Alma Alexander

I recently tripped over a blog entry, here:

http://community.penguin.com/_Talisman-Books-by-Alison-Goodman/blog/3471740/150186.html

And here’s the definition she uses: “By talisman book I mean one of those novels that you read over and over again, a book that seems to resonate through you, that wards off the disappointments and insecurities of everyday life.”

If you are asking me what three books I will run and get from out of a burning building, there are probably three.

1) My dogeared paperback copy of Lord of the Rings – yes, I know the book is replaceable easily enough, it isn’t as if it’s out of print or anything like that, and anyway I could probably quote you the entire damned book chapter and verse if you asked.  But sometimes it isn’t JUST THE BOOK. It really is the talisman. And this book – broken-spined, tattered, beloved – this book was probably one of the first thing that made me kneel at the altar of fantasy and begin SERIOUS worship there. Tolkien made me realise that the big epic dreams that crowded my imagination were FOR REAL, and were valuable. This book is the physical embodiment of that realisation for me. It’s a talisman not just because of its identity but because of what it represents, the kind of hugeness and wonder and awe and the way it made me cognisant of my place in this world.

2) I’d like to say “Tigana” by Guy Gavriel Kay, because as I keep telling everyone it’s one of the best BOOKS I’ve ever read, genre quite aside, the writing and the story make this amazing for me and so does the visceral emotional connection I feel to the underlying themes of the book; I’d like to say “Nine Princes in Amber”, the now out-of-print paperback edition that made Roger Zelazny lift his eyebrows in utter astonishment when I gave it to him to sign and ask me where on earth I’d got that copy because it had been out of print for YEARS – because of the legacy that Zelazny left me during the writing workshop which he presided over and which I had the privilege to attend (in the year that he died); I might, in fact, say all too many names and hesitate before my bookshelf too long and burn up with my beloved books before I could decide which of the novels on the shelf would be worth the saving (and in the end I’d probably grab at random anyway). But I might also reach for a volume of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, because all stories live inside that book, and I could read them and dream up the rest of a lost world by his tropes.

3) – because it’s irreplaceable – a really disreputable ancient and ill-favoured old-fashioned hardcover book with dull gray covers which give nothing away and which have been chipped away at the corners and on the spine – a broken down book, loved well long before I had my hands on it, with scribbled commentary in the margins and on the bottom of the pages. You’d think it was a worthless old thing if you set eyes on it; you would pay ten cents for it at a yard sale. You probably wouldn’t take it if it was pressed into your hands for nothing at all. You’d think it had no value beyond being something to start a bonfire with. You’d be wrong. This is the book that lived beside my grandfather’s bed, the book that he read and re-read and re-read, the scribbles in the margins are his thoughts, and in his hand. He’s been gone these twenty years. He’ll never speak to me again except through this book, and I WOULD go through fire to get it.

But those are talisman books in the purest and most glittering sense of the word. There are many many books that I love, and have adored over the years.

There were the books which drew my tears – “Les Miserables”, Howard Spring’s “My Son, My Son”, Karl May’s “Winnetou” (although it took me YEARS to unlearn all the “facts” I though I knew about the American Indian culture in general and the Apache in particular after I finished reading his work), Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”, almost ANYTHING by Ursula le Guin, a book not many people reading this will have heard of but whose title translates as “The Time of Death” by a writer of my own tongue and tribe by the name of Dobrica Cosic and another book by one of my own, Ivo Andric’s “Bridge on the Drina”.

Lest you should think that I spent my entire reading life weeping, there are books that drew my laughter – Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, T. H. White’s “Once and Future King”.

And there are the comfort books I return to because I have loved them and  because I know them and because if I am sick or tired or ailing I know I can go back to them and find solace there – “Song of Arbonne”, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, Mary Stewart’s Merlin books, “Shadow of the Moon” by M. M. Kaye or any fat historical novel by Sharon Penman (but particularly “Here Be Dragons”), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible”, lots of stuff by Pearl Buck, books by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Galsworthy, Boris Pasternak, Nikos Kazantzakis, Daphne du Maurier. Of more recent vintage, Catherynne Valente whose poetic vision enthralls me or Neil Gaiman whose dark and sardonically twisted tales and characters draw me in and China Mieville whose surgical command of the English language leaves me breathless and humbled.

I am a certified bookworm, rarely without a book halfway through somewhere in the house, often several in different parts of the house. And if I’m not reading them, I’m writing them…

…would you forgive me if I added #4 to my Talisman Book list, above? One of my own, a hardcover edition of “Secrets of Jin Shei”, the book to remind me what I am,  what the culmination is of all the gifts that all my other books have poured like gems into my waiting spirit. The truth is that I haven’t actually re-read the whole thing, not once, since it was first published. Possibly I am too afraid to, afraid of what I will find within those pages whose origins lie so deep within myself, afraid of all the things I will possibly – no, probably – find in there that I would have done differently, or would change even now if I could. But even if I never read those words that I wrote again in their entirety I’ll take a copy with me. And show it to people, after, if I lose the power of speech and they ask me who or what I am. Because that is what I am. Will always be. I am the creator of THIS THING, this book, this collection of words, this story… this talisman.

I am someone who loves books. Someone who loves reading them, who grew up to live and breathe writing them. A once-and-future writer – with hands and spirit overflowing with the talismans of language, of words. Someone who was lucky enough to have had poetry poured into my soul when I was just a child, and who was allowed to wander through the wild wood of story unfettered and free to taste of whatever fruit or stream I could find. I grew up in an  Eden of Word – and I still live there today.

With all my talismans safe beside me.

So – what are YOUR talisman books…?

I”ve always been in love with them. When I was younger it was hardcover notebooks, often A4 in size, in which I would hand-write ENTIRE NOVELS (I know I did. I have a few of those books still. With ENTIRE NOVELS written in them. In HANDWRITING. Often in pencil.) Later, especially when I graduated to the computer as a primary writing tool, they became smaller things I toted around in various purses and handbags and scribbled quotes and half-finished poetry and ideas into, for later transference into the computer where they could be further developed into full-fledged stories. Some were set aside as dedicated “Research journals” for particular projects, and are filled with scrawled notes culled from various research books read along the way, thoughts and ideas on applying facts discovered during research, often with hand-cut tabs which allow me to separate out stuff into distinctive sections so that I will at least know where to LOOK for them later. Frequently, as it gets closer to the writing of the actual story in question, these notebooks will blossom into a colourful and chaotic proliferation of multi-hued post-it tabs which guide me as to which bits belong in which chapter or section of the actual story I’m trying to write.

I currently have a stash of these notebooks, bound in interesting textured covers, sitting in a small pile on a side table and waiting for their turn at glory. They don’t know yet what they are going to be, what they are going to build. There’s the usual crop of idea-notebooks in every handbag I own, every suitcase, every travel-minded container (just in case I ABSOLUTELY NEED ONE right there and then and can’t be bothered to go hunting through a different bag).

In a sense, this defines a writer. Scratch through a writer’s pockets or bags and you’ll always find these things, full of chicken scratches of half formed and barely coherent ideas, sometimes in shorthand which even the writer is hard-pressed to recognise a week or a month or a year after they had scritched it down for remembrance.  If not a notebook, you’ll find old envelopes with scribbles on the back, napkins from fast-food restaurants with ditto (avoiding the occasional ketchup smudge), till slips from stores which went out of business six months before but whose ghost haunts the bottom of someone’s handbag because the back of a bill contains the first inklings of a deathless idea.

I take my notebooks everywhere. I take them travelling, and write down the things I see and hear and experience and taste and the things that leave me gaping in awe and the things that make me laugh and the things that make me annoyed. I take them out to restaurants with friends, and scribble furtively in them when I happen to notice a strange character sitting at a table a little way away and am suddenly mugged by that person’s life story (or my version of it, anyway) which I just have to jot down and preserve because some day I might need a character JUST LIKE THAT for a story not yet born. I leave them lying by my bed when I go to sleep at night because who knows what dreams may come (and need to be nailed down in ink on paper before they vanish like the ephemera that they are.

If people want to buy me presents and have no idea what to get me, a nice blank journal is always welcome. Yes, even though I already own more than I think I could possibly need.

Blank journals represent something to me.  A restless, exciting state of possibility and of Things To Come. They tremble with the yet-unborn spirits of stories still to be told. They whisper to me out of that inviting emptiness calling to me to come  and fulfill them, to help them find their destinies, and along the way, pursue my own.

They are physical links to that place that lies Between, where the stories live and fly.

At this time – let’s see – I have something like ten pristine journals waiting for their turn to shine. That’s at least ten stories which I still have to write. My life is full already, and all I have to show for it so far… are these empty pages.

Want to keep a writer busy, keep a writer dreaming? Give them journals. Give them beautiful things to put their pen to paper into. And watch their imagination spread their wings, and take flight.

Muggers are a fairly common occurrence in my life. And I kind of welcome them when they come, despite the drama and the inconvenience they bring in their wake.

No, I am not talking about the guy with the gun in a dark alley, desperate for what meager pickings he might glean from you in the shadows. No, I am not talking about the snub-nosed man-eater crocodiles of India. I am talking about the stories that sneak out of the woodwork when you aren’t looking and, well, MUG you – they sit there between you and the screen (which bears traces of your having tried to do something quite different) and leer at you and whisper, “Me. Me. Write ME. Everything else can wait.”

When people ask writers where they get their ideas, these ideas are often not mentioned or given short shrift – and perhaps that’s because they are impossible to transfer a knowledge of to somebody who’s never been a victim of one. Mugger stories are triggered by the most incredibly unbelievable things, a stray word, a phrase out of context, a line of song lyrics only barely paid attention to, a glimpse of a creature vanishing into the woods, a set of tracks on new snow, someone (jokingly) asking a silly “what if” that pushes an unexpected avalanche of thoughts down quite a different slope than the original question-poser might have intended. What they generally have in common is that the moment of inspiration is a subliminal flash, that some connection gets made instantly and generates a large electric spark, that they are IMPOSSIBLE to forget or lay aside once they have appeared, and they tend to be written very quickly, leaving trails of fire behind them as they accelerate away. And they will quite often be the best things you will ever write, which is so cruelly unfair to all the other things which you have put oodles of thought and planning into and which fade into insignificance while these comets of inspiration streak across your sky.

One of my mugger stories turned up when an anthology editor posted a note on his blog that one of his keynote authors had had to drop out because of unavoidable reasons and he was chewing his fingernails – there was a set of ideas he needed to have conveyed in a keystone story, and he listed them, and lo, the mugger stalked out of the night and parked on my shoulder and began whispering into my ear. I wrote that story in less than two hours, sent it in to the beleaugured editor immediately, and had confirmation of a sale less than 24 hours after that. It made my head spin, it did. That just happened again, recently, with another anthology which I had originally had no interest or inspiration to submit to – but something that an editor said struck something THIS time and the spark was there without my quite knowing how it had appeared, and yes, here we are, another mugger, written and sold in the space of a handful of days.

To any muggers waiting for me in the year to come – hi there. I’m looking forward to meeting you

…I am thinking of honey.

More to the point, of harvesting the honey.

My grandfather used to keep bees; so did my great-uncle. That was a thing that the two brothers had in common – the basic activity – but the way they went about it was very different. Great-uncle had a bee-keeper’s gloves – I cannot be certain now, it was too many years ago, but I think he may even have had a proper beekeeper’s hat. Grandpa… had nothing. Grandpa would open the lid of the hive, roll up his sleeves, reach in bare-handed and haul out the honeycombs – and the bees would swarm on him and around him, crawl on him, hum, be wary, but never ever ever sting him. They’d sting my DAD, who was just standing there kibbitzing at one time without being anywhere near the hive at all but he got half a face that looked like an over-inflated basketball for his pains while Grandpa calmly put the honeycombs back into the hive, put the lid back on, and let the bees get back to business.

I’ve never seen it done but I’ve heard of beekeepers who were able to stick their entire arm up to the shoulder into a swarm of bees hanging from some tree, grab hold of the queen, and transport the entire swarm safely to a new home without losing a member of the community or getting one sting for his pains.

Then there are the African bees, whom we had the, um, pleasure to make the acquaintance of during our sojourn in Swaziland many years ago. We never did find out where they were based – all we knew was that for a really painful period of time we had to stop up every orifice in our house (we stuffed cardboard boxes up the fireplace to stop them coming in there), and going out of the house for any reason became a race between us and the bees who would attack anything that moved. They disappeared, eventually, as mysteriously as they showed, but they caused our then-gardener to yelp “Madam! Bees” and then, in full and mystified sight of my mother and myself, take off at an Olympic sprinter’s pace and clear a six-foot fence with daylight to spare in order to get away from the angry hive of swarming bee-shaped velociraptors intent on his hide.

Writing can be like that, sometimes.

Often you just work the hives with all the required paraphernalia (and yet you STILL get stung sometimes. They’ll find their way through, the little so-and-so’s). Sometimes, and for rare individuals always and they know no other way, you simply *know what to do* and for those watching you doing it you’re performing miracles – hauling vast beeswarms off of trees or stealing honey without the bees being upset about any of it. And sometimes you’ll get attacked and driven away no matter what you do, simply because you’re THERE and you don’t ought to be.

Bees are ideas. They’re stories. They’re words. Handle them right and they’ll come up with honey. Push them, dismiss their presence or their message, treat them wrong, and they’ll turn on you. And sometimes they’ll just turn on you for no discernible reason at all and sting until you run screaming from the field with your arms protectively around your face crying out, “I give up! I give up! I’m going now!”

I’ve been having trouble with a troublesome swarm lately. My arm feels a little warm, inside that swarm, and I believe that means that I’ve been stung several times. But I also think I have the queen held between my respectful fingers now, and that all shall yet be well.

Excuse me while I tiptoe away and try and settle this particular recalcitrant swarm into that brand new hive I have had waiting for them for so long. And then I’ll go put salve on my stings, go have a glass of champagne, and wait for the honey.

If you’re the sort of writer beekeeper who does likewise with your life and career, I wish your bees a safe home and a good harvest to come.

Happy new year.

When I was young, we travelled on European trains.

They were old-world trains. They had compartments (think Hogwarts train). You wandered down a corridor, peering into the glassed-in compartments, seeking space; sometimes the grey utilitarian institutional pleated curtains were drawn, blocking your eye, and those compartments you passed quietly by; other times you’d catch the eye of some solitary occupant, and there would be a lift of an eyebrow, a minute nod, and you would push aside the door (they were more often than not often wooden, too, back then – no squealing metal in here, just the velvet rush of wood on wood in its groove) and lift your small square suitcase – no wheels! – up onto the rack, and sit down. You might strike up a conversation with the stranger. You might not, simply sitting there staring out of the grimy windows at the passing scenery, your chin cupped in your hand. There’s a photo of me somewhere, doing just that, a child with her elbow on the narrow windowsill, her eyes distant and unfocused, seeing who knows what. The seats were upholstered couches – at least in the classes that we travelled in – with ramrod stiff backs – no such namby pambyness as reclining seats here. You sat up, with your back straight, like a gentleman or a lady should.

People would take packed lunches – boxes or baskets of carefully wrapped cold chicken, or salami, or sandwiches, and sometimes a piece of apple cake or an actual apple for dessert. Good wholesome food, cooked at home by mothers and grandmothers, lovingly packed, gluttonously consumed when you got hungry. There would be a conductor with a peaked hat and sometimes a salt-and-pepper moustache and round glasses – or was there only one of those, and he went around all the European trains, a super-conductor (heh) who existed only in hyper-relativity space, like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. He’d come in with a punch attached to his belt with a silver chain, and punch a hole in your ticket, and tip his cap to you, and walk out again. And you would go back to the scenery, or perhaps playing a game of cards on the back of a suitcase fetched down from the rack for this purpose, or a book.

And night would fall outside, like a curtain, and things would fade away into the darkness. You’d see just lights passing by, like fireflies, enigmatic human habitations flickering like distant suns in some unknown galaxy, just as mysterious and far away as those stars in the heavens. Sometimes the moon would be full, and there would be a spill of old-gold or bone-white light on the landscape, casting eerie shadows. And then you’d pull into tiny little stations you often never even knew the name of – but they were home, for somebody, because you could see people getting off the train, or hugging those left behind on the platform as they climbed in. And then there would be a shout – that bespectacled conductor, hanging off the steps of one of the carriages – and the train would begin to move again, slowly, jerkily, leaving the flickering lights of the tiny station and the lives it harboured behind in the night. (There was a perfectly wonderful story about an Eastern European football team who was travelling by train into the heart of Europe for a match, and they had delegated one of their number to keep an eye on what stations they were stopping at – but every time the train stopped the poor sap would look out the window and announce they were stopped at Station Ausgang (which, of course, means “Exit” in German) until someone else woke up to the unlikely fact that they had just passed their sixth Ausgang in a row and while it might be conceivable that there might be several places with the same name it was probably not going to be six places strung out one after another on the same railway line… by which stage, of course, they were way past their intended destination, and the game they were supposed to be on their way to play had receded into history…)

If we travelled by night, we took a sleeping car. The private compartments would have attendants who would come by and politely turn the couches into sleeping bunks; somebody would always have to climb the velvet rope ladder and tuck themselves into the top bunk, just underneath the ceiling, where you couldn’t sit up without braining yourself – but I tended to be tucked into the lower bunk, with my ear against the soft lullaby of the wheels on the track, something that lulled me to sleep on many a night. Quiet, melodic, rhythmical, occasionally skipping a beat as the train passed a place where rail lines met, or a siding turned off, or a switch waited to let us through – ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-DAM, ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da-tat-tat-DAM, ta-da-ta-dam… And I slept, and I dreamed, and stories came crowding like night butterflies with midnight-black wings spangled with stars.

Those days, I suspect, are long gone, even in Europe, in these modern times. Trains today look more like the Amtrak trains that crisscross America – and THEY look rather more like an airliner cabin than the trains that rumbled through my childhood, and what’s more are proud of that. Brochures show lines of seats in an open compartment, just like in an airplane. People don’t really do the kind of thing that they used to – it’s kind of difficult, and not a little embarrassing, to be seen unpacking a lunch of cold chicken and apple pie out there in the open where anyone might look and judge and scorn. You go to the buffet car instead and you buy coffee in cardboard cups too hot to hold, and those tiny single-serving pizzaz which you KNOW are bad for you for a half-dozen good reasons, or sandwiches industrially wrapped in cling-wrap (turkey and mayo, chicken and pesto, roast beef… oh, sorry, we’re out of roast beef…), or large chewy chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies which leave you still hungry moments after you’ve finished crumbling them with your sticky fingers. People are more likely to sit there with earbuds in their ears and nodding to music only they can hear – taking isolation and insulation where they can, in the absence of the privacy of those compartments – or, worse, talking loudly on the ubiquitous cellphones that everyone seems to be carting around these days. Cranky babies or toddlers in the train car? Too bad, the parents are going the same place you are, you’re all going to be sharing this car for the next five or six hours, and the kid probably won’t be quiet for more than thirty minutes of that as (s)he falls into an exhausted nap to replenish their energies for the next bout of cranky they’re about to generously share with you. Sleeping cars are available, but all too often priced out of anyone sane’s budget – so you sleep sitting up, knees cramped against the back of the seat in front of you just like in the worst airplanes of your nightmares. Sleep, if you can; if there are no people bickering in the seat behind you, or there is nobody who’s imbibed a little too much and has lost his off-switch and doesn’t even realise how loud and obnoxious they’re being, or somebody who’s started to hum annoyingly with whatever’s playing on his iPod without even realising that they’re doing it.

But outside the land still passes by, in sunlight or under the moon, with rain leaving streaks of water on the windows or with nothing left to look at but the reflection against the outside darkness of the pallid overhead lights in the cabin or (if they’ve dimmed those) the occasional glitter of someone’s overhead reading light somewhere behind you.

When I travelled to Japan a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, a long sinuous double-headed white snake of a thing, pointed at both ends, whooshing along at hundreds of miles an hour. You barely have time to look at anything out of the window, there – you glimpse something and whoosh, you’re past, and its way over there behind you. I was in Tokyo as a typhoon came roaring down the throat of the city, and the trains were stilled until the storm passed, but there were shots of them on the news, hunkered down and gleaming wet in their berths in the rain looking like a nest of sleeping dragons; once they were released again and we went to board ours, it was an entire cultural experience. They ran like clockwork – they remained in any given station a precise number of seconds, and the doors would open at a predetermined moment, and close after the requisite number of seconds had ticked by, and it was your responsibility to be on or off that train in that period of time. The trains did not wait for the tardy. There was a confectionery seller in the shape of a young Japanese woman in a frilly apron and kitten-heeled shoes and her glossy black hair tied back in a huge Minnie Mouse ribbon – she would push her cart into the train car, bow politely to the passengers at large, serve those who indicated that they wanted something, and then, on the way out, would turn and bow respectfully to the oblivious backs of the seats facing away from her, a bow which no passenger would notice or see unless they were specifically looking (as I had been) before pushing her cart into the the next train car to repeat the procedure. The signs by the doors, where we waited to disembark, at the ready, knowing the short stops in the stations, were a precious mess of entertaining translations – my favourite was the English version of the sign underneath the emergency brake – “If you pull this you will be inquired by the crew”.

Sometimes I miss trains. I left an uncounted number of sunglasses on European trains, I left books behind (by accident or design) in my wake. I picked up the debris of meals, both homemade and purchased on board. I dreamed many a dream, asleep in my lower berth listening to the train sing to me.

I learned of land, and of sky, and of light, and of motion, and of people.

Stories. Stories, everywhere. Lost, in a train of thought.

Oh, please. It’s October. There’s “gravestones” in every suburban garden. The spiderweb/ghoul/pumpkin/candy/spookycreakynoises day is almost upon us, and the dead are about to rub their eyes and wonder if it’s time to wake up, after all.

Graves are a natural, given the time of year.

We have a cemetery not too far from us – some ten miles or so down the road. It’s one of the most obnoxiously CHEERFUL cemeteries I’ve ever seen – in spring, its main gate is awash in nodding daffodils and scarlet tulips and the cherry trees within the cemetery itself burst into bright extravagant bloom, and when October rolls around the trees around the perimeter and along the alleys within the cemetery itself turn all sorts of wonderful colours from burnished lemon yellow through bright orange bronze into deep russet reds. It might sound rather morbid to say so, but it’s a joy to take a walk in this area in the fall, actually, especially on one of those crackling cool autumnal sunshine days when the sky is an unbelievable blue and all the hues of fall pop against it just crying out to be photographed. I”ve done just that, many times. The place is nothing if not photogenic.

It also contains plenty of fascinating stuff in and amongst the graves themselves. There are a whole bunch of gravestones in there which are no more than a plaque – often moss-overgrown, when it comes to the older ones – set into the sward with simply the word “Mother” incised into it. Now, that’s all very well, but dear God in Heaven, *was that all that she was*? Who was this mysterious “mother” sleeping in the ground here? Might she also have been someone’s daughter, sweetheart, lover, wife? When was she born? When did she die? Was she a doting grandmother when she passed from the mortal sphere, or was she a new mother with babes in swaddling clothes left behind her in the world? There’s a STORY here, an untold one, and it bugs the storyteller in me something terrible. Inquiring minds want to know, as it were, first and foremost my own. Of course, given that there are no details whatsoever might also imply that I am free to make up my own version of this poor woman’s life. That could work…

There are other stones.

Poignant ones, which you pass by and you read the inscriptions and you find yourself tearing up. You pass by the stone marker, all askew now, and you take a closer look at the dates of birth and death… and you realise that the human life which this stone commemorates lasted less than a year, that the small body lying underneath this green grass and the soft autumn leaves was a babe in arms, that someone somewhere loved this baby enough to raise her this memorial. You wander pass a stone which gives only a name, a couple of dates, and a single incised line of two words: “Only sleeping”. There’s a stone – for a woman who was born in the late 1800s and died in 1934 – which has a balloon attached to it, which says “happy birthday” (someone’s optimistic. or someone loved this woman very very very much).

Then you get the amusing ones. There’s a stone in our cemetery which says that he who lies underneath it rejoiced in the name of “M__ Person” (I’ll redact the names. They may be dead but Halloween’s coming. I don’t want them after me) – as in, what else would be lying here? A beloved horse?… Then there’s a family monument, all marble and fake stone torches alongside the great slab, which bears a family name which begins with “Fuss” (no kidding). There’s a stone which trumpets that underneath it lies a “Distinguished Author, Scholar, and Renaissance Man of the 20th Century” – followed by a three-line-long quote by the great man himself which, um, doesn’t really add much to the equation – it says that man alone of all creatures can determine the fate of his species. The fact that it kind of leads inexorably to a graveside is, um, ironic. There’s a REALLY disconcerting one where a small cherub standing by the graveside blowing a horn is, um, holding the horn up in the required position but is minus a head bearing a mouth with which to produce a sound on said horn. Headless cherubim blowing the Last Post are kind of… interesting…. as and of themselves.

The thing is, for a certain small subset of people a graveyard is where a story ENDS. For those of us who come after, wandering the paths in golden fall sunshine and glancing at the graves, it’s where stories BEGIN. There are so many stories here. So many. Grave matters, to be explored, extrapolated, discussed, woven into tales.

Really old European cemeteries are even more interesting – the kind where the stones themselves have been worn away by time until all you can say with certainty that the buried one died sometime in the 1600s, for instance. And then there are other stories, like Greyfriars Bobby, for instance. I still think that it was churlish to refuse to bury the faithful dog with his master on the grounds that he was an unbaptised cur. They could have sprinlked holy water on the mutt and muttered something baptismal, if that was what it took. PLease don’t stand there and tell me that dogs have no souls and don’t go to heaven – because if that’s true then I don’t want to go there either. So there. All the holy rollers can have it all to themselves, without the joy of a wagging tail or a prodigious purr to leaven the long days of Eternity. There’s only so much angelic singing that you can do before you’ll probably wish you were dead all over again.

I suppose this particular meandering discourse might fall under the general heading of “where do you get your ideas”. Sometimes, other people bury them for you, and you can read just enough of a hint on a listing ancient grave marker they left behind to finish the story in your own inimitable way.

Happy Halloween. Don’t let the ghouls get you.

So there I was, driving down the same road I have driven down ever since I moved to my current house – it’s the only road connecting us to town and to civlization, and EVERY time we go out (to buy groceries, to go to the library, to go out for a meal or to a movie…) we drive down this road. I must have driven down it thousands of times by now.

And yet… and yet… EVERY TIME I DRIVE DOWN IT, I SEE SOMETHING THAT I HAVE NEVER NOTICED BEFORE.

Yesterday, it was a house, NOT a new one, which has this absolutely fantastic weird deck, half of it under an extended roof from the house itself giving it an oddly unbalanced look. It’s just into one of the side roads, but fully visible from the main drag, and like I said, I must have driven past it many a time this year alone. Never saw it before.

Or it could be something as simple as a paint job – there’s one house which I had been peripherally aware of for some time as being – well – a werid shade of plum, really, but was it THAT weird a shade, or did somebody just do a new and enthusiastic, but extremely ill-advised, paint job? On other occasions before that I had suddenly noticed a house painted a bright Hello Kitty pink, or totally painted (no accents, no other colour, just this massive BLOTCH) a certain kind of pukey teal blue-green shade which would give me a massive headache within hours if I had to look at it for any extended period of time, or suddenly changing from a gingerbread-house-type paint job which was full of whimsey and joie de vivre into this bland beige blah THING with no character whatsoever.

Or there would be a tree broken, after a storm.

Or there would be a lilac hedge which was not in bloom one day, and then, suddenly, explosively, magnificently, was in bloom the very next morning.

Or the way light falls in early fall or late spring, or high summer, or a cool grey winter’s day. Or a side street that suddenly seems to turn too sharply, vanishing behind the turn into somewhere that you cannot see, leading to heaven alone knows where.

Or the fact that there is only ONE streetlight sitting there at a specific intersection, and whole swathes of road just before and after it are dark (I keep expecting snow to start falling, and trees to sprout up all around, and Mr Tumnus, bearing Christmas presents, to pick his way delicately into the circle of light).

Or the single passenger waiting patiently at a bus stop without a shelter, in the rain, with water sluicing down his glasses (to the point that you have to wonder whether he’d actually SEE the bus if it turned up, before it ran him over…)

Or the pair of deer trotting down the sidewalk, like a couple of girlfriends out for shopping and lunch – or the buck I saw stalking down the side of the street once, with all of him nicely off the road and out of danger of being hit by a car – all of him, that is, except his huge and imposing antlers, the left-hand one of which stuck out well into the lane and made drivers giggle and swerve around it while the buck ignored them with a great deal of dignity.

Or the posse of kids with dripping hair and wet towels wrapped around them, crossing the street, but going TOWARDS the lake and not AWAY from it which immediately makes me wonder where they had in fact been swimming, then…

Or the way smoke comes curling out of a chimney on a house behind a screen of trees, on the first cool day of autumn, when the first fire gets lit in the hearth.

Or the way light spills from windows in the twilight, some bare of curtain or covering, letting you glimpse the alien worlds within where other people live and live and dream and work and play.

Or the guy who waves at you from his bike as you pass him, and you wave back, instinctively, but are perfectly sure that you don’t know each other at all and you just gave a cheery greeting to a complete stranger – which, to be sure, was not so unusual not so very long ago (…but try transplanting that scene into New York City).

Or the skunk that crossed the street once, with my car and another car from the other direction stopping a respectable way back and leaving him plenty of room to maneuver.

Or the way the wind turns the leaves of the quaking aspens and makes them a wash of silvery light.

Or the way the clouds are sitting on top of Mount Baker today.

Or the peace sign in the window of a rather dilapidated house needing a coat of paint and some TLC but with its heart in the right place.

What is it that makes you suddenly narrow your eyes and go, hey, I never noticed that before, but LOOK…?

It’s like you suddenly get a sprinkling of pixie dust into the corner of your eye, and things that were invisible become perfectly clear, perhaps just this once and you’ll never see them again, perhaps you’ll never unsee them once they have been brought to your attention. It’s faery play, if you listen you’ll hear echoes of silvery laughter and a rustle of diaphanous wings. Was that thing that just flitted across your windshield a butterfly or a real to goodness fluttering sprite?… Are you SURE…?

What kind of things have you noticed lately that you could swear had never been there before… in places you could have sworn you knew like the back of your hand…?

1. There are times that I have sat and watched words which *I am typing* appear on the screen in front of my eyes… and not recognised them. That’s how much my characters – or sometimes just my story – take over when I’m in “writer mode”. I sometimes think it’s a mild form of possession.

2. There are characters I have created that I actively dislike (no, I’m not telling which). There are times that it’s HARD to be fair to those characters. I like to think I generally come out on the side of the angels, but I don’t know…

3. In my stories, people *die*. Sometimes they do so for a really really good reason, or a good cause. Sometimes they do it willingly, in the hopes of achieving something with that death. Other times their death may appear meaningless or wholly arbitrary. But see, this is the way things work in the real world, too, and I don’t think that my fictional realms should be any the less “real” for being created by my mind.

4. I don’t work from outlines or write-by-scenes (which is the literary equivalent of paint-by-numbers, I guess) or to rigid pattern. My stories are as organic as they come. I stick a story seed into the ground, water it copiously, and it sometimes astonishes even me when something weirdly exotic comes up out of the good earth. Having said that, I do have to admit to one amendment to this – for the kind of complicated stuff that I write, keeping a timeline is kind of… essential. All of these characters exist and live and work and play and plan independently, and it sometimes matters that one of them has to be a certain age before another meets them – it really will not DO to have a wonderful romantic relationship happen, and then discover that in your original timeline one of the two lovers has to be three years old…

5. There is a time, after the completion of every single one of my books, usually after it’s “safely” out of the house and in the hands of someone who has influence on its future (such as an editor), that I wander around the house chewing my nails and driving my poor husband nuts with the generic whine of “Nobody wants my book!” He usually counters, once some sort of positive reaction has come in, by putting on his “I told you so” face. But for a while, there, things get sticky. They do. I go through phases of absolutely believing that every sane reader out there simply HAS to hate this thing I have just completed.

6. I flinch at bad reviews, despite trying to train myself into the mode of understanding, on an intellectual level, that there are bound to be people out there whose cup of tea my work ISN’T. Silence, however, is far worse than even the worst of bad reviews. At least a bad review means that someone has READ the book, even though they hated it. Resounding silence makes an author wonder if the book actually does exist, or if the previous couple of months of frenetic editorial activity and galleys and copyedits and proforeading have all been just a figment of one’s imagination. (All this means, usually, is that the reviews arrive in a clump six months later, having been collected by someone in the publicity department and then gathered dust in their inbox for a while before they got sent out. But tell yourself that when you are sitting in your bubble and waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen…)

7. There is something frankly terrifying the first time you see your book in the hands of a complete stranger.

8. You never stop learning in this game. Even when you start teaching, you learn from the people who call themselves your students. That’s because writing is as individual as people – it’s almost like a mental fingerprint, people have pet words, pet phrases, a way of painting an image or an emotion, and people will ask the damndest questions in a workshop or classroom scenario, questions which sometimes make the *teacher* stretch in order to answer them. That’s absoltuely wonderful.

9. There are times that it’s a royal pain in the ass, being a writer. You learn to THINK like one. You sit down to watch a TV show, or go to a movie, and the rest of the people watching the same thing will sit rapt for an hour or two and then drop their jaws in utter astonishment at some twist ending… which you worked out halfway through the story and were waiting with increasing impatience to be vindicated. And you usually are. You learn fast not to open your mouth when other people are watching anything with you, because objects get thrown at you otherwise.

10. It never gets old. Okay? It just never gets old. Every time a new book arrives, it’s like the first time. A flutter of the heart, a burying of the authorial nose into the pages to inhale that fresh new book smell, a strange and silly smile that won’t leave your face for the next forty eight hours. Every book is a little piece of a dream come true. It’s a little bit like sitting outside on the porch just as the clouds break on a gray day and the sun streams through, and everything that was monochrome is suddenly part of a bright and vivid world, and you understand perfectly just why you were born – simply to be the one to see those colours come to life before your eyes.

Just the other day an editor I like and respect – and have sold several stories to – wrote this on her blog:

“Some good stories but not good enough to send up the line. Most stories start too slow to catch my eye. More than one, if I’ve past the first or second page, I think, “This would’ve been a great story if it started here.” In other words, get to the point already.”

And I know what she means. I do. I do, really. But in one sense she conflates “slow” and “badly paced” – and I have to take a step back here, and speak up in defense of “slow”.

Yes, a story should have a point. Tales that meander all over the place – tales that go no further than internal angsting of the characters – tales that basically consist of a beautifully described setting (yes, Author, we know you love the place, but be done, already…) – these are stories which I have never personally been able to engage with at all.

At some point I christened them “New Yorker stories” because every time I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of New Yorker ‘literary’ fiction I’ve kind of found myself swimming with these myopic literary sharks, taking random bites out of anything because they can’t seem to focus hard enough or long enough to actually be dangerous. Don’t getme wrong, I’ve read stories labelled as ‘literary’ before and some of them were deeply brilliant. But on the whole, I do prefer my stories to be, well, you know, GOING somewhere, and taking me there with them. So yes, a point would be good. A point is essential. A story has to have something to TELL me, and something within it to change the characters who inhabit it to the point that I can tell that this has actually happened.

In many cases it is a purely beginner mistake, made fairly often when you are starting out on your writing life. You kind of wander into your story through a side door and poke around the place for a bit until you find yourself comfortable enough to get on with telling the story which you came here to tell in the first place. You grow out of it; experience soon teaches you to recognise when you’ve started a story in the wrong place, and confidence born of writing and writing and writing more will let you make the hard decisions – to abandon the side-entrance and the lingering in the back corridors, in favour of coming in through the front door with verbal guns blazing, as it were.

But this is a fairly specific problem, and “strating in the wrong place” is not the same as “slow” – because slow can be beautiful, and a story that is all point and nothing else is just as awkward and uncomofrtable as one that has no point at all.

Slow is depth. Slow is taking the time to know your tale. You take your story out and ply it with wine and roses by candlelight, you don’t slam it against the wall in a back alley and have your wicked way with it without first asking its name. Slow is waking to a perfect tropical day in a beach resort, wandering out to the verandah and stretching languorously as you watch the sun glitter on perfect pale-blue waters… and then remembering that you came here with the love of your life, that he wasn’t in bed when you woke this morning, and that he said that he might be wanting an early morning swim before breakfast, and that you’ve just caught a glimpse of something thrust under your door and half under the rug, a note from resort management which, when you pick it up, warns you that a hungry shark has been seen close to shore and that you should not go into the water until the problem has been sorted out. Cue ominous music.

But without that slow – without that first glimpse of paradise – the point of the shark is kind of lost. Unh, yeah, sure, there’s a predator in the water. But far more importantly than that, there’s a PREDATOR in PARADISE – and without the slow, without the establishing shot that gives you that paradise to begin with, all you’re left with is the monster.

Think of all those horrible B-movie slasher films, with bucketloads of fake blood and monsters killing for no particular rhyme or reason except that, im, it’s Halloween or something. There is no “slow” there. No subtle. Nothing but the bucketloads of fake blood and the teenage scream queen who’s about to become hamburger. Now think of some of the more subtle Stephen King efforts, where you are lulled by slow, where the small and pretty and innocent and innocuous Maine towns which King loves to set his stories in hide some ghastly horror beyond imagining – made all the more horrifying because of the way that it comes in and leaves bloody footrpints of Point all over the carefully and painstakingly manicured lawns of Slow.

In other words, it isn’t the slow that the problem. It’s a lack of proper pacing, a lack of sense of just enough “slow” to set up “sharp”. Give slow a chance to catch you, because it is the slow that will hold you in the end. The point, however brilliant it is, is sharp and swift – it stabs, and is gone. The slow, it lingers, and twists, and prolongs the pain and the pleasure, both.

Speaking for myself, I build worlds with a loving touch – I like to think I am the kind of writer who can make a reader forget for just an instant that the story that they’re in is really just a stage play and all that surrounds it just stage scenery, painted plywood. To make the reader forget this just long enough to start believing in the truth of it all, to make that reader look at a painted forest and begin to feel the breeze picking its way between the trees, just barely stirring the leaves, lifting strands of the reader’s hair as though with tender fingers, to hear things rustle in the undergrowth.

I am a slow writer, a writer of slow and subtle. I’m kind of proud of that.

I am a book collector.

My husband is another one.

When we got married, he already had a considerable collection of books under way; when we moved from Florida to Washington state he decided to cull it down to a manageable pile.

We got a friend to help us out; hubby presided over the whole thing, sitting at a kitchen table, while I brought double handfuls of books – from the shelves and cupboards in the entrance hallway, from the long and tightly packed shelves in the office, from the tall bookshelf in the spare bedroom. I would pour these out before him and he would triage them into three teetering piles – To Go, To Keep, and For The Friend (the ones the helper wanted to sequester for himself out of that loot). We ended up with fully two thirds of our moving boxes being stuffed with books. Probably 1,500 books, at that point.

Because I knew that we would be moving and there seemed little point in moving my own books TWICE, I had yet to bring my own collection from New Zealand into the fold. When my own moving boxes finally arrived once we started nesting here in Washington, there were at least thirty book boxes out of some fifty packages delivered by the movers (and these included some hefty bits of furniture). We unpacked and sorted THOSE, and lo, there was another 1,500 or so, or damn close.

We have now been together for a decade. In those ten years, we have not ceased to gather up books. We are capable of walking into a bookshop on a random weekend and plopping down $150 on (new and used) books.

We now have a house which has a library off the office, an entire room filled with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three of the four walls. One wall sports a sliding secret door that, when closed, hides the library.

From the office side, the door is, of course, disguised as a bookcase.

The floor-to-ceiling bookcase from hubby’s house in Florida is now in the office and stuffed with enough reference material – on things as diverse as a dictionary of poisons and antidotes, histories of medieval women, a manual on screenplay writing and a Chinese-English dictionary – to make it groan under the weight.

Another room has built-in shelves most of which are triple-stacked with paperbacks, and that room has other shelves where larger hardcovers roost. There’s a book case in the bedroom downstairs. There’s a book case in the second bedroom upstairs – a double one, from floor to ceiling. We built in another shelf into a wall in the corridor. There’s a shelf of large coffee-table books (on Antarctica, on China, on bonsai, on castles in Scotland and trees in South Africa…) tucked under what in normal houses would be a breakfast counter off of our open-plan kitchen.

There are books stacked on the piano, next to my armchair in the living room, which I am currently reading. There are books stacked next to my husband’s armchair. There are piles on the coffee table. There are random books scattered on the dining room table, next to my bed, in the car.

A lot of these books – his, mine and ours – have been read, and many are re-read favourites which have been read many times (I have a fat paperback copy of Lord of the Rings which is literally falling apart from being loved too much…)

But you will have done the math already and figured out a simple truth: we have not lived so long, even combining our lifetimes, to have read every book in this house.

There are unread books on our shelves.

They are not abandoned. Essayist Gabriel Zaid once wrote, “The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” In a response to this, British writer Nick Hornby said, “With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”

Recently I came across another essay on the subject, Kirsty Logan’s “Confined by Pages: the Joy of Unread Books”**

Kirsty says, “An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book—any unread book—could change your life.”

She freely admits to having almost a thousand unread books on her shelves. She has not read these books not because she is afraid that they will not live up to her expectations – but because having an unexplored world out there right at your fingertips is a totally exhilarating idea. It’s an unopened map, full of places for you to go, and you can open it up to any page according to your mood and surrender to writers as different as Maxine Hong Kingsley, Samuel Delany, Norman Mailer, Mervyn Peake, Susannah Clarke, Michael Chabon, Lousa May Alcott, Louis de Bernieres, or some writer whose name you’ve never heard of but whose book you bought on impulse because you took a look at the back blurb and got intrigued (I’ve found many gems that way). It depends on your mood – Kafka or Scheherezade – and it’s ALL THERE, still waiting for you, still unread. Some of it might stay unread as newer recruits come into the fold and claim your attention. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there, and every one of the books on your shelves is part of you, of who you are, of who you were, of who you are becoming.

There is a very good reason I gravitate to the bookshelves of every new house I step into. Those books will tell me more about the inhabitants of that house in five minutes of browsing than in twenty four hours of intense conversation. I have learned to Read the Books, not the innards, but their meaning in people’s lives.

Anyone coming into our house would no doubt be similarly enlightened about us.
Who am I? What am I interested in? What are my husband’s interests? Where do we meet and converge, and where do we each go our own way? Which one of is interested in ancient mysteries and crop circles, and which one in the histories of Byzantium and the Crusades? Which one reads John D. McDonald, and which one reads China Mieville? Do we both read Robert Sawyer? Are we both eyeing the same book on the crowded coffee table, like the last piece of pie on a plate, and wondering which one of us is going to make the first successful grab at it?

Yes, there are books in this house which haven’t been read.

They are waiting for their own rainy day, for their moment, for their hour. Or they are folded over the secrets which they hoard, and may never give those up. Schrodinger’s books, both read and unread at once, unknowable until they are picked up by a human hand.

We LIKE it that way. We will never be caught in the unthinkable situation of having “nothing to do”. All we ever have to do to keep from feeling bored and at a loose end, even for just an instant, is walk to a bookshelf and run our fingers across the spines of the books that live there, and choosing one we have not yet been introduced to, and settling in to become better acquaintances.

Our house is full of unread books, of dreams yet to be dreamed, of roads yet to be travelled down. It is a place of magic. Walk in through our front door, and you will hear stories whispering in our walls.

And what about you? Do you have unread books on your own shelves? Are you ashemed of them, or do they fill you with joyful anticipation…?

** http://www.themillions.com/2010/05/confined-by-pages-the-joy-of-unread-books.html