Duality

One of my favorite singers of all time is Maddy Prior. What I love most is her range; she can sing a sweet tune, but she often chooses grim and terrifying tales of death and destruction.

As a writer I often contemplate my own duality. In 'real life' I like to think of myself as a cheerful person. People describe me as happy. However, almost of my work has dark elements. Perhaps composing scary prose helps me live a joyful life. Or keeps me from whacking people over the head. :-) In truth, we are all creatures of light and of dark. The writer's lifestyle too is yin and yang; publish and rejection, creation and blockage, loneliness and exhilaration.

Listen to Maddy Prior singing a lovely old carol, and then the song that first drew me to her, The Fabled Hare. The New Year is upon us, cold and dark. But spring is just around the corner.

A Science Fiction Holiday

I’ve haven’t been blogging as much lately because I’m almost done with another book, which has proven to be harder than anything I’ve ever done. Not a bad thing, but it has kept me busy. This one is science fiction, and although I’ve written some sci-fi shorts, it’s my first novel in this genre.


Which has garnered some interesting responses. Those who don’t read fantasy tend to lump it into the children’s book slot, or perhaps link it to some childhood fairytale memory, which makes their comments slightly more positive. With science fiction, non readers can more negative. Sic- fi is weird. It’s for boys. It’s (sigh) not serious literature. I usually just smile and say if you read one my books it would mean so much to me.  :-)

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how no one says Merry Christmas anymore. I don’t make an issue of how I’m greeted holiday-wise…I Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Happy Holiday them back, because for me it’s the intent behind the wishes.

In the spirit of the season, I wish you and yours the magic of this special time however you express it, and contented reading whatever you pull up on your Kindle or off your bookshelf.

It’s all good.

Halloween House

This year we made a spaceship made from Rice Krispie treats (yum). The aliens look like spiders because spiders ARE aliens, I'm convinced. No pooping animals this year. They don't make aliens that poop. A marketing opportunity for sure.

Happy Halloween!!!

Goth Susi

I’m not much of a doll person; I don’t hate them or anything, but they’ve always seemed a little creepy, aka Twilight Zone’s I’m Talking Tina and I’m Going To Kill You. Shudder. As a female kid I did have a few and have kept a couple. My favorite was a life sized doll (I know, REALLY creepy) named Susi. Susi has sat in my childhood rocker for as long as I can remembers, clad in a pink fluffy dress.

This next bit many seem unrelated but if you’ve read my blog you know it will tie together in the end. As I’ve said so many times, a writer's lifestyle is difficult for many reasons, one of which is the understanding that income levels rise very slowly. I’m doing better than I was when I started, but I’m not making anywhere near what I did in corporate-ville.

I know that and have accepted it, but sometimes I long for those flush times. So the other day I was drooling over some unneeded item of clothing when I thought of poor Susi, wearing the same stupid dress for the last 40 years. So I did something about it.

I used an old skirt of mine that didn’t stretch enough for dancing as a dress. I gave her a pair of my lace socks, added a red headband, clipped on some earrings, and last but not least, gave her a punky armband…Goth Susi arises!

Dressing her in new garb was so much fun, and it didn’t cost me a dime. The old Kelly would have found a site with doll clothes and ordered her something. The new Kelly realizes that the fun comes from doing it myself. And that’s something the writer’s lifestyle has taught me; I don’t need a lot of money or stuff to make me happy. Would I add back in fancy vacations and lavish gifts to my family if I ever make it big? Yeah. Do I need those things to live a joyous life? Nope.

Hummm…maybe Goth Susi would like to be a fairy next…

We’re Only Human

I’ve heard that expression many times: in conversation, in insurance commercials, in literature. In some ways it has lost all meaning, becoming not just a remark on human imperfection, but an excuse that can cover just about everything. I cheated, well, I’m only human., I crashed into your car, well, I’m only human, as if that resolves responsibility. But perhaps how we come to grips with our darker nature does, in some ways, define us.

Most books, if you think about it, are all exploring what it means to be human; in literature that means conflict, and usually brushing up against the dark side. This is no more evident than in science fiction, where humans often encounter beings from another world. I’ve been thinking about what makes humans human a lot lately, since my current project is science fiction.

Some of the robots I’ve read about lately and seen on TV are so life like they make me shiver. And although they may nod, blink, and smile, no matter how much they may resemble or behave like humans we know they are not. At least right now. I’m still hoping for Azimov’s positronic brain. :-)

Conversely, sometimes “real” humans can act in inhuman ways. Recently I saw the creepiest scene ever in the newest Bourne movie. SPOILER ALERT. Scene build up: scientist works on a government project which is going to be shut down. The government kills all of the scientists except one woman; she doesn’t know she was meant to be killed. So these same government agents, masquerading as psychologists, come to visit the woman to see how she is getting along. While searching her house they discover her gun. One supposed psychologist sits next to the woman, the man holding the gun on the other side, the faux psychologist calmly says “on three.”…they were going to kill the woman and say she killed herself. (She escapes.)

What chilled me to the bone was how matter- of- fact the agent said “on three.” I wondered how many times did it take for her to become so deadened to killing…. at what point did she lose her humanity?

With aliens, of course, they never had humanity to lose. But they must have a semblance of it, in other words, if you can’t recognize yourself in an alien it becomes a monster. Which is fine if that is what you are going for, but I want my aliens to be a definite shade of gray, no pun intended.

A fabulous example of this concept is from Star Trek Next Generation. The ship comes upon a new planet and some of the ship's children are spirited away. The aliens, when confronted, can’t understand why the crew is so upset. You can have more, the alien woman says, we can’t. Even though the kidnapping of children wasn’t tolerated by the captain and wouldn’t be in any real life situation, the viewer can still feel sympathy for the aliens.

Exploring humanity is so interesting…if an alien or robot acts humanely, are they more human than a “real” person who behaves with no sense of right or wrong? That’s what I’m pondering about right now…

We All Get Better

Recently I discovered a collection of short stories by one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy writers. The reason I hadn’t read them before is because these tales were early works of said author. Very early. I devoured them with great zeal and was….rather disappointed. It wasn’t that the stories were bad…a couple were ahhhhh worthy…it was that none of them showed the sparkle I’ve come to expect. I couldn’t put my finger on it; the plots were more or less good, the writing technically great, but that special something just wasn’t there.

After I finished I got out my first story. It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t that good either. OK plot, only a few edits I wouldn’t have made today, but it didn’t wow. I can see why it never sold.

Reading the early works of one of my favorite (and famous) writers made me feel a whole lot better about my stuff. We all start out somewhat shy of what will develop into our own personal style, and even after achieving that, we can all strive to get better and better. This experience has also caused me to contemplate just what does make a story sing beyond plot, characters, setting, technical expertise...I know it when I read it, but that's not all that helpful. Hummmm...

In the meantime, I can only hope that my debut story never gets dug out from its worthy grave.

Wormholes

If you are a genre writer I’m sure you’ve had this conversation:

Them: “Oh you’re a writer? Me too! What do you write?”
Me: “Lots of things, mostly fantasy and sci-fi.”
Them: “Oh.”
Me: “What do you do?” (Already knowing the answer.)
Them: “I write literary.”

Ah yes, literary, where an apple is an apple and never a magical fruit. That’s not quite right; an apple would be a metaphor, perhaps standing in for a woman who can never be pregnant. Did you get that? A metaphor, usually presented over and over just in case you were too dense to understand the first time. Sigh.

Lately some fantasy and sci-fi writers, perhaps to get literary recognition, have dived into that (to me) pompous arena. Over the past couple of years I’ve read, and I kid you not, at least ten stories about metaphoric spacial wormholes appearing in human flesh: brains, hearts, legs, arms, one day they woke up and there it was. Of course, they weren't just wormholes, they were really talking about alienation.

I’ve railed before about Ant Rand. Love her stories, but I don’t like Objectivisim jammed down my throat. My husband asked me the other day if I thought literary works and Ayn Rand books were the same.

Not to me. Was Ayn Rand an intellectual snob? Yeah. She believed intelligent people should get better treatment and more stuff. But she made no pretense of this and never tried to hide her beliefs. You know from the first few pages what she is going to pound you with.

Literary works, in my opinion, are a totally different animal. They try to hide the “real” meaning within heavy, confusing prose, but then present their goal again and again just in case you don’t “get” it. Every time I read one of those stories it feels like the author is saying I’m smart, can you tell I’m smart, and if you can’t figure out the puzzle you’re stupid.

I used to be able to avoid literary fiction, but now it’s in every fantasy and sci-fi collection I pick up. But then I read something by one of genre’s (and proud of it) best writers and laughed my ass off.

Luckily, there was no wormhole in it.

The Return of the Zombie-Genre by Ursula K. Le Guin

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.