Inspiration

The nonfiction book I'm reading at the moment isn't really grabbing me. It's interesting at times...but it just isn't quite as, umm, engaging as I'd been expecting. So no real inspiration from that. There was a glimmer of something as I read this morning that reminded me of a story I started some years ago and abandoned, as if perhaps the information here might give me a good way to continue the story. If that's the case, as I keep reading this section of the book, then maybe I'll discuss that next week.

I did, however, just finish Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Behind the times, I know--it's been on my to-read list almost since it came out (definitely since before it was an Oprah book and before I'd heard any rumor of it being turned into a movie), and I just finally got around to getting my hands on a library copy. It, like the nonfiction book I'm reading, was one that I'd brought as possible book club books last week.

Others have said so much about the book (and movie) that I don't feel any need to add anything to general discussions about the book, but I guess what was inspiring was the voice. The spare, bleak tone fits the mood and storyline of the book so well--the way the man is just "the man" and the boy unnamed as well, the imagistic fragments of their journey. I think those of us who identify as genre writers and genre fans have a tendency to privilege so-called transparent prose in a way that can sometimes bleed writing of voice. McCarthy is not writing baroque, lush prose by any means, but he still creates his voice in a way that, well that I think we're often afraid of. I can certainly think of works firmly considered genre that break from that tendency and have strong, distinctive voices, but the shying away from such an approach seems to underlie many discussions on writer forums and reader forums.

So that's my nugget of inspiration this week--we talk of each writer having a unique voice, and that's true in a sense, but each work has its own voice as well, one that needs to work with the thematic and story elements to build the story into a cohesive whole.

Short Fiction...umm, Wednesday

I knew exactly what I was going to mention this week in short fiction, but then things snowballed last night and I ran out of time. So here, a bit late, are some comments on the short fiction I read this past week.

The main story I want to recommend is Kage Baker's "The Bohemian Astrobleme." I'd already had the story open in a tab of Chrome when I heard the news that Kage Baker died of cancer this weekend. So it seemed fitting to make sure I read the story right away. It's a story of a secret society of scientists investigating the source of a strange rock or meteorite origin. There's a...I was trying to put my finger on how to describe the tone of the story, and the best I can do right now is a certain distance to the voice, a quaint distance. Not like it's completely removed from the story, but a hint of a story recounted after the fact, perhaps in some drinking establishment for England's intellectuals. It makes for an entertaining story.

I also enjoyed the two-part Theordora Goss story "The Mad Scientist's Daughter," which concluded last week. Much of the fun was in the references to the famous stories (and the way this undermined them or tweaked our understanding of them). I did have to Google "Rappaccini's Daughter" (though once I did, I realized that I'd read that as well), and I wasn't able to identify Helen Raymond/Meyrinck. Anyone have any insight on what story she is pulled from?

Anyway, sorry I was late this week, but hopefully those stories are worth the wait.

Inspiration

I love this cityscape. Common kitchen jars and boxes, canisters and utensils as buildings is a great conceit. Those who've read a lot of my writing know that I have a fascination with taking something normal and making it huge, in a way that leaves the reader uncertain if it's the objects that are big or the characters who are much smaller than humans really are. I wish I could say that I trace it to a childhood love of this book, but the truth is that while Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was an important book for me growing up, I didn't discover this one until much later. But reading it to my daughter (over and over and over), I recognize a similar impulse here, one that really resonates with me.

More online fiction

I sometimes forget to include Tor.com in the online zines for short fiction that I read, so since I missed a lot of these stories last year, it's good to see a post that lists all of their 2009 stories. I hope to catch up on some of these in the coming weeks.

Short Fiction Tuesday

Strange that my favorite short story I read this week was a vampire story, but there it is--"The Coldest Girl in Coldtown" by Holly Black. I am not a vampire fan usually, but I think what I like about this is the sense that she manages to create plausible effects of a vampirism outbreak. Some governments try an all-out war; others stumble into an uneasy truce. And though the story (thankfully!) makes no attempt to romanticize being a vampire, she manages to capture how even as awful as it is, some people will still romanticize it. In addition, it's just an entertaining story, which, you know, is a good bonus.

Full truth, this wasn't quite my favorite short I read this week, because I (re-)read a story in a collection I own. After finishing Jeff VanderMeer's wonderful Finch, I went and read "Corpse-Nose and Spore-Mouth" from the Secret Life collection, since it works as a self-contained story but is also a sort of early scene of the novel before the novel became something very different. The story is also online, I realize now, along with Jeff's commentary about how the story fits with the novel. So I certainly recommend that as well, both for the story itself and for the glimpse into how a scene can change so dramatically in style and focus.

Nemonymous revealed

I can now reveal which story in Nemonymous 9 was mine: "The Rude Man's Menagerie." Here's one review that had some nice things to say about the story:

Some of the tales use the image of chalk figures like the Cerne Abbass giant. One such story is ‘The Rude Man’s Menagerie’, in which Rebs, working on the remains of her late father’s Michigan tree farm, discovers the chalk figure of a man who appears to have drawn various animals to himself. The man appears malevolent, and Rebs resolves to free the animals — but how? This is a satisfying piece of fantasy that runs on its own internal logic; by the time reality comes gently free of it moorings, one is happy to go along.

Why were there multiple chalk figure stories? This may not be clear to someone picking up the anthology, especially someone from the US who doesn't know about the Cerne Abbas giant, a chalk figure also known as the Rude Man. The subtitle "Cern Zoo" was listed as "Cern(e) Zoo" on the submission page, as an anagram of the previous "Cone Zero" and "Zencore." Much of the discussion I stumbled across relating to the anthology focused on the CERN aspect, so I decided to take the Cerne aspect. But what kind of story could I, a US native who's never been to Cerne Abbas...or anywhere in the British Isles for that matter, write about the chalk figure?

It took me awhile to answer that question, but when I did, I felt that the process of writing the story fit perfectly in the anonymity of the Nemonymous series of anthologies. It was a story, I remember thinking at the time, that anyone familiar with me through my writing would not guess from me. But because I set it very concretely in the West Michigan I grew up in, with all kinds of geographic details from those fields and obvious familiarity with what it takes to work trimming Christmas trees...well, anyone who knew me growing up would pick that up right away. In fact, my brother was paging through the book when he was visiting, not even reading anything in detail yet because he'd just picked it up, and he picked out my story at a glance.

I rarely set stories in the real world--creating and taking advantage of particular differences from our own world is a big part of what I enjoy in writing--but it was fun to try to use my childhood without resorting to either nostalgia or the sort of small-town mockery you often get when writers try to revisit where they grew up.

Cern Zoo also includes one story that will be reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of 2009: "The Lion's Den" by Steve Duffy.

Inspiration

While I may not usually write what most would consider the more science-fictional end of the SF-fantastic continuum, and while I never really enjoyed science classes when I was in school, I find myself frequently reading the science, space, and tech articles in popular press venues. Little interest in the specs of such things, but the fact that they can do this or have learned that is fascinating. Probably my two favorites are archaeological findings and biological discoveries, especially zoological and botanical. New animal species, new understanding of evolutionary trends, new plant mechanisms, rediscovered relics and foundations and the things they say about those who lived there...

So while I don't have any new insights from any nonfiction books this week, I will link to one article, about an armor-plated, deep-water snail, nicknamed the iron snail. The article is primarily about how the snail's armor could inspire new approaches to bullet-proof vests and similar things, which is interesting itself--it seems we're constantly finding new things in the plant and animal kingdoms that then influence technology. But also, just the snail itself inspires me to refresh my memory on the fascinating ecosystems that have evolved in places like deep sea vents. Really, even the most imaginative SF stories are no more wild and strange to human imagination than places like that, far underwater.

Short Fiction Tuesday

I'd read a few short stories this past week, and some of them I enjoyed, but none were really jumping out as something I had anything to say about. So I decided to just pick one today that I hadn't read yet, and that would be the one I'd make mention of here. I've enjoyed various stories by Aliette de Bodard, so I chose her "In the Age of Iron and Ashes" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

I enjoyed the story. It's a dark story of gathering doom...that isn't relieved a lot in the end. Yudhyana, the protagonist, gives a good foil to the darkness of the war with his caring for the recaptured slave girl and his conviction that he's a man for peaceful times, not capable of handling the war-time duties given him. Which gives the ending even more punch... The dancing, the magic of an earlier era now lost, the various gods all add some good touches to the overall mood and feel of the story.