A week or so back, Rick Bowes loaned me his copy of Dave Schwartz’s (snurri) THE SUN INSIDE. It’s a novella put out by Rabid Transit Press about an Iraq War veteran’s adventures inside the hollow earth of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar.

It is wonderful.

Schwartz strips the jingoism out of Burroughs’ world while reveling in all the weird and wonder of the setting. The dinosaurs are there, the weird races, the vastness and mystery that lingers right around the corner. At the same time, Thomas Tucker, the novella’s hero, is a sympathetic character and commentary on the Burroughsian hero. Dave writes Tucker with humanness and decency. The fact that Tucker winds up in the Hollow Earth via an online dating service only hints at the style you can expect.

So yeah, this book was great. How great? A day or two after finishing it, I passed by this:



Not only can David Schwartz write, they’re already naming buildings after him.

Give thanks.

Checking in briefly from my sister's rather fantastic cabin south of Denver. Photos from the trip will be up on a Flickr at some point.

Very much ahead of schedule, Booksurge put Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds out on Amazon -- we finalized the book a week ago, but had thought it would take at least two to three weeks to appear on Amazon. Instead the initial listings were there in just under a week! Which turns out to be very interesting timing with my moving cross-country and Erik being abroad in Germany for Liepzig.

I think that they're still working out the kinks -- the information seems to shift every couple of days, and the cover image is a little wonky -- but I am officially announcing its availability because erikbethke did so, which caused Raph to do so, which caused the news to start propagating all over the darn internet. ;) But we are live, though the book's official "meatspace" launch remains Austin GDC, which at this point is barrelling down upon us like a train on fire.

In other Settlers news, my related article "Fair Trade Goldfarming" is up at the rather newly-minted GiantRealm.com, piloted by the elusive Joe Blancato, whom I worked with extensively at The Escapist and is now helming his own shindig (and, if he reads this sentence, also correcting my grammar). The concept of desirable goldfarming elements in MMOs is not new, but I think I might have Coined a Term. Think of it as either a taster (though not this taster or even this taster of the juicy book) or an extension upon the larger Settlers project.

Thoughts appreciated, even while I am velocitized. Proper marketing endeavors and all of that initiate when jsridler and I are actually traversing <2 states per day. But of course we are very excited about the book's availability on Amazon, and seeing all of this work and idea exchange come to tangible fruition.

It may seem odd for someone who is a fantasy writer, but I’m also a scientist. I have a PhD in biophsyical chemistry, I did eight years of laboratory research as a grad student and post-doc, and I teach college chemistry.

People who hear that then usually ask “Why don’t you write (or read) much SF?” The reason is that I’m a very hard sell when it comes to fictional science. Most of the biology I see in SF is so impossibly speculative or fundamentally flawed that my suspension of disbelief is shot and I can’t enjoy the fiction.

As a science teacher, which I’ve been for over twenty years, I’m always interested in efforts to teach people science. Its basic principles govern the entire world around us, including such common things as cooking and the weather. Yet science education seems to be a low priority for many schools, teachers, and students.

Hugo-winning author David D. Levine (who has a fantasy story forthcoming in my magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies) recently blogged on Tor.com about a workshop called Launch Pad where a dozen SF writers attended lectures by astonomers. The overall effort was aimed at spreading science education through popular fiction, which I wholeheartedly support, but I also think it will result in more accurate science in SF. For a difficult-to-please reader like me, that can only boost the entertainment value as well.

I was also struck by something from David’s account of the lecture on public misperceptions of astronomy. The wrong explanation of why the moon has phases (“it’s the shadow of the Earth falling on the moon”) is a sore spot with me because I once got that incorrect argument from a SF/F editor in remarks about a story of mine. In their defense, they said they got it from a geologist, but that makes it even worse. :)

I hope this Launch Pad workshop continues. I often give advice on biological sciences to my writing friends, and I would happily lecture at any Launch Pad-analog focused on those areas. I’m also in favor of including SF/F editors in something like this. If they’re going to evaluate or criticize objective facts in manuscripts, they should at least have some idea what they’re talking about. Another way that science education would make the world a better place!

I finally recovered, somewhat the worse for wear, my copy of Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav. I got to finish the last twenty pages, and now I get to talk about how Morris uses dialogue.

Like I said in that other post, the object is to understand how dialogue is used in fiction not driven exclusively by plot and character.

Letters from Hav is a travel narrative about a fictional city located somewhere along the south Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. My edition includes a two-page spread of kickass high fantasy style maps of the city. In terms of content, I would say the book is about 80% worldbuilding, 15% character, 5% plot. Stylistically, it is beautiful, deceptively simple. Here’s the opening:

I did what Tolstoy did, and jumped out of the train when it stopped in the evening at the old frontier. Far up at the front the engine desultorily gasped, and wan faces watched me through crusted windows as I walked all alone down the platform to the gate. There was no pony trap awaiting me of course (Tolstoy’s reminded him sadly of picnics at Yasnaya Polyana), but a smart enough green Fiat stood in the station yard, a young man in sunglasses and a blue blazer beckoned me from the wheel, and in no time we were off along the rutted track towards the ridge.

Characterwise, we get the slightly fictionalized, nearly-transparent POV of Morris herself, functioning, as in the best travel writing, largely as a vessel for the eye. Gradually one acquires the impression of a quiet escapist struggling to drown her own questions of identity and self through immersion in alien experience. She rarely speaks except to ask questions; often she will opt to narrate her own part in a conversation while delivering explicitly the dialogue of others. This emphasizes that the focus is meant to be on the city and its inhabitants, rather than on herself–without every quite managing to divert us from the fact that there is no such place as Hav, allowing us, through implication, to come eventually to an understanding of the city as a metaphor for Morris herself.

The denizens of Hav, in their mode of speech and purpose, fall into three categories: outspoken intellectuals, opinionated, idle people in positions of power, and those of the working class. From the working class people we get the flavor of the dialect. Morris is referred to almost universally as “Dirleddy”–a mashing-together of “Dear lady”. These characters appear fleetingly, often in crowds, and speak briefly and to the point–often with jocular good humor.

I wore my toweling hat from Australia to go to the Serai. “Başinda kavak yelleri esiyor,” a passer-by said without pausing, which being translated from the Turkish means “There is the springtime in your hat!”

Both the intellectuals and people in power are prone to long, not-very-plausible speeches relating anecdotes about Hav’s history, politics and culture. Hav has a complicated history of colonization and occupation by many of the world’s military powers: Ottoman, French, British, German, Russian. Each culture maintains a presence in modern Hav, and each is represented by at least one eloquent mouthpiece. In this way, Morris creates an impression of overwhelming diversity and cultural complexity contained within one city. As I’ve said, some of these diatribes are long and not very believable as anything an individual could spontaneously rattle off—even from an intellectual or politician. She does make an effort to break them up with narration, granting some impression of a more spontaneous, realistic conversation recounted from notes. But it’s certainly not the kind of dialogue that would generally be considered “good” from the perspective of ye plot-oriented genre writer. But it’s not like all these people are just convenient mouthpieces for info dumps either: every one of them has a discernible agenda to get across and a personality that shows through in the details they choose to provide. On the other hand, the style of speech doesn’t actually change much from diatribe to diatribe. Intellectuals can be distinguished from political figures in that they’re more willing to break from formality and more open about inserting their opinions into the story they’re telling. Other than that, sentence structure and delivery remain surprisingly consistent among representatives of the three categories. And yet somehow it works.

Coffee arrived, flavored with camomile, together with biscuits on little scallop-edged plates, and the Caliph asked if I would like to see something of the house.

“You know its history, I dare say? Count Kolchok built it for his mistress, the dancer Olga Naratlova, who came to Hav with Diaghilev. Everything was taken from the house when Kolchok died, but I have had her portrait painted in memoriam“—and he showed me on the wall above our sofa a large and sickly representation, doubtless taken from a photograph, of a dark turn-of-the-century beuaty, full length, leaning in a dress of satiny red against a truncated column.

“What became of her?”

“Ah, you must ask the Bolsheviks. She went home to Russia in 1918, and was never heard of again.”

Poor Olga. She sounds a lonely figure, hidden away here in such secluded luxury, and she is lonely still, for hers is the only portrait in the whole of the Caliph’s house—”and just think what the Ikhwan would say, if they knew I had her!”

“Describe the darkness inside Brass? It was too complete to fix with words. He shunted and shuttled through the dark until he stopped in one of the cells, was lowered by the mechanical hands into the glycerine coffin, and the lid fell like a feather falling on a mound of feathers. That darkness? Perhaps you could hint at it with a lack of words. Perhaps you could hint at it by saying that once the voices came, there was nothing else.”

That's the opening from “Cage of Brass” by Samuel R. Delaney. The rest of it plays out like some gothic horror melodrama bookended by a far-future prison-break story and told almost entirely in dialogue. When I think about all the stuff I love to read, it's stories like this that give me hope. They just start by grabbing you by the face and not letting go.

So there you have it, I like face-grabbing prose. In fact if once you grab my face you then drag me about and throttle me a bit, well hell, all the more power to you.

Here's a picture of me relaxing with my favorite book:

I’ve been insanely busy these last three weeks, reading subs for Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I got 50 subs the first day, and it’s tailed down to 20 or so per day since then, but that’s still over 125 subs in the magazine’s Inbox. But some of them have been really good, so I’m really enjoying it. Now, off to read some more!

So... I took that Mythological Creature Personality Test.

Your result for The Mythological Profile Test...

Unicorn

You scored 30% Esotericism, 24% Power, and 30% Malevolence!

Take The Mythological Profile Test at HelloQuizzy

Well, shit, I guess I may as well post a picture of my cat to go along with that.



If anyone needs me, I'll be lying down with a towel over my eyes and muttering, "The Horror! The Horror!"

I'm a big fan of David Milch's series Deadwood. Milch is likely one of the best and most eclectic television writers of the past thirty years, and Deadwood may be his greatest work. His command of dialog in particular is amazing.

Youtube has a highlight reel of his lecture at Sherwood Oaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XKxv1_0oLk


While much of the lecture is clipped, I found his comment on the process of writing as opposed to outlining interesting. I don't know that I agree that his analysis works for everyone, but I think there is value to it. I've certainly learned a lot from writing a story a week for three months, or trying to write a story in a single setting. In both cases, the greatest effort was spent on writing rather than pre writing or revision.

I've also had this approach fail miserably, and found that the early version of the story would have benefited from solid outlining or serious revision.

There is no one best way to write fiction. John Gardner had a good quip that there were no real rules to fiction because as soon as he tried to think of one he could think of a dozen people who broke that rule with aplomb.

I'm beginning to agree with a point Bruce Holland Rogers and others have made that each story is its own beast. Great stuff can be done in a week or a day. Great stuff can take months. Great stuff can take a year. If you keep learning different approaches, you might come to realize sooner rather than later which is the best approach to the story.

Or, to paraphrase the wrestling legend Dory Funk, as soon as you stop learning, brudder, you're screwed.

JSR

 

Going down again. Work, writing, moving -- we leave in nine days. Safe to assume me dead for the interim. :) If you need anything, email or call. I may pop up sporadically.

In the meantime, take this amazing letter, sent by Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus. Then do yourself a favor and obtain the rest.

Paris.
February 17th, 1903

My dear sir,

Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for its great and kind confidence. I can hardly do more. I cannot go into the nature of your verses; for all critical intention is too far from me. With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

After these prefatory remarks, let me only tell you further that your verses have no individual style, although they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal. I feel this most clearly in the last poem, "My Soul." There something of your own wants to come through to word and melody. And in the lovely poem "To Leopardi" there does perhaps grow up a sort of kinship with that great solitary man. Nevertheless the poems are not yet anything on their own account, nothing indpenedent, even the last and the one to Leopardi. Your kind letter, which accompanies them, does not fail to make clear to me various shortcomings which I felt in reading your verses without however being able specifically to name them.

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all -- ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity: your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty -- describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses -- would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away. -- And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called on to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

But perhaps after this descent into yourself and into your inner solitude you will have to give up becoming a poet; (it is enough, as I have said, to feel that one could live without writing; then one must not attempt it at all). But even then this inward searching which I ask of you will not have been in vain. Your life will in any case find its own ways thence, and that they may be good, rich and wide I wish you more than I can say.

What more shall I say to you? Everything seems to me to have its just emphasis; and after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your must hushed hour can perhaps answer.

It was a pleasure to me to find in your letter the name of Professor Horacek; I keep for that loveable and learned man a great veneration and a gratitude that endures through the years. Will you, please, tell him how I feel; it is very good of him still to think of me, and I know how to appreciate it.

The verses which you kindly entrusted to me I am returning at the same time. And I thank you once more for your great and sincere confidence, of which I have tried, through this honest answer given to the best of my knowledge, to make myself a little worthier than, as a stranger, I really am.


Yours faithfully and with all sympathy,
Rainer Maria Rilke