Mad, Bad

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Although epic poetry holds an important place in literary history, I tend to read prose more.  Like most wordsmiths, I do write poetry—more like dabble in it.  Unlike my fiction writing, the poems aren’t intended for publication.  They are too deeply personal for that.  Still, my recent post about Gothic (the movie) had me thinking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.  They were known for their poetry, of course.  I can’t pretend to have read a ton of it, but their free-spirited personalities are intriguing.  Back in 2012 I read Edward Trelawny’s account of Shelley and Byron’s last days—neither lived more than six years after the summer when Frankenstein was born, both dying before forty.  I was recently reading about Byron in another context and was reminded (I’d read it before) that an acquaintance once described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

Authors, I suspect, are often neurodiverse.  There’s a reason I think this.  The size of the population that reads for pleasure is depressingly small.  It stands to reason that writers are a subset of that small population.  The writers I know tend to have some quirks.  They function just fine in society, but they do seem to operate on a different level.  I’m naturally drawn to them.  I have been trying to get to know writers locally—there are quite a few here in the Lehigh Valley—and sometimes they will let you in.  Often not.  It’s tricky to befriend writers, in my experience.  I suspect I might be one myself.  In the published side of things, I’ve produced six non-fiction books, but I also publish short fiction (and have completed six unpublished novels).  Still, I’m not part of the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” club yet.  If there is a club.

Over the years I’ve joined three different writing groups.  Their meetings are interesting since many of us are introverts.  One thing we all have in common is that we love to talk about writing.  Perhaps it’s because mainstream success is so difficult to come by.  Publishing houses have consolidated and the “Big Five” are responsible for by far the majority of books the reading public—that most rare group—buys.  One thing that’s true among the writers I know is that most would keep writing even if publication, or hope of publication, was off the table.  It is what we do.  For many years, perhaps too many, my writing was academic.  What nobody knew in my teaching days, however, was that I never stopped writing fiction.  It was there I put my thoughts that I’d classify as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

Learning to Write

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If you’re not famous as a writer, nobody asks you for advice on improving their game.  Part of that is simply having a writer’s outlook.  We all have our own ideas about how it’s done.  I admire the work of Stephen King.  He’s a gifted storyteller and his books often deal with the kinds of things I think about.  I had his book On Writing on my reading list for years.  What finally got me to read it was finding it in a local independent bookstore and wanting to support said venue.  I found it both helpful and a little scary to read.  This is part memoir and part instruction manual by someone who isn’t full of ego, despite his success.  Egoism isn’t uncommon among writers, but King realizes that many people have talent, but not all know how to bring it to any kind of success, no matter how modest.

I really enjoyed reading the memoir parts.  Indeed, I wish I could’ve read them when I was, say, in college.  My own trajectory as a writer might’ve turned out differently.  His instructive sections are also helpful, but the part about finding an agent is hopelessly out of date.  The internet has made doing so both easier and more difficult.  Too many people now flood agents’ offices with pitches that you practically need an agent to get you an agent.  I know this from experience.  Nevertheless, King’s advice generally feels quite solid.  And it’s encouraging to hear of the commonalities we share in our upbringing.  Writers often begin in less-than-ideal situations.  If we can struggle out of them, some can find success in writing while others manage to do it on the side (this isn’t my day job).  But write we do.

As with most of King’s books that I’ve read, this one went fairly quickly.  Not every book that I read makes me feel eager for reading time, but King always does.  In part, at least with On Writing, it’s because I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing this right.  During the course of reading his book, two more rejection letters came for my fiction projects.  Any writer knows that you have to deal with lots and lots of these.  King started earlier, but, like me, he kept his rejection slips.  Eventually I ditched mine because they’re too discouraging.  And I still submit to what has become, since this book was written, a very, very crowded fiction market place.  Still, this is an encouraging book, offering advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.  It’s a shame I waited so long to read it.

Oblong Box

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When Borders was closing—a sad day in the annals of American readers—things were marked down.  On one venture to a remaining store somewhere in New Jersey, where the checkout line snaked like one of those around a Times Square theater before the doors open, I picked up Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems.  Poe has, of course, been in the public domain for many decades so anybody can publish his works.  I did attempt to sit down and read through this behemoth that contains 73 short stories, but stumbled at “Hans Pfaall,” the first.  This story is really a novelette, in today’s measure, coming in at nearly 19,000 words.  (It took Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque to get me through it.)  So I’ve been content to dip into it now and again to read one of Poe’s stories.  In print. When the mood hits.

I read “The Oblong Box” in preparation for watching the movie.  I had never encountered this story before, and I prefer to read the base before attempting the latter adaptations (particularly by AIP).  The problem with reading Poe from this remove—in the light of his reputation—is that even the title tells us the box is a coffin.  How it is to be used in Poe’s tale may be unknown at first.  Here Poe divides his characteristic obsessiveness between the narrator and Mr. Wyatt, his temperamental artist friend who is newly married.  Wyatt, the owner of said oblong box, takes it on a voyage by boat from Charleston to New York.  The narrator obsesses over what might be in the box, being kept in a cramped stateroom rather than in the hold.  A storm leads to a shipwreck and rather than be rescued, Wyatt binds himself to the box and leaps into the ocean.  I won’t put the reveal here, but you get the idea. Today the title gives away Poe’s original twist.

There are still many of Poe’s stories that I haven’t read.  I’ve had enough of a head start, however, that I may eventually make it through those he published.  I’m aware that some of them may be funny, and some are tales of ratiocination.  Some may be completely unexpected.  Like many writers, Poe’s reputation is based on certain of his most well-known tales.  But also like most writers, his interest ranged fairly widely.  And he had that sense of “what if” that tends to drive those of us who write in a similar vein.  But these days we know that if we see an oblong box we’ll already have a pretty good idea of what’s inside.

Photo by Tom Oates, 2013; This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Nabokov at English Wikipedia

Won’t Tell

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This one is pretty darn close to too tense to read before bed.  I don’t remember how I found out about Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me.  That’s usually a pretty good sign that I found it in a bookstore.  Those are still places to linger while trying to find something a bit different.  This one is a page turner, but also one that I’m not quite sure how to classify.  It may be horror but the “monsters” are all humans.  I almost don’t want to describe the plot because it is so exquisitely suspenseful.  When I’m reading to get sleepy, I often find myself trying to grasp pieces of a story that are floating away like dandelion fluff, unable to put them back together.  Then I know it’s time to close my eyes and re-read a paragraph or two tomorrow.  That never happened with this one.

I think I can say this much without giving it away: Juno lives on an isolated island in a lake with her parents and younger brother.  The parents warn them of the murderous strangers who are seeking them—the father was a states’ witness against a powerful criminal family—so the children must never be seen on the island.  If anyone happens to come, they must hide and remain quiet until they leave.  They have to practice drills in case this ever happens.  It gets pretty creepy, from nearly the first page.  I would also advise against reading the back cover copy, since it will give some of it away.  I tend not to read the copy until after I read a book—you just never know what they might let slip.

This is a story about perseverance and discovery.  Discovery that is full of tension.  It’s a reminder of how precarious childhood is.  There are plenty of twists in the story and chapters generally end with information that creates a tension that the next chapter will only partially resolve.  The end result is a story that pulls you along and is pretty chilling.  I’m not sure if I’d call this horror or not.  If there’s a good case for a thriller being a separate genre, this could be useful as evidence.  Even if it’s not horror, it is likely to appeal to many who read in that genre.  There’s nothing speculative about it.  Perhaps that’s why the story scares in the way that it does—this could happen.  What happens?  Like mother, I won’t tell you either.

Personal Publishing

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I recently joined the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.  I haven’t really met any other members yet, although I know one from another local community.  By my reckoning, this is the fourth writers’ group I’ve joined and I do hope it leads to some friendships.  I like talking about writing.  I read Blurred Lines by Scott Christian because he’s a person I recently met and he kindly gave me a copy.  A collection of poems and stories, it’s a small book but a deeply personal one.  I guess that’s one reason that I like talking about writing with other people—it is deeply revealing.  There are those who write as a job, and there are those who write because they must.  This book falls into the latter category.  Some of us are compelled to write down what we experience, whether it be in poetry, fiction, or fact.

Self-publishing can be a way of expressing what the publishing industry suppresses.  I once told a group that it’s a little disturbing how much power publishers have in determining what people can read.  I write “can” intentionally.  Only the biggest in the industry have the financial wherewithal to get books into bookstores (where readers congregate like bees on a warm day in October) where they’ll be laid out on tables and priced to move.  Like many others, I began my writing in academia.  It took some time before I realized that academic prices are a deterrent to readers.  Breaking out of that mold is also difficult.  At the same time, publishers have resources to devote to marketing that an individual seldom has time for, or the reach to accomplish.  So it goes.

Another review of Nightmares with the Bible has appeared (this one in Catholic Biblical Quarterly).  While not glowing, it does recommend reading the book, despite the fact that the publisher has no interest in paperbacking the series and it takes a great deal of motivation for even me to spend that much for a book.  Yes, I can understand self-publishing.  It is a writer’s chance to get their voice heard.  Even some famous authors—Mark Twain comes to mind—had to get their start by paying to have their books published.  Some of us write because we can do no other.  We have thoughts and feelings to share.  And I keep joining local writers groups looking for the rare person who will talk to a stranger about that most intimate act we call writing.  Reading such a book is a very personal thing to do.

Nightly Entertainment

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A list of most gothic recent books, I believe it was, that suggested The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.  It’s a big book—over 500 pages—so I decided I’d wait until autumn to get underway.  It ended up taking most of September and half of October to finish it.  Since I prefer to start fresh, I had no idea what it was about.  A night circus, of course, as the title indicates.  It is set in the late Victorian period, although I’m not sure all the turns of phrase in the book were current at that time.  There may be a few spoilers in the description, should you want to go out and read this yourself first.  I mention that because something that only becomes clear near the end is a pretty good starting place for giving an idea of what the story’s about.

A very old man (who doesn’t look or act old) is a very accomplished magician (not the stage variety).  One of his students becomes very proficient and the two begin a rivalry that involves each setting a protege against that of the other.  It is a contest, we eventually learn, to the death.  The younger magician selects a daughter he didn’t even know he had, while the original teacher selects a young man without prospects.  The battleground on which these two duel is the eponymous night circus.  Each tries to outdo the other in creativity and wonder.  The circus is open only at night (hence the name) and is fueled by actual magic.  A cast of characters gets introduced, and they’re very well drawn.  In my experience of reading the book, they drew me back in because you pretty much liked most of them and with magic involved, well, you never know.

The novel was gothic in the Victorian setting and in the sense that there is an ancient contest underway here that interrupts into the then present.  There aren’t spooky castles, however, or really even damsels in distress.  The women characters are all strong and resilient.  The writing is lively and the resolution is satisfying.  The real draw for this book is the writing and the complex story that doesn’t overwhelm or leave you feeling too lost.  It’s a magical realism with boundaries and offers a good message that magic is all around, if we only open our eyes to it.  It’s a good book to get lost in for a few weeks.  I appreciated the fact that the villains weren’t the focus and the violence was mostly implied.  It kept me turning pages, gothic or not.

Whole Books

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One of the many peculiarities of my thought process is that I’ve tried to discuss only “whole pieces” on this blog.  In other words, as a “consumer” of media, my self-imposed limit has been discussing only whole books rather than a single short story.  Or the entire run of a television series rather than an individual episode.  The startling contradiction occurred to me that my latest book is an extended study of a single short story.  You see, Washington Irving was no novelist.  As America’s first famous writer, his fiction came in the form of short stories—sketches, he called them—and so to write a book on Sleepy Hollow meant focusing on a short story.  I love to read short stories.  I’ve always waited to talk about them here after finishing the book I found them in.  Maybe it’s time to discuss stories, or individual episodes here as well.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” many people are surprised to learn, is not a novel.  It’s often presented that way in telinematic adaptations.  The story, published as part of a collection of stories in 1820, is only 12,000 words in length.  Now, if you don’t work in publishing that figure may mean nothing to you.  There is no scientific way to parse these things but short stories tend to run from a few hundred words to about 15,000.  The next major category, the novella, is generally said to start at about 17,500.  You’ll notice there’s a gap there, between the two.  This is the strange territory sometimes called the “novelette.”  That’s because many modern fiction publishers cut the short story off at 7,500 words, and that leaves a gap of a literal myriad of words.  7,501 to 17,500 is the novelette, according to some.  And for the sake of completion, the novella tops out at 40,000 words so anything longer is a novel.

Irving wrote before these fine distinctions existed.  He wrote and people read.  Poe fell into a similar category.  He was known to have written only one novel,  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, but some of his short stories are long.  “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” stops just shy of 19,000 words, a novelette in today’s nomenclature.  My own fiction writing has been shaped by the fact that many magazines (even online, non-paying) top stories out at 5,000 words.  Some even at 3,000.  If you’ve ever tried to get a novella published, you’ll know why you shouldn’t even try.  All of which is to say maybe it’s time I start giving myself a break and talk about short stories.  Or an interesting episode.  If I can wrap my brain around it.

Iron Age Angst

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Browsing can lead to unexpected finds.  Such is the magic of bookstores.  Most of the books I read are recommended to me either through online sources or from people who have an inkling of my tastes.  Often such books are on the long side.  While I don’t object to really getting into a book, like most people I wonder where the time goes and a short read gives you a sense of accomplishment.  So it was that I was browsing a local bookstore for something brief.  I came across Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.  The back cover bore no BISAC info telling the genre, but in this case the blurbs convinced me that I’d find this a rewarding read.  It’s not horror, but it has a sense of doom about it.  There may be some spoilers below but I won’t give away the ending.

Told from the point of view of Silvie, a teenage minor, it recounts a college anthropology experiment on the moors of northern England.  Silvie isn’t one of the students, but rather a high-school-aged daughter of a bus driver enamored of Iron Age Britain.  A professor has three students set to live part of the summer like Iron Agers, and Silvie’s father has brought her and her mother along to do “the women’s work.”  Yes, he’s a chauvinist and he has violent tendencies.  He clearly wishes he’d lived in “simpler” times.  I suspect what makes a novel like this work is that many of us know people like the father.  Hard, angry men.  As the story unfolds we witness his abuses and the clueless professor simply continues play-acting Iron Age.  Until they get the idea of sacrificing a victim like the bog people of northern Europe.

The style is spare, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  As one of the blurbs says, there are echoes of Lord of the Flies as well.  What do groups of men get up to when unleashed from civilization?  It took me some time to figure out, since this is entirely first-person narrative, that there are only three students—one woman and two men.  With the chaperones it’s two men and a woman.  This uneven power structure raises its own questions.  Meanwhile Silvie is coming of age, beginning to realize her own sexual awakening.  Her best role model is the co-ed among the group since her working-class mother lives in fear of her husband.  The story is compelling and a bit scary.  It’s also a rewarding read that won’t take a month or more to finish.

Clergy Problems

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I believe Revival is the most recently written Stephen King novel I’ve read.  It was pretty good—it certainly scores high on the religion and horror scale, although it takes quite a while to get to the horror part.  Part of the problem for me is that I liked Charles Daniel Jacobs.  I tended to relate more to him than to Jamie Morton (the narrator/protagonist).  Perhaps this was because, like Jacobs, I studied to be a Methodist minister.  And like him, came to have a rather different view of what is really going on in the world.  He’s clearly King’s villain, however.  Or “fifth business” as he’s termed in the novel.  The secret lightning he seeks turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin.  I was curious to know more about it.  The novel, as is typical, has several subplots but the main one is how Jamie and Charlie face what’s after death in a tragic climax.

Charlie starts out as a Methodist preacher.  When his wife and son are tragically killed, he becomes a huckster who actually has tapped into an electrical power that can heal people.  It often, however, leaves bad aftereffects.  Jamie, who knew him as a kid, is cured by him from a heroin addiction.  Their paths continue to cross over the next fifty years or so—this is a longitudinal story—as Jamie comes more and more to distrust his childhood hero.  Charlie can use electricity to perform wonders and it make him rich.  He wants more, however.  He wants to see beyond death to assure himself that his wife and son are in a better place.  It seems to me that that motivation isn’t a bad one.  The only way he seems a villain is that he doesn’t really care for other people.

The story is well told but it doesn’t have the same “classic” feel as some of King’s earlier novels.  He well understands, however, that horror and religion belong together.  I haven’t read all of his novels—not by a long shot—but clergy aren’t rare and when they’re present they’re implicated in the horrors, or in this case, responsible for them.  These are important insights, as others have also noticed.  Revival is one of those books that requires some reflection.  It certainly feels like something written by a man facing the limitations of the aging process.  And not necessarily at peace with it.  Ministers sometimes do go bad—they’re only human—but they can also lead to real change.  I, for one, am interested to hear what King has to say about it.

Not Bram

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I guess I wasn’t sure if Stoker was horror or not.  It’s similar to Hitchcock in many ways, and some suggest it’s a “thriller” rather than horror proper.  One of the refrains of this blog is that horror is a poor genre designation.  Too many other genres bleed into it and it grows into several others also.  Still, Stoker was conceived of as a horror movie and it fits that, generally.  The title made me think of Bram, the most famous bearer of that surname, at least in my mind.  I’m pretty sure that others had the same impression, since some websites take pains to mention that this is not a vampire story.  It’s not.  It is, however, a story about a psychopath or two.  But it generally gets compared to Shadow of a Doubt rather than Psycho.  I’ll spoil things below.

On India Stoker’s birthday, the family receives the news that her father has died.  She was very close to her father and distant from her mother. During his funeral she notices someone watching from afar.  It’s an uncle she didn’t know existed and who’s decided to live with them.  This uncle, we learn, was released from an asylum.  As a child he’d killed his younger brother.  After arriving at the Stoker mansion, people who recognize him disappear.  India was trained as a hunter by her father and senses something is wrong.  The uncle meanwhile seduces her mother so she doesn’t see his obvious faults.  (He’s a charming psychopath.)  He’s goal is to have his niece, India.

There’s a creepy atmosphere throughout, and it’s difficult to determine what India’s end game is.  She’s able to take care of herself, mostly.  She does rely on her uncle to save her, though.  India discovers that he’d been institutionalized at the fictitious Crawford Institute, interestingly in Crawford, Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up.  Instead of accepting his plans for her, however, she charts her own violent course.  This is an odd film as far as determining character motivations go.  It’s not really clear what India or her mother really wants.  The uncle’s straightforward about it, but he’s a serial killer.  It’s difficult to know upon whom to cast your sympathies.  A movie about family dynamics as much as about horror (a character kills both his brothers, his aunt, and a housekeeper that he feels is in the way), it has no clear message.  And there are no vampires anywhere to be seen.

Who’s Knocking?

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I’m by no means alone in enjoying Stephen King novels.  I’ve read a fair number over the years.  I was put on alert for The Tommyknockers by a scholar who pointed out some of the religious elements in it—again, not rare in King’s oeuvre—but I’d never heard of it before that.  I’m not really a good fan boy, I guess.  In any case, I saw a copy with the shiny copper of King’s name worn off at a library book sale for a buck.  It sat on my shelf for many months because, well, it’s long.  I finally pulled it down in October only to discover that it wasn’t my favorite King story.  For one thing, it’s simply too long.  For another, the characters aren’t the easiest to cotton onto.  If you’ve not read this one and you plan to, a spoiler of two might slip out but I’ll do my best not to ruin the ending.

I think horror when I think King, although I know it’s unfair to typecast authors like that.  Tommyknockers is more King’s hand at science fiction.  Well, at least it has a space theme, which is generally a cue for sci-fi in my book.  Bobbi Anderson discovers a buried flying saucer on her Maine property.  With the help of an alcoholic friend (Jim Gardener) she begins to excavate it.  The saucer, which has been buried for millions of years, is reactivated by their interaction with it and soon the entire town of Haven, except those with a lot of metal in their bodies—like Jim, are under its power.  They invent advanced gadgets (and weapons) using power from the ship and standard batteries.  They begin physically transforming into something less than human.  Jim, mostly immune, tries to help Bobbi out but he, along with a fairly extensive cast of disposable characters, are powerless to stop things.

Like most King novels, it’s well written.  Like some of his other material, it’s over-written.  Having had my own written work chopped down  (and, let’s face it, I’m now an editor), I see places where cuts could be made.  As with any long book, however, I’m left feeling a bit lonely now that characters I’ve read about nightly for many weeks are gone.  Even though I really had a difficult time evoking much empathy for them, hey, they’re people too.  Or so it seems.  Such is the magic of fiction.  Besides, there are bits of the old King horror still present in the book.  I know it won’t ever be my favorite King novel, but it won’t stop me from reading another, when I have the time.  Hopefully the next one will be a few pages shorter.

New Gremlins

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I haven’t seen the movie Gremlin in years.  I’m adding it to my Christmas list this year, however.  Probably because I watched Shadow in the Cloud recently.  And although that gremlin wasn’t cute, it led me on a journey of discovery, and that counts for something.  I have to admit, first of all, that I’d never heard of Roald Dahl before a kind family member sent us some of his books when our daughter was young.  We became rather hooked.  His novel The Gremlins was among those we read but there was something I didn’t know (one of trillions of somethings, of course).  And that is that Roald Dahl was probably the reason anyone outside the Air Force knew about gremlins at all.  Dahl was a pilot with the Royal Air Force.  His first children’s book was the aforementioned Gremlins.

Image credit: US Government, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I first learned about gremlins from The Twilight Zone.  “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” came close to giving me literal nightmares.  (And Nope reminds us that there may be things in the atmosphere that we really know nothing about.)  That particular episode was based on a short story by Richard Matheson.  It was also incorporated into the 1983 Twilight Zone movie which I have, unaccountably, never seen.  Of course, I saw Gremlins in a theater back in my college days.  That was before I understood, or really had any interest in holiday horror.  This is one of those instances where the birth of a monster can be traced and its lore can be watched to grow, in real time.

Dahl took something he’d heard about—gremlins weren’t believed to exist by anyone—and made it literal, in the form of a children’s book.  Soon after, other vendors, such as cartoon creators, picked it up.  In the Twilight Zone it began its transition to horror.  Then a regular horror movie was made of them.  All of this has taken place since World War II and there are plenty of people alive who were around at the time.  Shadow in the Cloud was a reboot of a monster generally underused.  There are few times people feel as vulnerable as when they’re flying.  Heck, climbing a tall ladder is enough to give me the willies.  And the movies have shown us that even on the ground we’re not really safe from the monsters of our imagination.  That’s why it seems like a good idea to me to watch Gremlins again.  And to dream of the monsters we invented.

Unintentional Patterns

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Time, they say, is what prevents everything from happening at once.  I’ve noticed something about my reading life (is there any other kind of life?).  One of my favorite topics on this blog is books.  Both reading and writing them.  When I wake up and try to clear the cobwebs of sleep from my head to think about the day’s post, I always feel relieved when I have a book I’ve just finished because that’s an eager and ready topic.  When I’m in the middle of a large book, it seems like a long time until I’ll be able to jot down some thoughts on it, and the ideas don’t always flow.  It’s here that I’ve noticed a strange kind of pattern and it has to do with the way I read.  Interestingly, it isn’t intentional.  It goes back to my post-commuting literary lifestyle.

I read nonfiction in the mornings.  I awake early and after about an hour of writing I try to get in an hour of reading before thoughts turn to work and its unraveling effect on the fabric I’ve been weaving before the sun rises.  The nonfiction I read depends, to a large extent, on my writing projects.  Not exactly the kind of research that time and libraries afford academics, but still, research in my own way.  Often these nonfiction books are large—400 pagers seem to be the trend.  I’m a slow reader, so they take some weeks to finish.  At night (or actually evening, for I retire early) I read fiction.  It isn’t unusual for my fiction choices to be briefer than the nonfiction books of the morning.  It always seems, however, that I finish two books very near the same time.  Then I have two book posts in a week and many days without any.

Since we married over thirty years ago, my wife and I read to each other.  Usually she reads while I wash dishes.  Those reading choices are by mutual consent.  They sometimes make their way into my research, but more often they show up in my fiction writing.  In any case, they also seem to fit this same pattern.  When I finish a large nonfiction book in the morning, the same day, or the next day, I generally finish my fiction book.  Shortly after that our dishes-reading book finishes.  I’ve noticed this happening over the past couple of years and I always wonder about unexpected patterns that I find.  It doesn’t always happen this way, but it does often enough to make me wonder.  If I intentionally set out to do this it would be understandable, but as it is, it simply happens.  As they say, things tend to occur in threes.

Fiction

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All writing is fiction.  I suppose that requires some unpacking.  One of the first things we do when we approach a piece of writing is answer the question “what kind of writing is this?”  We may not do this consciously, but we wouldn’t benefit much from reading if we didn’t.  If your significant other leaves you a note stuck to your computer monitor or the refrigerator door, you know at a glance that it likely contains pithy, factual information.  If you pick up a newspaper you know what to expect the contents to be like.  It’s quite different if you pick up The Onion.  Or a romance novel.  These categories are extremely helpful, but they can also be problematic.  Any writer knows that you write and others decide on your genre.

I read a lot of nonfiction.  It is a kind of fiction, however, since it follows a narrative and it contains mistakes, or perhaps faulty assumptions.  Moreover, nonfiction is a reflection of its own time.  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s England had giants in its past.  It simply did.  Today we question his working assumptions just as surely as future people (if we long survive) will ours.  This current generation doesn’t really excel at critical thinking.  Many academics, as critical as they are in their own fields, fall into standard assumptions once you get beyond their expertise.  They accept the fictions of their era just as readily as does everybody else.  In reality our nonfiction is not the naked fact we like to think it is—it is the narrative of one perspective.  It is perhaps the truth as it is perceived in its own time.

This may seem to be a subtle distinction, but it is an important one.  Genres are very convenient handles that we use to classify what we’re reading.  Very often they become straightjackets that constrain what writing has the potential to be.  The word “genre” is related to the concept of genus, the classification about species.  Zonkeys and other, perhaps rare, but possible cross-breedings show us that hopeful monsters of the literary world are also possible.  We would soon suffer without genres in a world as full of words as this one is.  We also suffer from simple distinctions that somehow become iron-clad over time.  Think about the narrative that comes out of the White House.  We’re accustomed to it being mostly nonfiction.  At least we were until recently.  Watergate broke our trust in that, and now we live in a world of fiction masquerading as reality.  Critical thinking is, perhaps, the only way to make sense of any of this.

Write Brothers

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Work interferes with my concentration.  I suspect I’m not alone among writers in this regard.  Just last week I had two fiction pieces accepted for publication (one of which won honorable mention), but the little time I can allot to writing is divided between fiction and non.  Up until now the non has been more successful at finding publishers, but last week might’ve tipped the balance a bit.  As someone who works well more than eight hours daily, culling that time for creative enterprises can be difficult.  I’m told that Isaac Asimov, in the days before personal computers, kept three typewriters, each with one of his projects ready to go.  He would work on the one he felt like at any given time without having to reload a single typewriter with a half-finished piece.  My laptop has the dubious advantage of keeping multiple windows open in which several projects are simultaneously active.

At the moment I have three book projects going; two nonfiction and one that will become novel number seven, if it ever gets finished.  Not only that, but my short stories file has many contenders for my rationed time.  Long ago I lost track of just how many tales there are—some are on disc and others are on paper.  Some are finished, awaiting revision, and others have just begun clawing their way into written form.  The problem is finding the time to work on them.  The oft-heard lament of the working writer is that life is more working than writing.  And having had some minor affirmation of my fictional functionality recently, I’d love to explore that a bit more, but who has time right now?  Even as I finish typing up my blog post for the day the hour to begin work is looming.

Stephen King’s advice to wannabe writers is to read.  A lot.  Although I do my best to keep this dictate among my personal commandments, I run into the immobile object of nine-to-five-plus repeatedly.  If I take a vacation (which is seldom) it is often “to get away,” but writing is more a matter of aging in place.  Finding your comfortable spot where your thoughts flow freely and where the coffee pot’s just in the kitchen and if an idea catches you before sunrise you can spend time wrestling it even after light filters in through the curtains.  Those are rare days since weekends are for doing the chores neglected in your forty-five-plus hour work week.  And settling between fiction and non is never an easy decision, especially when one has just received a vote of confidence before login time on a Monday morning.  For now, however, I have to concentrate on work.