I want a genre with ragged edges, where the fantastic and the normal  can be found in the same world, just in different neighbourhoods;

I want a genre with a sense of wonder that doesn’t treat me like a child;

I want a genre that doesn’t reek of pretension resting on dusty pedestals;

I want a genre that respects tradition, but isn’t enslaved by it;

I want a genre that may stoop to disgust, but also aspires to awe

I want a genre that will allow me to be a dime-store grifter Monday, a starship gunner Tuesday, a kid growing up in a bad home Wednesday, a sexual cosmonaut of love’s dark sides on Thursday, a fighter first level (veteran) Friday, a trick shooting monkey on Saturday, and pro wrestler in the year 2020 Sunday.

Any suggestions?

JSR

Since it's official, just posting a note here that I'll be teaching a game workshop at this year's Context, a very cool convention in Columbus, OH.

Via the workshop website:

Erin Hoffman: Interactive Narrative and Game Design
(Sunday, September 28th, 11am-2pm)
This workshop explores the fundamentals of video game design through the use of interactive fiction, exploring the places where interactivity and storytelling overlap. No technology or game training is necessary, though a laptop computer is highly recommended. Attendees will be provided with advance reading and will create a small interactive fiction game using the Inform7 Engine.

Erin Hoffman has been working in video games since 1999 on an assortment of genres from massively multiplayer online games to Nintendo DS titles for young audiences to action-RPGs for PC, XBox, and PlayStation2. $20.

I am excited. I've been scattershot working on a design document for an Inform7 game for next year's IFC, and this will be a good opportunity to actually execute on it to have something to show during the workshop as a process example.

thehollowbox and I are also in Gary Braunbeck's masterclass workshop (uberwoot). You should all come and hang out with us! It's a very nice con, excellent staff and programming with a pleasantly small and very friendly population. I had a great time last year and hope to make this a habitual trip along with ReaderCon. Giant cons are not my thing, but these small, well-run ones with great guests are a lot of fun.

In other appearance-type news... I will of course be at GDC next month (Feb 17-24), then in San Diego for the weekend, then back to NY on the 24th for brennye's arrival on the 25th (yay!!). I will be at IMGDC in Minneapolis giving a roundtable on BetterEULA in the end of March, very shortly thereafter in NYC to be on a panel at the Virtual Law Conference April 3-4, likely moving within a few days after getting home from that, and then things should quiet down until skkyechan's wedding in September, closely followed by Context. Said quieting down is of course contingent on thehollowbox and me not moving out to Long Beach during that time, which is possible (and likely even more complicated if we wait until after Context -- hmm).

Whew.

In working my way through Weird Tales #347, the issue containing my story “Excision,” I recently read Clayton Kroh’s story “The Yankee at the Sitting-Up.”

Growing up in the South myself, with family roots in the upper and Deep South going back 350 years, I’ve always had a shine for Southern literature and culture. The region and its history are so checkered, good mixed with some very bad, and the juxtaposition of such elements has always fascinated me. I read tons of Faulkner and Penn Warren in high school and college, and I’ve tried to keep up with modern Southern literature like Bobbie Ann Mason and Daniel Wallace. As a fantasy writer, the Southern gothic has always intrigued me, but I haven’t yet found a way to make it work within what I do.

Clayton sure made it work in his short piece. The speculative element was slight, which isn’t a problem for me, but the characterization and the setting just dripped from his word-choice and descriptions. It might’ve helped that I knew all those things he was talking about, so the story leapt right off the page for me.

Clayton, according to his Weird Tales bio, got his degree at ODU, just down the road from where I went to school. He’s an Odyssey grad like me, but I haven’t yet had the chance to meet him. Hopefully I will soon.

For two years I primarily read short stories. I’ve posted about this before so won’t rehash the details, but recently I’ve noticed I have little energy for reading them. There are many factors here, including a massive academic workload, but I think I burnt out on the short form. I realized this when I finished Nancy Kress’s excellent novel Beggars in Spain. I loved the book, the first SF work I’d enjoyed in years, and had that novel-readers joy of wanting to get back to the story to see how things pan out.

This is a joy you can’t get from short stories. As Poe said, short stories are best read in a single sitting. But since I had pushed myself to read wide and deep in the short story field, discovering new authors, I now realize I was burnt out from jumping into so many different landscapes and voices. I’d initially loved it, the surprise and joy of finding a story you liked from a previously unknown source. And I had so many of these moments, from Nelson Algren to Joyce Carol Oates, that I didn’t see that there could be any negative to this approach. Recently, enjoying Kress’s work, I recognized this short story fatigue. So, on to novels for a bit.

Don’t get me wrong. I love short stories. Love them. They do things novels can’t and the way they do them appeals to much of what I love in literature: intensity, experimentation, voice, a fully realized idea. And I know I will go back to devouring them soon enough (I’m real keen on reading Datlow’s Inferno as well as some other anthos and more Jeffrey Ford and Faulkner and John Sayles, of the ones that pop in my head right now). But given how tired I am at the end of the day, having to start from scratch with a “new” story every night is too draining, but returning to a novel with characters I’ve already gotten to know sounds like the right fix. So, I guess it is time to redress the balance, since I’ve starved myself of novels for two years.

I wonder how this will effect my short fiction . . . if at all?

So, on to Peter Straub’s Shadowlands, which I’ve wanted to read for years. Then Blood Magic. Then the Asiatics. Then The Pilo Family Circus. Then Prodigal Blues. Then It Happened in Boston? Then . . . who knows?

JSR

Over the last couple of months I've experienced a strange confluence of influences. Call it collective unconscious or determinism or blind stupid coincidence, some of it happens because of the things I surround myself with while trying to puzzle through the big game of life. For me this is indelibly entwined with writing (which, as I've said, for me is always driven from theme), or perhaps more broadly to anything creative. I have never been able to be creative without first knowing what I am being creative for.

So it was interesting to come across so many recent touchstones for another piece in my ongoing grokking of the world. Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a short story called "Karma Ex Machina", which centers around a new kind of capitalism, and then for Christmas I received from my mother an audiobook of Bill Clinton's Giving.

It's difficult to talk about this without stirring up a political debate, so I'll just log here that I would rather not go there; I'm more interested in the contents of this book, which were very much a kind of invigorating sugar scrub spa treatment for the soul.

Giving is about the myriad good things going on in the world at any given moment. It is about incredibly smart, successful people coming to the inevitable realization that if we love life we must love our fellow man, and if we love our fellow man we should prevent their suffering where we are able to do so. And if we are smart and if we are looking for the sustainability of global happiness and prosperity we should also increase our own wealth through this process.

It is very much a part of the quality of life rhetoric that has been slowly fighting what often feels to be a losing battle against the insane overwork culture that has gripped the US over the past few decades: that doing what is right, doing what is good, doing what is healthy, leads to prosperity. And business should be about prosperity, so these two things do not come into conflict. When they do they inevitably lead to a self destruction situation.

The "old" capitalism, the capitalism of the 1980s and 90s, existed in a different world where survival was so recently an issue (all of this, probably contaminated by my exposure to thehollowbox, has greatly deepened my interest in the Cold War lately) that the concept of enlightened self interest seemed about as comprehensible as calculus to a chimpanzee. But that's what this is. It is calculus of the soul, an enlightenment where our self interest means the interest of humanity and of the planet, and we should not rest until all of those interests are singing together. This is a core critical thing to me that has only been thrown into greater relief over the last five years. A good job is not a good job unless it is doing good in the world.

But at any rate what I intended here was to highlight, out of the incredible panoply of charitable organizations presented in Giving, a few of my favorite charities. And this stuff is percolating -- jeffhowell posted recently about the high-powered Microsoft dude who left his job after visiting a deeply impoverished school in Nepal. John Wood's story appears in Giving, too. He sold everything he had to buy books for these kids halfway around the world. And now he has a foundation.

But that length is not necessary (though it's pretty cool). With the amount of wealth in the US, or in any civilized nation, the merest fraction of average monthly income makes a world of difference in a third world country. One of the most interesting charities in the book was Kiva.org, an organization that facilitates microloans to developing countries. For $25 you can go in for 1/7 of a business loan to a single individual in Afghanistan who will use that money to open a bakery, grocery, or other small business. And it is a loan -- they start the business, report on it, and you get your money back, to then invest back into the system or keep if you like. Loans like this are what make for genuine rebuilding. On the website you can look at all of the business proposals of these individuals all over the world and contribute directly at any denomination to their cause. And you can see your fellow lenders.

The other program that I found extremely interesting is Chess In the Schools, an initiative to start chess programs in second grade classes in New York. This group has field tested chess programs in second grade classes and demonstrated with raw data that teaching kids chess at this level improves their academic performance and confidence across the board in all subjects. Now they just need to implement it in as many schools as possible. An entire class program can be funded for $3000. They aren't currently open to new joinees, but I am going to be contacting them to see if there's a way Gamewatch can sponsor a particular class. Obviously my interest here is that it boosts math and science in the US, which are frighteningly behind other nations, and it's (yet another) way that shows that games are good for you.

Then there are groups I didn't know about like Ready4Work and Citizens Against Recidivism. It doesn't take much learning about the situation to realize that the revolving door prison systems across the US are destructive, inhumane, and huge cost sinks. I caught Ted Koppel's interview on the Daily Show several weeks ago on this subject, specifically with the breaking point that California is approaching with the intensely overloaded prison system, and the reasons why people who enter it have the odds stacked against them of breaking out. Ready4Work and CAR have proven track records of keeping people out of prison. This cycle has always struck me as one of the most harmful and unnecessary injustices currently in progress in the US, so these two programs really caught my ear.

Heifer International deserves a mention, even though they're one of my favorite charities and I knew well about them before. But they're an amazing and perfect example of a smart charity that perpetuates itself and generates wealth and stability at an astronomical rate.

That's just a tiny handful of the programs profiled in the book, and links to all of them and more are up at the Clinton Foundation website.

Listening to this book really was a kind of therapy. And it was exhilarating in its own way. Much of what Clinton talks about in the opening of the book is the way that things have changed, and the way that the information age has revolutionized charitable work in the US and across the world. We have been steeped in negativity for so long that it becomes easy to forget all of these people working quietly away to do amazing things in the world. The internet has actually changed a lot of that -- made this information easier to access, connected people across th e world, allowed organizations to form around specific niche interests.

And that is how the change comes. You don't have to quit your job or starve yourself or do anything incredibly melodramatic to make a positive change in the world. You just have to lean a little bit. Look at the things you purchase, look at where your money goes, and shift it a little to a company that has committed to going carbon neutral or donates to local charities. My financial planning company has a 401k "ethical responsibility" profile ready-made -- yours probably does too. If we each leaned a little bit, the world would move.

I am making the same offer with this that I did with An Inconvenient Truth. If you're interested in reading or listening to Giving, leave me a comment and email me your address and I will have it sent to you in your format of choice (audio or print). All you have to do is pick one of the charities in it, kick them $10 or $20, and post about which one you donated to and why. Offered to the first to reply with interest. If you don't find it amazing, I'll buy the donation back from you.

The book is honestly full of hope. It really will make you feel better about the world. One of the complicated aspects about the internet and the "information age" is that it can be difficult to sort through it all, to get an algorithm that gets you the right information in the right dose at the right time. This is the right information. This is the stuff we ought to be thinking about. Give Britney Spears a break and invest in something good for the world.

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”
– Anne Bradstreet, ‘Meditations Divine and Moral,’ 1655

“Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flanner O’Connor, and others are worlds according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specification” Raymond Carver, “On Writing,” from Call if You Need Me , page 87.

I dig this quote. It got me thinking. On top of every writer being a world builder, a writer has to give their world their own mythology. I don’t mean necessarily in the form of classic myth, though some fantasy and SF writers love to do it that way. I’m thinking more of the personal mythologies that inhabit the worlds of great writers. The themes and symbols that their hopes and dreams take in their worlds. The eye candy, shadows, and sunrises of their interests, experience, and desires represented in fictional forms.

Many of my favorite writers have a rich iconography of these myths in their work. Bradbury and his small towns, carnivals, and poetic imaginings of Mars. Lansdale and his wild, weird, gothic and violent East Texas menagerie of heroes, villains, and razors. Braunbeck and his blue collar protagonists with blood stained lives, who fight against their dreams succumbing to entropy. Hemingway and his quest for a broken man to be made whole by combating nature, searching for love through conquest, and being his own worst enemy. Highsmith and her beautiful betrayals from people whose nature is sharp, deadly, and filled with dark humours. Algren and the dirty fingernail existence of soldiers, cons, cops and whores trying to scratch through life despite circumstance and their own failings. Leiber’s swashbuckling pace, theatrical heroism, and mean, beautiful women that travel across genre. Tons more, but those are a few.

When I think of my own work over the past ten years, it is interesting to see that, like all my favorites, I, too, am creating a mythology for my worlds, rooted in my loves and hates, my interests, experiences, and dreams. I won’t pretend to be doing this consciously or well, nor am I anywhere in the league of my heroes, but I’ve watched this “personal mythology” grow. Character types keep appearing. Themes are now apparent that had not been. New additions are being made. All are related because they all from me.

I’ve never read much about this from an author’s stand point, so if anyone has any insight on this, fire it my way. But it was eye opening to realize it was happening to me and my colleagues. Just like our heroes.

But the more I think of it, the more it makes sense that when we write, regardless of if we are a genre author or not, we are creating our own mythology for our worlds. That’s what the stories are. Not linked by narrative like the Illiad or the Bible (at least not for me), but by author. Each story is an addition to the pantheon, even if it bares no resemblance to the rest, or contradict other stories, or whatever. Reminds me of Latvian mythology, which has no narrative spine. Just a collection of stories, rooted in folks songs, about the country, its history and creatures, its little hopes and big dreams that even Soviet occupation and its terrors couldn’t extinguish.

I think your personal mythology reveals itself after you have a lot of stories under your belt. I only really caught wind of it in the past two years. Before that, I thought each story was a unique gem with precious little in it related to the others. But over time, patterns emerge and the idea of them all being part of a big ass tree of myth is kinda neat. Granted, mine is full of exploding fat people, drugged-out wrestlers, alcoholic ghosts, tough kids and rotten adults, but, hey, I gotta be me.

JSR

The more I work in the areas where I work (which frequently feel more like play, and the more they feel like play, the better the results I tend to get), the more I think that my entire profession, or series of professions, can be distilled into a single concept of the science of choice.

Games are about choices. They fundamentally are about choice and consequence, which is a variation away from Jim Gee's codification of the game experience as the scientific method. What is interesting and, to me, justifies that variation is that players are not purely objective oriented. They truly delight in finding ways to get bizarre results out of an intentionally predictable interface, and this becomes a form of self expression. We have handles, in terms of our online identities, for a reason beyond their simple utility. Providing environments promoting choice results in increased player loyalty, faster spread of viral material, and a generally happier player base.

Marketing is about choices. The number one thing you cannot do without resorting to dishonesty (which inevitably backfires) is market a poor product. Trace patterns in people who have had exceptionally strong careers in marketing and you will generally see a high level of skill in selecting what they market. Viral marketing is about setting up an environment where your prospective buyer can make a choice and feel good and rewarded for making that choice. Facebook, one of the most powerful recent marketing and social networking tools, is inherently leveraging choice in a way that MySpace failed to accomplish.

Writing is about as choice-driven as anything I can think of, not just in terms of the above scenarios where you are predicting or attempting to influence choice, or the ways in which choice plays a role in everything in life, but storytelling fundamentally also comes down to choice (and, again, consequence). Storytelling is, in general, another broad metaphor, if you incorporate interactivity.

The further we get from having to expend all of our energy to ensure our basic survival, the more we value choice. Free will becomes of value when you are equally safe making decisions on your own as you are placing your fate in the hands of a dictator (one who is stronger than you and will ensure your basic physical protection). This is largely why we are seeing an explosion of choice-as-personal-expression, from online avatars to personal websites and blogs to downloadable single-unit portions of music. There are entire services now, like Second Life, which on a basic level exist only to allow you to make choices. They don't even bother to throw much of anything else into the mix.

AnthologyBuilder has been making the rounds on various journals, though I heard it first from Matt Rotundo. I talked about something like this in my many maunderings on new speculative fiction models, so I'm tickled that something like it (which must surely have been long in development then) now actually exists. It has interesting implications, including potential undervaluing of future collections compiled by the author, which is reason for caution, but overall it's a terrific thing, the iTunes of fiction.

There's been an evolution in game design over the last decade emphasizing choice and player expression. It's taken the industry this long to come fully to terms with the fact that maximizing player decision-making isn't a bad thing. Some guidance is still needed, which is what will differentiate a world like SecondLife from an actual game -- but you would be amazed at the reticence of game designers to put choice in the player's hands, even in something as inherently social, expressive, and commercial as an MMO. Games like A Tale in the Desert take this to new heights in experimentation (and there is no question that designing for choice is an expensive process), but overall for some time now the industry has been waking up to the value of allowing the player to make simple, even completely meaningless, choices, and rewarding them for it.

This is venturing on a lot of words over something that appears to be an obvious realization, but the concept of choice is as fundamental as the concept of freedom, and it is equally overlooked in so many enterprises. Choice is good. Choice is fun. Choice is what life is about. In a world where we have a profusion of information and manipulatable media, the differentiating factor is how we navigate that media, which comes down to identity, which comes down to choice. It amazes me how much StumbleUpon can multiply your web traffic, and this, too, is choice and identity based, leveraging word of mouth and encouraging users for finding cool stuff on the internet. In any undertaking where your objective is to reach more people (in depth or in breadth), I can think of few ways in which adding an element of choice wouldn't drastically improve your reach and the resonance of your effort. And I do think that all art ultimately becomes interactive, or it becomes extinct.

My copies of Weird Tales #347, featuring my story “Excision,” arrived a few days ago. The severed head in the jar looks even cooler in person! It was odd for me to read the teaser sentences; about my story but not written by me. The artwork for my story is awesome, especially the tiny picture in the margin of a cute little bunny with wicked cat’s claws. I haven’t yet read any of the stories, one by fellow Odyssey alum Clayton Kroh, or Mike DeLuca’s non-fiction column, but so far it’s pretty damn cool.

We all find out about books, stories and authors from a myriad of influences. Friends make recommendations, we read a cool review from a reviewer whose tastes we trust, we get reading lists from schools, we see what our favorite authors dig, etc.

But there is a certain joy in finding an author on your own, authors who get in your sites almost by accident. Here are a few of my own favorites that I discovered for myself:

1. Graham Green: I was astounded he was not on a recent 50 Best British authors since the Second World War list (the link is on Locus, though I was tickled to see A J. P. Taylor, though I still say D. C. Watt was a better historian, if less flamboyant). I bought a A Burnt Out Case just because of the title! And it got me interested in Green’s work and his blend of sly wit, sharp dialogue and rich, wild, and darkly funny worlds are the right antidote for certain kinds of blues (Our Man in Havana being another fave). Need to read more of him.

2. Joe Lansdale: I’ve said before I read Lansdale’s introduction to the comic book Preacher and was so impressed with his voice I quickly bought The Drive In I and II, then Writer of the Purple Rage, then The Bottoms, then . . . well, most of his short story collections and novels now grace my bookspace. Of all the writers working today, Lansdale has the career I most envy and aspire to, and he has written some of my favorite stories and novels and comics: A Fine Dark Line, Mucho Mojo, “The Pit,” “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” “Bubba Ho Tep,” and the much underrated Freezer Burn.

3. Gary Braunbeck: Lansdale woke me up to the modern horror scene, and by doing so led me to my favorite contemporary author, Gary Braunbeck. I read his non fiction collection first, Fear in a Handful of Dust, and was so impressed I bought Graveyard People (short fiction) and In Silent Graves and have been raising Mr. Braunbeck’s flag very high. “The Marble King”, “The Friendless Bodies of Unburied Men,” “Duty,” “Safe,” “Some Touch of Pity,” “Kiss of the Mudman,” In the Midnight Museum . . . I could go on, but go read my interview with the man and see for yourself:

http://www.fearzone.com/blog/gary-braunbeck-interview

4. Herman Hesse: Steppenwolfe was the perfect book for my work-savaged brain after my M.A. Beautifully written story about a man having a mid life crisis of intellect and emotion and finding a path through fantasy to recovery (sort of). Nothing else I’ve read by Hesse has matched this work, which I just picked out of a bin at a used book store.

There, four points of the lodestar of finding an author on your own. So take a chance next time you’re in the bookstore or surfing amazon. Explore. Muck about. You might stumble upon a future favorite you would not find any other way.