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| 1. Having just finished The Wee Free Men, I point everyone to Match It For Pratchett. 2. Fourth Street Fantasy Convention is June 20-22. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) matociquala is the Guest of Honor, and I'm going as her date. 3. The last print issue of Subterranean Magazine has a story of mine in it. 4. As does the current issue of Weird Tales. 5. David Berberick is trying to answer the question, Why do people love Tolkien? If you want to help, take his survey. 6. If you've read A Companion to Wolves and noticed a typo, you could do matociquala and me a tremendous favor by commenting either on this post or on her post asking for the same favor. 7. L. Timmel Duchamp reviews The Bone Key for Strange Horizons. 8. muneraven also reviews it. 9. And from the Department of Head Trips, Alison Sinclair (whom I do not know, but I wish her well) has sold a fantasy trilogy which is described as being "in the tradition of Sarah Monette and Ellen Kushner." o.O I have a tradition? | |
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| icetome reviews Mélusine and The Virtu and generally thinks I don't know what I'm doing. Lighthearted Librarian has some advice about reading The Doctrine of Labyrinths. jess_ka thinks Bear and I together are greater than the sum of our parts ( A Companion to Wolves). 2ce also likes the wolf book. (Favorite line from the review: "you need to show up to the party prepared for the viking gang bang.")
I know, I promised to shut up, didn't I? But, see, something happened* this morning, and I need to give it time to settle. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.I've had the experience more than once while writing these books of putting something in, basically because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and only much later, like a book or two later, finding out what it was for. Today that happened with something in the first book. In the first fifty pages of the first book, no less. Yeah. Three books later, I know why I did that and what it means. This is a completely unnerving thing to have happen, even while at the same time it is tremendously cool and shiny. Because it gives me the heebie-jeebies. What if I'd taken that thing in book one out? (I almost did take out something in book one that turned out to be incredibly important in book three and is going to come back again in book four. I needed to cut a hell of a lot of words, and my editor said, "This scene doesn't seem to be doing anything." And I stood my ground, even though at the time, she was completely right.) What about all the things I did take out (because they didn't seem to be doing anything)? In other words, this is a part of the creative process that not only does my rational mind not control, it doesn't even know about it except as a fait accompli. I'm not at all a fan of mysticizing creativity--in fact, quite the reverse. I don't think the Romantics did any of us any favors in trying to divorce art from craft, or in suggesting that artists are like geese who lay golden eggs and any attempt on their part to examine what they do or think critically about how they do it will only kill the goose. But, honest to Pete, as far as I'm concerned, my mind has just done a magic trick. I don't know how it works. I don't know what just happened. But here it is, a golden egg and a very startled goose. And now that I know what I'm doing, I need to pause and think about how to do it better. --- *Events that take place entirely in thought also "happen," even if it feels weird to describe them as such. | |
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| More reviews of A Companion to Wolves: here, here, and here. On the other hand, redzilla is sick to death of trilogies and wizards and thieves, with scott_lynch and myself as exhibits A and B.
Note to self: the maribou is the thing with the feathers; the caribou is the thing with the antlers. You only hurt yourself when you get the two confused.
UBC Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. ( cut for those who would really rather not )
I have a theory about tip sheets. My theory is that once you start signing them, you enter an infinite loop. Thus the fact that no matter how many you sign, the stack never gets smaller.
I really want to see the Muppets do Tom Waits' song, "Don't Go Into That Barn." I am a little worried about what this says about me as a person.
Around about the twenty-second of this month, I am going to go hole up at heresluck's place in a kind of minimalist writer's retreat, and there will be radio silence on this blog until after Minicon, whereupon we will resume with, so help me blue fuzzy thing, a complete draft of Corambis which I am not ashamed to show the world. That, at any rate, is the Plan. I'm not sanguine, exactly, but I admit to some cautious optimism that this may work. | |
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| Via oursin, a lovely, thoughtful article on craftsmanship, by Richard Sennett. "Innocent confidence is weak," may need to join "Perfection is death" on my monitor.
The wolf book gets three positive reviews, all of which are thoughtful, and all of which are engaging with different aspects of the novel. That's just . . . nifty.
I don't even know how to explain what I love about Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine games. They're point-and-click flash games, focused on puzzle-solving--not unlike, in their different medium, the Infocom text-adventure games I loved as a teenager. It isn't the Submachine games qua games I find compelling--I inevitably resort to the walkthroughs sooner or later because I am (a.) lazy and (b.) playing Submachine when I should be, oh for instance, writing a novel--nor the story, such as it is. It's the art (I also love the visible learning curve from The Basement to, for example, The Future Loop Foundation), and the way the art builds the world. There's a sort of steampunkish, Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson ethos to the Submachines, and yet the undertones are not of whimsy, but of fear. There is an intrinsic, pervasive creepiness to this abandoned world, and I think that's what draws me back in with each new installment. | |
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| Paul Di Filippo reviews A Companion to Wolves (among others) for the Washington Post and thinks it's a soap opera for furries and yaoi readers. On the other hand, the ALA's Reading List Council thinks it's worth a mention. ETA: myalexandria has a very thoughtful post about Isolfr and feminism. To which I can mostly say, yeah, that's what we meant. wild_patience isn't real keen on me, but I can't argue with her raving about Bear. More commentary on Mélusine from imani.
N.b., I collect links to reviews of my books for several reasons. One is that, as a writer, I'm curious about what people think. Another is that, as a long-time reader and a literary scholar, I'm fascinated by the different ways one book can be read and interpreted and reacted to. Now, I could chart reactions to any book, any author's body of work. But, you know, I've got my experimental sample right here. Also, collecting reviews of somebody else's work seems weird and creepy and even a little stalkerish. Also, although this may sound counter-intuitive, it's easier for me to be impartial about reactions to my work than it would be for me to be impartial to reactions about somebody else's book that I loved (or hated). But here's the thing. Mélusine was published in 2005. The last time I even looked at it, except for fact-checking for The Virtu and The Mirador and Corambis, was sometime in 2004. Today, in 2008, my head is full of Corambis and, guiltily, the stories I want to write once Corambis is finished. I've moved on, in other words. Which is not to say that I don't still love Mélusine and that I'm not proud of it. Because I do and I am. But, to swerve for a moment into a possibly florid metaphor, my novels (I hope) are like a chambered nautilus marking my growth as a writer and as a person, and Mélusine is a chamber I've grown out of. This is, I think, the way it should be. You shouldn't get stuck on one novel, one moment in your writing life, one chamber of your nautilus. So, for me, Mélusine is a record of who I was and what I was thinking, rendered in fictional form, in the first few years of the new century. Whereas (to pick an example at random from books I read and loved last year) Peter Watts' Blindsight is something I'm thinking about right now. I'm engaged with it in a way I'm not engaged with my own work by the time it gets published. I'm far more likely to be upset with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about matociquala's Dust than I am with a hypothetical someone saying something wrong-headed about The Mirador, because I love Dust in a way you can only love books you didn't write yourself. Which leads me to my further point: I do not post links to reviews so that people will defend my honor. My honor's fine, thanks. I post the links so that I can find them again and because I think they're interesting. Which, you know, is maybe just egocentrism. But hey. My sandbox. I can build my sandcastle any way I want. | |
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| Jeff VanderMeer ambushed me yesterday. And speaking of Jeff, his and Ann's anthology, The New Weird, in which I participated, got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. w00t! orrin likes The Bone Key, as does Sam over at Whatta Fiasco. (I'm both pleased and amused that no one can agree on what the best/worst stories in the collection are, although, yeah, "Listening to Bone" is the slightest. I could explain what it is I think the story is doing and why I still think it belongs where it is, but, you know, that defeats the purpose of telling the story in the first place.) tangeriner likes The Virtu, ethereal_lad gets the nutcase mishmash of genres, and schnaucl thinks the series should be longer (an idea which, I have to confess, fills me with terror and ennui in roughly equal measures--I love these guys, but I am done). Poodlerat has a review of A Companion to Wolves. I've no idea exactly what this is (oh the wonders of the internet and its daily doses of wtf?), but some of you may know and/or be interested in it. Shadow Unit will be updating regularly Thursday night and Sunday night; the first full story will be posted in exactly one month (February 18). There's an RSS feed for updates, also a message board, so I'm not going to mention updates here after this, except as the spirit moves me. It's my blog; I can be capricious like that. | |
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| Things are much better this morning. (Another possibility for what was wrong with yesterday is the nightmares I had Monday night about an infestation of things that looked like little beanbags with eyes but were really a cross between the flying leeches that get Patrick Hockstetter in IT and the mold Cherie blogged about the other day. No nightmares last night, thank goodness.) I got through the tricky bit of the rewrite that was giving me spasms earlier and then figured out what's going on with "The Ninth Secret of the Tea Ritual," which has also been giving me spasms, albeit much more quietly. Shyly, even, for the kitsune-narrator is rather self-effacing. So I'm going to type in the new stuff on Corambis and see where it gets me. (I suspect it gets me to having to rejigger a Sibylline reading, which is the trouble with having the sort of memory which, as the White Queen says disapprovingly, only works backwards.) And then I think maybe I'll see if the kitsune story wants to be written today. Because, as I have said, I need more short stories.
Two reviews of A Companion to Wolves, here and here.
BPAL ( for the kitties ) | |
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| 1. the wolf book Lovely review of A Companion to Wolves here; we also make OF Blog of the Fallen's auxilliary Best of 2007 list.
2. BPAL I got myself a bottle of Titus Andronicus for my birthday, and also, of course, imps. Thus far, I have tried: ( for the kitties! )
3. UBC Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West 1865-90. Urbana: Illini-University of Illinois Press, 1987. My opinion of this book hasn't changed. The pictures are fantastic, the primary source material is fascinating . . . the book itself is deeply flawed and frustrating. I'm now reading Alexa Albert's Brothel (2001), which makes an interesting pairing.
4. Corambis progress, and there even is some! I went through the first draft and extracted about half of it, non-consecutively, into a salvage file. Most of the rest of it I was positively grateful to lose. I have 60 connected pages of the second draft, and feel much more confident that I might be doing something right this time. | |
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