It’s December. You can expect some year end posts. Here’s my list of 10 favorite reads from this past year.

1. The King Must Die by Mary Renault: A historical novel set in ancient Greece retelling the early life of Theseus up to his killing the minotaur and returning to Athens. It walks a fine line between the real and the fantastic because while nothing “magical” happens, the characters believe their world is magical.

2. God’s War by Kameron Hurley: Probably the most recently published book on this list. Some people have a problem with science fantasy. I don’t. This read like a hybrid of China Mieville and Anne McCaffrey. If that doesn’t sound great then I don’t even want to hear it. In a way it recalled the 1970s when genre lines weren’t so fiercely defined. I’ll probably read the sequel Infidel when I’m home next month.

3. The Last Days by Brian Evenson: An absurdly violent detective novel about a cop infiltrating a cult of extreme self-mutilators. This is one of those books that grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. Not for the squeamish.

4. Warlock by Oakley Hall: A western with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon. Hall is one of those “writer’s writers”, I think. He never was popular but he worked in popular genres. (I’ll also track down his Ambrose Bierce detective novels when Stateside.) This reminded me some of Deadwood, but it probed more into the American habit of making heroes of violent men.

5. I Was Looking For A Street by Charles Willeford: Willeford’s memoir of being a freight riding runaway during the Depression. Parts are heart-breaking, but other parts show a compassion for humanity in all our absurdity.

6. Freaks’ Amour by Tom De Haven: Another disturbing and violent book. It read like Sid & Nancy meets Tod Brownings’ Freaks or Philip K. Dick meets punk rock. Take your pick. Mutant entertainers try to survive in a world that despises them. The book’s a weird relic of the 1970s and the Cold War, but oddly relevant. The most likable character is a drug-dealer who sells mutant goldfish eggs.

7. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins: I blathered about this one before.

8. Flanders by Patricia Anthony: A magic realist novel set in the trenches of World War One? Maybe. The Last Temptation of Christ meets Goodbye To All That? An American sniper in World War One slowly begins to crack due to combat stress and the homicidal tendencies of his fellow soldiers. While in No Man’s Land he begins to see visions of the dead and those about to die.

9. The Double Shadow by Frederick Turner: A lost classic of the New Wave? It’s a shame Turner didn’t write more SF. He might have won a name for himself as a peer of M. John Harrison, Samuel R. Delaney, and Gene Wolfe. (Though he did go on to a career as a poet and teacher.) On a terraformed Mars the scions of two royal families engage in a status war fought with aesthetics and style. Even if the book was meant as a critique of an emergent culture of narcissism, it still works as an SF novel. Definitely worth tracking down.

10. Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison: The Spacewoman in question is a communications officer / ambassador / diplomat in a future utopian society.  There’s little in the way of plot and “thrills”, but a lot of wonder as she recounts her experiences from a life time of alien contact.

I realize it’s been months since I last posted. My computer HD died sometime in September, causing me to lose a month’s worth of cool mushroom photos, Hen of the Woods, Giant Puffball etc, which I would otherwise totally have put up here otherwise. But it’s cool, no need to pretend like you noticed—who reads blogs anymore?

I’ve been tweeting some, that’s got to count for something. Maybe I should port my tweets over here so the skull doesn’t look so dusty.

Anyhow, I have not been idle in the interim. Weightless Books is tearing right along; this month we’re running an Apex subscription drive, 25% off, plus some freebies for participants and a game of Nook Tablet roulette. The Homeless Moon put out a special edition best-of chapbook for World Fantasy, which you didn’t hear a thing about unless you were there; it was all very hush-hush. We used the space octopus cover castoff from chapbook 4, I thought it came out quite nice.

And, the real reason for this update, Small Beer intern and audiophile Julie Day has started a podcast series, the current episode of which features me, yes me, talking a bit about Weightless, a bit about beer, then reading aloud “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek, one of the stories I translated for the forthcoming SBP anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. Which is a lovely story, a brief, crisp confection with a darkly bitter center, into the translation of which I put much effort, just so that you, non-Spanish-speaker, could enjoy it. So please go listen. Then in a week or so, I believe there may be another podcast episode wherein Gavin, Julie and I sit around on a late Thursday morning drinking beer and rambling about beer on tape. Fun!

And that’s about it from me. I have another of my own stories upcoming on Pseudopod—I’ll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, be well. Don’t lick any toads you haven’t first positively identified.

Ah, November. Football, a crisp chill in the air, piles of fallen leaves.  And National Novel-Writing Month–”NaNoWriMo”–that amateur-novelist love-fest that always makes me shake my head.

I’m fine with any motivation structure that gets butt in chair to write. And plenty of ‘learned’ or ‘informed’ amateur writers use “NaNoWriMo” to do writing they would be doing anyway. But “NanoWriMo” seems to extend beyond that into a deluge of deluded hobbyists.

There’s nothing wrong with a hobby. I build electric guitars. They don’t come out perfect, and I don’t mind. But I would never claim that my hobby-level work deserves to be paid for or could compete with the work of pro luthiers.

Something about fiction writing seems to attract amateurs. Unlike most hobbies, where you can’t even try them out without having some specialized learning or equipment, many amateur novelists somehow think that anyone who’s had an English class can write a novel. That there’s no need to study or learn. And that their novels, written without any training or insight, will deserve to be bought or to share the shelves with pro authors.

Laura Miller on salon.com last year offers the take of a reader. She’s not a fiction writer and so doesn’t understand the value of butt-in-chair. But she does see through the hoopla of “NaNoWriMo” to the patheticness of deluded hobbyists and the hypocrisy that they’re not reading.

I agree, especially about the reading. To that I’ll add the hypocrisy that they’re not studying writing or trying to learn something about it.

I echo her wish for hobbyist novelists to read instead of trying to write. For those who insist on trying to write, read a good how-to-write book first. Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends is one of the best.

So if not a National Novel-Reading Month, then maybe at least every October could be ‘national read a writing book’ month.

I had a great time at Capclave, a couple weekends ago.  (Except for the con-crud that delayed my postlude…)

Highlights included moderating a small press panel with Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, and Mike Walsh of Old Earth Books. Meeting BCS authors Adam Corbin Fusco and David Milstein; hanging out with Jen and Melissa. Chatting again with BCS author and novelist Genevieve Valentine. Seeing co-GOH Cat Valente again (I met her last year at World Fantasy, when the BCS party woke her up at 2 AM :) ).

Speaking with James Morrow, who lectured my year at Odyssey. His novel about Darwin’s lady assistant flying a steampunk airship over the Amazon, which he read from at ReaderCon 2010, is in rewrites and hasn’t yet found a publisher. Which is sad because the excerpt was great. He really liked the cool BCS flyers I had.

Chatting in the bar for hours with co-GOH Carrie Vaughn, a fellow Odyssey grad and bestseller who I had never met in person.  She is mostly known for her urban fantasy, but she’s read tons of epic fantasy and published several dozen short stories, and knows a ton about the field.

The Terry Pratchett surprise visit. I’m not familiar with his work, but I know he’s a very clever and engaging guy. The excerpts that his assistant read from his new book were quite droll (although the assistant read for way too long and interjected his own opinions too often).

They only made enough time to take one question, and it wasn’t about his books but about a BBC documentary he had helped make on assisted suicide for terminally ill. He talked for twenty minutes about that, made even more profound because of his own health situation, and it was utterly fascinating. (I will be blogging about that specifically later.)  Someone in the crowd put it on youtube, and Capclave posted an mp3 of the audio.

The GOH interview. I didn’t know how they would do it with two GOHs. It turned out that Carrie and Cat know each other, so they interviewed each other and took pre-written audience questions.  It was the best GOH interview I’ve ever seen. They were engaging, witty, and profound. Topics included the sociological underpinnings of the mythoses of vampires and werewolves; writing for shared-world anthologies; writing goals and achieving them; where they live and the sense of place in their writing.

I was only at the con for a day and a half, but I had a great time seeing these cool people and having great conversations. That seems to be what I mostly get out of cons–talking to clever people about interesting things.  I’ll definitely be back next year.

Today marks the beginning of a new novel, the last in a short series I’m writing at crackerjack speed for my own enjoyment and, I hope, yours! So here’s a post on some pre-writing work

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I spent this past week and weekend plotting a new novel. The method I use was first introduced to me by David Morrell in his excellent book THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST. Before I read this book, I hated outlining. It sucked the life out of the story. But the results of “writing by the headlights” approach often meant tons of drafts until I found the core theme or idea or emotional heart of the story I wanted to tell.

Morrell’s method, though, isn’t bullet points or index cards or other things I’d tried to no avail. Instead, you have a dialog with yourself about the story in prose, and you ask questions and challenge assumptions about the tale you want to tell. It feels silly as hell at first. But I’m a pretty chatty patty, so it works well for me. The questions help minimize the wasted drafts as you burrow deeper or avoid cliches or find that the story you wanted to tell isn’t the one you’re thinking of right now, but another one buried deep in a adjacent idea.

It works well for me most times. It reduces drafts, keeps my enthusiasm high, and allows me to use a tool of storytelling, dialog, to outline. All aces.

I have friends who can’t stand this method, so I wondered why it worked for me. A couple of things jumped up.

1. It’s like improv, a form of comedy storytelling that forces you to mine the moment and then dig deeper. You keep going until you get to the best material (and even the lesser stuff can become stories or poems or whatever later). I’ve absorbed so much comedy and have rehashed and riffed on it for years with friends that thinking on the fly to get a reaction, to tell a story, is almost second nature (even when the joke bombs). The immediacy of it, too, appeals to me, and that also comes through in story dialogs of plot, where making a point form list in short hand, or, heaven help me, making a graph of the rising action like Damon Knight suggested would be about as appealing as a knee to the jaw.

2. Story Dialogs reminded me of something I did as a kid and young man a lot, which was walk with my friend James and just talk about anything and everything about pop culture, usually in the form of lists (top ten scariest horror films, top ten strongest wrestlers, top ten beauty queen TV actresses). All arguments had to be defended. All points were subject to challenge. And you got more points if you dug up cooler info about lost classics, obscure flicks and books, bizarre historical figures, etc. This perpetual time killing in the suburbs as we walked everywhere and nowhere, I think, conditioned my mind to braimstorm in dialog form.

And, thankfully, after a rusty start, I’m back in the game and getting the pages done. Onward!

JSR

This weekend I will be at Capclave, the local D.C.-area SF/F con.

The co-Guest of Honor this year is bestselling writer Carrie Vaughn, a fellow Odyssey grad.  I’ve heard her writing lectures in podcasts (they’re very insightful), but I’ve never met her in person.

The con again this year has lots of cool literary SF/F programming.  I will be on several panels, again this year:

Friday 8:00 pm:
Short Fiction: Where is the new good short fiction found now?

Saturday 11:00 am:
Small Press Publishing: Running a publishing company, publishing a magazine or semi-prozine.

Saturday 1:00 pm:
When Characters Threaten to Take Over

Alas, no reading this year, for some reason–I did ask for one.

I will probably swing by the hotel bar Friday after my panel, at 9PM.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be around Saturday, and I probably won’t be there Sunday.  If you see me, feel free to grab a snazzy BCS flyer and say hello.

So, at around 230 am last night, I finished the draft sequel to DEATH MATCH.

Hurrah!

I’ve got revisions to do, but the beast is largely the way I like it and so the next Spar Battersea adventure will be coming to your town in a couple of months. It was fun to write, and you can rest assured that Spar become a tar baby for trouble in the next subculture I wanted to write about. Which one? Take a guess, True Believers. Take a guess. ‘Nuff said.

It also marks the third novel I wrote this year. And I’m planning to finish another one before Christmas. Now, the Spar books are shorter, but even still, it’s a lot of wordage and 2011 will end as my most productive novel writing year yet. I’m no Walter Gibson or Michael Moorcock, but I’ve upped my game by a factor of two. I’m working harder and I hope smarter and hope things start turning my way real soon.

I’ve got some other big plans and good news, too, but they still remain top secret. I’ve also been hit with some disappointments that are also confidential. But it’s funny that in the wake of the good and the bad, my solution to most of this stuff, after I’ve celebrated my victories or stewed like a rotten egg after defeat, is the same:

Write the next thing you want to write. Read the next thing you want to read. Try and keep your momentum fueled with more joy than anger and get on with it. Which reminded me of this quote

“Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those Sons-of-Bitches. They’ll NEVER live the way you live. Go do it.” Ray Brabury

Oh. Hell. Yeah.

JSR

Buddhist monks invented tea thousands of years ago in what is today southwestern China. These monks lived atop the mountains and found the beverage improved their ability to meditate over long periods of time. Also it complimented their other super-powers. Soon the habit spread throughout the lowlands, and in the 7^th century Lu Yu wrote his now famous panergeric to the beverage, A Fistful of a Cup of Tea. People became ecstatic — so much so that when Lu Yu died he became God.

Centuries passed.

The first westerner to have drunk tea was the north African traveler Ibn Battuta who traveled to India in search of a job. He was impressed by how the beverage invigorated the spirit and increased energy.

After watching one too many of his coworkers get torn apart by angry elephants, Battuta decided to return home. When he got there no one believed a beverage like tea could possibly exist.

It wasn’t until George Orwell wrote his seminal essay, Tea, after singlehandedly defeating the forces of Spanish Fascism, that the English stopped drinking boiled mud and adopted the habit.

The rest is more or less history.

I have a story in “Space Squid Gone Wild: The Best Comics, Stories, and Features From Five Years of America’s Favorite Unknown Zine.”

My story is all about “Your Mother”.

E-Book is only 2.99USD!!!

Actuate a copy for yourself today!

A recent article on Salon.com laments that more and more aspiring writers don’t read much.

Reading has always been viewed as an essential activity for writers, whether for priming the creative pump, checking out other authors’ technique, researching the field, or reading for fun.  (Which of course is how all writers started out.)

Writers who don’t read can end up with huge knowledge gaps in any of the above, which often show through in their work.  My favorite is the infamous case of an epic fantasy novelist who had only ever read one fantasy novel before writing his own (and a third-generation one at that: Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth).  It was a classic case of the reader thinking (as the Salon article puts it) “If this guy can do it, so can I!”  The (epically awful) results speak for themselves.

Alas, I’m as guilty of not-reading as anyone.  I do read magazine subs for hours every day, which makes me think a bit about writing and technique, but that’s not the same.  I blame it on not having much time, which is always a lame excuse, and on being very hard to impress.

But over the summer I started my reread of George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire books, in preparation for the new one.  I’m enjoying them all over again, and I’m getting a lot of new insight.  I’ve always admired his stuff, and I have kept current on his short fiction.  Maybe it’s that I’m reading slower this time or I know more about writing than when they first came out, or I’m thinking more about novels lately, but I’m seeing lots of very cool story things and writing things.

So maybe this will get me back on the reading wagon.  At least, until I finish all 5,500 pages of GRRM. :)