Category: Reading

Reading Is Fundamental

One disadvantage of my newfound love of reading on my Nook is that I’m unable to accurately reflect my reading progress on goodreads, which does so by page numbers of print editions. No such tracking exists as of now for ebook editions, so I’m going old school and talk about the short stories I read this past week here on the blog.

The fiction I read this week came from one of the back issues of various ‘zines I purchased over the holiday, in this case, from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19.

“Tubs” by Ray Vukcevich.  From Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19.  Vukcevich is a favorite of mine.  Any ‘zine with stories by him and Carol Emshwiller make it a must-have.  If you want a clinic on worldbuilding a quirky world, this story is it.  5 out of 5.

“Grebe’s Gift” by Daniel Rabuzzi.  It might be a little unfair to read and rate any story having read anything by Vuk, a writer I admire for his usual brevity.  Rabuzzi’s story is very rich and textured, if a touch slow for me.  4 out of 5.

“Dropkick” by Dennis Nau.  It took me awhile to warm up to this story.  For a moment I thought it, too, was running a bit long for my taste.  But the payoff was well worth it.  I really loved the characters in this one.  An enthusiastic 5 out of 5.

“You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, But Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out” by Cara Spindler & David Erik Nelson.  This one was a re-read from about three or so years ago when I’d read The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.  I’d almost forgotten what it was about until a certain secondary character was introduced.  And then I remembered not feeling ready to be able to grok this story when I first read it.  But I was now, and I loved it.  5 out of 5.

“The Bride” by Kara Kellar Bell.  This story seemed well-written but a bit predictable.  Maybe because I’d read a story recently with a similar theme, but I’m not so sure about that.  3.5 out of 5.

“Lady Perdita Espadrille Tells the Story” by Andrew Fort.  I’ve never been a huge fan of the story-within-a-story, but I did enjoy both stories very much.  I like to think it brought me close to world from which I was far, far removed in the ’80s.  4 out of 5.

“The Slime: A Love Story” by Anna Tambour.  My previous exposure to Tambour’s writing was her story in the Interfictions anthology, “The Shoe is SHOES’ Window.”  And while I recognize a similar quirkiness in “The Slime,” I didn’t seem to enjoy it as much.  3 out of 5.

“Such a Woman, Or, Sixties Rant” by Carol Emshwiller.  But for the length, I thought this was more prose poem than fiction.  And I really like prose poems.  4 out of 5.

“For the love of a(n Elder) God, you say, Not a letter from an occupant”

It’s one thing to take my roller derby nom-de-guerre from H.P. Lovecraft without having read any Lovecraft.  But trying to write a story based on the mythos without doing so could end up making me look like an asshat. 

The story I’m writing concerns a tidbit I happened to read about The Deep Ones.  No, I’m not gonna tell you which tidbit–that’d spoil the story.

Anyway, I didn’t want Wikipedia to be my only source, so I did some digging into my own library and found the first story with the Deep Ones, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in my copy of The Tales of H.P. Lovecraft edited by Joyce Carol Oates that I bought awhile back but never opened.  Last night, I picked up The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories for the title piece, another (as it’s commonly agreed) Deep One tale.

And, as I looked these books up on goodreads, I’m reminded that I have a copy of HPL’s Supernatural Horror in Literature.  Cool!

Anywho, I haven’t finished “Shadows” yet, but I have to say this research is fascinating.   Lovecraft has spent too long on my “bookshelf of shame” (i.e. writers whose work I have but haven’t read), and while his style doesn’t appeal to me, the mythos does.   And the more I learn about his work and that of his publisher August Derleth (good, bad, or indifferent), the more fascinated I become.

What’s even better is that this material has actually caused me to think about my seekrit nonfiction project that I’ve been working on in a new light.  It’s could take me in a direction which sends me back to the drawing board.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Chapter XXXVII

Today, Chapter XXXVII of my life begins.

“I’m 37. I’m not old.”
-Dennis, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I’m starting this chapter off right with a two-and-a-half week vacation from my dayjob, a trip next week to Readercon, a camping trip with friends the following weekend, and after that, my next NSO gig at the next home derby bout.

Role ModelsFor the past couple years, I’ve tried to obtain writing-related birthday gifts. This year, though, I dusted off my Audible account, and treated myself to Role Models by John Waters.  I quoted it a lot recently, having read snippets from it and heard various podcast interviews and readings.

I’m listening to the first few chapters now, and thinking about my own role models.  I’ll blog about them some other time.  But this book is making me give some thought to who’s influenced, not just my art, but my life as an artist.  In Waters, I think I’ve found a new one.  Just look out the quotes I’ve used recently as well as the links below.  If you’ve been paying any attention to how I feel about writing and how I pursue it, I’m sure you’ll understand why. 

“Let her go, let her go, God bless her/ Wherever she may be”

One D.O.A., One on the Way One D.O.A., One on the Way by Mary Robison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mary Robison’s prose is as dense, sparse, and evocative as ever. You might call the snippets of text disjointed, or gripe about a lack of obvious plotline, but there’s still a narrative to be followed.

The main character is certainly the sort who might reveal a lot of the facts of her life to you, but still keep you at arm’s length. Indeed, Robison’s prose seems to purposely keep me at a distance. I know a lot of people who would complain about that too, but it was a curious experience for me. It’s almost as if I had a front-row seat in the theater of the main character’s life, but with a splatter-shield in front of me.

And believe me, with everything she goes through, that’s a good thing.

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“These dreams go on when I close my eyes”

Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harvest Book) Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I first read Bynum in Tin House: Fantastic Women. I thought “The Young Wife’s Tale” was nice story with nice writing, but it didn’t prepare me for what I’d find in this novel.

Bynum’s writing style is simply hypnotic. It’s as dreamlike as just about every other reviewer says it is, but that shouldn’t put you off. Just don’t get too tied up in the dream logic of these interconnected vignettes. Don’t worry about the line between the real and the dream. Just go with it and be absorbed.

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Up a Slipstream Without a Paddle

Because I’m perpetually behind on my blog-reading, I only just found out that the proprietor of Lobster and Canary is going to attend Arisia at Cambridge, MA, the largest sf/f convention in New England.

The items on L&C’s particular schedule are of particular interest…

  • Non-Standard Fantasy
  • The Undefended Borders of SF
  • Interstitial Fiction: Dancing Between Genres
  • Inherent Darkness of Fairy Tales
  • The City as Character
  • Myth and Folklore in Fantasy

Of course, Daniel is scheduled to read as well, but I wanted to focus on the panels listed (I assume they’re panels).

(Oh, and yes, Calista — I now regret not coming and will plan to come out next year.) 🙂

Anyway, picture the sort of fiction that comes to mind when you hear those topics–love it or hate it–and you’ll have a good idea of the sort of stuff I aim to write. Aim, and still fall quite short of the mark. Still, unless the “please feel free to send us more” is part of certain markets’ form rejections, I remain hopeful. In any case, it brought to mind a conversation I had yesterday which dislodged a memory of a blog post from writer Steven Barnes…

You should read ten times as much as you intend to write. Want to write 1000 words a day? Read 10,000 words. Furthermore, this reading should be BETTER than your current ability, and BETTER than your intended goal, if possible. Want to write comic books? Read pulp fiction. Write pulp fiction? Read popular fiction. Write popular fiction, read bestsellers. Write bestsellers? Read classics.

And you want to write classics? Well…pick your grandparents very carefully.

I’ve internalized this advice to the point where it actually took me a second to remember where it came from. But it begs the question, what do I read that’s “better” than my intended goal if I want to write what I say I want to write?

Now, I’ve done or am doing most of the “required reading” — Feeling Very Strange, Interfictions and Interfictions 2, Conjunctions 39 and 52, Tin House 33, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, (edited to add:) Trampoline, and most of the individual short story collections published by Small Beer Press, and others. But there are times when I feel like I’m being shown how to do the breaststroke before being taught how to properly do a front crawl. Don’t know where the swimming analogy came from, but it’s as good as any.

And I guess the main reason I’m thinking about all of this–assuming it’s not a symptom of the Andromeda Strain I’ve been fighting off the past few days–is that I seem to be feeling a bit of existential angst about my writing. I don’t even care about, Will this pay off in the end, or not? I care more about, Am I doing this right or just spinning my wheels? Are my goals reasonable? What am I doing as a writer?

Also, Who the hell am I as a writer, anyway?

Because Reading is Fundamental

An author I met at Astronomicon, Daniel Rabuzzi (The Choir Boats), has been blogging a multipart Year-in-Review of his favorite speculative and fabulistic art. His review of short fiction was of particular interest. I’m in the process of reading most of the anthologies he listed, and can personally second his opinions of two particular pieces: the short story “Rats” by Veronica Schanoes (from the Interfictions anthology) and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s collection The Ant King: and Other Stories.

My list of favorite short stories of 2009 won’t be half as comprehensive. While I’ve certainly done my share of short-story reading, it’s basically been in service of my writing education. My primary focus was dissection to figure out what made them tick. Still, certain stories and collections stuck out in my mind in 2009–though this is not a comment on the quality of everything else I read, unless where explicitly stated.

We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. Rarely do I enjoy each and every single story in a given collection. It’s only happened three other times, with M. Rickert’s Map of Dreams, Howard Waldrop’s Howard, Who?, and Ray Vukcevich’s Meet Me in the Moon Room. I saw a lot of similarities in theme between Beagle’s collection and Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories (Daniel cites Millhauser’s story “Dangerous Laughter” as a favorite. I liked it a little less.) but Beagle’s stories resonate a little better with me.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God by Etgar Keret. The novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers” alone (on which the film Wristcutters: A Love Story is based) is worth the price of the book. There isn’t much I could add to RJ Burgess’s review on Strange Horizons other than, “Just read it.”

Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler. I have yet to read any of Fowler’s novels, but I’ve opened their covers at bookstores and it boggles my mind that I’ve seen no reference to her short fiction. Okay, that’s a lie–I’m not all that surprised there might be those who’d rather not know the Fowler who wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, Wit’s End, and Sarah Canary is the same one whose stories still appear every so often in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

“Pride & Prometheus” by John Kessel. Why does it seem that a lot of my favorite writers do Jane Austen riffs? In any case, it was a deserving 2008 Nebula winner.

“Absalom’s Mother” by Louise Marley. This was a real diamond in the rough that I discovered in the anthology Futureshocks. Don’t even get me started on what I thought about it, but it was worth finding the single story with strong emotional resonance. Because few things resonate more than a mother’s love for her child.

“Help, I’m Steppin’ Into the Twilight Zone,” Part 2

The Twilight Zone: The Odyssey of Flight 33 (The Twilight Zone) The Twilight Zone: The Odyssey of Flight 33 by Rod Serling

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The changes made in this adaptation were understandable. The original episode was defintely more a play set in an airplane cockpit. But the new character and his story added little, and I thought his end was a little unfair.

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“Help, I’m steppin’ into the Twilight Zone”

The Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? (Rod Serling's the Twilight Zone) The Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? by Rod Serling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Bought this adaptation of my favorite Twilight Zone episode at the 2009 Rod Serling Conference. Written and drawn for YA audiences, the adaptation is almost too faithful.

When I first saw this episode as a YA, I had no idea how gimmicky the twist was. Nor did I realize that Serling committed a major sci-fi writing faux pas when the alien showed how well he could pass himself off as a businessman but didn’t know what it meant to be “wet.”

I still love the twist, though, not from a plotting perspective, but from a character one. It was a life-lesson: no matter how slick you think you are, there’s always someone slicker, so smugness doesn’t pay. And despite the slight tweaks in this adaptation, that lesson remains.

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