A Different Lord

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I just wanted to learn the basic outline of Lord Byron’s life without having to commit to the hundreds of pages most of his biographies boast.  Something brief, but authoritative.  Something for which I could be sure the author was vetted.  I hadn’t read any of the Writers and their Works series before.  It gets good reviews and here was the story of Byron in less than 100 pages!  I was excited to get started.  Then I discovered this is mostly about his poems rather than his life.  It contains 21 pages of biography and 60 of poetic analysis.  I really should’ve checked more reviews.  I’m not really into poetic analysis.  I know that those of us who create tend to think of our creations as extensions of ourselves.  I’ve made 3-D art (kind of like sculpture), I’ve drawn, I’ve painted, I’ve written.  These are parts of me that exist in the world.  But really, I just wanted to know what Byron’s life was like.

Actually, I did learn the answers to some of my questions.  Although a “lord,” he didn’t inherit much wealth.  Indeed, the opposite.  His eventual wealth came from his poetry.  This is nearly an impossible dream these days, of course.  His fame brought the spotlight onto his personal life and politics.  A man who easily “fell in love”—he was a Romantic, after all—he had affairs and his politics weren’t those of the majority.  He left England at the advice of a friend, never to return.  He was friends with Percy Shelley, which is common knowledge.  As he made a home, actually several homes, in Europe, he continued to earn good money for his poems.  He was famous and feared, it seems.  Although the book doesn’t describe it, he gave the world its Byronic hero.

I haven’t read much of Byron’s poetry.  That style of writing has never appealed to me.  The poetic life, however, is of endless interest.  Shelley drowned on a boat trip home after visiting him in Italy, and Byron was present at the cremation.  (And I got yelled at in the New York Public Library for trying to snap a picture of the fragments of Shelley’s skull that were on a special display.  Byron had been there in person, of course.)  A few short years later Byron also died while helping to plan and finance the Greek war for independence.  Still, there is more I’d like to know.  But probably not enough to read a biography of several hundred pages, though.

Cuckoo’s Roost

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John Wyndham is someone I discovered through movies.  Often considered a science-fiction writer, his works cross over into horror, particularly on the silver screen.  Many years ago I read Day of the Triffids and, having seen Village of the Damned, wanted to read The Midwich Cuckoos.  It was a pretty long wait.  I kept thinking I might find a copy in a used bookstore, but it never happened.  When I saw a reprint edition I ordered it with some Christmas money.  There are some horror and sci-fi elements to the story, but there’s also a bit of thriller, as it’s called now, thrown in.  The book is quite philosophical because of the character Gordon Zellaby, a Midwich resident who keeps thinking about what is happening in terms that don’t match the expectations of other, more prosaic thinkers.  In case you’re not familiar:

Midwich becomes unapproachable for a period because an alien ship (the sci-fi part) has covered it.  Everyone in the village is asleep for a couple of days.  When they awake, generally no worse for wear, they soon discover that all the women of childbearing years are pregnant.  They all give birth about the same time to children that look eerily alike and have bright golden eyes.  The officials know this has happened but adopt a wait-and-see attitude.  Meanwhile, the locals get on with things but they discover these new children develop about twice as quickly as humans do and they can control people with their minds.  They also have collective minds so that their brainpower is quite above that of Homo sapiens.  Zellaby makes the connection with cuckoos—birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and after they hatch shove the other chicks out of the nest.  Indeed, this is a story about what if cuckoos were humanoid aliens who tried the same thing with people.  Told with a British stiff upper lip.

The story slowly unfolds and gets scary as it grows.  I saw the movie quite a few years ago and the details were lost on me, so I was learning as I read.  I suspect that it differs from the book quite a bit.  Perhaps it’s the Britishisms that make this story less of a horror tale.  There’s a kind of jocularity to the style, at least for a good bit of it.  The serious issues of how governments and individuals interact is raised and discussed to a fair extent.  Even though the book is fairly short, there’s a lot going on here.  But now I need to watch the movie again.

Release Date

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July 16.  That’s the release date for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  If you’re so inclined, preordering helps to earn a book attention.  (I know it’s pricey, but thanks for considering it for a second.)  This book has been, like most books, a long time in the making.  As my wife will attest, reading the proofs nearly sent me into a spiral this time around.  It wasn’t because they were bad (I only found 7 mistakes) but it was because of my own doubt about how well I’d done this one.  I found myself between elation at some parts, and dread at others.  I really like this book but I spent my proofreading journey anticipating what critics would say.  I do take a few chances in this one and it has what I believe to be an important message.

Writing books is like walking into a library naked.  There may not be many people there, but those who are can see more than you want them to.  I love the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  I learned a lot about Washington Irving doing this research.  I learned a lot about Halloween—that’s one of my favorite chapters.  I also like the conceit I applied to the book itself as a labyrinth.  And I’m already looking forward to reading more renditions of the myth once the dust settles a little.  Reading the proofs took a good portion of the weekend, as well as after-work time the previous week.  I could focus on little else.  Books, you see, are parts of their authors.  I feel a little bit crazy for even writing them in the first place.

That having been said, I’m chuffed with a July publication date.  The best time for Halloween books to be available is the summer.  My last two Halloween titles (Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible) both came out in November or December.  Not that there were angry mobs at Barnes & Noble demanding them at the end of October.  The other deadline I’d set myself was to have this published before Lindsey Beer’s reboot of Sleepy Hollow hit theaters.  I seem to have managed that one by quite a margin; there’s still been no release date announced.  For her, that is.  I just received mine yesterday.  I guess it’s time to start touching base with those good folks in the Hudson Valley who expressed an interest in the project when I first told them about it.  I’m anticipating Halloween already.

Therapy with Books

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I’ve been doing this for years and just found out there’s a name for it.  Bibliotherapy is a treatment method that uses reading to deal with anxiety.  It is closely related to writing therapy, which I also use.  Both have been self-moderated, in my case, and both have been part of my way of coping for decades.  I was actually surprised to learn that these are valid methods of treatment that some therapists use.  I knew about journaling (I suppose blogging counts), but the larger picture was never in focus.  We live in stressful times.  We went through a very stressful four years about, let’s see, eight years ago.  This time I’m intentionally using bibliotherapy.  Reading a book (eyes off the screen, please!) is a way of entering another reality for a while.  Already this year I’ve stepped up my reading, as much as work will allow.  (And now, proofs.)

Writing is therapeutic as well.  Both reading and writing engage your mind.  And can remind you that there are other things to life besides headlines.  I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately.  That doesn’t mean I’ve been publishing a lot of it—that part’s still very difficult for me—but writers do it because that’s what writers do.  And it makes me feel better.  More balanced.  One of the truly difficult things in my life is when I’m on a roll, particularly with fiction, then I have to stop for work.  The whiplash is almost too much some days.  I realize that you can’t make a living out of pouring your soul into words, unless you’re very lucky.  And even then I suppose it might soon start to feel like work.  Maybe some day I’ll find out, but until then reading and writing will see me through.

I know I’m not alone in this.  There are other people out there who spend as much time as possible between the pages and/or with pen in hand.  There’s nothing like it.  These therapies can change your mood.  Give you hope.  Make you feel complete.  And this can happen whether something you’ve written gets published or not.  I admit to having seen therapists from time to time; I probably should do it more.  None of them, however, have suggested bibliotherapy.  It’s something I stumbled onto myself.  That’s probably no surprise.  I bumble my way through life most of the time.  We all know, I suspect, when our brains are firing properly, what makes us feel better.  The shelves that surround me most of every day certainly know.  And there is a name for it.

Cloistered

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Free will.  I’ll go on the record as a proponent.  Any kind of determinism gives me the willies.  At times, however, it does feel as if we’re merely pawns.  Katy Hays deals with the concept of fate, and the occult world of tarot, in The Cloisters.  The writing is quite compelling and the story moves along at a good pace.  It follows Ann, a graduate from eastern Washington who wants to get away from the town where her father was killed.  She accepts the offer of a summer program at the Met in New York City, but because of a mix-up ends up at the Cloisters instead.  I’ve never actually been to the Cloisters, but this novel makes me want to go.  At this museum of Medieval and Renaissance art, Ann works with Rachel, another assistant, Leo, a gardener, and the curator, Patrick.

Rachel has been at the Cloisters for some time and Patrick, her boss, has become enamored of tarot decks and their history.  He’s been seeking perhaps the oldest complete deck known and has come to believe that perhaps the cards do have the ability to tell the future.  Ann befriends Rachel.  The two begin to make discoveries, particularly Ann, but Rachel, who is independently wealthy, manipulates her, taking advantage of the fact that Ann never wants to return home.  Then Patrick is poisoned.  I won’t reveal whodunnit here, but the last half of the book has several twists that make you reassess whatever conclusions you may have drawn.  It’s a fascinating story, well told.

This novel is another example of dark academia.  Much of it takes place in the library of the Cloisters and Patrick holds a Ph.D. while Rachel is a graduate student.  Ann is about to enter a doctoral program.  All of them have some fairly dark secrets in their lives.  And all of them are driven.  The story has elements of social commentary as well, particularly concerning how life in New York City will drive people to extremes when the competition makes this necessary to survive.  Although three of the four commit crimes, they are all likable people.  Three of them are academics as well.  All four are quite intelligent.  I was drawn into this tale from the start and even as the darkness was revealed couldn’t bring myself to dislike any of the characters.  Some novels have antiheroes that you just can’t feel for.  The Cloisters moves in the other direction, and it does make you wonder just how much choice you actually have and how much is left to fate.

Proofing Yourself

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Some publishers give you advance warning.  Many do not.  As a struggling writer, after I submit one manuscript I move on to the next project, knowing proofs will eventually come.  The thing is, I’m obsessive.  When I’m in the middle of a project I can think of little else, thoughts of it leaking into other activities throughout the day.  I’m in the middle of one such project, as I have been for at least three months now.  Then the proofs came.  If you write books you know that proofs always come with deadlines.  You need to drop everything and prioritize them.  I read many academic books with tons of errors, and I think I know why.  If proofs come at an inopportune time, you read them as other required activities (I’m looking at you, 9-2-5) permit.  For me, it’s difficult to let go of my present project.  My current fascination.

The proofs for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth arrived yesterday.  I’m excited for this book.  I have hopes of reaching out to local magazines and pitching stories about the Legend this autumn.  But I’m red hot into a new project.  My mind is of an age where there’s no guarantee that I’ll remember precisely what I was thinking if I lay aside my present project for a week to read the proofs.  Indeed, the last two weekends have been so busy with other things that I haven’t had time to watch any horror movies at all.  Just yesterday I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling hopelessly behind already, a feeling that lasted all day.  Then at 4 p.m. the proofs arrived. ( For context, 4 a.m. is late for me.  I’ve been waking up later due to that pointless ritual of annual time changes which, like everything else, the government can’t seem to get right.  In any case, proofs trump all.)

My time is extremely regimented.  I had to drop all committee work at our local faith community because the meetings were all in the evening, scheduled for after when I’d normally be asleep.  I wake early to write and read before the snowplow of the 9-2-5 throws me off the road for another day.  Everyone who talks to me feels that they don’t have time for what’s important any more.  The proofs are here and I’ll get them back by the deadline.  I’ve never been late once told when they have to be in.  My accountant tells me that anything that leads to royalties, no matter how small, counts as a second job.  I hope this one sells well enough to make it feel like that.  In the meantime, please don’t come knocking because I’ll pretend I’m not at home.

Naming Names

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I recently saw a story suggesting that Elon Musk was named after the leader of a Martian colony in an unpublished novel written by none other than Wernher von Braun.  Now, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it did get me to thinking about names.  The awesome responsibility that parents have in naming their kids.  I suppose many people don’t think much of it, but I remember asking, at a young age, why I was named “Steve.”  (There’s no “n” at the end, despite what people throughout my life have tried to “correct.”)  An old belief suggests that children might emulate those they’re named after.  Of course, some of us just can’t let things go.  Nobody else in my family was named “Steve,” and being very Protestant, I wasn’t named after no saint.  (Besides, he was Stephen.)

My mom told me a couple of things.  First of all, she wanted to name me after her father, Homer.  As an adult I think it might’ve been worth the childhood beatings I’d have to have taken, but my father vetoed it.  “Steve” was taken from a character in a Dick Tracy cartoon.  Mom liked the sound of it and my father didn’t object.  I’ve never read Dick Tracy—I’m not much of one for newspapers in general—but I did see that Warren Beatty movie back when it came out.  Once I tried to find a character named Steve in the cartoon line-up and I did find that there was a criminal by that name at one point.  Mom never told me this and I only found it as an adult, after I’d already decided against a life of crime.  But still, names sometimes inspire behaviors.  Influence choices.  Don’t they?

Homer and His Guide: Image credit: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Children named after their parents sometimes follow in their footsteps.  Or those named after a great person in history use that in their internal monologue as they try to attain similar things.  Now, I haven’t researched this—I’m just guessing here.  But for many years it was unusual to find a German boy named Adolf.  There are also names that are retired for someone being, say, the son of God.  Mom swore it was wrong to name a boy “Jesus,” even in admiration.  She didn’t know that the Anglicized Hebrew name was actually “Joshua,” common then as it is today.  Homer was a pagan, and I wondered how my great-grandparents came up with that name.  The best I can figure is that they were from upstate New York and there’s a town called Homer in Cortland County.  And I wonder if he ever asked his parents why he was named that way.

Contours of Dark Academia

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As I attempt to trace the contours of dark academia, I’m learning that much of my reading has been classified that way by others.  My main engine for discovering this is Goodreads, making me think I should shelve my own books more.  Also, I recently visited a local Barnes and Noble where one of the front tables was dedicated to dark academia.  Looking over the titles gave me fiction reading ideas for months.  In any case, apart from classical dark academia, where the setting is an institution of higher, or specialized learning, the category for many includes books about books.  This would pull in titles such as Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I read before my current conscious interest in the genre.  I think I was looking for gothic books back then.  I include, on my personal list, books about students with dark experiences, such as Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle.

The books about books category does shed some insight.  I love Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it’s not really dark enough to be, well, dark academia.  I understand the critique that dark academia tells stories of privilege, but that dissipates somewhat when including books about books.  Higher education is, and remains, a domain of privilege, but it is possible for those raised poor (such as yours truly) to break in.  I enjoyed higher education throughout the eighties and into the aughties.  After that it began to get far too political and business-oriented.  (Not that I wouldn’t go back if I had half a chance.  Or even a quarter.)  My point is, dark academia can deal with those who lack privilege, but I also believe there’s no point in denying privilege does exist.  And opens doors.

Dark academia is new enough that its parameters are permeable.  To me the real draw is that a fair bit of sculduggery really does exist in higher education.  The reading public seems eager for it.  Thinking of all the odd, somewhat tenebrous things that occurred in the course of my couple of decades in academia, the genre rings true to me as well.  As I think back over the books I’ve read, I think maybe I should build a shelf especially for dark academia.  I’m trying to read in it more intentionally now, but I’ve been unintentionally exploring it for decades.  When you add books about books, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose joins the crowd, and I read that one all the way back in seminary.  I tried to be part of academia, but there’s a darkness about an unrequited love, and so it just makes sense to me.

and Seek

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I’m afraid there may be spoilers—but not for the ending—below.  Discussing this story will be difficult without giving some things away.  Kiersten White’s Hide has given us an imaginative world with masterful misdirection.  Fourteen people a bit down on their luck, and strangers to each other, are offered an opportunity to win $50,000.  They have to hide in an abandoned amusement park for a week where two of them will be caught each day and the last person remaining wins.  The novel mostly follows Mack, a woman whose father killed her family while she survived by hiding.  Not only does she have survivor’s guilt, but she’s been homeless and the shelter director thinks she’ll have a chance at winning the prize.  There is a lot of social commentary here, as well as a monster.  Okay, spoilers below.

The minotaur is a most useful monster.  The backstory here isn’t in Greece (well, the deep backstory is, but that is only played out partially here) but in Asterion.  No state is given for the town, and the contestants can’t be given that information.  They’re locked in the park, with supplies, but very little information.  Then the contest starts.  After a couple of days Mack and a couple others begin to suspect that something’s wrong.  Those who get caught while they’re hiding leave personal effects behind, and since they all need the money that seems unlikely.  Then their host stops coming, leaving the bewildered contestants on their own.  Mack and those she’s befriended come to understand that being “out” is really being eaten by the minotaur.  Well, they don’t realize it’s the minotaur.  The one who does gets eaten before he can tell.

In any case, this is a tense horror story based on a classic tale.  There is, of course, a rationale for the murderous behavior in a modern setting.  White keeps you waiting quite a while to learn what it is, and there are plenty of places where I thought I’d figured out how it’d end only to be proven wrong.  And she gives believable character sketches and explores the kinds of motivations that drive different people who find themselves needing an income.  (One of the characters was raised in a religious cult—bonus!)  Those who are poor aren’t always at fault, but those who are wealthy will do anything to preserve their excess.  We see that playing out in daily life, even as it’s being explored in fiction.  The minotaur isn’t always what we think it is.  And the more you think about its insidious origin story provided here, the scarier it becomes.

To Dracula, a Daughter

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Nosferatu, by F. W. Murnau, was deemed in copyright violation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and ordered destroyed.  Rights to the novel were properly purchased by Universal and the horror film proper was born.  Other studios wanted to get in on the action, so the rights to the story of the Count’s daughter were bought by MGM.  They then sold the rights to Universal so that the latter could produce a sequel to their earlier hit.  Dracula’s Daughter didn’t do as well as the original, but it kept the vampires coming.  Some years later, Son of Dracula came out, keeping it in the family.  Having watched Abigail, I had to go back to Dracula’s Daughter to remind myself of how the story went.  I recalled, from my previous watching, that it wasn’t exactly action-packed, but beyond that thoughts were hazy.

Picking up where Dracula left off, von Helsing (that’s not a typo) is arrested for staking a man.  Then a mysterious woman arrives and steals the body to destroy it in an attempt to rid herself of vampirism.  We see that just five years after Dracula the reluctant vampire was born.  Creating a scandal at the time, Dracula’s daughter also seemed to prefer females.  Apparently the script was rewritten several times to meet the approval of censors during the Code era.  The modern assessment is that this is based more on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla rather than an excised chapter of Bram Stoker’s novel.  Since the world wasn’t ready for lesbian vampires in the thirties, she falls for Dr. Garth, a psychologist that she wants to live with her forever.  Kidnapping his secretary to Transylvania, she draws him to Castle Dracula.  Her jealous servant Sandor, however, shoots her with an arrow.  Von Helsing explains that any wooden shaft through the heart will do.

Already as early as Stoker, at least, Dracula had brides who were vampires.  It makes sense that there might be daughters and sons.  And studios, learning that people would pay to watch vampires on the silver screen, were glad to keep the family dynamics rolling.  Vampires proved extremely popular with viewers—a fascination that has hardly slowed down since the horror genre first began.  Some of the more recent productions explore themes and approaches that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of cinema.  We don’t see Dracula’s daughter actually biting victims—one of the many things the Production Code wouldn’t allow—and there’s no blood.  Nevertheless, the story itself went on to have children and they are still among us.

Dead Darlings

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The thing about being a writer is that there’s no one size fits all.  I watched Kill Your Darlings because it is an example of dark academia, or so it’s sometimes presented.  I have read some Beat Generation writers, but the movie made me feel very ignorant of that aspect of American counter-culture.  The movie is based on true events and such things as coincidences of writers always makes me feel terribly alone.  In case you don’t know the story (I didn’t) Allen Ginsberg came under the influence of Lucien Carr at Columbia.  Carr had been surviving at the university by the writing of his one-time lover David Kammerer.  Carr introduces Ginsberg to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the four (excluding Kammerer) kick off what would become much of the Beats.  Carr, however, kills Kammerer and Ginsberg, who has become Carr’s lover, must decide what to do.

Ginsberg grew up in a broken home, as did Carr.  I could relate to their feelings of loss.  Of course, the Beats relied on drugs and alcohol and sex to write, breaking the rules of institutions like Columbia.  Now that I’ve written my “million words” (and more), posted for free on this blog, I think back to my literary friends.  Both in high school and college I knew guys (I was awkward with girls) who dreamed, or at least talked, of becoming writers.  Over the years this pool has dried up.  Seminary and doctoral study were too focused to find those who really wanted to write.  Academic books, maybe, but not forms of self-expression.  Now, I’ve never used drugs, nor have I wanted to.  I write nonfiction books that are creative forms of self-expression.  Naturally, they don’t sell.

Many of us who write were raised in broken homes.  With tattered dreams we set out to try to make something of our lives in a hostile world.  My behavior in college wasn’t exactly conventional, as any of my roommates could attest.  It often appeared that way on the outside, even as poems rejected from the literary magazine were called “too depressing.”  So I pursued an academic career, but there was, whether anybody saw in or not, always a wink in my eye.  The same is true of my writing since.  This blog scratches the surface.  There’s a huge pile of fiction, and yes, poems, underneath.  They may someday be found, but I do have my doubts.  Movies about writers will do this to me.  Even if they don’t really fit my tastes in dark academia.

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

In Praise of Paper

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I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

A Plea

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One literary Saturday recently I found myself in the attic.  When we first moved to this house I sometimes wrote up there but I quickly learned that with no heating it was intolerably chilly on autumnal mornings, and that didn’t speak well for the coming winter.  Nevertheless, I set up a shelf with my fiction writing on it.  I was looking for something on that shelf when I discovered many things I’d forgotten.  Novels mostly.  I don’t know how many I’ve started, but I have completed six (now close to seven).  Going through the papers and folders on that shelf I found about 250 handwritten pages of another novel—one that I’d completely forgotten.  There were stacks of short stories, also handwritten, awaiting some recognition.  I haven’t had a ton of success in getting fiction published—the current count is 33 short stories—but I was inspired by what I found.

When my wife and I visited a lawyer some years back to make out our wills, I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to interject a literary executor.  At that point I had published only three books and two of them were academic.  Besides, there’d probably be an extra charge for adding that codicil.  I guess what I fear is that all of this work will just get dumped when I die.  Retirement doesn’t look like a realistic possibility for me, and what I need is time to sort it out.  Some of the novels aren’t good.  I know that.  Some are.  One was actually under a book contract for a couple of years before the publisher decided to kill it when the acquisitions editor left.  I haven’t found a replacement publisher yet.  Then, a few years back, my laptop started complaining about the amount of writing I was asking it to remember.  I had to buy external hard drives to store some of my writing.  Even I forget it’s there sometimes.

Graphomania should have its definition expanded to include those whose thoughts overflow to the point that they’re constantly writing.  There’s a reason I get up so early in the morning every day.  Up there in the attic I found what I was looking for and pulled it off the shelf.  A half-written novel that I had, unwittingly, started to write again presuming that the original had been lost.  All of the writing has been done while trying to hold down a demanding 9-2-5 with no sabbatical and few vacation days.  Not all of it is finished.  Not all of it is good.  But someone, I hope, will stand in front of the dumpster on some future day and say, “This doesn’t get thrown away.”

Bibliographer for Hire

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Why is bibliographer not a job?  Why can’t a person make a living categorizing knowledge?  I ask this because I see YouTube videos of people saying your job should be what you enjoy doing.  What if you enjoy creating bibliographies?  You see, my research methods are a bit unconventional.  They kind of have to be since I have no institutional support for my writing, and yet I want it to be intelligent and informed.  That means I have to locate my own sources and inevitably, when I’m compiling a bibliography, I’m happy.  Even if it means ferreting out obscure sources and trying to learn where something was originally published, I’m still at the top of my game.  (Yes, this is one of those things that the longer you’ve been doing it, the better you get at it.  These days it means learning to engage the internet for research.  Since it’s more of a money-making venture geared towards entertainment, that can be tricky.)

I remember those days of typing out bibliographies by typewriter, smearing White-Out all over, or trying to use that ribbon stuff that was supposed to be able to type over mistakes.  My friends and fellow students hated bibliographies.  Secretly, and perhaps perversely, I was enjoying myself.  You see, a bibliography is gathered knowledge.  When I finish reading a nonfiction book, particularly one where I want to do further reading myself, I go through the bibliography.  I want to know the origins of ideas.  There’s an irony here since my last few books have featured quite a few of my own ideas supported by what I’d read.  And I know that unless I provide a precise footnote, anyone who might read my work might wonder “how I know” what I’m writing.  It’s increasingly becoming one of those “pay attention to your elders” sort of thing, I guess.

But the bibliographies I could compile!  The really tricky part when writing The Wicker Man was the word limit.  I know authors who struggle bringing the bibliography down to required length, and I feel for them.  I really do.  You see, a bibliography is a record of what it took to get me to write this book.  These are the things I was reading, pondering.  Or found along the way.  There’s an art to a bibliography as well.  Some topics seem to attract authors with last names beginning with a certain letter, for instance.  Or others seem to have a dearth of another letter.  I may be the only person who finds such things fascinating, but can’t that be a paying job?  It is most interesting work, and categorizing knowledge is a full-time job.  If only it was a paying one.