Boy, You Gotta Hammer That Nail

I am tired of rejections. That's all I have to say about it right now.

Recent reads include the fifth Chelsea Cain thriller, Kill You Twice, which was as awesome as the rest of them, if not more so; Tana French's first book, In the Woods, which didn't commit as much Olympic-level emotional archery as Faithful Place but which was very nearly as good; Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, which was genuinely interesting but not something I'd necessarily recommend; Douglas Starr's The Killer of Little Shepherds, which was fascinating and well worth reading but stopped just short of being ah-may-zing; and Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, one of the best books about mental illness I ever hope to read. Remarkable in more than a few ways, and gave me a far superior handle on schizophrenia than I'd had before. Also, I finally finished Ghosts by Gaslight, and what a mixed anthology. Some of the stories bored me silly, and others were so captivating I wanted to read them again when I was finished.

I know there are more books I've finished recently, but I neglected to write them down. Do you guys want me to link to Amazon for this stuff? I could, but I don't figure I have the kind of influence where you want to run right out and buy a book that I've loved. (Plus, four of six of the books above came through my library. Love your libe!)

...

Okay, so maybe that wasn't all I had to say about rejections. I reread my New Year's resolutions this week, and one of them was to be in beginner's mind when writing. I think I'm succeeding at this, slowly; trying to just write well, make each story better than the last, and zip up any consideration of anything else. I get frustrated with the question of how good it has to be before I get a bleeding acceptance, of course, but attempting to write well for the sake of writing well feels good.

Nevertheless, when I am certain I'm improving, when I've read stuff in the market that's exactly like the stuff I'm sending, when I just want to be thrown a bone, it's depressing.

Too, this has been on my mind a lot lately. Go skim it and come back.

The list of mags that's rejected him and the number of times they've done so (near the end) just will not leave my head. 13 tries at one magazine? I never ever would have thought of being so persistent. After five tries, I'd probably say "okay, their style and my style don't mesh" and move on. But no, not this guy. And I note that he has piles of publishing credits, all over the place, and I think, well, obviously he knows something I don't know. And I think the thing he knows that I don't is PERSISTENCE, which is a different quality than persistence. (I'd like to pin this on gender, but that doesn't seem like a wise idea.) The latter is just continuing to try and get published, sending stuff out to market after market; the former is hammering at the same nail until it goes directly into the concrete.

I don't know about that, though. Aren't you just going to bend the nail? Further thought is needed.

On Sunday I drive north to Big Sur, to Esalen, where I'll be at a week-long workshop with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston. I am looking forward to this so much that I'm jealous of myself. So, until next week (or perhaps the week after), adieu.

Yet More Misogyny and Recent Reads

So there's a big flap going on about the sexist content of the recent bulletins of SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. To be clear, the bulletins aren't just little shitty newsletters, they're glossy printed magazines, and a one-year subscription will set you back $32 for four issues. To be further clear, I don't feel like saying much about this issue is really up to me, as I'm not a member of SFWA and haven't personally read the controversial content in question. So I'll summarize that from what I've read - and Googling and spending half an hour reading blogs and forums seems to be the only way to find out what went on if you don't have access to the bulletins themselves, which is why I'm talking around this instead of speaking to it directly - this is more gender bullshit from entrenched misogynists in the SF/F publishing industry, and it's worth getting pissed off about.

I have looked forward to joining SFWA for years, and now I don't think I want to, if/when I'm on the point of qualifying. E. Catherine Tobler has explained the situation eloquently here, and Samantha Henderson has responded more similarly to how I would (i.e. more weariness, fury, and swears) here. I'm a little disturbed that Scalzi didn't do more to halt this (he's the president of SFWA), but there's too much I don't know to place any real blame on him.

On to the reads.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I flew just under 6,000 miles in three days (yes, my arms are tired), and this meant a lot of reading got done.

Before I left, I read Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, a short book by William Styron about his depression becoming a full-blown breakdown. I wanted to read it because I wanted to know what a skilled wordsmith would say about madness, which I mistakenly thought he'd explore in more detail than the (far more familiar to me) business of depression. This brief book unfortunately slimed me a little with the mental ectoplasm of the Great Male Narcissist. I know the essay was meant to be about him and his suffering with depression, but even at that it still seemed overly self-involved. I think this is what happens with depression.

I also read The Quiet Room, a uniquely structured memoiresque book about schizophrenia nominally by Lori Schiller. I walked away with many remaining unanswered questions about schizophrenia, but a better picture of the course of the illness and some of the experience of it. The best part about it was the well-balanced picture of the human cost and tale of schizophrenia - how it affects loved ones over the long term as well as its sufferer. I have a bunch more books about schizoaffective disorders on my TBR list (including one about, get this, identical twins, one of whom suffered from schizophrenia while the other one didn't). It's a mental illness I don't understand especially well, and I'd like to.

On the trip I read Dead Ever After, the final Sookie Stackhouse book. A few shenanigans here and there, but EXTREMELY satisfying (although YMMV if you were an Eric fan, which I decidedly am not). I'm sorry there won't be any more books about her, but I'm also kind of glad. She's in a happy place.

I read the fourth of Chelsea Cain's thrillers about Archie Sheridan, The Night Season, as quickly as the other three. It took several unexpected directions, and I can see how it may have been disappointing for some readers, but I enormously enjoyed it.

And I read State of Wonder, Ann Patchett's latest. It's the first of her books I've read. It reminded me a lot of The Poisonwood Bible, which I didn't particularly like, and I found myself looking forward to finishing, but also reading with enjoyment (Patchett creates narrative tension extraordinarily well). The book seemed limp, dependent on its settings, and much of its plot struck me as outlandish. Yet when I was in the last chapter, I felt like I'd been through a remarkable experience. I looked back at the journey of the novel with amazement and pleasure at what I and the characters had been through. Ultimately I am confused about it.

I felt this way after The Accidental Tourist. Not a book I especially enjoyed, but I'm glad I read it, and bits and pieces of the characters and events kept popping up in my head long after I'd finished. On balance, was this a good reading experience? I have no idea.

I planned to start Redshirts when I got home, and read it halfsies with Faithful Place, a mystery/thriller by an Irish writer named Tana French who was recommended by a blogger I like. I blew through Redshirts in about four hours all told, before I'd even properly started the other book. Rollicking, most excellent fun. I read Faithful Place all last week, and I loved it to pieces. The writing was extraordinary on a sentence-by-sentence basis, witty and delightful, and the character-building and tension were wonderful. In truth, few books I've ever read have made me either laugh or ache as often as this book did. Potent stuff. Off I go to devour French's three other books.

I'm reading more and more thrillers in the last year or so, and I don't really know why. I've read heavy-hitting thriller writers like James Patterson and Scott Turow and haven't especially liked them - they feel pretty blatantly like junk food - and I don't often enjoy standard mysteries of the Christie type. But I keep stumbling upon midlist writers like Chelsea Cain and Tana French and wanting nothing more than to read them all the time.

What I really need to do is get back to my own writing. I've settled on the wikibook as the next project, and its structure is ideal for doing a little bit at a time, a few pages every day, in between research, outlining, reading, etc. But elephant-eating is a difficult business.

Picture credit to Shel Silverstein (obviously)

Through the Jungle, Through the Dark

This week I took a short trip to Minnesota - a state I'd never visited - to meet a longtime over-the-internet friend. It was a relaxing visit, and interesting, and I got to spend time with two sweet dogs and see Tremors for the first time.

I also got a good amount of reading done. I'm going to a writing workshop in July with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston; the original partner for this workshop was Steve Almond, so I dutifully read a couple of his books, but he dropped out due to (I presume) pregnancy (his wife's, not his). Houston replaced him, which meant I needed to pick up her books, too. I read her Waltzing the Cat (short stories) last weekend, and then a novel, Contents May Have Shifted, over the course of my trip. They were both books I appreciated but that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to read, and the novel was frankly a pretty frustrating experience. I liked the short story book better. I also reserved her memoir at the library, because it seemed to me through reading both of these books that that's what she should have been writing all along, and I'm curious about what the shift in medium will bring to her work.

I read some more of Ghosts by Gaslight (last mentioned here), and I'm glad to be over halfway through it. Some of the stories have taken my breath away but some of them have been tedious. On a friend's good advice, I'm only reading a story or a couple of stories every few days, instead of reading it every day like I do with a normal book. I feel dumb that I never knew how much easier anthologies were to read if you take your time.

I tried to read some more of Irene Iddesleigh, which I've been reading snatches of here and there in the last couple of weeks, but reading it on the plane was too difficult. To appreciate Ros's badness you really have to be sitting in a quiet place, preferably with someone nearby to whom to read aloud the worst bits.

And finally, I read Chelsea Cain's third Sheridan/Lowell book. I raced through the previous one and mentioned to Matt how much I was enjoying it, and he said "This is a series, right? How many of these has she written?" and I said "NOT NEARLY ENOUGH," because the answer is five, and now I've read three. There could be fifteen and it would probably be about right. Evil at Heart was a little bit...messier than the first couple, more haphazard (in my opinion), but I loved it anyway. These are great characters and it's a blast to spend time with them. Amazon indicates that another one's coming out in August, but its title is Let Me Go, which says to me that it might be the last one. :(

I missed California even during the four days I was away. Not just because of the weather, but because of the California-ness of it. The essence of being here. On the plane I read two issues of The Sun, and one of the "Readers Write" columns was about the theme of home, a concept that my mind turns to often. I think my next writing exercise will be on the topic, because there's so much I wish to say about "home" and what it means to me. In truth, it might be an exercise that begins now and takes me the rest of my life to complete.

Three Days Coming, Three Days Staying, Three Days Going

Home now from the East now. I am still in the throes of a rotten cold that's been punching me out for a full week (longer than I'm accustomed to), but now that I've ejected a metric ton of mucus from various orifices I hope to be on the mend. I got a tiny bit of writing done on the plane on the way there but was too busy or too ill to do more in the ensuing days. I think the chapter I finished is about twice as long as it ought to be, but it'll come out in the wash.

I didn't take 2666 with me simply for weight reasons, although I'm finally finished with the fourth section of it and am 200 pages from the end. Instead I read Heaven's Bones, a Wizards of the Coast Ravenloft series book by Samantha Henderson (who is my hero for the time being), as well as Sweetheart, the second thriller in a series by Chelsea Cain. You might remember how much I enjoyed the first one. I very much liked this one too, although it seemed less tightly controlled. Quite satisfying/shocking climax, though. Heaven's Bones was extremely interesting and frightening, full of terrifying imagery. There seemed to be a huge cast of characters, although that's not a negative; I had no problem keeping them straight and was eager to know what would happen next in each storyline (though they were all connected, of course). I doubt I'll read any more Ravenloft books, but this one was great.

I also got in some pages on John Dies at the End, but I think I'm about ready to give up the ghost on that one. It keeps kind of exploding out into new weirdnesses too frequently for me to keep up. I can't figure out how all the supernatural events fit together coherently and at this point (about halfway, I think) I no longer care. I enormously enjoyed the beginning so I'm disappointed in myself for not wanting to continue, but hey, life is short and they've made the book into a movie.

That's all for today. I'm hoping to feel well enough to do my New Year's resolution post uncrappily, but we'll see.

Bookworm Report

I can't think of anything big and thematic to write about today, so just some short updates. Mostly about books.

--Over the weekend I read Chelsea Cain's Heartsick. I discovered her through the modern-day Bloomsbury that is a certain Portland writers' group, one which includes Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch, Chuck Palahnuik (to whom I do not cotton as a writer, but whom I respect), Monica Drake, Cain herself, and others. When I discovered that Cain wrote contemporary thrillers, I was shocked, because I thought it would be crazy hard to be a thriller writer in a writers' group including high-literary folks. I suddenly had a hundred questions for her about how she coped with this, emotionally and practically, but I knew I could never even get to the point of writing her a fan letter, much less asking her for advice, unless I actually, um, read her books. So I started with Heartsick, the first in the series, and - I never say this unless it's true - I couldn't put it down. It was SO FUCKING GOOD. If you like thrillers, or if you don't really like thrillers but you like reading about serial killers (me), or if you liked The Silence of the Lambs (also me), read this book. I mean it. Get hold of it today. Beats The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a country mile.

--I also finished off two books lent to me by a friend: The Hunger Games and The Glass Castle. I know I'm a weeeee bit behind the zeitgeist on both of these books, but I think that's good, because I didn't love either one. It's a bit nuts that I didn't like The Hunger Games, because I still carry Feed around in my head every damn day of my life and I loved the Uglies series, but stylistically it was so plain that I felt you could barely distinguish it from journalism, and I really didn't want to read journalism about Battle Royale. And I was put off by its intended audience. I am not so naive as to think that kids can't handle shit as intense as this (I read The Shining before I was ten), but this book seemed way over the top, kind of on purpose, for reasons I don't really understand. I hypothesize that Collins initially wrote it for adults, but publishers or somebody told her that adults don't want to read about teenagers (which is crap, but seems a pervasive notion), so she recast it, and the people who took it on were all "ooh, it's over-the-top for kids, we'll get a lot of attention, let's do it!" Perhaps not. It's just a guess.

The Glass Castle seemed lesser than the sum of its parts. It read like a long string of going-nowhere stories, the winding tale of the writer's upbringing, and they didn't really build to anything except "Wow, what a shitty childhood." Sure, it's redemptive that she made it out and got a degree from Barnard and found success in the end, but I didn't feel anything driving the narrative (except the need to record it all) until about 3/4 of the way through.

--And I read Cinderella Ate My Daughter. If you have a daughter or were ever a young girl, oh, read this. I have a lot of love for the author, Peggy Orenstein, who wrote me back after I wrote her a fan letter for the essay that ultimately became this book, but it's not just that. This is an extraordinary, necessary book, and it shoved me a few steps further down the path of belief that marketing and advertising agencies are altering the shape of our days and months and years and lives in ways that are akin to human rights violations.

--I've been reading kind of a lot in the last few weeks.

--Yesterday I bought a Nook. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I hate almost everything about ebooks (the sole shining advantage is the lack of storage space necessary. There's also the (insane) fact that data seems more permanent than physical objects in our current century, which is only sort of an advantage and more just awful), but I looked at the Nook display and all the people buzzing around it for a long, long time when we were at B&N on Monday. I felt this settling sensation inside me and decided it was time.

I picked Nook over Kindle despite my devotion to Amazon (and Prime membership, and all sorts of other good reasons) because the internet told me that Kindles have ADVERTISEMENTS, which I am NOT DOING in ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM. NOT. I read books to get away from that excrement. So I bought a Nook. I used it a little bit yesterday, to check out a book from the library and to buy another Chelsea Cain book (on sale). I read the library book for a couple dozen pages and it wasn't that bad. I liked the experience of reading it pretty well, even if I don't think much of the book so far.

The thing I would really like is if ebooks and paper books could exist in the same market. There are books I'd rather hold in my hand to read, and books I'd be happy to carry around with me in an electronic gadget. I'll bet there are lots of readers like that out there, and that their preferences as to which books are which are very different from mine. So it would be great if we could just have both. But the current model of book publishing simply won't sustain, and it seems that ebooks are exactly the catalyst needed for a total industry overhaul. So maybe paper books will go.

See, even Darth Motherfucking Vader hates ebooks

--Matt talked patiently with me for nearly two hours a few nights ago about the [non-]horror book. We talked widely and generally about creative work and its pitfalls and perils, and we talked quite specifically about what I should do with the book. He helped me to discover something pretty amazing about the kind of hero I like to read about (compared with the kind of hero everybody else apparently likes to read about), something that I think will propel me into the second version of this book.

I liked the book the way it was, but after talking and thinking it over, I'm going in a completely new direction. Away from murky cross-genre and toward adventure; away from an unlikable and unspecial heroine and toward a more traditional one. (With actual motivation!) Those of you who read All Available Time will barely recognize this next version (I hate to call it a draft, since rewriting it nearly from scratch doesn't feel like a goddamn draft) when I'm finished with it. If you, too, liked it the way it was, let's electronically put our heads together and weep for it. Then I'll get started on it all over again.