The Blue Candle Society

“Well now, you want to keep me around for Clyburne, don’t you? Unless you’ve decided he ain’t much of a threat. He thinks I’m on his side, after all.”

Gantry eyed him for a while, his expression difficult to make out in the dark. Finally, he lowered the pistol. “Sure,” he said, “sure, Quinn. Because you’re really on our side, right?”

“You can help me find Temperance. Clyburne couldn’t convince me he cared about her if he tried.”

“Yep, Clyburne’s a cold fish isn’t he? I’m willing to keep her alive for a while, just ’cause she’s such a fine looking woman. Let’s see if we find him up there, shall we?” He stepped to one side. “After you.” Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 30’

Posted in Serials

Well, I won NaNo again.  Now to finish off the other 30,000 words or so to make it, you know, a novel.  On to December, or NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month).

Posted in General writing things

I’ve been cranking along on a novel, trying to wrap us some revisions and new wordcount on a deadline, and I’m starting to realize that past versions of myself are really screwing me over.  I have enough problems with coherent plotting without various past versions of me leaving notes detailing contradictory versions of what they seem to think are brilliant ideas on directions that I could take the novel.

One past version of me will posit an idea for a scene involving, say, Vicar Dumbarton challenging someone to a race in his new Model A at the Armistice Day Cotillion, then another past version of me will leave a note about some great scene where Vicar Dumbarton is eaten by an orca on the way to the Halloween party.  And who gets stuck with reconciling all this?  Present-day me, that’s who.

Well, screw it.  I’m going to pawn it off on future me.  That poor sucker won’t know what hit him.

Posted in General writing things

Actually, a series of back and forth articles about genre versus literary fiction, played out across the New Yorker and Time, but I’ll focus on the last one, by Arthur Krystal.  It is a very strange article, since for some reason Krystal seems to want to convince the reader that he really doesn’t think “genre” fiction is inferior to “literary” fiction, really he doesn’t, even as he says things like “we don’t expect excellence in writing” in genre fiction (and what do you mean, “we” Kemo Sabi?), or that genre novels “stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes.”  If you really think genre fiction is inferior, just say it, loud and proud – plenty do.  Of course, if the best you can muster to differentiate the sides of the imaginary bright line is talk of “escapism” and “guilty pleasures”, maybe a firm stand isn’t that great of an idea.

I don’t really understand this obsession with guilty pleasures anyway.  You’re a grown-ass man – if you find something pleasurable, just own it, as long as it ain’t hurting anyone (and reading a book rarely does, outside of necronomicons and the like) – no need to be wracked with guilt over it.  The problem is, I get the sense that a lot of the people talking about guilty pleasures are guilty not so much because they think the product they are consuming is inferior, but because they really think literature should be painful.  These people are free to scourge themselves with stuff that is unpleasant to read all they want, but I don’t know why they keep telling me about it.

Krystal sort of wanders into a swamp when he starts talking about literary fiction being set apart by “the writer’s sensibility, his purpose in writing, and the choices he makes to communicate that purpose.”  That might have  been a nice jumping-off place for a point, if he had one, but instead of trying to convince us of the rather startling proposition that genre writers don’t have a purpose in writing, or don’t make choices to communicate it (or perhaps that they have some particular set of purposes they can choose from that don’t overlap with those of literary writers), he just sort of dribbles off with something about a (possible) “struggle to express what’s difficult to convey”, which doesn’t, apparently exist in “true” genre  fiction.  The fuzziness about the fact that literary fiction may or may not be conveying something difficult to comprehend makes it seem like a poor choice for defining the class.  The fact that it is blindingly obvious that genre fiction is constantly conveying all sorts of things that are not necessarily easy to comprehend is the other problem with the notion, of course.

I guess another idea is that various genres have conventions, and that these are limitations of the form.  But a) since when do limitations of the form make something inferior?  And b) is he really unaware of conventions of literary fiction?  Of course, if one points out genre fiction that doesn’t follow an expected convention, we come back to that “true” word that keeps popping up as a descriptor, that handy way of saying “Oh, well that one doesn’t count”.  The weird notion that genre fiction is defined by the use of stock characters (and I guess that literary fiction eschews them utterly) doesn’t even warrant consideration.  I’d say he’s just falling into the trap of defining genre fiction as “the sort of thing I don’t like”, except that in other paragraphs he points out things he calls genre fiction with excellent, original characters, and seems to realize he’s doing so.

I worry, when I read article like this, that the authors of them are simply unable to see excellence in writing unless it is jumping up and down on the page saying “Look at me!  I’m excellent!”  It is kind of sad to think of people who spend so much time thinking about writing missing so much in the written word.

Posted in General writing things

The car’s engine revved as it came, and Farthing continued drawing his pistol with only a slight pause. He snapped off one shot, then turned to jump to his right. Jefferson lunged behind him, going to the left, and threw his hip at Farthing’s back as he went by.

Farthing twisted even as he stumbled, and Jefferson caught an accusatory expression on his face in the blinding glow of the approaching headlights. Jefferson thought Farthing was actually trying to bring his pistol to bear, still moving in that rapid, jerky way he had.

Then Jefferson was hitting the road as he heard a wet thud behind him. He felt the car whip past, just missing his legs he thought, and turned in time to see Farthing still bouncing on the road like a battered rag doll. He scrambled to his feet as he heard squealing brakes from down the street–the Cord encountering Reeves’ car. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: The Figurine, Part 29’

Posted in Serials

I’m just getting in from a month of on and off traveling, so today I’m limiting myself to a link to a post on the creative process by The Oatmeal.

Posted in General writing things

Perhaps I shouldn’t bring this up, since I recently heard a literary agent railing against the use of ellipses and semicolons (and basically anything but commas and periods), but this article on some lesser-known punctuation marks struck me as useful, since I always like to have as much flexibility as possible.  Of course, there is the difficulty of not having keyboards with authority points and the like on them, but some of those lesser-used function keys could pressed into service, I’d think.

More general advice on punctuation can, of course, be found here.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/144712

Posted in General writing things

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately (hence the dearth of posts), and I noticed a few things.  For one thing, part of my travels took me to Florida, and I must say that folks in swing states have my sympathies around-about election time.  I couldn’t even enjoy a bit of television with my room service meals.

But more to the point, look at the books I brought along for my spare time on a 3-day trip.  I don’t even know what’s wrong with me.  I was on a plane for a while, but I’d have to be delusional to think I was going to get through five books in three days on what was, after all, a purposeful business trip.  I suppose I would have felt rather smug had there been a volcanic eruption somewhere that left me stuck in an airport for two days, but as it was I just added several pounds to my backpack for no good purpose.  Maybe itt is time to think about one of those e-book readers the kids are talking about.

Posted in Uncategorized

As loyal readers know, I frequently find inspiration in everyday events for spine-tingling tales of suspense and horror.  Well, I recently one of my original bonechilling ideas came back to haunt me.  I had sent my snowblower off for carburetor repairs, and I received a call informing me that they had found two bolts with missing nuts in the auger.  Oh, and I discovered that the other one had fallen off my wheelbarrow.

Okay, now that I see that all written down it seems a bit less terrifying than I thought.

So perhaps I will close with another bonechilling experiece, this one from my childhood, which might just possibly explain why I ended up writing horrifying (and occasionally horrible) stories.  Of course, I’ve written plenty of other kinds of stories (involving unicorns, spaceships, that kind of thing), and if any of the damn things ever get published maybe I’ll reveal some of the events in my background leading to those.

But the story involves the house where I grew up, and a stairway, and a door (spooky already, am I right?)  Anyway, there is a doorway at the base of the main stairway in the house, leading to what at the time was a little library.  I had to pass the doorway every time I descended the steps, which I had to do often since my bedroom was on the second floor, and somehow I’d gotten the notion, as children will, that there was a monster living in the room.  I don’t think I ever had a really clear vision of what the monster looked like, but it was vaguely humanoid, sort of an ape-man I think, and I was fairly sure, on some level, that it would try to grab me when I went by.  Naturally, I formed the habit of clearing the last few steps pretty quickly, and swinging around on the staircase rail so I could make a fast U-turn and hit the ground at a good clip.

This technique worked well enough for quite a while (I never got grabbed, at any rate), but one day, when I was, I don’t know, 6 or 7 years old, I decided that I’d had enough.  I knew, of course, intellectually, that there was really no monster in the room – I’d walked right into it many times with no trouble.  So one evening, as the shadows stretched down the hallway below, I decided that it was time to face my fears, square my shoulders, and walk slowly down the steps in a dignified fashion, mere inches from the doorway.

I didn’t realize that my father was in the room at the base of the stairs that evening, and I have no idea what waggish impulse made him pick that particular night to leap out and surprise me when he heard me coming.  I don’t think he knew about my monster theory, because I assume he didn’t actually intend to give me a heart attack.  That moment, though, when I saw the looming, distorted humanoid shadow on the wall, freakish hands outstretched, really connected me with my inner terrified person.

Posted in Bonechilling Ideas, General writing things

After all, the heinous crime was discovered ages ago.  But it took me this long to find a discussion of the theft of millions of pounds of Canada’s strategic maple syrup reserve that didn’t reference a “sticky situation”, or worse yet “sticky-fingered thieves”.  I have too much respect for you, the readers of this blog, to have truck with weak puns.

Anyway, I have to say there is something sad about a strategic syrup reserve.  Here in New York, maple syrup is still produced by local farmers as a secondary income stream, and thus subject to wild price fluctuations brought on by outbreaks of tent caterpillars and so on.  It seems to me that’s how it should be, but leave it to Canada to industrialize and commoditize everything.

Posted in Uncategorized