For the stories in our second chapbook, each of us at The Homeless Moon chose as inspiration a fictional setting. Here’s the first scene of mine, “The Cannon and the Prophetess”:

One Kestrel pronounced the last phrase of the sonnet he had been reciting for the Duchess of Ennasin, and the crowd of loungers who made up her court erupted in applause. Acknowledging their flattery, he lowered himself to one knee.

“No, no,” said the Duchess, twiddling her manicured fingers to indicate he should arise. “You mustn’t prostrate yourself. Your primitive origins are of no consequence—you outrank me, Your Majesty!”

The assembled nobles tittered at their hostess’s kind condescension.

With an abruptness inappropriate to tact—but which he had come to know would be expected, secretly desired, of an educated savage such as himself—One Kestrel surged to his feet like a predator ready to strike. The bones and beads sewn in his robes of state rattled satisfactorily, the brilliant feathers of his royal headdress rippled, and he allowed his eyes to flash just so.

The nobles gasped, recoiling; this time, the nervous laughter of the Duchess betrayed an underlying terror. “My dear Captain Saturno, you are to be commended on such a magnificent find! If only you would allow me to purchase him from you.”

Captain Saturno took a knee himself. Resplendent in his shining steel cuirass and waxed moustache, he made a flourish, and taking her offered hand, placed his lips to her ring. “Your praise is acknowledged most humbly—but I am afraid King Kestrel cannot linger, for he is called away on an engagement at another court—and I’m sure Your Eminence could not wish to sully His Majesty’s reputation by making him late.”

“At the very least,” the flush Duchess begged, “allow me to offer His Majesty a parting gift—a boon. Name anything! It shall be wrapped and placed in his flagship’s stateroom, where my court’s generous donations to his cause already await.”

One Kestrel drew back overeducated lips from filed teeth, and throwing a ravenous glance at his master and keeper, uttered that too-familiar entreaty with which he’d caused himself to be expunged from so many a court. “There is one small secret I dearly desire. I can only
further impose on Your Eminence’s hospitality in this: if you would, provide me with your military’s recipe for gunpowder.”

Amidst the ensuing uproar, Saturno clutched One Kestrel by the elbow and propelled him from the court. His face was bloodless, blank—but whether with rage or something else, One Kestrel didn’t know.

Once they were safe aboard the caravel Constança, Captain Saturno barked orders to throw off the moorings and get underway. He escorted His Primitive Majesty One Kestrel, King of America, to his sumptuous, gift-strewn lodgings in the brig, shoved him inside, and slammed the door.

And here are the relevant lines from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, from which I took my inspiration:

Pantagruel then asked what sort of people dwelt in that damned island. They are, answered Xenomanes, all hypocrites, holy mountebanks, tumblers of beads, mumblers of ave-marias, spiritual comedians, sham saints, hermits, all of them poor rogues who, like the hermit of Lormont between Blaye and Bordeaux, live wholly on alms given them by passengers. Catch me there if you can, cried Panurge; may the devil’s head-cook conjure my bumgut into a pair of bellows if ever you find me among them! Hermits, sham saints, living forms of mortification, holy mountebanks, avaunt! in the name of your father Satan, get out of my sight! When the devil’s a hog, you shall eat bacon.

I’m not going to make any attempt to synthesize one with the other; chances are it would turn out a disaster, and anyway I’d much rather just encourage you to read the story and form your own opinions.

So instead, I’ll close with Gustave Doré’s utterly demented evil jester illustration to Rabelais’ prologue, which starts like this:

Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings)….

Particularly when they are twice as big! Last year’s Homeless Moon chapbook weighed in at 44 pages. This year’s: 80. The poor woman working the register at the printers nearly killed herself trying to get them up onto the counter.

Two weeks remain until Readercon and the “official” release. In the meantime, we will be sending out a few advance copies for review and/or to wedge under your chair legs so they don’t wobble. I am setting ten copies aside for ye F&SFesque blog promo. If you want one, and are willing to write a bit of a blog entry about what you thought of it, ask. If you are not the eleventh person to do so, you’ll get one.

Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait the two weeks and paypal me the two bucks for shipping. Less than that, even, if you’d prefer the electronic version. Not sure exactly when that’ll come off. But soon–in the next couple days. When it does, you’ll see it here.

Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.

Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.

Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.

It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.

This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.

“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.

But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.

I just stumbled onto possibly the best object lesson in showing, not telling in fiction I’ll ever get.

In 2005, I wrote a story called “Hope and Erosion”, about a kingdom living in a sandcastle threatened by the rising tide. It was the second story I’d ever sold, to a Christian fantasy e-zine called Dragons, Knights and Angels. I was very proud of it at the time. At the time, it was the best story I’d ever written.

In 2004, all unbenknownst to me at the time, Jeffrey Ford wrote a story called “The Annals of Eelin Ok”, which was published in Datlow and Windling’s The Faery Reel, and won the Fountain Award for that year (and on whose website it can still be read for free). It’s based on the exact same premise: a tiny, fantastical being living out his life in a sandcastle made by human hands. His story is way better. I just listened to it on a Podcastle show from a couple weeks back, read by Rajan Khanna, who may be my new favorite podcast reader—his voice is understated, quiet and calm and eminently listenable, but somehow capable of hitting just the right emotional notes with the strength of a clapper striking a cathedral bell. It almost made me cry.

Here’s the lesson: everything about a story is more powerful when you’re experiencing it right there with the character. “Hope and Erosion” is told like a parable. Hermit, the hero, is a hero in the classic fairytale sense, the way Sir Gawain is a hero, or the Red Cross Knight. Which is fine, but there’s no understanding that kind of hero as a person. He’s away up there on the pedestal of myth.

Eelin Ok is a fairy, but he’s a person. His whole life is there on the page, his heart is open, and you’re in it.

I suppose this lesson may work better on me than on you, gentle reader, since you may not have had the luck to have written the exact same story as Jeffrey Ford. But if you feel so inclined, you might could get a similar effect if you read the two stories side by side.

Read the Jeff Ford story, anyway, if you haven’t. It’s awesome.

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!”

Well, I meant to write something today about Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav, which is a phenomenal book with a strange and challenging structure that holds all kinds of lessons for somebody like me who would absolutely love to sell fiction on the merits of weirdness and style alone. But, big turkey that I am, I took the book with me to Boston this weekend and forgot it somewhere, so cannot accurately quote examples.

Instead I thought I would just try laying out the bones of the argument I would have tried to make.

This year’s Never-Ending Odyssey workshop master class focused on dialogue. I consider myself not so hot at dialogue, so was looking forward to an opportunity to learn why and what I could do about it. But as lecture after lecture rolled off me like water off a duck, I began to realize that part of what makes me do poorly at dialogue is that I don’t enjoy writing it, and maybe what stops me from enjoying it is the fact that good dialogue, at least in the sense that it was being taught here (by genre writers, for genre writers) doesn’t serve the same purposes in the kind of stories I like to write (those with atypical structure and nontraditional plot).

I came home from TNEO with the idea of looking through great examples of the kinds of fiction I do like to write and figuring out where and how their use of dialogue diverges from, say, the snappy repartee of a Raymond Chandler detective, and where (if at all) it follows the same rules. Last Letters from Hav would have made a great case study (and still will if I can figure out where my copy went), because not only does it lack a traditional plot structure, but it’s designed not to read like a work of fiction at all. It’s fiction masquerading as nonfiction. So its characters aren’t required to further any plot, but rather are expected to act like real people: random, arbitrary, at times even dull, driven by their own purposes rather than the author’s, yet in reality just as constructed and unreal. Especially since one of Morris’ strengths is the style of her prose, so in order for us to believe Letters from Hav as a continuation of her actual nonfiction writings, we have to experience the “real” residents of Hav as filtered through the author’s erudition and wry commentary.

Which, of course, I can’t really do, because I haven’t got the book.

But the idea is to do a similar thing with a variety of atypical fiction. Borges and Lucius Shepard immediately come to mind, but I’ll throw in any other idea/theme-driven (rather than plot-driven) prose stylists I can come up with. Poe? Ray Bradbury? Vonnegut? Ken Kesey? Umberto Eco possibly. Maybe even Dostoevsky.

Obviously this is going to be a long-term undertaking.

Yesterday afternoon I drove home to Western Mass from TNEO on NH highway 101. It was a rare, beautiful day stuck smack in the middle a week of downpours and violent thunderstorms. The past week, wherein my only opportunity to go outside was the walk from dorm to classroom and back (failed to do enough crits ahead of time, fool of a Took), had left me thoroughly stir-crazy, but also exhausted (didn’t get a lot of sleep at TNEO either). The brown “Pack Monadnock” road sign by the trailhead in Peterborough seemed to be laughing at me. But I knew there was no way I’d make it up Monadnock and back before dark in my current state. I drove on for a couple miles, the desires for a good long walk and a good long nap vying in my head. The walk won, and I veered abruptly off the highway at a sign for the Edward MacDowell Reservoir.

This was a core of engineers project in the 50s, designed for floodwater control after the Peterborough Flood of 1938. The fortuitous chronological gap in the satellite data above shows what the lake looks like when full in winter vs. low in summer. I circumambulated it in about two hours, counter-clockwise from the dam at bottom. The trails don’t go all the way around; I had to veer off the dirt road near that hooked inlet on the northeast side and find my own way through the marshes. Amphibious bushwhacking! Not for the faint-hearted.

I found an early-industrial ruin on the east bank of Nubanusit Brook, overgrown with oak and black birch, about 100 feet from Richardson Road. It looks like they diverted the brook for power or cooling or both–there’s a hundred feet of iron piping, four feet in diameter, which passes through two different brick-and-stone building foundations before emptying into a hundred-foot fieldstone spillway, 12 feet deep, 12 feet in diameter. You can sort of see it in the southwest edge of the 1900 USGS Topographical Survey map of Petersborough, just below the 55′ mark. There’s a little dam, and the brook splits in two for a short distance. And I found a big iron flue a few hundred yards downstream, so I figure it must have been a forge. Fun. Moss all over everything. Sorry there are no pictures–but it’s just as well. My camera would have gotten destroyed if I brought it.

I climbed an embankment onto the Spring Rd bridge, crossed the brook, then cut back into the woods through the grounds of a nuevo-colonial manse, heading south again towards the lake. I waded through some enormous ferns, stepping-stoned my way over some swampy ground, then followed an abandoned dirt road for a quarter mile before it disappeared again beneath hazed-golden marshland, when I reached the edge of which a crowd of blackbirds took off from the reeds.

The woods were dense with undergrowth along the shore, but I could see where they thinned out beneath tall pines on the far shore. The mad notion came upon me of wading across a narrow section of marsh rather than going all the way around.

My folly first became apparent when I stepped off the overgrown bank into that windy little stream you can see on the satellite photo. I sank in up to my waist, and the muck at the bottom nearly swallowed my walking stick. So I slogged through chest-high reeds for a while, looking for a shallower route. It was only after about five minutes of this fight that I paused for a rest and became aware of a singular, stinging-hot pain overwhelming my knees, shins, wrists and forearms. I looked down at myself to discover that most of my exposed skin was covered with crisscrossed scratches turning an angry pink, as though I’d received significantly more than forty lashes with a serrated noodle.

I jumped into the water again and stood there waiting for the pain to recede.
I had not, until this point, been aware that sawgrass could grow anywhere but in salt marsh habitats. Lesson learned.

The current dragged against the backs of my knees. An impossibly red flower grew beside me. I gazed at it, thoughts absent.

Rather than expose my shins to any more punishment, I opted to wade upstream for awhile, carrying my sneakers tied around my neck with my map and wallet stuffed inside, until I found a place to climb ashore. There, under the pines, I found the trail.

I hiked barefoot over roots and spongy pine needles for another mile or so. Along the way I encountered a wealth of bizarre and delicious-looking mushrooms: indian pipes, chanterelles, russet boletes, white russula, yellow coral. Eventually I found my way across the causeway and back to the car. I stopped at the public beach, had a quick splash about in the deep, mineral-red waters at the foot of the dam, then headed home.

It’s pouring and thundering again now outside my window, and the cherry trees are lashing back and forth like seaweed at rip tide.

Hey!

I just noticed that my story “The Urchin’s Dark Kite” is now live in the May 2008 issue of the online fiction magazine A Fly in Amber. Woo.

Please go read it, and enjoy.

‘Master,’ said the lion, looking at the boy with glowing eyes. ‘You who bear the emblem of the Childlike Empress, can you tell me this: Why must I always die at nightfall?’

‘So that Perilin, the Night Forest, can grow in the Desert of Colors,’ said Bastian.

‘Perilin?’ said the lion. ‘What’s that?’

Then Bastian told him about the miraculous jungle that consisted of living light. While Grograman listened in fascinated amazement, Bastian described the diversity and beauty of the glimmering phosphorescent plants, their silent, irresistible growth, their dream-like beauty and incredible size. His enthusiasm grew as he spoke and Grograman’s eyes glowed more and more brightly. ‘All that,’ Bastian concluded, ‘can happen only when you are turned to stone. But Perilin would swallow up everything else and stifle itself if it didn’t have to die and crumble into dust when you wake up. You and Perilin need each other.’

—Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

I visited Montreal for the first time this past weekend, on the event of my sister’s graduation. Had an enjoyable time drinking fine French Canadian beers, pretending to speak French and struggling valiantly to hold my own with idealistic, new-minted Canadian intellectuals. Also spent a fair amount of time wandering the streets presenting my country-boy fish-out-of-water colors to the absurdly thin and fashionable Quebecois in my unhip hick flannels and wool and silly aussie hat. It rained a lot. I stood under a lot of awnings in zen contemplation of clouds, hid out in bookstores (found a nice used copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) and the Musee des Beaux Arts (viewed ghostly panoramic tintypes of the Bay of Havana, glorious hyperbolic propaganda posters of the Cuban revolution), stepped in a lot of puddles and got a lot of drenched. Like I said, an enjoyable time. But I am a simple man, and I have to admit, the best part of the weekend was last night at 11 after the long car ride home, standing in my garden with the stars and the seedlings and the dregs of a half-pint of homebrewed kolsch.

It’s the contrasts that make meaning.