ericmvan

However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph.
—Isaac Rosenberg (1917)

Having done the WoW.com interview, and having seen comments to it, and thinking over lots of comments I've heard inworld over the last year, I have drawn a rather depressing conclusion. It seems to me that the players who are most familiar with the game's "lore" are not interested in story, but are, instead, engaging in a sort of data mining, that they may then use said data in an "I-know-more-than-you" pissing contest. And, on the one hand, it's sad, because WoW ought to be about story, and on the other hand, most of the "lore" is so badly written that it pretty much amounts to The Simarillion for Dummies. People see internal logic where, in fact, there's usually only what was convenient for Blizzard. Anyway, I should never begin an entry on such a dispiriting point.

Yesterday....

Hoping that a change of scenery would jog something loose and help me get the proposal for Blood Oranges (working title) written, we left the House and went to the Athenaeum. And it worked, at least to some degree. I managed to get a rough version of the synopsis worked out. It still needs tweaking, and a bit more added on about the ending, and, of course, the book will not look much like the synopsis, but everyone involved knows that up front. I suspect it's a bit heavy on theme, and a bit light on plot, but that's not surprising. As I've said about a million times, I can't know a story before it happens, and it won't happen until I write it. To wit, a response to something I said yesterday, from Geoffrey (readingthedark):

However you go about it, the authenticity and commitment that you place in story (partially because of Campbell) coupled with how it's not real until it's actually written (and the day-to-day nature of the multiverse) means that you'll only know the story when it happens. Reducing the unknown into a proposal is tough because there's no way to guess the future when authenticity is all that really matters. Being meticulous and delicate and ruthless and telling nothing that could possibly be untrue doesn't fit into a spreadsheet no matter what you do.

Yeah. What he said.

When I was done at the Athenaeum, Spooky and I didn't really feel much like heading home. Instead, we drove east, past Brown University, to Wayland Square. We got coffee and cookies at a deli/coffee shop called, I think, The Edge. Good coffee, and cheaper than the swill from Starbucks. Then we spent some time in Myopic Books, which is just around the corner. We were good and bought nothing. The day was grey and chilly, though the temperature was in the mid sixties. The sky looked like snow. Before heading back across the river to Federal Hill, we stopped at Eastside Market, and I found myself staring at a full-wall display of Stephenie Meyers' idiotic "saga." And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the people who did the art direction for the original covers of the Twilight books did a nice job. Would that my books had covers half that artful. Indeed, the original cover for Twlight would have made a far better cover for The Red Tree than the lurid "paranormal romance" template it was saddled with. Think about it. It's true.

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Last night, I took off my writing hat (the conscious writing hat, I mean; the unconscious one never comes off), and Spooky and I spent three hours and forty-five minutes in a marathon grind for reputation with Timbermaw Hold in Wintersong and Felwood. Shortly after midnight, both Shaharrazad and Suraa reached exalted status, and were awarded the title Diplomat.

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Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks.

And here are eleven photographs from yesterday:

( 10 November 2009 )

Thanks to all the men and women in uniform serving our country today. I'm also remembering those of my family who served and fought in years past, especially Uncle Carmine who fought the Battle of the Bulge with a dog by his side.

I have read all of the poems submitted to me for my special issue of Goblin Fruit. Some I have responded to. If you haven't heard from me yet, here's the deal: the Winter 2010 issue will hold about 15-16 poems. I have marked 10 poems that I am reasonably sure I want to use, and I have about 30 submissions I've hung on to temporarily which I will sort through to fill the remaining 5 to 6 slots.

As for Clockwork Phoenix 3; I apologize and ask for patience, but I pledge, responses will start soon and when they do they'll be coming fast and furious. After all, there's 555 mss. to get through and counting.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died!

Claude Lévi-Strauss was still alive!

I fail current events.

(In other news, I am returned from Providence, where there was pizza and much late-night conversation with readingthedark, and last night Viking Zen and I watched Volver (2006), my first film by Almodóvar. I liked it. Today I am back to raking the lawn.)

There's not a whole lot to say about yesterday. I did not "hammer out" the proposal for Blood Oranges. Instead, I sat here all day, making notes for the book, trying to find something like a plot. That provisional plot I inevitably use for proposals, which often looks very little like the finished book. I think I may include the proposal for The Red Tree in Sirenia Digest #48, as an example, because I read back over it yesterday, and I truly am grateful the book described therein is not the book I ended up writing. It'll be the same way this time, but even knowing that makes this no easier. I'm just no good at "hammering out" prose, even provisional prose. My response to the received wisdom of writing instructors and workshops that one should never be afraid of writing a bad first draft...well, it's rude, my response, and centers on my general unwillingness to write anything badly.

I did come up with two names yesterday, the name of the narrator (yes, it's another first-person narrative)— India Phelps —and the name of her lover— Eva Canning. I lifted Eva from "Werewolf Smile," from Sirenia Digest #45, though this Eva will be a very different Eva from that Eva. It's not much, but it's a start.

I am thinking that today I'll be going to a library to continue my notes and the working out of this puzzle, in hopes that by tomorrow I'll be ready to write the proposal/synopsis thing, however provisional it might be. And I still have a short story to write for Bill Schafer at subpress this month, and two pieces to write for Sirenia Digest #48. That means I have, at best, twenty days remaining to get all this work done, having lost most of those first ten days of November.

Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks.

I forgot to mention that Spooky and I read and adored David Petersen's Mouseguard Fall 1152, and are now looking forward to Winter 1152.

However, last night we watched the series premiere of the V remake (it really is a remake, and not a "reboot"), thanks to Hulu, and I was not so impressed. Thing is, I was never much of a fan of the original series, and I saw very little last night that improved upon it. Sure, Morena Baccarin does a superb job, and is extremely easy on the eyes. But that's about all the first episode had going for it. Partly, it's that this new V is weighed down by the blandness that usually infects network television. Interchangeable, forgettable characters reciting forgettable, interchangeable dialogue. I'll watch again next week, but I'm no longer optimistic.

And now I need to get dressed and slip out into the chilly grey day.

I saw The Fourth Kind tonight. It's yet another horror movie that makes an attempt to pass itself off as a work based on "real footage." I think the only purpose it served was to demonstrate how well done Paranormal Activity is in comparison; despite Paranormal Activity's occasional lapses into cornball territory, it comes out looking like a masterpiece for the ages when compared to the flopping, squawking, awkward, aimless, poorly written and even more poorly executed mess of Fourth Kind.

ETA: I feel the need to mention that before this big chunk of lame celluloid got rolling, I saw a preview for James Cameron's Avatar. It looks ... awful, both in terms of its FX and its storyline. Just sayin'.

Off being an Angel in the House, so I've loaded up the iPod with Edwardotorian light reading—it makes a spiffy torch for those secret passages!—and I've been flicking my way through golden-age Angela Brazil, up to 1922.  Of course, I'd much rather have the books—nice, chubby, fluffy things with cocoa stains and awfully jolly plates—but the pixels will have to do.  Heaven knows, I'd hate to wake up in a girls' school, but the stories are  utterly comforting, smooth and sweet:  like bowls full of floating island.  Even the titles make me smile:  The Madcap of the School, The Jolliest Term on Record.  They're all the same and all different—seaside schools, moorland schools, Georgian halls, dissolved abbeys with optional ghosts; shy girls, snobs, hoydens, madcaps,  malaperts, twenty girls or two hundred.  Mind you, Brazil can't plot for toffee, but she knows fourteen.  There are misunderstandings, meannesses, masquerades, undying crushes,  ghosts which aren't, and the occasional uprising in the Fourth.  (She has rather a pash for gipsyish brunettes.) There are censorious or adulated mistresses; there is frolicking with garlands on the lawn, in Attic attitudes.  There is real landscape, done in watercolor—and not only English.  Much to my surprise, there are jaunts to Sicily.  She must have visited and fallen madly in love, pressing flowers, taking note of the picturesque:

"You can always tell a brigand because he never carries an umbrella."

So, what featherweight reading do you like?

Nine

Can you spot the difference?

An opinion piece that takes a hard look at what "citizen journalism" is actually worth.

If you want to submit a poem for me to consider for my guest-edited issue of Goblin Fruit (guidelines here) today is the final day.

It's a tough world, so we takes the Good where we finds it. (And beats it up and steals its lunch money.)

• In a guest spot over at Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days, the indefatigable Charles Tan includes "At the Edge of Dying" by Mary Robinette Kowal from Clockwork Phoenix 2 on his list of best short stories of 2009.
  
• And over at the Diabolical Plots blog, where enterprising writer/reviewer David Steffen says he listened to every single Pseudopod podcast, the recording of my story "The Button Bin" makes the top five in his "Best of Pseudopod" list.
  

A sunny late autumn morning here in Providence.

Today, I go back to work, and I do so in earnest. I feel as though most of October and all of November (thus far) have been allowed to lay fallow. Sure, I tried to write "Romeo and Juliet Go to Mars," and I did write "The Dissevered Heart" for Sirenia Digest #47 and last week I tried to get started on "The Wolves, the Witch, and the Weald" for Sirenia Digest #48. I managed to write the flap copy for The Ammonite Violin & Others, and give more interviews, and there were various other bits and pieces of work that did not get ignored or set aside. But, still, mostly, health issues and depression and various sorts of uninvited chaos conspired to encourage me to slack off and allow so much needed time to slip away.

Today, I intend to hammer out a proposal for Blood Oranges (working title), which I will have to my agent before the end of the week.

Saturday was mostly spent on housecleaning, as sovay and readingthedark were expected in the evening. I'd asked them both to come down from Massachusetts to help me talk through some of the barriers between Me and the Next New Novel. Saturday night was long, and filled with good and useful conversation. The novel, and many things pertaining to the novel (and no shortage of things not pertaining to the novel). First and foremost was the problem of evil, and how it relates to the book I'm about to try to write. Spooky and Geoffrey went out and got pizza from Fellini's on Wickenden Street. I'd thought we'd actually talk about plot, but I find it too absurd, discussing "plot points" as if they are something that should be worked out beforehand. This is, by the way, the first time I have ever asked friends to step in and help me get over a story hurdle, and it speaks to my current desperation. But it was a smart move. The talk went on until almost dawn. Geoffrey left about five a.m. (CST) for the drive back to Framingham (though I'd offered to let him crash on the sofa). Sonya spent the night, and took the train back to Boston yesterday afternoon.

I think it was the most socializing that's taken place in this House since we moved in. I ought to have taken photographs.

If you have not already, please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. I have a medical thingy coming up at the end of the week that I fear is going to seriously dent our finances, and every little bit helps. Frankly, as everyone crows about how publishing is being forced "to reinvent itself," I think I'm ready to return to true and genuine patronage. Find myself a patron or ten willing to pay me to keep this up, this writing, or to shower upon me offerings of land and property (a modest house of my own would be fine and dandy). As long as we're talking revolution, I may as well dream.

By the way, I have learned (rather belatedly) that the German-translation of Low Red Moon will be out December 1st. Out in Germany, I assume. Unfortunately, it has been renamed Kreatur. What? Is it not possible to translate the phrase "low red moon" into German? I admit, I've only gotten as for as "red moon"— rendering it as roter Monde —but I do not speak German. Anyway, I thought someone might be interested.

Okay. Work.

I meant to post this yesterday, on Carl Sagan Day, the 75th anniversary of his birth. But lots of stuff happened yesterday, and so I am posting it tonight. It makes me feel just a little better:

(as seen on the NCSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences calendar)

Location: Caldwell Lounge, NCSU campus

Come find out who won NC State's 2009 Fiction Contests. Winners of the statewide contests for short fiction and short-short fiction were chosen by this year's judge, science fiction legend Samuel Delany, professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University, and one of the most distinguished American writers and critics of the last 50 years. Delany will help announce the contest winners and will give a reading from his own work.

To find Caldwell Hall on the NC State Campus Map, click on the "North" region of the map (labeled region 4). Caldwell Hall is Building 25.