writing

Aliens For the Defense!

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

The first novel-length project I finished (which shall molder in box in my close forevermore) grew out of the fact that criminal defense attorneys routinely have their clients try and tell them whopper stories about “what really happened.” My personal favorite is a colleague’s client who explained that he tested positive for cocaine because he was helping a buddy move a couch and when he picked it up a cloud of white powder erupted and flew up his nose. My book took that phenomenon and aliened it up a bit (it involves the Flatwoods Monster).

Now, in my wife’s home state of Wyoming, somebody is trying to sell something similar, but I doubt any court (or defense attorney) is going to be buying. The defendant was arrested for being drunk in public, but he had a good reason:

Police say a central Wyoming man they arrested for public intoxication claimed he had traveled back in time to warn of an alien invasion.

* * *

The man told police he was only able to time travel because aliens filled his body with alcohol. He noted that he was supposed to be transported to the year 2018, not this year.

I suppose time travel isn’t an exact science, even for aliens But don’t worry, the invasion isn’t until 2048, so we’ve got time to prepare.

In the meantime, might I suggest an expert witness should this gentleman decide to go to trial?

Aliens

Will I Care Once I’m Dead?

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Thinking about future projects the other day – ideas that are well enough developed that I can see a book coming out of them – I figured that I have material for about 20 books locked away in my brain. Even at a pace of one a year that means a long haul going forward. Let’s face it – chances are that I’ll be in the middle of writing some book when I die. What should happen to it and any others that might be semi-started?

The issue is back in the news recently thanks to the amusingly public way that the late great Terry Pratchet’s unfinished works were handled. Per his request, his hard drive (which contained as many as 10 works in progress) was destroyed – by being crushed by a steamroller.

The comments I read when the news came out was mostly amusement and pleasure at Pratchet’s wishes being so scrupulously honored. After all, if he was so specific as to how his literary executor was to deal with his unfinished work he must have felt fairly passionately about it never seeing the light of day. Who could argue that the right thing to do is precisely what the author wants?

Destruction isn’t the only option, of course. Robert Jordan, author of the massive Wheel of Time series, realized he wouldn’t live to see the completion of the series, so he provided a trove of notes and left the final few books to be completed by Brandon Sanderson. I can’t speak to the quality of Sanderson’s work and whether he did a good job with Jordan’s baby, but, again, it’s hard to complain when the people involved do just what the author wanted them to.

The legal-rule side of my personality says this is precisely how it should work. An author (or her designee) is the master of her own work, after all. If she never wants the world to see it, or only wants the world to see it with certain conditions, that’s her right. If she wants to take any potential masterpieces to the grave, that’s no problems.

Except we have examples where ignoring the author’s wishes turns out pretty well. When Franz Kafka died he left his literary executor (and friend) Max Brod fairly specific instructions:

Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread

Brod did no such thing. As a result, we have all of Kafka’s novels, including The Trial, none of which were published before Kafka’s death.

franz-kafka-the-trial

A world without The Trial is barely fathomable (ironically), but had Brod did as instructed, we’d never know of it. Nabokov’s The Original of Laura was published against his wishes after he died. Even Mark Twain had a new collection of essays published almost a century after his death – against his wishes.

And so I find myself retreating from my bright-line rule of always doing what the author wants. After all, what’s the harm in ignoring those wishes? Yes, work might be released that the author wasn’t happy with, but the author isn’t going to be around to complain. A reputation could be diminished, I suppose, but authors have very little say in how the world perceives them when they’re alive and even less when they’re dead. Besides, does the posthumous release of a bad book by a great author devalue their prior work? It’s not a perfect analogy (since Harper Lee is still alive), but is To Kill a Mockingbird any less a masterpiece because Go Tell a Watchman was kind of ordinary? I don’t see how.

It’s a more complicated problem than I thought it was at first glance. Certainly, I don’t think it’s a legal issue. I’d oppose any law that required an author’s papers and unfinished works to become some kind of public good and exploited willy nilly. Nor would I support laws that would punish people like Brod for ignoring the wishes of their dead author friend. But, I have a hard time working up too much outrage when an author’s wishes are disregarded, so long as the person doing the second guessing is a close friend or family member. If they are all right with it, I’m in no place to complain. It’s kind of like jury nullification – I’m not a fan of promoting it, but I’m glad it exists for the rare occasions when it’s really necessary.

So I guess what I’m saying, to my literary heirs, if they ever get around to reading this – you’re on your own!

Even Fantasy Has to Make Sense

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

One of the repeated comments about this shortened season of Game of Thrones (which wraps up Sunday) is that show runners have really cranked up the pace, running from big event to big event instead of letting things play out over time. Part of that’s due to the nature of the season (it’s only seven episodes long) and part of it’s due to where we are in the story. Once we have the scope of this world in our heads it’s not a problem to handwave away some of the timing issues in order to barrel ahead toward the show’s conclusion.

But there are limits, and the limit seems to have been breached by this past week’s episode, “Beyond the Wall.” A quick, spoilerly, recap of the relevant bits:

Jon and company go north of The Wall to capture a zombie ice walker to take back to King’s Landing to prove to everybody this shit is real. After walking for a bit they come across the army of the undead and, for some reason, pick a fight. Jon sends Gendry running back to Eastwatch for help, which provokes a raven to be sent to Dragonstone, which leads Daenerys to fly up to save the day with all three dragons. All the while, Jon and crew are surrounded by the undead army (until it’s dramatically appropriate for it to attack, of course).

Putting to one side the sheer stupidity of Jon’s “strategy,” there’s a big whopping problem with the timing of all this. We only see the army of the undead hold off overnight before attacking, but surely it takes several days (at least) for the Gendry/raven/dragon transport system to deliver fiery death to them, right? It’s at least something that has kicked some people out of the story, pulling them past their flying snowman moment. Even the director of that episode admits the timeline is “getting a little hazy.”

But that’s not really what I’m interested in (although I’m one of those people). I’m more interested in some of the defensive comments made in response to complaints. There are several in the comments to this write-up over at io9 – they’re fairly typical:

While you’re focused on a believable timeline, does it ever cross your mind that you’re watching a show about fucking dragons.

***

I’m sure it would have been fun to watch seven guys stranded on a rock for another episode while they waited for the raven and the dragon’s trip back because the audience wanted a show about magical ice zombies to keep things realistic.

Someone even posted an image of the gold standard for this kind of thing, MST3K’s admonition that “it’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

People are free to accept any explanation (or none) for why something seems off in a show, movie, or book, but I have to take issue with the argument that because something is fantasy anything goes.

One of the cool things about writing fantasy is that you can, generally speaking, make up anything you want. People who can wield the power of the elements? No problem. Mythical talking beasts who aid intrepid adventurers in their quests? Bring it on. Nonetheless, there are still a couple of limits.

Primary is that to the extent the characters are human beings, they should behave like them. Maybe a guy can fly or perhaps he can summon huge storms with his mind, but he probably still gets hungry, tired, or would be pissed off if he found his girlfriend in bed with another guy. Unless there’s an in-world reason to the contrary, characters should behave like real people.

That leads into the second restriction – any fantasy story should follow the rules that it sets up for itself. Let’s say you have a world that includes a pegasus (or pegasi) and we’re told early on that, despite the wings, they can’t actually fly (they’re mystical ostriches). A pegasus cannot, sometime later, save the day by flying to the rescue. Not because it’s a known fact that a pegasus can fly, but because we’ve learned that in this world they can’t. Once your own rules go out the window the story isn’t grounded in anything.

That’s the problem Game of Thrones got into this past week. We’ve spent years getting used to the scope of its world, the sheer size of it. Characters stationed in different sections of the map were truly separated. It felt like a big place. Until the writers needed it not to be and pulled a dragon ex machina out of the hat (followed closely by a Benjen ex machina – ugh). Look, I get it – rapid transmission of information in a pre-modern fantasy world is a pain in the ass. Why do you think I had mind walkers (telepaths) in The Water Road? But if that’s the world you’re playing in, you’re stuck with it.

Saying “this is fantasy” gets you out of a lot of boxes as a writer, but it isn’t carte blanche to do whatever you want. Even in a world of dragons, frozen armies of the dead, and faceless men, stuff still has to make a basic kind of sense.

None of which is to say I’m not hella pleased with where things ended up after this episode. After all . . .

IceDragons

New Technology = Moral Panic

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I’m reading Tom Perrotta’s new book Mrs. Fletcher, which is about a single mother navigating the modern world on her own once her brotastic son leaves for college. At one point she flashes back to a talk given to the local PTA addressing the then latest and greatest moral panic – Internet porn. It was delivered by a prosecutor, naturally, since history shows that the best reaction to any panic is to lock people in cages.

The panic over Internet porn is hardly the first situation where an emerging technology leads some people to think said tech is going to lead the world to hell in a hand basket. In fact, it’s a fairly predictable pattern that’s played out many times throughout history.

Slate has an article about the moral panic that surrounded the great technological breakthrough of . . . cheap paper.

Although the printing press had brought reading out of the monasteries and upper classes, the actual production of books didn’t ramp up all that much because of the lack of quality paper. People lower down the socio-economic ladder didn’t own books, they owned a book – usually a Bible.

That started to change in the 19th century:

The paper machine, invented in France in 1799 at the Didot family’s paper mill, could make 40 times as much paper per day as the traditional method, which involved pounding rags into pulp by hand using a mortar and pestle. By 1825, 50 percent of England’s paper supply was produced by machines. As the stock of rags for papermaking grew smaller and smaller, papermakers began experimenting with other materials such as grass, silk, asparagus, manure, stone, and even hornets’ nests. In 1800, the Marquess of Salisbury gifted to King George III a book printed on ‘the first useful Paper manufactured solely from Straw’ to demonstrate the viability of the material as an alternative for rags, which were already in ‘extraordinary scarcit’ in Europe.

Then, in the 1860s, came the real breakthrough – paper made from wood pulp. Upwards of 90% of modern paper is made from wood pulp or recycled pulp. This cheaper, more readily available paper led to the explosion of low-cost books for the masses. That’s why it’s called “pulp fiction.”

You know, things like this:

CrookedCity

NakedandAlone

And it was of the Devil:

Detractors delighted in linking ‘the volatile matter’ of wood-pulp paper with the ‘volatile minds’ of pulp readers. Londoner W. Coldwell wrote a three-part diatribe, ‘On Reading,’ lamenting that ‘the noble art of printing’ should be ‘pressed into this ignoble service.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge mourned how books, once revered as ‘religious oracles … degraded into culprits’ as they became more widely available.

By the end of the century there was growing concern—especially among middle class parents—that these cheap, plentiful books were seducing children into a life of crime and violence.

* * *

Moralizers painted the books as no better than ‘printed poison,’ with headlines warning readers that Pomeroy’s brutality was ‘what came of reading dime novels.’ Others hoped that by providing alternatives—penny delightfuls or ‘penny populars’—they could curb the demand for the sensational literature. A letter to the editor to the Worcester Talisman from the late 1820s tells young people to stop reading novels and read books of substance: ‘[F]ar better were it for a person to confine himself to the plain sober facts recorded in history and the lives of eminent individuals, than to wander through the flowery pages of fiction.’

It’s easy now to look back at such panics and roll your eyes and the naive concern about cheap books or television or whatever kind of music kids are listening to at the time. But history, as they say, repeats itself. Rather than being smug in our modern superiority, maybe think twice the next time some panic is sweeping the nation. Try not to give future generations something to roll their eyes about.

ThinkoftheChildren

Gone Writin’ – Be Back in August

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

So here’s the thing about being a writer – once you finish up one project, you need to jump on the next one. Sure, you can give yourself a nice pat on the back and a week or so to enjoy success, but, sooner or later, the next book beckons.

WriteAtDawn

With The Water Road trilogy in the rear view, it’s time for me to start working on my next book in earnest. Guess what – I already have! I began the first book of my next series (tentatively called Empire Falls – and, yes, I am aware) last week. It’s going to be a steampunk story set in a world with one superpower teetering on the edge of collapse. I’m envisioning seven books (!), so I need to get cracking!

WriteAllTheThings

To help me build some momentum, I’m going on blog hiatus for the rest of July. That way I can pour all my typing and word-generation energy into the new book. Hopefully, when August rolls around, I’ll be knee deep in it and past the point of know return. Until then . . .

KeepWriting

The Exception That Proves the Rule

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Years ago I wrote a review of an album by an obscure (even by prog standards) band. It was a middling album and I gave it a middling review. Fairly soon after I got a hateful email from one of the band members taking issue with the review. Aside from one factual thing I got wrong (which I changed) the rest was an odd mix of special pleading and attempts at sympathy. They put themselves out there, shouldn’t that count for something? Didn’t I care that another band member had just died and wasn’t it a shitty thing to do to write a less than positive review at that time (as if the obituary made it outside the band’s local area). It was an interesting experience.

And an understandable one. After all, once a creative person looses something on the world it’s inevitable that somebody, somewhere isn’t going to completely fall in love with it. Dealing with negative opinions of your work is just par for the course. If you can’t handle that, don’t publish books, release albums, or put your paintings on display for all to see.

Given that, the general wisdom in the writing world is that a writer absolutely, should not, never under any circumstances, respond to a review. Down that path lies madness. Even if there’s a clear error in there somewhere, it’s better to just let it go than be perceived as some thin-skinned artist whose feelings have been hurt. Because guess what? Nobody cares – unless they care enough to laugh at you.

Naturally, there’s an exception to that rule. At least if your Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese’s last film, Silence, wasn’t the critical darling and commercial success I’m sure he’d hoped for (full confession – haven’t seen the move, read the book a long time ago). In particular, a review in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK caught his eye. Scorsese decided to respond, both to correct a factual inaccuracy and to take issue with something the reviewer said.

“Bad move!” you cry! Not quite – as a result of Scorsese’s letter to the editor, he was invited to write an entire column unpacking the philosophical issue in the review he’d taken issue with. And, verily, there was no storm of shit produced by it. So how did he get away with violating this golden rule?

For one thing, he’s Martin Scorsese. He’s entitled to a little bit of leeway. Having said that, fame doesn’t prevent things going wrong, so there must be something else.

And it’s this – although Scorsese responded to a review, he didn’t complain about the review’s verdict of his work. He made two discreet points – one factual and irrelevant to the film’s merits, one philosophical that dealt with issues well beyond whether Silence was a good movie or not. In other words, he actually engaged, constructively, with what the critic said. He didn’t get defensive.

As I’ve said more than a few times – reaction to art is personal and nobody’s opinion of a piece of art can really be “wrong.” So it’s pointless to take negative reactions personally. Constructive engagement is one thing – hair-on-fire literary retaliation is entirely different.

Still, there’s a reason that the rule about responding to reviews is one that almost everyone can agree with. Think of it this way – if you’re tempted to write something about a negative review of your work, ask yourself, “am I Martin Scorsese?” Chances are, you aren’t. Act accordingly.

BookReview (Big)

In Defense of Worldbuilding

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A while back over at Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel wrote a lengthy article called “Against Worldbuilding,”* in which he argues that authors and readers are so enamored by the details of literary worlds that they lose focus on the actual story being told. What he says isn’t wrong so much as it is a game of definitional Léger de main. Along the way, Michel engages in some low-key genre bashing.

Let’s get out of the way what Michel gets absolutely right – some writers get so wrapped up in the worlds they create, in the details and minutiae of them, that the story, characters, and all the other important stuff kind of disappear in a puff of imagination. This happens, no doubt (although I wonder how many writers follow the advice of one person Michel links to who thinks it’s important what shapes the tables are in a given world). The problem isn’t an overbuilt world per se, it’s the fact that, as Michel puts it, things turn out like “they were producing an encyclopedia instead of a story.”

Where Michel goes wrong is in deciding that such deep diving and navel gazing is what “worldbuilding” is. Also, that it’s something that’s limited to certain particularly pulpy genres like science fiction and fantasy.

But the fact is that every author – even writers of non-fiction – have to build worlds with their words. Hell, I have to do it when I write legal briefs, much less when I write fiction. That’s because unless you’re writing for the small subset of people who know exactly what you’re talking about you have to do some foundational work of explaining the place where your tale is taking place. As I said several years ago in a review of the first season of Mad Men:

What is more fascinating to me about Mad Men is the world these characters live in. When people talk about world building they usually are talking about sci-fi or fantasy writers, who build new universes and worlds from the ground up. But the truth is, every writer of fiction (whether on the page or screen) has to pay attention to world building. Thus, just because Mad Men is set in a real time and place from our recent past doesn’t mean the creators can shirk on the details that lend the world depth and credibility.

Another example that springs to mind is Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage. It’s a story about a political prisoner in Burma and what he has to do to survive. It’s not a translation – it was not originally written in Burmese. It was written in English, presumably for an audience in the English-speaking world. A world that, most likely, isn’t familiar with the horrors of a Burmese prison camp or the kind of Buddhist rituals that might help a person stay sane in such a place. There’s lots of worldbuilding going on there, there has to be if the story Connelly tells is going to have any kind of resonance. By contrast, I just started Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem and it drops you right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution without any worldbuilding at all – but it was originally written in Chinese, so I expect that audience didn’t need any of that heavy lifting.

Perhaps aware of this fact, Michel performs a little magic. He walls off “worldbuilding” in the genre ghetto and instead says what literary writers do is “worldconjuring.” That is:

Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Worldconjuring uses hints and literary magic to create the illusion of a world, with the reader working to fill in the gaps. Worldbuilding imposes, worldconjuring collaborates.

In other words, worldconjuring . . . builds worlds, it just does a better job of them. This is linguistic slipperiness not seen outside of Earthforce:

What Michel has done is taken something that is definitional and turned it into a qualitative judgment – it’s the same thing as people who say “rap isn’t really music” when what they really mean is “I don’t like rap.” Fair enough, but whether you like something or not doesn’t change what it actually is (see, also, the infamous Roger Ebert v. video games dust up or any endless circle jerk on what “prog” is). All Michel has done is give what he perceives as “good” worldbuilding a different name. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s the same damned thing.

As I said at the beginning, Michel’s real point is solid – for some writers (and readers), worldbuilding runs roughshod over everything else. That sucks. But when it doesn’t and it’s transporting and wondrous and visceral – it’s still worldbuilding. It’s just worldbuilding done write. Everybody who picks up a pen to tell a tale has to do it – here’s hoping we get it right more than we get it wrong.

* NOTE: Word really wants “worldbuilding” to be two words, but since that’s how Michel spelled it I’ll keep it that way.

Thoughts On a Con

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Over Memorial Day weekend I got to participate in a con for the first time.

No, not this kind of con.

BusterKeaton_Convict_800

This kind.

Contraflow_steampunkersComicConWizardWorld_2014_Steampunk

Specifically, Vandalia-Con up in Parkersburg, which is specifically a steampunk-themed con.*

“But wait,” you say, “you don’t really do steampunk, do you?”

Well, actually: (1) I have; (2) I’m getting ready to do it again (details coming!); and (3) I figured that steampunk fans might be interested in gunpowder fantasy like The Water Road. At the very least, it would be an interesting fact finding mission. So what did I learn?

First, before I go any further, I want to say that everyone I interacted with at Vandalia-Con – from the organizers to the attendees to the other vendors – were great, friendly, fun people. As a clear outsider (a DC United jersey does not constitute steampunk cosplay) and newbie at all this I couldn’t have felt more at home.

To my eyes, this con was mostly about embracing the steampunk “lifestyle,” as opposed to the celebration of any particular work of steampunk fiction. Most of the other vendors were selling clothes, jewelry, and the like. Aside from a couple of presenters who also had some books for sale the only other person selling “content” was a small publisher of sci-fi and fantasy books.

And, oh, the fashion. I was impressed by the wide variety of detail applied to different costumes. Guys seem to have it easier than women. A vest and top hat will suffice for the fellas, while the ladies seem doomed to bustiers and bustles (and very tiny hats – for some reason). To each their own, I guess, but it looks very uncomfortable from where I’m sitting. But as I said – that was while in a not-at-all-chic DC United jersey (although it did get some love from one of the hotel staff, even if he is a Crew fan).

But the primary reason I was there was to try and sell some books and drive some people to my mailing list. On that front, the con didn’t really meet my expectations. As I said, I think most people there weren’t really interested in consuming content, but having fun dressing up and what not. Which is totally cool – but it’s not a great setup for an author trying to move some copies. I did sell a few (one woman – complete in bustier and bustle – bought a complete set of The Water Road trilogy) and got some mailing list sign ups, but not enough to offset the investment (hotel costs, mostly). But when considering what kind of event you’re going to, it’s worth trying to figure out what the audience of regular attendees is like – you may have brilliant widgets for sale, but if nobody’s really interested in widgets it won’t make much difference.

Unfortunately, that’s the kind of mercenary mentality I have to have these days. Which is a shame, because the weekend was a lot of (expensive) fun. Thanks for being my first, Vandalia-Con!

* Note that none of these photos – even the first one – were actually taken at Vandalia-Con. I can’t find any of those online and my phone pics didn’t turn out well enough to use. All images via Wikimedia Commons.