced delirium to discover a plague has all but erased mankind. Stewart does a grand job of chronicling Ish's journey and ultimate ascension to the role of 'the last American', but what sticks with me are the glorious interludes where he tracks the gradual decay of technology, and its absorption back into the natural world.

If you've been following this blog, you'll know by now I have a thing about names. For some reason, the name 'Ish' has always struck me as hauntingly odd. Well, today I discovered why. In 1911 a man from a stone-age culture walked out of the California hills and became famous as the 'last wild Indian'. His name was Ishi, and he experienced a few years of celebrity at the university in San Francisco. David Pringle has written a great piece about all this, including the connection between Ishi and Earth Abides - you can read it here. There's a Wikipedia article too. They say truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, it's at least as fascinating.

Dig the starfields ...

... in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, the UFOs are great but check out the gorgeously crisp night skies they're flying through, courtesy of the great Doug Trumbull.

Do you want source with that?

On my bookshelf as a young kid I had a book called Bambi by Felix Salten, another called The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith and The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. I suspect my parents bought them for me when the Disney movies came out. However, these were 'real' paperback editions, not movie tie-ins. So, from an early age, I was very conscious of how adaptations play with the source material.

Thanks to their popularity – not to mention the power of the Disney marketing machine – it's the animated features that most people think of when you throw them the title. And that's a shame. Don't get me wrong – I love these movies – but they're just one studio's interpretation of the texts. And for all the rewards movie success may (or may not) bring to an author, it's a pity if it's at the expense of the original work.

Adaptations can lead to some fairly bizarre situations. PKD famously refused to write a novelisation of BladeRunner and no wonder – why novelise a screenplay adaptation of a book you wrote yourself? Just read the damn book! Or take Michael Crichton's novel of the The Lost World, written concurrently with the movie script, which is a sequel to the movie version of Jurassic Park rather than his original novel, and amongst other things has to deal with the tricky problem of resurrecting Ian Malcolm, who dies in Jurassic Park the book but not the film! Confused? Let's not even go into the different iterations of The HItchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy (although the mutability of that particular sequence of stories has a charm all its own, and seems entirely appropriate given the rather unreliable reputation of the Guide as a definitive source of knowledge).

Of course, it's not a given that the original is better than the adaptation. There are plenty of movies that spin literary flax into cinematic gold. But seek them out all the same, if only to see what you've been missing. And ponder, for example, why this scene never made it on to the Disney storyboard:

"(The assassins) tied Pinocchio's hands behind his shoulders and slipped the noose around his neck. Throwing the rope over the high limb of a giant oak tree, they pulled till the poor Marionette hung far up in space. Satisfied with their work, they sat on the grass waiting for Pinocchio to give his last gasp. But after three hours the Marionette's eyes were still open, his mouth still shut and his legs kicked harder than ever ... The rocking made him seasick and the noose, becoming tighter and tighter, choked him. Little by little a film covered his eyes ... He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched out his legs, and hung there, as if he were dead."

Rip it up

Deleting stuff on a word processor is highly unsatisfactory experience. You push a key and it's gone. Where's the passion? Where's the anger? How can electronic deletion deliver the same catharsis as, say, grabbing the ten pages of manuscript you just spent a whole morning sweating over (and which you just reread only to conclude they stink), ripping them to shreds and hurling them into the wastebin? So here's my challenge to programmers: write me some software where, when I hit delete, the whole page disintegrates, or melts, or explodes into flaming shards of atomic chaff. With suitable sound effects, of course.

Make sure there's an undo though. Just in case.

Short and ...

... I'll let you decide if it's sweet. Read my latest microtext at Six Word Stories.

W = 100c – T ...

... where W is word count, T is temperature and c is a constant the value of which I haven't quite worked out yet. My basis for this theory? The fact that yesterday evening, still sweltering in the UK heatwave, I laboured for two hours over maybe five hundred words of manuscript that at best were distinctly average. This morning, I got up bright and early (well, early) and in one hour rewrote most of what I wrote last night and added another five hundred words for good measure. I reckon the temperature difference between the two sessions was a good twelve degrees. QED. I shall now submit my findings to the Nobel Foundation in the hope of receiving the recognition I deserve.

Dig the asteroid field chase ...

...in The Empire Strikes Back. Nuff said.