They were not far wrong.  In fact, they weren’t wrong at all.

The Gods of Gotham has a much different feel than Carr’s book.  Faye, of course, has a different voice, and the novel takes place nearly fifty years earlier, back when New York was just beginning to boom into an over-crowded metropolis.  It’s an interesting book historically, just to be set down into a wealth of details that are so alien to today, and to see those details as natural (because they are to the narrator, a bartender turned policeman, who struggles to do what he thinks is right in a society that cares nothing for morals, for the most part.  Or, what is more interesting, has wildly varying definitions of morals).

I’m not sure I could ever write a book like this.  One, the mystery is intricate and involved and seems like it must have been plotted in advance.  Two, the attention to historical details is, well, overwhelming.  Not as a reader, no, but as a writer I’d feel… constrained?  Manic-depressive?  Lost?

Instead, I’ll create my own worlds, thankyouverymuch.  But, dear Ms. Faye, I’ll lose myself in yours, if you don’t mind.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
My mom turned me on to this book. (Thanks, Mom!)  She was convinced that I must’ve heard of Anne Lamott or the book or something, but she was wrong.  I’ve never heard of ANYTHING.

Which now makes me rather sad.

The subtitle of this book is Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and my girlfriend Megan knew about it.  How?  Because she was assigned the book in a creative writing class and I will say here and now in front of the entire internet that the next time I teach creative writing (assuming such a time comes) I will assign Bird by Bird.

But it isn’t because I think this is the best textbook on creative writing.  Hell, it isn’t a textbook at all.  It’s not an instruction manual (though there are things like instructions in it).  It’s almost the opposite of a Guide to Writing.  What it is, in fact, is your closest friend sitting down with you and talking.  That.  Just that.

Which is to say that Lamott’s book is a wonderful book, and a showcase of writing, regardless of the advice it’s aimed at giving.  The advice is good, sure, and useful, yes, but what’s more important from a writer’s standpoint is seeing a writer at her best and worst.  And what’s more important from a writing standpoint is how masterfully she pulls the whole thing off.

How much of the thing?

The whole thing.

(Back when I worked in the York County Library reshelving books, I was infatuated with the yearly collections of political cartoons I found.  Most of them I didn’t really understand, because I didn’t really follow the news, but something about the attempt to capture an entire argument in only a few panels really struck me.  I’m an easy sell for, I think, for strong opinions under a wedding veil of humor.  And, no, don’t ask me who’s getting married.)

The book is about half cartoons and half essays, each essay framing one of Bors’ main concerns in the world today and thereby neatly dividing the book.  Also, the essays are funny.  Hell, I’d read just a book of his essays, minus the cartoons.  Granted, I’d also read a book of his cartoons, minus the essays.  So a win?  Yes.

I don’t always agree with his opinions, but it doesn’t matter (and I don’t really want to read someone parroting my own thoughts) because he’s honest, cutting, unbending, and funny.  Especially that last part.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Of course, you already know that last part.  The Burgess part.

(By the way, did you know that Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called The End of the World News?  Did you know that it is awesome and you should read it right away?  Yes.  Well, then… good.  Good for you, you know-it-all.)

I have seen the movie version, and it was harrowing.  Reading the book is a little more harrowing, because you are in Alex’s mind all the time, and you never escape the fact that he’s fifteen and his droogie friends are only a year or so older (a fact that’s easy to escape with Malcolm McDowell as the lead, clearly old enough to be vicious in a way that’s harder to forgive in a child/teenager).

It took me a long time to get to the book, though not because I didn’t like Burgess (see above) and not because I wasn’t interested.  Hell, the creation of a new language was enough to intrigue me (though I didn’t find it as difficult to slip into the new vocabulary as I expected).  I think it was that the book was so talked about, so pedestaled, that I was afraid.  Afraid of what?  I don’t know.

O my brothers, I don’t know, because the book is glorious.  Violent as it is, as pessimistic as it is (and despite what Burgess may tell you in the introduction, the last chapter that was excised in the original American version does not make everything sunshine and roses), the book is seductive, and beautiful, and it is the language that makes it so.

Of course, I’m a poet by training, so maybe that’s to blame.  YMMV.  But probably not.

The reason I showed you that was to show you this:

Which I think is a perfect example of how to interpret, analyze, and reformat a genre to one’s own ends.

Also, it’s funny.

As I’ve just warned Megan, my new form of exclamation from now until eternity will be Blammity blam!

It’s called THE SCARLET SCHOOL FOR PROSTITUTES.

I’ve got you hooked right there, right?  Right.  But wait, there’s more.

In a world different from our own, either the future or the past, or on another planet entirely, there has been a disaster.  The population has been reduced to the bare minimum.  And so–

Wait, I’m going about this all wrong.

In a world where no one can love who they want, one girl rises up!  Um…

Okay, so here’s the situation: In this world (or city — we’re not picky), we’ll call it Plantagenet, only a very few people have true rights.  If you are a girl, then there is a chance — a very small chance, mind you — that when you grow up you’ll be chosen by a man of means to be his wife.    If you’re a boy, you are pretty much out of luck.  As soon as you are old enough to leave school, fully trained and in the flush of your youth, you are sent to tame the wilderness, or to complete menial, dangerous jobs, and you will probably die in a few years.  Though their are rumors that not all the boys who disappear die…

In The Scarlet School for Prostitutes, the girls are taught everything they might need to know in life if they are chosen to marry, i.e. how to be a lady.  But they are also taught the skills necessary to living in the Scarlet Schools, because that is where most of them will end up: first aid, diplomacy, self-defense, and midwifery, especially.  Because there is no birth control, the Scarlet School become baby factories.

But one girl (who doesn’t have a name yet, because I haven’t gotten that far — okay, let’s call her Johanna) doesn’t want the life she’s been born to.  She’s made friends with a boy, and when he’s sent away to the wilds or to clear the sewers of ravenous beasts, she begins to plan.  She’ll seduce a man into choosing her for a wife, because then she’ll have the power to save her friend, but she ruins everything by getting pregnant, because if you become pregnant than you and your baby become property of the Scarlet School.

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  What happens next?  I don’t know except that it’s the end of the world as Johanna knows it.

Would you read it?

This is assuming that agents regularly wear socks.  And that socks can, indeed, be knocked off which, now that I consider the phrase logically, seems unlikely unless you were to take the food with the sock.  And I’m not sure anyone would appreciate that.

So, for your reading pleasure today, I have the opening paragraphs to my young adult science-fiction novel Persephone.  Unlike most of my other work, there is no fantasy in this book, no breaks into unexplainable magic-like interludes (except of the Arthur C. Clarke variety of “sufficiently advanced technology”).  It was a strange challenge for me since inexplicable events are part of what allow me to keep going in a book once I get stuck.  But here I had to use actual science!  Mad science, perhaps, but science all the same.

These are the things I remember: the weight of my cat curled up on my chest; the honest-to-goodness last fast food hamburger I ever had; the rancid-sweet smell of Houston after a rainstorm; the girl who tried to befriend me the first day of kindergarten, and who I made fun of for her crappy haircut.

These are the things I don’t remember: what chocolate cake tastes like; the particular feel of being outside on a sunny day; my parent’s faces.

And it’s not even quite that I don’t remember them.  If I really didn’t remember these things, that would be fine.  I wouldn’t remember that I didn’t remember them, so I wouldn’t be bothered by the lack of memory.  What I feel, though, is infinitely worse.  I can sort of remember these things, but I know that my memory isn’t accurate.  My parents’ features change.  The sunny day becomes confused with exercising in the sun room.  Chocolate cake becomes just another form of flavored tofu.

Maxwell, my wrist computer says, my own voice coming from its speakers, get a grip.  There’s no point in obsessing over what you can’t change.

My name, for example.  Maxwell Clerk MacLeod.  Can’t change that and, despite what you might think, there is no good feminine version of either of those names.  Maxie?  Tried that for a micro-second in fifth grade and it took years for the echoes of Maxi Pad to die.  And Clerk isn’t even a name, it’s the sound a chicken makes with marbles in its mouth.

Stop being stupid, Maxwell.

I’m sitting in an air vent near one of the outer rings of the Exploration-Class Spaceship Santa Maria.  Spread around me are all my possessions in the world, everything that is irretrievably mine.  A backpack full of food.  A wood-handled brush.  A mirror.  A kitchen knife honed to a razor-sharp edge.  A barely-working wrist computer.

Everything is silent around me, except that it isn’t.  Nothing is silent on the Santa Maria.  Just like you don’t pay attention to your own breathing unless it’s brought to your attention, unless you’ve been running as fast as you can to escape the grasping hands of someone you had thought was your friend, all the sounds of the ship normally go unnoticed.  A thousand beeps and creaks, the constant whoosh of circulating air, the subtle whirring of the cleaning robots as they slowly, inexorably scour the ship, all of it was as much a part of my body as the pulsing of my blood.

Instead, here is this:

Which is to say that I mostly pretty much love the Scissor Sisters. Their videos end up (again, mostly) being strange and expressive and experimental and interesting. It doesn’t hurt that they often have good hooks (or that the band members, when in the video, are awesome to watch).

This video interests me because it is pretty much clearly defined to be uncomfortable (in a way that the song it’s illustrating was never meant to be). Who are these kids, where is this school, and who thought this would be a good idea? (The answer: Clearly the woman playing the piano.) Of course, I say that, but I would’ve loved to be in a school where this is the sort of theatrical presentation that was put on. And I say that partly because the whole exercise is so overtly theatrical. Look at that blood! The car! We’re watching anti-realism! Brecht and Artaud are alive and well and in elementary school.

Lastly, even though a large part of what charms me about this video is the clear awkwardness of the kids (and the clear fun they are having) that one kid in the back near the end clearly knows how to dance.

Hannes Bok

I found out about the writer (and artist, see above) Hannes Bok through Lin Carter’s book on the history of fantasy Imaginary Worlds.  I’d bought that book to read during my seclusion in Wyoming last year because I was trying to enhance my “academic” background for all the SF&F reading that I do.

No, that’s not it.  The reason I was reading it was because I am fascinated with critical studies and reviews, especially of genres that are typically on the fringe of those being critically studied and reviewed.  Even more so, I’m fascinated by such studies and reviews that are written by authors in said genres (such as the glorious The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s criticism written under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., and the book I have yet to read (having just received it) by Michael Moorcock titled Wizardy & Wild Romance).

Lin Carter’s book is not a very rigorous or even very critical study of fantasy, history or otherwise.  And yet it is a wonderful resource for fantasy that you may have never heard of  from the late 19th c. through the early 20th c.  Some of that fantasy is deservedly unknown — the writing is poor and the characters weak and etc., etc. — but all of it is interesting when taken as a history, of each novel being a step in the evolution of the genre (evolution in this case meaning transformation rather than a “getter-better-ness”).  For example, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land is amazing in so many ways — even if reading through the central part of the novel is a struggle — partly because of the way it is told, and partly because of the world Hodgson creates, so mysterious and epic and, well, reading just past the first chapter will show you why Lovecraft admired the book so much.

Hannes Bok’s The Sorcerer’s Ship is not a greatly written novel, but it has a lot that a student of fantasy can take from it.  The world that Bok creates is deliberately small, almost minor in both scope and creative breadth (especially when he gets into describing the cities), but the way he approaches that world is what makes the book interesting.  At various points he ends up trying to explicate what is going on, but the explanations provided simply make the story all the stranger.

Maybe that’s evident in his artistic work, such as the drawing above.  The human sailor grounds the picture in some sort of reality, but what reality?  Everything that is recognizable about the drawing makes the story its telling as a whole less comprehensible.  And is that what I want out of writing?  Incomprehension?

No, I want the wonder.  I mean, how can you not look at the expressions on the man and the cat and not wonder?  And that wonder, more so than any answer Bok could give us as to what they’re discussing, that’s what makes a story live.

I’m not sure why I’m talking like this.  Perhaps it is because I am in need of a soul.

Anyway.  This show on YouTube that is also on TV somewhere.  I don’t know where because I don’t have TV.  I have a TV.  Somehow, it isn’t the same.

Anyway.  This show is strange.  It is many different elements stitched together by a madman.  Or a scientist.  Or a brilliant child.  Watching Off the Air is mind-threatening.

On that show there was a clip of a music video.  That music video was so arresting that I was compelled to search it out.  The results of that search are below.  Watch them.  Watch it.  Realize that you are both the consumer and the consumed.

I am a producer of things to be consumed.  I am trapped in an infinite loop.  I do not like the beach.  There is no hope for me.

Every time I watch this video, it makes me cry.

The question I ask myself, I suppose, is why.  What is it about the broken-up timeline that makes the video so effective?  Why would it not be as effective if told in a straightforward fashion?

I think the answer has to do with our ideas of narrative.  The truth is that even in a situation like theDead Island trailer, even when the timeline is broken, we (i.e. viewers & readers & well, just human beings) can’t help seeing a narrative.  We can’t help seeing each segment in the order its given to us and making that into a coherent story.

Look at it this way, if the trickery with time was taken out, strictly, for the whole mini-movie what you would see are a few shots of the family as they arrive (what happens at the very end of the video), then the daughter running from zombies, the parents trying to save her, the daughter turning, attacking the father, and everyone overrun with the final shot being the zombified daughter falling to the ground.  What would that leave us with?  The futility of life?  A short story replaying events we’ve seen nigh a thousand times in zombie narratives?  What’s theactual story?

But the way that the movie plays out now, there’s a clear story, a clear focus.  Sure, zombie stories pretty much always end the same way (excepting outliers like Shaun of the Dead): everyone dies.  This is no surprise.  But what the trailer highlights is the humanity we watch zombie movies for — the struggle against the inevitable, and the love (and humanity) that drives that struggle forward.  What’s the last shot?  Where are both timelines coming together?  The father and the daughter reaching out for one another, in hope and love.

Most of my stories (and novels) don’t have what you (or I, for that matter) would call happy endings.  That’s because I don’t care about the ending.  The ending doesn’t matter.  What matters is what happens along the way, both the struggle to overcome and the struggle to hold onto our humanity while doing so.

But horror is only interesting to me for the beauty it reveals.  And beauty is only as interesting as the world it stands out against.

Instead, I will link to this: The Postcard Story.  It’s a combination (pizza hut/taco bell) photography and fiction project that my friend Ashley MacLean and I are trying to fund via Kickstarter.  See, I like to write flash fiction and Ashley likes to take photographs and we both enjoy getting our work before an audience and so we thought:Postcards!

That’s the picture for the first postcard, which a section of the story that begins: “Each performance lasted ten minutes and ended with an explosion.”

I supposed I was thinking of “Harrison Bergeron” when I came up with that line… though, really, I have no idea what I was thinking as that was one of those lines that came to me while I was trying to go to sleep, the words repeating themselves in my head until I either fought myself into amnesiac sleep or, admitting defeat, wrote them down.

So I wrote them down, and the words that followed, and now the story (led on by the domineering opening sentence) has decided it wants out.  IT WANTS OUT!  And the only way out for words is publishing, and the words thought that instead of normal publishing, they wanted to be ingested directly into the eyes of their next victims.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Last night I sent our Kickstarter project into the great wilds of the crowd-sourcing internet, afraid that it would get lost in the forest (for the trees) or eaten by the grues that lie in wait in the shadows.  We trained it as well as we could, giving it language and logic.  We provided the weapons of rewards and the shield of video (deftly provided by Megan Goode).  We gave it a map, and a month to get where it needed to go.

Amazingly, it’s almost already found its way there.  In just a day, the project has been three-fourths funded (a phrasing I used simply because it was alliterative, obviously).  Soon, our little project will be a fledgling now longer.  It’ll have its own friends.  It won’t answer our calls.  It won’t come home to visit.

But that’s okay.  No, really, we love our little The Postcard Story, but we understand that everyone has to grow up sometime, and that babies only stay babies forever in extremely creepy (if you think about it) cartoons.

And we’re using this as a springboard toward greater things! (As are all things in life, right?) (Don’t answer that.) (Really.) This was thought of as a project that Ashley and I wanted to do but also as a test case.  If this project grows wings and flies, avoids the sun, and makes it safe away from the maze, then what other projects might be flung into the air?

And, on that note, I lied.  Here’s the video your mother warned you about: