Well *somebody* thinks I'm a winner, at least

My novel won first place in the preliminary round of the "Do it! Write!" literary contest. Woohoo! My wife won this contest last year, and now she has an agent. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Other irons in the fire:

• A short story being looked at by a pro market. I received an e-mail from the slush editor telling me it had been passed up the food chain to the editor-in-chief. ::fingers crossed::
• Another short story at a different pro market. I haven't heard from them, but they've had the story for 37 days longer than the average time for rejection listed by duotrope, and for ten days less than the average time listed for acceptance. Hey, I know it's not much, but you have to take your positive portents where you can find them!
• A contest entry for a significant national contest. The talent pool I'm up against is huge and daunting, but I feel really good about my entry--my query letter and the first two pages for Vanishing Act. I already thought I had a good query letter, and I went back and polished the heck out of it. I think I managed to improve it quite a bit.

So, you know, no action on the blog doesn't translate to no action on the writing front. ;)

Revisions on my novel just got put back on the front burner--I'd been focusing on short fiction for a bit, hoping to get a sale or two. But there's a possibility I'll get a full request or two out of this, and I don't want to squander it.

On entertainment versus "literariness" in SF

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's essay "Barbarian Confessions," from the book Star Wars On Trial, edited by David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, is temporarily available for free reading here. According to Rusch, this essay proved to be controversial. I certainly found it to be food for thought.

For the most part, the history she describes sounds unfamiliar to me, as if she's inhabited a completely different fandom than I have. In her version of reality, the reason for SF prose's waning popularity is that it has grown increasingly literary, and readers who are looking for fun escapist books are being turned away, and only finding SFnal satisfaction in media tie-ins. Literary fiction, on the other hand, has rediscovered narrative and storytelling--including classic SF tropes--and restyled itself mainstream fiction. Non-SF readers dismiss SF because it's no fun, with not enough gee-wiz and laser battles and exploring strange new worlds.

While I see reflections of reality in that version of things, it's a distorted version of my perceptions--like one of us is living in an alternate universe.

I definitely agree that literary fiction is appropriating SF tropes and being so churlish as to refuse to acknowledge it (except for Michael Chabon, of course). There are a lot of books on the literature shelf that are obviously, as far as I'm concerned, science fiction and/or fantasy, and it's just pandering to literary readers' prejudice that keeps them from being shelved there. Most notably Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife. Both authors, IIRC, have poo-pooed the notion that their works are science fiction. Bullshit; they are. (Or fantasy, if you want to argue the point in Niffenegger's case, but speculative fiction either way.)

On the other hand, the thought that what's driving mainstream readers away from SF is that it's not mythic enough, not escapist enough, not heroic enough, is utterly alien to me. What I invariably find, when I talk about my enjoyment of science fiction to people who are not fans, is that they think it's all Star Wars. In fact, I have an entirely undeserved reputation among my students as a Star Wars freak--undeserved because I never bring up Star Wars or Star Trek, but since I make no secret of the fact that I'm a big science fiction geek, everybody jumps to the most obvious conclusion. (In point of fact, while I do like Star Wars and most science fiction movies very much, I'm much more fanatical about written word science fiction.) People tell me they don't like science fiction because it's silly, escapist, unrooted in things that matter to them. It's not lack of escapism that I see driving non-genre readers away--it's the perception that escapism is all that's there.

But hell, I don't have anything like Rusch's experience or credentials. Who am I to argue with a Hugo-winning author and former editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction? (And a damn fine writer, I might add. When I was lucky enough to attend WorldCon, I voted for her to win one Hugo she did not get, but in my opinion deserved--for "Recovering Apollo 8.") If she says that's what she sees, I certainly ought to take it seriously and consider the fact that the folks I'm interacting with aren't representative of the larger readership. When she talks about the "Science Fiction Village," hell, she knows those people.

And more importantly, while I don't necessarily agree with her summary of readers' attitudes toward science fiction, I emphatically agree with her larger point:

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

I've played the literary game. Majored in literature, went to grad school, taught Shakespeare and Magical Realism. Hell, I'd say I played the game well. I'm all for authors aspiring to literary merit and profound meaning.

But entertainment ought to come first. If you've written a profound work that does not entertain, then in my opinion you've failed as an artist. Conversely (contrapositively?) if you have written an entertaining work that is not profound, you've succeeded. Maybe not as much as if you'd been able to do both, but more than an author who does not entertain.

As to the specific point of the essay, I'm not antagonistic to media tie-ins, but I largely don't read them. If they truly do (or potentially could) bring more readers to SF and revive the genre, then good for them. As an aspiring writer, I'm much more annoyed by celebrity novels. Those do crowd good books off the shelves, much more than tie-ins, which, after all, are written by real authors, and often real authors struggling to establish themselves and be able to do this for a living.

(A minor bone of contention: she very nearly lost me as a reader by assuming I didn't know what the word "catholic" meant. I would recommend to anyone to avoid suggesting in an essay that your readers look up a word in the dictionary. Seriously!)

Puppy

That is all.

Not Dead Yet

I bet one can tell a thing or two about how school's going by the spikes and troughs in my posting here.

I've gotten optimistic signs on a couple of my stories that are out looking for homes. Maybe I'll have good news in the next month or two. Or maybe not. The writing's not going so well right now, mostly because I'm working on schoolwork fourteen hours a day. Spring break's about twenty-nine teaching days away, after which I'll be shifting into review mode with my AP classes, so hopefully things will get better soon. And hopefully all my hard work will pay off. Some days, I swear I wish I knew how to phone it in.

I've been reluctant to send out "Spacelift." I just can't decide if it's ready or not. I did some pretty extensive revising since I posted the first draft under password protect here. I just don't have access to a lot of critters. There are places like OWW, of course, but I'm not in a position to reciprocate right now. So it goes.

I haven't been reading anybody else's blogs either. I think I'm about ready to dip my toes back into that sea. I hope people still remember me. :)

In other news, we lost Fraemie, our oldest dog, a couple of weeks ago. She was sixteen, and we knew the end was near, but it was still hard. I carried her downstairs that last morning, playing with her, and she seemed pretty chipper. We had been struggling on and off to get her to eat, but we seemed to have turned the corner with that. I fed her her breakfast, which she dug into eagerly, and went off to do some last schoolwork before getting dressed. A couple minutes later, I heard a weird noise coming from the kitchen. A couple days before she had accidentally pushed her bowl under the lip of a cabinet, and needed help getting it back out where she could eat. I initially thought the same thing had happened, and that the noise was her kicking on her bowl, trying to dislodge it. I walked into the kitchen to find her on her side in a puddle of pee, running in place. She'd had seizures before, but none like this one. We took her to the vet, where she went on to have another half-dozen or so seizures, showing signs of pain, and so we ended her suffering.

In a way that was my first experience of death. I've had (a very few) relatives pass away, but I've never been there as it happened. It was . . . well it was something that will stay with me.

This was much more my wife's loss than mine. She had the dog for a year before she met me. I was deeply saddened; she was devastated.

I was a bit disappointed that none of my coworkers asked about my emergency absence. I'd typed in my emergency e-mail that my dog was having seizures; nobody asked if it was okay or what had happened. Kids in a couple of my classes asked and expressed sympathy when they found out, but as far as the adults at my school were concerned, my unplanned absence was nothing but an inconvenience for them to deal with.

So it goes.

In happier news, today we are driving to Melbourne, hopefully to get a new puppy who was co-bred by the same breeder who bred Fraemie. She looks cute as hell in her photo. I'm really bad about taking pictures, but hopefully I'll get off my lazy ass and take a couple and maybe post one here.

October Sky and Good Writing, Part I

I'd never heard of the movie October Sky before last year, but now I've used it in my classes two years in a row. It's a wonderful story about fathers and sons, about striving to be yourself and not who others want to define you as, about overcoming long odds, and math. :)

It hasn't yet ceased to amaze me how I'll start the movie, turn the lights down, and without me having to do much of anything, conversation and off task behavior will just die of its own accord, as the kids get totally hooked by this story. The kids are thrilled at the high points and concerned at the low ones. A quiet moment will come along, and you could hear a pin drop. Often there's applause when the movie gets to the end. This is a powerful story, and one the kids eat right up.

When you show the same movie class after class, you get a chance to move past the narrative, and see what's going on behind the magic. I've heard some folks recommend typing out or copying down published stories that you find effective so that you can get beyond the spell and see how the author accomplished it. I haven't yet tried that myself--spare time is just too hard to come by these days. :) But I can totally see how that could be good advice, because, among other things, I felt a similar effect as I saw this film repeatedly. Either way, the point is to get to where you're not pulled into the thrall, so you can see what's going on. (It's not the same exactly, but I didn't just watch the movie repeatedly; when you show a movie to kids in 50 minute increments, you do more than just watch the screen.)

I had a couple of observations I thought I could take away from watching this today, one of which I'll post now, and the other one I'll save.

A lot of what I've read on story structure talks about having disasters continually separate the protagonist from his or her goal, and either forcing the protagonist to regroup, or forcing the protagonist to revise the goal. At the end, when all seems the most hopeless, the protagonist finally breaks through. It gets to seeming like the protagonist can never have a moment of success of enjoyment along the way, and that hardly seems to represent all the fiction out there.

As I watched October Sky, it occurred to me that the pattern I was seeing was slightly different from that. There were disasters, true. And each low was lower than the low before as well. But there were highs too, and each high was higher than the one before. First Homer gets excited by the sight of Sputnik, but then he destroys his mother's fence. Then Homer gets help and builds a more powerful rocket, but he accidentally launches it in the direction of the mine. Then Homer and his friends regroup and create a launch site out of town, only to have their rockets explode before reaching a respectable altitude. Along the way he gets encouragement from Wernher von Braun, but gets discouragement from his father. He has a successful launch and gets written up in the newspaper, but then he gets arrested when he is suspected of starting a forest fire. Then we get a whole series of disasters, but once they're past, success again: Homer proves his innocence and wins the state science fair. This is followed by the biggest fight with his father yet, and by violence caused by the miner's strike.

Do you see my point? The highs get progressively higher, but always with some new disaster to make satisfaction fleeting. Until the end, of course. So it's really more of an oscillating function. Something like this, maybe:


(Yeah, I'm a big nerd, I know.)

Anyhow, I thought this was a useful way of looking at plotting, particularly for longer works. Next time I write something long, maybe I'll try to follow that kind of rollercoaster pattern.

-o-

The movie's only real moment of fail comes at the very end, and it's a minor shame. Homer's dad finally comes out to the launch site to see what he's been so obsessed with, and together they launch a rocket and watch it climb into the sky. Impressed, his father stands there, jaw agape, for a little while, and finally gives his son the first sign of approval of his choices and interests: he puts his hand around Homer's shoulder. Unfortunately, the camera's loving closeup, the father's slow arm motion, and the placement of the two actors makes it look like Homer's Dad has an entirely different sign of affection in mind. In every single class I show this movie, the spell is temporarily shattered and the class breaks into giggles when it looks like Homer's Dad is about to grab his ass:

I didn't crop it to look that way. That's pretty much a full screen shot.

The Hero's Journey

I have a friend of a friend who is an author with a big house and swears by writing to the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey, or "Monomyth," is a series of tropes that are supposedly ubiquitous in stories from every culture. This was first pointed out by Joseph Campbell, and later elaborated on in the context of playwrighting by Christopher Vogler, and doubtless others as well. Here's a wikilink with a pretty thorough description of the structure.

I've seen it asserted online that pretty much every successful story can be analyzed in terms of the Hero's Journey--not that they elaborate on every stage of the journey, but that they focus on part of the journey while at least alluding to the rest of it. I'm not convinced that this is so, though. Certainly I can think of lots of novels--especially fantasy bricks--that adhere to this structure closely. I'm willing to concede that the same goes for a lot of short stories. But when I think of a story like "All I Have To Do . . ." or like Elizabeth Bear's "The Horrid Glory of Its Wings," I'm hard pressed to make the connections.

. . . hmm . . . let me rethink that. In "All I Have To Do . . . ," maybe the challenge Liz is confronted with is getting to the bottom of her ability and learning to live (or not) with it. She rejects this challenge through her drinking and her attempts to stay awake. Her road of trials could be when she befriends Ronald and they experiment with filming her and with attempts at lucid dreaming.

» Spoilers abound. Click to show/hide. «

One could argue she confronts evil and is defeated when she kills Ronald she confronts evil and loses--loses in the sense that her interpretation of reality is flawed, and so she kills someone who is, if not innocent, not quite the monster she things. Her dark night of the soul would be her time in the mental hospital. She confronts evil again when she moves beyond her desire for revenge--she says--and dreams her little dream of all of us. You could even say she becomes the teacher, by bringing us to enlightenment and oblivion.

Does that work? *frown* Arguably. But is it useful? If the connections can be as tenuous as I just outlined, how does that help me when I set out to write a new story, instead of merely shoehorning an existing story into the broad strokes of this structure?

I wish I had a good resource on the Hero's Journey for writers. Like every good English major, I have a couple of books by Joseph Campbell, but those don't focus on the craft side of storytelling, but on the analysis side. I'm not going to go out and buy a how-to book without knowing if it's going to be helpful--I have enough useless books on writing. I found precious little online on this topic.

Is steampunk a single genre?

I've been dipping my toes into steampunk--as a reader, not a writer--for the last year or so, just trying to see if it's something I enjoy reading, and if it's something I thought I might be able to write at some point. If I ever do write steampunk, it will likely not sound like a lot of other steampunk prose fiction out there, because I don't think I could pull off the pseudovictorian prose that a majority of the steampunk I've read affects. I have encountered a few examples, though, where the steampunk is all about the juxtaposition of modern contrivances with low technology. I could see myself doing something like that. On the other hand, I have no great interest in writing about England, but I could have fun writing something set in the United States or in Latin America--or in some totally unheard of land.

The more I read, though, the less convinced I am that all the things being bundled together to show how trendy steampunk is are in fact one genre.

(I'm no expert of course. I think I've made this point before: My blog, my aimless and possibly inaccurate rambling. I'm just thinking "aloud" here. If my facts are wrong, feel free to tell me where.)

I perceive of steampunk as being inspired by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. The Victorian overtones in steampunk are in homage to those two authors. For them it wasn't an affectation, though--it was their era. (Of course, Verne was not a subject of Victoria. Presumably the same stylistic choices that were common in English literature were common in French, or perhaps he was simply translated that way.) I've actually seen Verne and Wells classified as examples of steampunk, but that seems patently ridiculous. They wrote science fiction. Their science fiction bears the stylistic and technological stamps of their societies, but these are not self-conscious homages to an earlier age.

When it comes to fashion, what is the difference between being steampunk and being simply quasivictorian? Goggles? When people mod their computers or whatever, that is pretty clearly steampunk, because what they're creating is a Victorian-inspired version of something technological that never actually existed in that era. This is what a Victorian computer would have looked like if there had been such a thing. That seems pretty quintessentially steampunk. But if we're just talking about top hats and waistcoats and pocket watches and monocles, where's the steampunk in that?

A lot of writing on steampunk I've read refers to the original Wild, Wild West as some sort of proto-example of the genre. I love Wild, Wild West as much as anyone, but here, specifically, is where I am most unconvinced. I'd say pseudo-historical action tales including technology that didn't exist in the period in question has a long history as a trope. In how many Indiana Jones or Allan Quartemain type movies have we seen some millenia old native treasure trove feature automated devices putatively powered by carefully counterbalanced stonework or by underground streams or whatnot? Should we label these something like "stonepunk"? I don't think so because I don't think the creators of these movies and shows had it in mind to meld science fiction with historical settings. Rather, they had a particular setting in mind, and they didn't want to let the technical limitations of that setting interfere with the cool eye candy they wanted to pull off.

I'm not convinced that Brisco County, Jr. counts either, because Brisco actually is a time traveler. That makes this as much a steampunk story as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

What it all comes down to for me, I think is this: the literary steampunk I've read is largely based on imagining what could have been if earlier societies had managed to invent high tech items based on the technology available to them at the time. It envisions societies substantially affected by these inventions, though still recognizable historical. The nonliterary examples I'm familiar with seem to be more about style--James Bond in the old west, say. What would a fan of the Will Smith movie, or of the Jackie Chan Around the World in Eighty Days, make of the Victorian prose, "gentle reader" asides, and infodumps of written steampunk?