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By alexandrasokoloff, on July 24th, 2010
by Alexandra Sokoloff
My fourth supernatural thriller from St. Martin’s is out now, Book of Shadows, my first novel without “The” in the title, and my favorite book so far.
It’s about a very male, very rational (he thinks) Boston homicide detective who reluctantly must team up with a very female, very irrational, mysterious (and of course, hot) witch from Salem, to solve what he thinks is a Satanic killing – which she insists involves a real demon.
I have been fascinated with witches and the modern practice of witchcraft for as long as I can remember. I mean, please, didn’t we all grow up with The Wizard of Oz, not to mention Halloween? And in a way the book is precisely about that existential question posed by Glinda the Good, in her very first line of the movie: “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”
And I don’t mean that just literally, but metaphorically. Because the whole history of witchcraft seems to me to boil down to the question of whether women are good or bad. For centuries, during the times of the old earth religions, witches were seen as good: healers, midwives, mystics, helpers, the folk equivalent of doctors. In the Middle Ages (and I’m sure throughout history, but particularly starting in the Middle Ages), the organized, patriarchal church (and male doctors) tried to stamp out this manifestation of feminine power with the systematic torture and genocide of women in the form of the Inquisition. Witches were evil, women were evil.
In the 1960’s, when societies were expanding the borders of ordinary consciousness, there was a newfound fascination with the earth religions and an upsurge in the practice of goddess worship, including witchcraft. I know most of us who who’ve lived for any amount of time in California have known a practicing witch or two in our lives – anyone who’s ever been to the Renaissance Faire as many times as I have probably knows whole covens.
But get outside of California and OH, it’s a different story. It’s always been hard for me to comprehend he defensiveness that arises in response to the suggestion that God might actually be female, too. (Um, doesn’t even Genesis (that’s the Bible Genesis, rock stars…) say “God created man in his own image, male and female he created them”… ?)
I mean, I love you guys, you know I do – but you’re only HALF the human equation.
Try referring to God as “She” in, oh, the Bible Belt, for example, though. Which yes, I do frequently, and I feel that collective internal gasp of horror around me (And then women, girls, come up to me in private to say, ‘Thank you”).
Women are just not supposed to have that kind of power.
So in Book of Shadows, I wanted to dive right in and explore some of those things that make some men – and a lot of women – uncomfortable with feminine power, and feminine energy, and feminine sexuality, and feminine deity – the whole yin of things. It’s noir, but it’s supernatural noir. I wanted to take two people who were as different as I could make them on the surface: male vs. female, rational vs. intuitive, doing vs. being, real world vs. the unconscious, psychic world – even their cities are opposites: Boston vs. Salem – and force them to work together and learn that they’re a lot more similar than they seem on the surface.
Actually I think my cop protagonist, while he doesn’t exactly trust this witch, probably with good reason, takes all of the above feminine stuff pretty much in stride, admirably so. What he’s not so comfortable with is the idea that there might really be something supernatural going on in this troubling case.
One theme I come back to over and over again in my writing is the idea that messing around with the occult, or other dark forces (which you could say about drug abuse, or certain kinds of sex, or abuses of power) can open doors that let undesirable elements through that aren’t so easy to get rid of. And that young people are particularly prone to supernatural experimentation – and attack by supernatural predators as well as human ones. That’s definitely something that goes on in the book. And some of my earliest exposure to that idea was my sixth grade study of the Salem Witch Trials. (That’s right, isn’t it – we all got the Salem Witch Trials about sixth grade?)
The ambiguity of that situation has always drawn me. Were the girls who accused the “witches” pawns of land-grabbing villagers? Bored and frustrated pre-teens seizing the only power they’d ever have by acting out? High on ergot? Freaked out – maybe a little possessed – by their experimentation with voodoo under the tutelage of Tituba? Wouldn’t you just kill to know?
I tried to capture some of that ambiguity in my accused killer, a troubled musician in a Goth band who has taken a little too much of an interest in that very bad real-life magician, Aleister Crowley.
The research for this one was a real treat, too. Of course I had a whole backlog of witch stories to draw on, from people I met working at the metaphysical bookstore The Bodhi Tree, in L.A. (and that’s also where I met a lot of grunge teens who were rabid about Crowley), to attending ceremonies with Craft friends, including witnessing what for me was the real magic of “Calling the Corners”. I’ve had a love affair with Boston since I set The Price, there – it’s not just layered with American history and an amazing art history as well, but there’s just something deliciously eerie to me about the whole place. I got to go to Salem on Halloween (think Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras but with more witches, pirates, and Puritans). And I was incredibly lucky to find a criminalist in the Boston Police Department who gave me an extensive tour of Schroeder Plaza, the department and the crime lab, and answered all kinds of technical questions for me. It was one of those projects where even though circumstances around me were very complicated at the time, everything I needed for the book fell into my lap – I love it when that happens.
Almost like… hmm, magic.
So my questions for the day are – What’s your take on witches? Know any? Are you familiar with the way witchcraft is actually practiced, or is that whole world completely mysterious to you? Or do you do the odd spell or two yourself?
- Alex
By Robert Jones, on July 19th, 2010
This piece contains information that might prove useful to writers whose work relates to criminal or
historic identification investigations.
The piece provides information about forensic facial reconstruction, which is a process of
reconstructing a likeness of the face of an often-unknown person, who is also often a murder victim,
using their skull and soft-tissue statistics as guides. At this stage in its development, forensic facial
reconstruction is still a controversial technique, which is likely why it is also referred to as forensic
facial approximation. Its value resides in its ability to contribute to a combination of it and other
verified techniques applied during an identification process.
Forensic facial reconstruction methods themselves comprise combinations of investigative expertise
from a number of other fields such as anatomy, ancestry, anthropology, archaeology, artistry and
osteology in addition to forensic science. (Osteology is a study of bone structure, skeletal elements and
teeth that can contribute to determining the sex, age, previous health and, sometimes, the cause of death
of a person from their skeletal remains.)
Facial reconstruction is not new. It has a long history and is thought to have been originally associated
with religion and ancestor worship. It has been refined more recently by those involved in
anthropology and archaeology and forensic science.
Being based on a number of subjective considerations, facial reconstructions of one skull by two
different sculptors would not be exactly the same. Facial reconstructions can thus assist in
identification processes; but, for reasons outlined in the “Additional facts” portion of this piece, they
are not admissible as evidence in most United States courts.
Forensic facial reconstruction is generally done in two dimensions by drawing and in three dimensions
by sculpting. In the first case, sized drawings can be superimposed over a photograph or x-ray of a
skull to check its similarities. If accurate, copies of the drawing can be distributed to aid in identifying
the deceased.
In the second case, sculpting requires a knowledge of soft tissue thickness. Since the thickness varies
from face to face and from one portion of a face to another, it is difficult to estimate. Fortunately, for
some time, thickness measurements have been taken at specific points of facial tissues of persons of
various ancestry, age, sex, size, etc. The measurements have been recorded and averaged by group, and
they provide a guide for sculptors. Reportedly, if remains include some soft tissue, a forensic artist can
approximate tissue thickness covering additional facial areas. The position and configuration of main
facial features are usually fairly accurate because they are largely determined by the configuration of
the skull. Due to their uniqueness, items such as hair, glasses and jewelry can also help identify their
owners.
Computer programs have, of course, been created to take advantage of their storage, speed and
flexibility in adjusting the form, texture and color of a reconstructed face as suggested by sex, age and
race. Given the number of living persons in the world and the number of possible variations, none of
the previously described procedures represents an exact science.
Three-dimensional processes vary with individual sculptors, but they generally include the following
steps:
- The skull in question is examined to note any features, such as the configuration and symmetry of
nasal bones, the size and configuration of muscle attachments, the configuration of the mandible (lower
jaw) and the configuration and condition (especially wear) of teeth. These features contribute to the
overall appearance of a face.
- The skull is then cleaned and repaired (if required) with wax.
- The mandible is attached with wax according to tooth alignment. If no teeth remain, averaged
dimensions are used.
- Nasal openings and eye orbits are filled with modeling clay, and artificial eyes are set and centered
within orbital rims.
- A plaster cast of the skull is made.
- Small tissue depth markers are attached to the hardened casting at 21 specific locations (known as
landmarks). The lengths of the markers indicate the average thicknesses of soft tissue at those
locations.
- Modeling clay representing facial muscles is layered onto the cast, followed by clay representing soft
tissues of the neck.
- The nose and lips are reconstructed, the nose requiring a formula to determine its probable length,
pitch and configuration.
- Muscles of facial expression and soft tissue near the eyes are added.
- Clay representing tissues is added until it is within one millimeter of the height of the tissue
thickness markers, and the ears are added.
- More clay is added until it covers the tissue thickness markers; and finishing touches such as hair,
wrinkles, glasses and jewelry are applied to complete the reconstruction.
As previously mentioned, forensic facial reconstruction is not an exact science, but continually added
data and improved techniques are steadily improving its accuracy.
All facial reconstructions are not forensics related. The process has also been used to recreate the
likenesses of long-dead, especially historic, persons. An example is the recreation of the face of
Tutankhamun, the Egyptian king who died 3,333 years ago. His recreated face adorns the cover of the
June, 2005 issue of National Graphic Magazine.
Additional facts:
As some readers might know, a legal precedent is a legal principle having as its source a court decision
regarding a certain issue. Legal precedents provide guidelines used by judges to decide subsequent,
similar issues. Such a precedent is the Daubert Standard, which was set by the U.S. Supreme Court in
1993. Most, but not all, states have adopted the standard.
The Daubert Standard is used to decide the admissibility of expert witness testimony and to ensure that
the expert testimony is reliable. It allows a party to raise a motion, {known as a Daubert motion), to
exclude the presentation to a jury evidence that might be inadmissible and/or unfairly prejudicial. As
practiced today, facial reconstruction does not uphold the Daubert Standard and is therefore not
admissible as expert witness testimony.
As might be expected, forensic facial reconstruction is not exempt from the fact spinning of some
television shows. For example, many have had their characters order facial reconstructions
immediately upon the discovery of skeletal remains. Actually, such reconstructions are usually
requested as a last resort to enhance the possibility of identifying the remains.
A popular instrument for measuring facial soft tissue thickness was originally a needle that had been
held in a flame until its tip was covered with soot. The needle was then inserted until it struck bone and
then extracted. The portion of the tip that had no remaining soot indicated the tissue thickness. More
accurate methods, for example, ultrasonic probe measurements and CAT (computed axial tomography)
scans, have replaced this crude, but clever, method.
By Bev Vincent, on July 17th, 2010
I’m doing something a little unusual today. Not with this blog—in real life. For two-and-a-half hours, I’m going to be standing in front of an audience of writers and other interested (hopefully) parties talking about my writing career trajectory in a presentation titled (though not by me): Skills Learned on the Path to Publication. It is sponsored by the Houston Writers Guild and takes place at the Sugar Land (Houston) library.
As I was thinking about my writing career to date I wondered: where should I start? Have I always been a writer? Well, yes and no. Because I grew up in a rural setting with few neighbors my own age and only one channel of television, I became a voracious reader. I probably would have been a reader in any setting, but who knows? I think reading leads to the desire to write in many people. I certainly took my stabs at it at an early age. I wrote an Agatha Christie knock-off for an eighth grade English assignment. Along with two other stories, mine was cited by the teacher as “good enough to publish.” High praise, and completely untrue, but it was the sort of encouragement I needed. At least the teacher recognized some potential.
I remember tackling a novel one summer in my teens. I wrote it on a plastic-shelled manual typewriter, nothing nearly so romantic as the old Royals or Caronas of earlier generations, but it was mine. I wrote on mill paper, which was plentiful since my father worked in the paper mill. Rough paper about the same color of brown as some fast food chain napkins. My influences at that point were Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury and Charlie’s Angels. I remember very little about the plot except that it had to do with murder among a group of acquaintances who were traveling somewhere, one of them a Farrah clone described in Spillane’s lurid prose. Did I mention I was a teenager? I got at least a hundred pages into that book, typing a page at a time with no idea where I was going or what I was doing. Alas (or, perhaps, fortunately) that manuscript is forever lost.
When I went to university, I continued to write. Having discovered horror novels and stories, I began writing short stories in that genre. Most of them were handwritten in a blank journal with the university crest on the front. Story ideas were listed in the back pages, and the stories themselves sloped and slanted across the lineless pages. Many of them were completed and typed up, though some trailed off into blank space without resolution. I used to share these stories with some of my dorm neighbors, but I never considered submitting one for publication. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about doing such a thing.
Then I ratcheted things up a notch. Twilight Zone magazine was in its heyday and they announced a short story contest, which I decided I would enter. I can’t remember for sure if my submission was typed on white paper or on the mill paper I was still using for scratch. Somehow, I suspect the latter. I probably violated every manuscript rule under the sun, including stapling the pages together and failing to double space. None of my typescripts from that era survive.
The story was called “A Change in the Weather” and had to do with a young boy trapped in a country store by a particularly virulent and no-doubt supernatural storm. Peter Straub was one of the judges for that contest. I am very happy to report that he has no recollection of my story whatsoever. Dan Simmons won the contest. Did I mention I was way out of my league? Oh, well. Small steps. Live and learn.
Unlike my early novel attempt, those short stories still exist in holographic form. For a long time I couldn’t find them, but I finally turned up the journals a number of years ago. In fact, I’ve rewritten a number of them and even had a few published over the years. The core ideas weren’t all that bad, though the execution was amateurish. Some of them are hopeless, like a rip-off of The Mist crossed with “Trucks” that has a bunch of people trapped in a greasy spoon diner after all the dogs in a city (maybe in THE WORLD!) go mad and start attacking people. (Frankly, the story, simply called “Dogs,” isn’t as good as it sounds!)
Now we get to the gap years. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “gap year” is a year someone (usually young) takes off between one stage of his or her life and the next. Between high school and college, or between undergrad and grad school. Usually the person travels or works.
My “gap year” from writing lasted from about 1987 through 1999.
I honestly can’t explain where my interest in writing went for all those years, and why it returned. I certainly didn’t stop reading voraciously. For two of those years, I was living overseas, so I traveled and worked, but I certainly had a lot of alone time when I could have been writing if I’d been so inspired. For most the rest of those years, I was living by myself in an apartment in a foreign country (the U.S.!), again not writing. It simply didn’t occur to me that it was something I might want to do with my copious free time.
Then, the urge reappeared. At first, I was handicapped. I would dig my notebook computer out of its carrying case and set it up on whatever perch was convenient, write a few pages, and then return the computer to its hiding place where it would remain for days, weeks or months. The process of starting to write had a level of inertia that I could easily allow to overcome me. If I was going to write, something had to change.
My wife, bless her soul, asked me what I wanted for Christmas in late 1998. After some consideration, I answered that I wanted a place to write. Somewhere permanent, somewhere that could remain undisturbed, where I could sit down, turn on the computer and start writing without having to find a place to set up. She bought a lovely roll-top desk and we found a suitable place to install it. The roll-top was a stroke of brilliance on her part. I tend to generate piles of papers, books, and notes while I am working. At the end of a session I could just back up the day’s work, turn off the computer, pull down the cover and—voila!—my clutter was hidden beneath the handsome, dark, corrugated cover.
That really represents the beginning of my second career as a writer. From that point on, my productivity grew. By 2000 I was being paid to write both short stories and essays and I haven’t stopped since. Writing is now as much a part of my daily routine as breakfast and working out at the gym. I now have my own office, so rolling down the desk’s top is no longer a necessity (nor even remotely possible at the moment).
Sometimes I think I hadn’t lived enough to write when I was younger. What did I know about other people’s lives, let alone my own? I am constantly amazed by very young writers who have something meaningful and universal to say. I know I sure didn’t. Not at 21—not even at 31. Now that I’m in my (very) late 40s I think I’m starting to hit my stride. My necessary gap years are at an end.
By Thomas Sullivan, on July 16th, 2010
Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again. Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism. The best things are like that. Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral. It’s their nonconformist free nature. After all, how can you define magic? If you could, it wouldn’t be magic. And writers depend on magic.
Want to borrow some?
I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7. People magic. Nature magic. And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day. Here. Take my place. Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive. This is your first religious experience. Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.
You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive. And a hundred others like him. But before that, gaze hard out the window. Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people. 70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty. Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water.
Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.
See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg. See the razor wire on the church school where you are working. Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels. Angels everywhere.
The people are not time oriented here. They are event oriented. And you are an event. Even though they have seen you before. You came and went. Thousands of times. So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women. Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects. Yeah, you can sneer at that. But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby. I do not know why there were four more in quick succession. You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what? Stop escaping? Hey, what do I know? But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over. Driving is, in fact, creative. A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.
But there is great love here. Huge love. You see it in the children first. They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook. They want so desperately to be held and hugged. I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg. Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age. Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge. Quite unforgettable.
Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly. One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness. And these are not uninformed people. They get it. Who they are, who you are. Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride. When you own nothing, nothing owns you. So go ahead. Walk through the winding streets. Accept one of the invitations to come inside. Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea. Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school. Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original? The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers. They throw nothing away. Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry. A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks. When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children. The kids are so often sick…
I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know. It happens like this. You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food. They form a circle and start clapping. Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement. Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours. Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you. The more outrageous your signature moves the better. Walls. You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down. It happens differently with the men. The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.” To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus. It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop. Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten. Music. The universal language.
But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon. Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart. Keyboard, drum kit, guitar. Interpretive dancers. My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that! I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video. Not gonna happen. It’s gone now. Some things are too perfect for anything but memory. When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them. You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins. You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people. You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges. Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared. Doesn’t matter. We didn’t have to say anything. Those people knew.
Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there. But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you? Easy to discover in the Dominican. Tougher in your own backyard. But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column). There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you. You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column. And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
By John Rosenman, on July 13th, 2010
If you’re a romance reader or writer, you’re likely to know what HEA means. Otherwise, probably not. HEA stands for Happily Ever After. In other words, if you write or read romance, you probably expect your lovers to live HEA with no serious problems. Otherwise, it’s not really “romance.”
This came to my attention recently when Heather Massey wrote a review blog on my SF adventure-romance novel, Beyond Those Distant Stars. You can find it as the July 6 post on The Galaxy Express at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net. Heather is very positive and supportive concerning the novel, but my non-HEA ending is a bit of a problem for her. At the end of the novel, Jason and Stella do not ride (or fly) off into the sunset together, and the reader knows there will be no more romantic or erotic scenes between them.
For readers wanting a traditional romantic ending, it’s a downer. It also commits the unpardonable sin of being UNPREDICTABLE. One romance reader said online that when she reads romance, she wants “to turn her brain off.” That means she settles into a romance knowing that the course of romance may be rocky, but that all will work out beautifully in the end. HEA will reign.
This may be the main reason readers like romance. It guarantees a predictable, happy product, a storybook ending with the metaphoric equivalent of violins playing in the background. It’s escapist fiction, a recess from the pains and disappointments of the real world.
Now, I admit I don’t read traditional romances, but I think the HEA requirement is too simple. Worse, it encourages sameness, comformity, mediocrity, and predictability. I suspect a lot of folks share a similar negative view of romance, but we shouldn’t forget that some romances are darn good. My point is that romances need to be less restrictive and more open to possibilities in order to explore more fully the often painful and difficult realities of life. Romances can be complex. They can be literature.
The Galaxy Express is devoted to SFR [Science Fiction Romance]. Beyond Those Distant Stars is a science-fiction romance. ONLY, there’s no HEA and while the romance is important, it’s not the main thing. I like this because (1) It’s less predictable and I have a real problem reading a book whose ending I already know in advance, and (2), it contains more verisimilitude, which means it’s truer to life. C’mon: How many HEA couples do you know? For that matter, how many successful, loving couples who have shared a long life together have done so HEA? Answer: practically none. We’re talking about human beings here, folks, and human beings are the most contrary, cantankerous critters in the universe, inclined by their flaws to keep divorce lawyers and day time drama watchers happy.
So when I write science fiction adventure-romance, my lovers will seldom live HEA. Usually they will split up and move on for various reasons, or continue together with some problems and uncertainties. In many ways, I think that’s more interesting and true to life. In addition, when I do write science fiction romance, romance is not the main thing as it is in romances. Always, I’m more concerned with ideas, adventure, and characterization. Always, there are romantic elements rather than a story focusing only on a romance. On top of that, one sex or erotic scene is usually enough. I can make my point with that.
While I know there are readers who want simply to turn off their brains and curl up with a book whose happy ending they’re assured of, I see romance as a continuum of possibilities rather than a fixed standard. IMHO, that’s what romance should be. And if do have a happy couple, they will live HFN (Happy for Now), which to me is more plausible and realistic.
By James Moore, on July 12th, 2010
I’m writing this essay after what I tend to think of as a very productive day. I wrote two chapters of a novel, FRESH KILL which is being co-written with Christopher Golden 4,000 words, give or take. Not bad, all things considered. That puts me a little over 30,000 words into the novel, also not bad. Not great, maybe, but not bad.
My writing time is about to be compromised. I’m packing to go on a trip on Wednesday morning, where I will be driving up to New England to attend a writer’s conference, spend some time with friends and coauthors, drop in on a couple of editors in Manhattan for a lunch meeting and finally relax a bit and recharge. Recreation, in other words, with a side of business to keep me honest.
I could, arguably after a few of my experiences, take a plane and get there a lot faster. That’s not the point, however. I drive up to New England every year. I enjoy the travel time and the down time from whatever else is going on in my life. I get a chance to think and ponder and daydream that is often missing from my life these days. There’s the day job, the cell phone, the internet and the computer t consider, isn’t there? Obligations which, frankly, I won’t mind getting away from for a short time. I used to tell my wife that a simple trip to where I could look at the ocean for a couple of hours was quite sufficient for me, and that’s true enough, but now and then a little extra can’t hurt, either.
And I am going to get business done, just not in the way that I normally do. I’ll still be writing almost every day, but the schedule will change a bit and I might not get quite as much down on paper as it were. Instead it’ll be in my head. Half of the novels I’ve come up with were first thought out on long road trips. The separation from all of the usual day to day distractions does wonders for firing my imagination. It might be a road sign, a particular cloud in the sky or even a song I’ve heard a dozen times already, but now and them on these travels something happens that gets the creative juices churning in a different way and now and then that’s a good thing.
I suppose you could assume that I’m trying to justify myself here, and there’s maybe even a little truth to that, but the real point I’m trying to make is simply this: Work never stops. Not really. Not if you’re serious about it. Yes, I could get my meetings done in New York at different times, but why? I’m already heading up that way. Yes, the conference would be there another year. I missed it last year, in fact, despite my best efforts to get there I simply didn’t have the cash flow last time around. Yes, seeing my friends would could also be rearranged. Hell, I drove up that way a few months ago and saw a lot of the same people. Want to know something? I got ideas on that trip, too. And I reconnected with friends and peers and editors. Hell, I sold a novel based on a pitch I did for a publisher I was chatting with at a dinner we were both attending. It worked out well then and hopefully it will work out well now. You never know.
Networking happens when it happens. Research (in all of its myriad incarnations) occurs constantly. Phone calls with editors take care of a lot of my business, but now and then I want to have faces to go with the names and the voices on the phone. I prefer looking people in the face to chatting on the phone. I always have, I likely always will. How can I get a real feel for what we’re working on together if we never have a chance to actually discuss the work in progress?
And the actual writing? Hell, I have a laptop, due in very large part to the very people I’m about to go see. I can write on the road as easily as I can write in my office. Added bonus, someone else has to make the bed when I’m ready to head out.
I won’t bore you with the importance of networking. We’ve already discussed that in the past and I reminded you here already. I’ll just remind you that a change of scenery is good for the creative juices and that if you’re serious about the writing thing, you’ll find a way to make it happen, even when you’re travelling.
James A. Moore
By Bill Lindblad, on July 11th, 2010
Your deadline is approaching, or possibly even past. You were working on a relatively solid piece of writing… for example, an examination of what causes monetary value in artistic work and suggestions on how to maximize it, while at the same time providing examples of how it is being increased elsewhere (thus providing both suggestions for personal growth and tips for making some needed scratch)… when another idea struck. It seemed like it was a stronger concept, and in the interest in producing your best work, you shifted gears. You’ve been working for hours, only to have a result like this:
………………
Today I was in a bookstore, examining a rack of vintage paperbacks. A copy of “Beachheads in Space” edited by August Derleth lay flush against a copy of “Wolfling” by Gordon R. Dickson. As my eyes roved quickly across the titles and authors, I saw
“Beachheads in Space – Derleth” on one and “Dickson Wolfling” on the next. In my mind, the two merged and resulted in “Dickhead in Space”.
I later related the momentary confusion and my immediate reactions (“What publisher or editor gave the green light to that? RhinocEros, maybe, but not Avon!”) to my wife, who laughed. Then laughed again. Then told me, “Wow. That needs a story. Maybe I’ll write one and submit it to a Bizarro market.”
There are many sorts of inspiration. There’s the inspiration to write, which is both the gift and the curse of most professional authors. Rare are the people who produce excellent work but who are not possessed of the compulsion to do so. For every T.E.D. Klein there are dozens of writers of comparative merit who simply could not let a decade pass without writing fiction.
Then there are the inspirations of story titles, of word constructions, of plot ideas, character developments and the like. These are almost as important to writing fiction as the first type of inspiration, and they can be plentiful or rare.
The conjoined titles, and Jen’s reaction to them, was an example from the second group of inspirations. Authors often have trouble seeking them out, and their absence can be the difference between easy or excruciatingly difficult writing.
Brian Hodge wrote an essay a few months back extolling the values of research. One of the points of that piece was that professional advice is often the result of experience, and it behooves a writer to use good advice… good, in this case, being anything which improves needed skills.
Harlan Ellison, always ready with advice for young writers, suggests intentionally mis-hearing things… getting a word or snippet of conversation and twisting it in your mind. Robert Bloch spoke of doing the same thing. William S. Burroughs suggested a variety of exercises, including things like focusing on all items of a particular color in a day, in the expectation that something would click which would find use in a story. Barry B. Longyear, in what might be my favorite example of how to draw forth inspiration, included a story at the end of It Came From Schenectady called, appropriately, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” It demonstrated concisely how he got his ideas… just not how he developed them.
………………….
As much as you might wish otherwise, the obvious fact is that you’re producing a bland, pedantic piece that either needed to be handled by someone else, or needed more research to flesh out the most interesting parts (i.e., various techniques used to generate ideas.)
What do you do?
At this point, you have obvious options: start over, do some more work to polish it into something more presentable, even jettison the whole idea and go back to your original essay.
Or, you could demonstrate via a framing device just how you think and the efforts you make to approach tasks from an oblique angle. The approach would have the benefit of getting you into your bed, away from the computer. Of course, if that’s your choice, you’d need something to provide a cap to the piece, hopefully something completely unconnected. In that instance, the partial essay might provide exactly what you need. Such as:
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief has achieved considerable hype and Riordan has the aforementioned competency (actually, he’s more than simply competent, he’s a skilled author who has won awards for his mystery work.) When hype and a core competency mix, success often follows… and that’s happened in this case. The first five books are out, and the first one is already quite expensive, although many used bookstores haven’t tumbled to this yet. Sure, it’ll peak and start slowly diminishing in turnaround value, like the early J.K. Rowling books or John Dunning’s Booked to Die, but if you can find a copy of that first hardcover, in first printing, cheaply then do so. Someone is going to make some money off of it, why not you?
By Brian Hodge, on July 9th, 2010
 I’ve had a lot of satisfying creative experiences while traveling this peculiar and sometimes baffling path I’ve chosen. A lot of kicking at dirt clods and falling blind drunk into ditches, too, but never mind those. Of the highlights, I can think of only two that I would be eager to re-experience afresh, if such a thing were possible … if, say, someone put out a home kit where you could pop the lid of your own skull and poke around with an electrode to stimulate memories.
One ranks up there for reasons that are more Hunter S. Thompson than anything, and doesn’t belong here. The other, though, a seeming product of the favor of angels or demigods, has always stood for me as an affirmation of what may be possible for any writer, allowing for a brush with that elusive energy some call grace.
It was a novelette titled “As Above, So Below,” and I wrote it as the capstone for my second story collection. At over 23,000 words, it wasn’t a quick dash from beginning to end — there was time and complexity enough to fall deep deeper deepest into it — and it wasn’t light material. It was about a guy who’d come to the end of countless incarnations and was the first to become … what comes next.
Four years ago I saw someone on an online forum pay me a compliment that I don’t expect to ever be bettered: “This was the story that got me to seriously consider that Hodge is some kind of literary shaman.”
I don’t mention that out of self-aggrandizement, or to try to drum up a few bucks in royalties. Used copies of out-of-print books don’t generate royalties, and the piece has never been reprinted — one of the perils of droning on for 23,000 words — although it was selected to hold down 1998 in a century’s best anthology that’s been due out … oh, any decade now.
Instead, this was a compliment for subtler cause than what it may look like on the surface. And I repeat it because I know no other way of conveying the degree to which it clicked that someone, somewhere, felt in the reading what I’d felt in the writing.
More specifically, in the completing.
That is what I would relive, if I could.
I finished it late on a spring afternoon, and soon went for a walk in the park we lived near. How to convey the numinous character of that walk…? I doubt I can, entirely.
- But imagine moving through a landscape at half-speed, without quite touching the ground, yet seeing, feeling, every molecule of earth and air. Like that.
- If the angel of death — Neil Gaiman’s version, preferably — walked up and held out her hand and said, “You have to come with me now,” I wouldn’t have argued that it couldn’t be time, that there was more to do. Because, right then, there wasn’t. Like that.
- Celtic legends tell of hapless folk who walk between just the right pair of trees, or past the right mound, and end up in some other realm, and don’t return for years, even though they swear they were only gone one night. Like that.
- A sense that doorways had been opened and anything could come through, could happen, and whatever it was, it would be exactly right. Like that.
Like all that. Times ten. Twenty. More.
I don’t know what made this one so different, so transcendent. The feeling took a few hours to fade. I’ve never experienced anything like it since, although it hasn’t been for a lack of longing, or identical habits, more or less. I’ve dug as deep in other works. Toiled the same feverish hours. Felt the same push and pull to the end. There’s nothing else to try, and that’s probably just as well. Addicts kill themselves trying to recapture a high like this.
In tribal cultures, the shaman is the one apart who rides the beat of a drum all the way to another world, and comes back with something for the good of one or all. Information. Insight. The lost pieces of somebody’s soul.
It’s not usually a role that’s sought, but instead accepted, sometimes only after fierce reluctance, an acquiescing to the demands of forces that won’t take no for an answer and keep hammering until they get their way. If you write for anything other than the shallowest reasons — the old line about sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper until blood comes out of your forehead springs to mind — then that insistent knocking probably sounds familiar.
I’ve heard, too, that in tribal cultures that had only an oral tradition, the written word was initially regarded as an act of sorcery. A thought set down here could be picked up there, verbatim, no matter how much time had elapsed.
An experience like I had with that singular novelette makes me think this wasn’t wrong. It has served as a lifetime reminder of just how potent, how world-shifting, that magic can be.
The thorn in this, however, is having to accept that you can’t force magic to happen. The best you can do is open yourself up to the wonder of process, to the possibility of awe, to the forces beyond and the inexplicable give and take at their core, and if the magic — the deep, resonant, transcendent magic — happens, it happens.
But if it doesn’t…? Assuming you’ve done everything else as right as you can, you should still finish with something to be proud of.
I want to say there’s always next time … but that seems too expectant, maybe a whiff demanding, and that would be wrong.
Maybe we only get one or two of these experiences per path, per life, if that, and their value is a factor of their scarcity rather than the likelihood of repeating them like party tricks. Maybe their worth lies in how long they continue to glow inside, like that first declaration from someone you dared to love who whispered that they loved you back.
If we’re touched by grace, maybe once is all we really need.
Because when it’s real, it doesn’t rub off. It lingers, a lasting confirmation that maybe, just maybe, the path where it has found us is the right one.
***** Why stop now? You are invited to segue over to my blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling from the timeless perspective of the warrior poet ethos. Currently on tap, “You’re Not Getting Worse. You’re Just Seeing Farther Ahead.”
[Photo by Michael Hodge]
By Mort Castle, on July 8th, 2010
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but I like ‘em and my friend Li’l Johnny Skipp(y) likes my doing ‘em, so, I’ doing this one …
And besides, I am entitled. This column will appear on my birthday: I am 64 today.
You think that’s old?
I do. It’s old enough so that it’s tough some days to be inspired …
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS: You know, there are plenty of good writers out there. Here are some of them, not necessarily new, not even necessarily new to me, but people I want to mention in this column that appears on my 64th birthday: Jim Shepard. Cody Goodfellow. F. Paul Wilson. Mike Black. Anthony Doerr. Bayo Ojikutu. Gary Frank. Jeff Jacobson. Harlan Epitome Ellison. Joe Meno. Nate Kenyon. David Niall Wilson. Holly Goddard Jones. Tom Monteleone. Allison Backous. Tony Mendoza. Ron Hansen. Marc Paoletti. Lee Martin. And my latest discovery (a discovery previously made by my wife and many others: Holly Goddard Jones. Amazing.)
Inspiring.
& Stephen King, who doesn’t even have to be good anymore and still keeps setting that bar ever higher (even when he doesn’t even have to). Think about that. Inspiring
Yeah, but what about bad writers …
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS: You know, there are plenty of not so good writers out there. There are those thriller writers who take 800 pages to solve some sort of vague if implausible mystery that a Donald Hamilton (remember him? Huh?) protagonist would have wrapped u[p in 165 pages. There are some literary writers who are so literary that they appeal to only those who understand literature because they have taken courses in literature taught by those who have degrees in literature because they have taken courses in literature taught by those who have … There are some who write a “good story ” as judged by those who have no more idea of a good story than the people writing the good story which typically has so breathless a pace and so paceless a breath that it can’t breathe at all …
You don’t think the bad stuff inspires?
If this CLOWN can get THIS published then … Heigh-ho and away and one more try and … Never say die!
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS: UH, Mort, You sound more curmudgeonly than usual.
Okay. I am 64. I’m entitled.
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS: Uh, Mort, haven’t you said your job is “to inspire?” Tell you the truth, man, you don’t sound all that inspirational!
Oh, I think that’s because I’m 64. And maybe after so many years of writing, maybe the inspiration isn’t always there for me … And I am not inspired, then how can I inspire you?
But on the days when IT is there, it is there. And perhaps more deeply appreciated because it is not a constant.
And when it is there, it is because of realizations that others have shared …
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATION… Guys like a certain Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury (soon to be even older than 64). Now just how is it he stays inspired?
Seems there’s a simple Bradbury formula: He wakes up alive. He looks out the window. And he says, “Now isn’t that interesting?”
Check out the new book of Bradbury interviews, Sam Weller’s LISTEN TO THE ECHOES. It’s an inspiring book about Mr. Inspiration Bradbury, and I would plug it even if Sam were not a friend, which he is, despite his being quite young.
MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS: I say it’s my birthday. Gonna have a good time. Wife Jane’s birthday two days ago. She’s 64. Wedding anniversary four days ago. 39 years of the past 64 spent married to each other.
Now, isn’t that interesting?
Gonna have a good time.
Goin’ to a party party. (Thanks, Beatles.)
MISCELLANEOUS CONSIDERATION: L’chaim … Ancient Hebrew toast. Translates “to life.”
Works for me.
Maybe for you, too.
It’s inspiring.
By Sarah Monette, on July 7th, 2010
“I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.” –Alan Rickman
So I was talking with a friend the other day about writing and art and being, or not being, a pretentious asshole, and she said, “Why don’t you write a Storytellers Unplugged post about that?”
And I said, “Thank you for doing my homework for me.”
Because it is a problem, and I think it’s one we all go through, the pendulum swing from “I’m just playing around, there’s no need to take anything I do seriously” to “I am a Serious Writer and you must Admire my Art.” The key, I think, is the Alan Rickman quote I used as an epigraph, not least because he shifts the discussion from “art” to “work.” Frankly, “Is it art?” is something so subjective that it’s not a useful question for an artist to ask. Everyone’s answer to “What is art?” is different, and even something that seems to be a consensus may be overturned in another five years, or twenty, or a hundred. And it’s something that you can’t control. Whereas, “Is it work?” is a pretty easy question.
But it can be hard to get the balance right between taking your work seriously and not taking yourself too seriously, especially when there are so many factors conspiring to make you feel defensive about taking your work seriously. There’s a lot of pressure on people who do creative things to be self-deprecating about them, whether it’s the “it’s just a hobby” gambit or “I’m not really any good at it” or (if you are a professional) “I’m just a hack.” All of which are ways of abjuring the idea that one takes one’s work seriously.
When I was a teenager, I went militantly the other way. I had a teacher who disparaged genre fiction, and I bristled up like a porcupine and became very much, “This is my Art and I am an Artist, and I will make you see the error of your ways!” It’s the opposite reaction, but it’s just as much a defense as the other. And there for a while, yes, I was really hard to live with. I’m not sure what knocked it out of me, but I think part of it was learning that making art and Being An Artist are not the same thing. You can do one without having anything to do with the other. Making art doesn’t require starving in a garret or being crazy or doing drugs or getting an M.F.A. or any of the other thousand and one things our culture thinks artists have to do. All that making art requires is that you do the work.
You don’t have to be defensive about it, either. You don’t have to tear yourself down, and you don’t have to build yourself up. Neither one makes a difference to the work you’re doing, unless you let yourself become poisoned with your own propaganda. Self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement are about how the world sees you and how you see yourself, and goodness knows it’s something we all struggle with, but it’s also, from another perspective, missing the point. Because the thing at stake isn’t your self (arguably, your self is just sitting around getting in the way), it’s your work. For me, at least, it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m not a very good writer,” but it’s quite another thing to say, “Oh, that’s not a very good story.” Because, dude, if it’s not a good story, why did I send it out? Why did the editor buy and publish it? And in my heart of hearts, while “I’m not a very good writer,” may feel true a whole freaking lot of the time, “That’s not a good story,” is going to feel like a lie. If I’ve gotten to the point of sending it out, I believe it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense to try to say otherwise.
For me, I think that’s the crux of the matter. Not whether I’m taking myself seriously, or not seriously, but whether I’m taking my work seriously. Because the rest of it, a lot of the time? Is just my self getting in the way.
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