I made it. With the emailing of the full draft of my 21st Century Gothic essay on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I’m done. That’s it. I’ve met my deadlines for 2009. Which is remarkable because for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to make it.

(I think I made it by going a little crazy for a while.)

Of course, a lot of those deadlines were for A BOOK OF ENDINGS (six new stories, yours now via Twelfth Planet Press!), but the timetable of 2009 work made it all the way into December. Now I’ve got to start thinking about my timetable for (*gulp*) 2010. Something a little calmer, I hope, though I maybe have just signed up for another Gilgamesh project. And there’s editing for the contemporary Ishtar story soon, most likely.

Anyhoooo, the essay. It’s in & it may or may not coherently argue that the battle of good (Sheriff Bell) and evil (Anton Chigurh) for the soul of one man (Llewellyn Moss), the elements of the supernatural, the voice of despair, the struggle to believe in a God who seems less involved in the world than Satan are all Gothic elements of this modern novel. There’s other stuff, too. I refer to Anne Radcliffe and Terminator in about equal measures, and naturally I mention MELMOTH THE WANDERER more than once.

But here’s the thing: I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about gothic literature. Turns out I’m not that knowledgeable at all. It impresses me how much trust esteemed editor Danel Olson has placed in his extensive contributor list (2 volumes!).

Plus, essays. Wow, I’d forgotten how hard they can be.

For now, though, the next steps are to return to the fun stuff. My stuff. The BROKEN novel. I’d left off with John Eiger about to — well, let’s just say he could be making a big mistake.

Man, I love when characters make big mistakes. I love sitting alongside them thinking, ‘oooooohhh, buddy, you’re in trouble now….’.

But tonight some rest and something new to read that *isn’t* NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I’m thinking it’s time to return to some Michael Robotham.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Taking a breather from trying to come up with finish an essay on why I consider No Country for Old Men gothic, to close some browser windows.

So, then.

If this is the future of storytelling, I don’t think I mind it at all.

Also, some reading for 2010. Could come in handy, particularly if you’re thinking of doing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge like driftwoodyak. I’m really keen on this, but I don’t think I can both read more AND write more all in the same 52-week period.

I’ve just added New Model Army and Death of the Author to my (already too-long) list. Man, I’m sick of reading boring books.

But if all that reading’s too much, maybe just skip to the end.

Last but not — well, just last — I came across the National Library’s page for A Book of Endings. Kinda cool.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Well, I didn’t have to go very far to find my welcome-back-to-the-blogosphere deathknell. Fictionbitch calls this the end for writers, but I wonder if it’s more about the end for readers. The end of a nice sit down in a bookstore, that is, heralded by Waterstones — a British bookchain, from the sounds of it. I don’t think we have Waterstones, but I doubt that gives us much of an evolutionary advantage.

Still, the article ends on a high note by suggesting Waterstones may end up killing *itself*. Selling eReaders will wipe out the need for bookshops of any kind, apparently. (Unless someone comes up with a Red Room for eBooks, I suppose.)

I found one of the Waterstone article comments interesting: a parent who tells their child, ‘we don’t care what you read, just read something!’ Much as I want to encourage reading, I’ve always found this idea of the mystically transformative powers of reading kinda … short-sighted. My neighbour’s kid took to reading at the age of about eight. He read & read. What he was reading was the Harry Potter books, over & over again. Not sure if he ever did take to reading anything else.

Quite apart from that, he was one weird little kid.

The point is read, sure, and read widely. But be aware when reading that you may still come across garbage. And reading garbage is just as bad as watching garbage, listening to garbage or, indeed, eating garbage. Strictly, y’know, in my opinion.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, all right, I admit I’ve laughed along with the best of ‘em at Dan Brown’s prose (the famous silhouette with the pink eyes is my favourite), but I do have to wonder: where in heck was the EDITOR in all of this? Could you GET another editing gig after that?

“Hi, I’m looking for a job, my previous experience was as editor of Dan Brown’s –” *click* “… hello?”

Yer have to hand it to Brown: he’s found something that millions of people can enjoy. More than one commenter over at this column even states it specifically: Brown gives good story (even if he doesn’t give good prose).

(Yes, yes, I know, story is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, what? Oh, well, I’ve not really read any … or, okay, I read one, but I skim-read it, & I don’t know if I really thought it was a good story. I’m just a Knights Templar-obsessive. It seemed to roll along, though. What’s that you say? Characters? Oh, well, I’m not sure there were any…)

Still and all, Brown would find a lot to laugh about with MY thwarted novel attempts. And I couldn’t blame him for that. Hats off to him for his runaway success, after all. Not many authors get that level of buzz around their next novel, that many people excited by & looking forward to their next work. Good on him, I say! And I actually mean that, though the flippant nature of the rest of this post is probably undermining my attempts to be sincere on that front. Good on him, so few of us break through, how can we begrudge the ones that do?

But if you ARE looking for a rollicking good story where the prose may not pain you so much, there’s an excellent-looking list here. Onto the wishlist with these!

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

The lurgy is finally lifting, thankfully. For a while there it was impossible to sleep AND breathe simultaneously. Which can add a layer of difficulty to, oh, everything.

From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

OK, so I’m getting a little obsessed with cover art (ever since Nick Stathopoulos turned in the fabulous A Book of Endings cover!). Yesterday I spent a couple hours staring at these sites:

http://www.thebookdesignreview.com
http://shelvedbooks.blogspot.com
http://henryseneyee.blogspot.com

I also followed various links, finding myself in a world of cover debate. Including a link to a rant by Stuart Evers on the good side of bad books:

After a promising first page, which actually made me laugh, Low Alcohol descended into the kind of literary hell most readers would hesitate to enter, even led by a Dickens or an Austen, let alone a debut novelist sniffing like a mangy dog around the arse end of Martin Amis. Derivative, unfunny, nasty and puerile, the whole shabby affair – concerning the life and loves of Doug Down – was an ill-conceived disaster. And I’m glad I read it before it fell out of print.

See, I’m not convinced there’s a value in that. Surely life is too short for bad books in the same way it’s too short for bad coffee, bad food and bad love affairs…?

Over at The Guardian, Alison Flood asks the question “are we really going to admit to judging books by their covers?” To which the answer must be ‘yes’. Even in an age when more & more of us are looking at electronic solutions for our libraries, it’s probably useful not to stray TOO far from your content with a misleading cover.

(This presented a particular problem for the cover of my own antho, as I find myself moving further away from genre into just a kind of ‘weird urban’ storytelling. Which — I hope! — the Stathopoulos cover captured rather brilliantly!)

Please-god, spare me from ever having a chicklit cover! Or from finding myself in the ‘chicklit’ section of Barnes & Noble (seriously, does that exist?). Somewhere I’ve seen chicklit referred to as the ‘buying shoes in the big city’ genre. Which reminds me, I think I *did* write a story about buying shoes in a big city once. But I like to think it was only because I needed shoes. And live in a city.

I digress. Let’s leave the final word on that one to author Janelle Brown, ““Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in.””

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

BUT lots of interesting reading suggested at SF Signal. In this case, non-genre titles for genre readers.

And there’s also recommendations on literary fiction for people who hate literary fiction at Emerald City.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Poll #1193954 Excitable reading
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

So my question is: what are you reading lately that you're finding knock-out, drop-dead exciting?!

Lately I've been -- largely by accident rather than design -- having a great time reading.

Which is to say, I'm *accidentally* stumbling across some great writing. Leapt from Walter Mosley to Michael Robotham to Lee Child purely via the tempting placement of covers in assorted bookshops. So, that's an American writer setting his stories in America; an Australian writer setting his stories in Britain; & a British writer setting his stories in, yes, America. You see?

I was pulled up for my sudden appetite for crime/detective fiction lately. As if it was unusual. In fact, I've always had a thing for detective fiction. I just got bored when it became trendy (which I'm pretty sure is an entirely fair response). I'm a Carter Brown fan from years back, & I've been known to travel through the fem fiction writing from Sarah Paretsky & Australian Marele Day, to Dorothy Porter's rather remarkable prose poem pieces.

What I'm enjoying about this fiction now, crime fiction, is the very thing I think my own fiction could benefit from -- the immediacy, the action, the stakes, the swift prose & swifter events of the narratives. It's a thrill to give yourself over to a story like that, an even bigger thrill to find your critical mind silenced, your sense of awe re-established.

Another thing I'm loving that I've always loved about these books is the theme of the outsider: the loner, bruised but unbowed, self-sufficient in all but love.

Lee Child does this brilliantly with his Jack Reacher character. But of course it turns up in other genres as well. Peter Watts' Starfish, with its lonely anti-hero, is one of my favourite Loner pieces. I think my love for the figure of the Loner stems from a teenage fixation on the 'Man with no name' mythos of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns (A Fist Full of Dollars, and so on). It wasn't just Clint Eastwood's piercing gaze that startled me, nor his blank-faced contempt for the goings on of the world. It was the freedom from rules I liked about that early hero, the freedom from duty, but also the freedom from geography.

I'm not sure why geography has weighed so heavily on me, but it's been on my mind since childhood. Perhaps moving house one too many times does as a kid does that to you: separates you from your surrounds, but also reminds you of how heavily you're tied to your possessions. The loss of a childhood toy, a childhood friend, a childhood ritual makes you wish you could lose everything, all at once. At least then you could stop worrying about the piecemeal loss life seems set on delivering.

Oddly enough, the other thing I've been reading a lot of lately is death prose.

How I pity them. They will never be truly well educated, because they do not read. They will never understand the human condition of people outside the limiting walls of their lives. They will never understand what it is like to be a different person, living in a different world, experiencing another vastly different life.
-- glendalarke

In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it.
-- Caleb Cain, Twilight of the Books, The New Yorker, 24 December 2007

I'm not really all that bothered by the idea that reading will one day perhaps be confined to a "reading class," primarily because, as far as literature is concerned, it more or less already is.
-- Daniel Green, The Prestige of Exclusivity, The Reading Experience blog, 26 December 2007

It's interesting to take a second to look at wikipedia. It started with the most populist, inclusionary point of view of all, but over time, people being people, a hierarchy and inner circle has been created. The exclusion is based on effort and skill, not race or income, but it's still exclusionary. And at its best, it makes the site work. When it fails, it limits discussion, reinforces small thinking and enrages the outsiders.
-- Seth Godin, Exclusion, Seth Godin's blog, 25 December 2007

Three tracts on the uses & abuses of exclusivity came through the RSS feed ( last week. )

dracula1897 is starting. Today there is a review of Bram Stoker's book from the year it was published. Deliciously, it spoils the entire plot. Proving critics can really be jerks sometimes.

Dracula is an epistolary novel (meaning that it's written as a series of documents; usually letters, here everything from letters to diary entries to newspaper clippings). On this community, they'll be appearing on the day they're dated, starting with Jonathan Harker's first journal entry on the 3rd of May. The novel finishes in November, so we've got about six months.

Dracula. Real time. What mortal hell will we unleash as we read it, end to end and as if it's happening now? What creepy cris-crossing of energies will we throw into the world as we commune with these monstrous happenings and also each other?

And isn't this a fascinating exercise in structure and live community? What if we all wrote books to be read like this? What an excellent experiment!

I recently asked a bunch of people this question & received some pretty interesting answers, so I thought I'd throw it out there:

"What stories do you find yourself recommending again & again?"

I'm not asking 'what are your favourite stories' & I'm not looking for stories you think you *should* recommend, but the ones you find yourself mentioning over & over, & only after your mouth starts working do you go, 'oh, look, there I go again, always talking about Mary Gentle's Ash or Peter Watts' Starfish, it's like I've never read another book in my life'.

Books, short stories, comics, or maybe it's movies & TV shows. What has lodged in your brain & keeps blurting itself out?

Over at filomancer's blog, some interesting comments are being made about the apparent decline in SF readership.

Sometimes I think that what's happened is that sf has become too sophisticated for its core audience, which used to be teenage boys. Their attention span, and maybe yours and mine, isn't going to last through three paragraphs' description of the protagonist's breakfast with his mother when that doesn't add any dramatic tension or move the plot forward. I'm sure this was true even back in the Golden Age, before everyone's attention spans got shorter. Science fiction used to be adventure fiction, and that's what attracted a lot of its readership.

Thanks to genreneep for pointing this out.

I'm blocked.

I was reading this book, quite happily -- well, not *quite* happily, that's the problem, that's why I slowed, stopped, looked around. And when I looked around I became --

-- blocked --

-- unable to continue with confidence. It was weird, but to start from the beginning: when I was, what, 19, maybe, I read a book. Well, several, but let's deal with just this one for now.

I read this book called DREAM DANCER & it was like a blow to the head. There was such energy & force in it that even a decade and a half later I could still recall its images. Despite the fact I couldn't keep up with all its vocab or ideas, I loved that book.

I had to hunt out a copy in a second-hand bookshop so I could return my borrowed library edition. And it was the first of a trilogy, so then I had to hunt out the other two. This hunt took several years but eventually I had all three books on my shelf.

On. My. Shelf. I never read them. I was afraid of the disappointment, because DREAM DANCER loomed so large in my mind. What if it wasn't as good, & I lost the joy of that memory. Perhaps it was best left alone. Perhaps, perhaps.

I am not good with leaving alone, I suppose.

Curiosity overtook me this year, or a desire to re-connect with my past, & I read DREAM DANCER again. And it was great. It was remarkable in its detail, astonishing in its breadth, delicious in its baroque cadences, impressive in its structure & strategy. I leapt straight from book one to book two: CRUISER DREAMS.

This author is new weird, this author is smart & has a sense of earthy beauty, this author is accomplished. This author mixes science with grand gothic tropes. This author should be more famous. Why isn't everyone talking about Janet Morris, I wondered.

Anyhow, CRUISER DREAMS slowed me down because its baroque sensibility tipped, IMHO, towards prose of the decidedly mauve kind. I found myself chuckling sometimes, & the unrequited love that seemed so painful in the first book just kinda, I dunno, I'm not good with romance plots anyhow, it's probably just me. But I still wanted to know why Janet Morris wasn't famous. ( So I googled her. )

Paul Wells admits to be a 'serial book-unfinisher' over here at macleans.ca, & it got me thinking: just how important *is* an ending, anyhow? Have our lives become too darn busy for proper resolution?

Or have endings just ceased to be important?

Someone once said that you can tell how much you're loving a book by how you approach the ending. If you rush forward, skimming pages, then you're bored & want it done with. If you savour it, lingering over each page turn, making sure to take in each word, then you want it to last forever & you're already mourning its passing.

I'm finding lately that I'm barely reading endings at all. Particularly with modern mainstream/literary books, they seem to stop rather than finish. They have become stylish little accessories that you can dip in & out of. Journey & progress (ie. story) are not so relevant. You don't need to know the ending to feel as though you've finished with the book.

It's like mood music. It's not there to be the focus of your attention & unless you have something else to do, a few chapters in you're maybe feeling like you've had your fill.

Take, for example, Chole Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime (which happens to be on the shelf in front of me): an elegant, smart book about a woman obsessed both with an affair and a murder. It pushes forward with a chilling sense of inevitability, only to finish with a kind of off-hand Clayton's confrontation* and a sense of issues put aside rather than resolved.

The ending might be trivial, yet I still like the book.

When I read it I remember thinking that ending was probably a believable depiction of how things go in real life. Life can be sort of dissatisfying and frustrating, too. Life can make you think that maybe there's _more_ somewhere else, some place just beyond reach. More than this, more than what you have. More than just a *suggestion* of murder, for example.

And, in Hooper's defence, I do actually remember the ending at least. There have been plenty of books where I couldn't tell you what actually happened on the last page, if anything. But I'll always remember how a book made me feel, & perhaps that's more telling than one little, final event at the back.

Years ago I developed what I call the 'hundred pages rule'. That is, I read to page 100 before I quit on a book -- because it often takes me a while to like a new story. I have to get into it rhythms & mindset. So, I read to page 100 to make sure of my opinion of the book before I let myself give up. If, at page 100, I'm still not really into it, I stop reading. Maybe I'll try that story some other time, maybe I won't, but I make sure to get at least that far.

Now I think I need another rule: the 'quit whenever you've had enough' rule. Whether that's page 101, page 340, or three pages from the end, I find I no longer believe the ending will make that much of a difference to whatever opinion I've already formed.

After all, there's a heck of a lot of good books out there, & life is way too short.



-----

* Clayton's confrontation: the confrontation you have when you're not having a confrontation.

"The first I learned of the new practice of splitting novels to satisfy chain store strictures was when I read Peter Watts' introduction to 'Behemoth: B-Max', which turns out to have been the first half of the final novel in his 'Starfish' trilogy. He says in the introduction to this novel -- and later confirmed in an interview for this site -- that it is merely half the novel he wanted to call 'Behemoth'. However, the chain stores supposedly don’t like big novels by non-big-name writers, though I would argue with two well-regarded hardcover novels, Watts was certainly well-known. Still, his publisher, Tor, told him that he had to either cut the novel down to an acceptable word count -- somewhere around 75,000 to 100,000 words -- or split the novel. So, he split the novel at a natural spot, and now readers can line up both hardcovers as I have on my rolling shelves."
-- Rick Kleffel, http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2005/02-23-05.htm

I'm torn.

Frankly, I'm not someone who's attracted to fat books. Too impatient. Too outcome-oriented. I read books & I keep a count of the number of pages remaining -- even if I LOVE a book, I still do that.

'Hmm, I'm on page 250, & there are 480 pages in total, so I only have 230 pages left.'

I don't know why. Terrible attention span. Easily bored. Doesn't make friends with the other children.

Or maybe I figure smaller books are more likely to be carefully edited, that more time will be spent checking the words than producing the words. More energy will be put into crafting than building. It's some kind of subconscious bigotry on my part, impossible to justify, really.

Anyhow, I am a fan of style, as I've mentioned. I can forgive a lot of things about a tale if it's beautifully told. I am happier with that than I am with a book which has a great story, but which bored me line by long, drawn-out line until I gave up & threw it away. I gaze across the vastness of a fat book's spine & often see myself turning into an old woman before I can manage to finish it.

So, unless a big book is really, really highly recommended -- I mean, really -- then I tend to skip it in favour of some faster, smaller hit. The fattest book I've ever read was probably Mary Gentle's ASH: A SECRET HISTORY. Yes, it came highly recommended, & yay, thank all that is holy that it did. It's one of my absolute favourite books. I love that book. It has smarts & style & epic action & it has emotion & wow, it feels like a real place, a REAL happening. I still miss Ash herself, that crazy, mercenary bitch.

In Australia we followed the British model of publishing ASH as one large book. In the US it was split into no less than four. The funny thing is that I loved the fact it was a fat book with a cover like a sand-covered chest. It made me feel like it was a magic box. It made the story even more potent to have it there as one huge, courageous thing, one massively assertive object.

'Here I am, I'm gutsy enough to be THIS BIG.'

The fatness of it gave it a solid presence when I held it. It made me feel taller. To have split it up -- even though there were logical places to do that -- must, surely, have damaged the momentum & lessened the effect. Reducing the object must have made the story feel less serious. (Americans are now welcome to correct me, of course -- please!)

But if ASH hadn't come so very highly recommended, would I have picked up such a big book & paid money for it?

Probably not.

So if you're asking me if I wish they'd published Peter Watts' BEHEMOTH as one glorious, weighty, thick tome, then yes, I do. And not just because it would mean I wouldn't have to pay the purchase price twice. More importanly, because the author believes it is one story. And because I trust Watts, I love Watts, & his first book, STARFISH, is one of my other absolute all-time favourites, & favourites are rare. Rare enough to be taken seriously & to be given their space & to be applauded for their bravery.

And when I get around to purchasing & reading BEHEMOTH (I can't believe I've let it go so long), I will probably buy both books at once & glue them together & read them as one large, healthy story the way God & Watts intended.

You can consider this -- sight unseen -- a very high recommendation to do the same. ;)