…give me a call. I’m halfway through the current draft of a novel I would like to finish by month’s end (not likely) so I probably won’t be posting much if anything here. Meantime a couple of new images so you have something cool to see when you drop by.
I don’t post music videos normally, but I thought this was exceptional. It’s music based on China Mieville’s truly excellent novel, Embassytown, which I urge everyone to get, read, immerse yourselves in. This novel goes on my list of “novels to be used to teach science fiction” along with a handful of others. Enjoy.
From the Governor’s Office we have the announcement of Missouri’s third state poet laureate:
Gov. names university professor poet laureate
Jefferson City – Gov. Jay Nixon announced the appointment of William Trowbridge, Lee’s Summit, as Missouri’s new Poet Laureate.
Trowbridge is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo., and the author of more than 340 published or forthcoming poems. His appointment will run for two years, and during his term, he will present and lecture on poetry to school, community and civic groups throughout the state.
“Professor Trowbridge is one of the country’s outstanding poets, and we are honored to have him as Missouri’s poet laureate,” Nixon said. “With a number of outstanding candidates from our state, the decision is never easy. I appreciate the work of the Missouri Center for the Book and of the advisory committee in making its recommendation to me.”
Trowbridge has published eight collections of poems, including Ship of Fool in 2011, and his work has been reprinted in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks. He was co-editor of The Laurel Review from 1986 to 2000, and his poetry has earned several awards.
Trowbridge is Missouri’s third poet laureate; he succeeds David Clewell, of Webster Groves.
http://governor.mo.gov/newsroom/2012/Gov_Nixon_appoints_William_Trowbridge_as_Missouri_s_new_Poet_Laureate
Last July, I had the honor and privilege of interviewing Ursula K. LeGuin by video link, she in Portland, Oregon, I in Columbia, Missouri. It was a delight for me and, I hope, for you. I have finally been able to upload the video to the Missouri Center for the Book site. It’s on YouTube and now it is here.
Enjoy.
Last Friday, the 6th of April, I had the pleasure of being on-stage host to Mr. David Gerrold, writer. If you’re not familiar with his work…but what am I saying? Of course you are! Even if you may not know it. David Gerrold wrote one of the most loved episodes of the original Star Trek, the marvelous The Trouble With Tribbles. Even those who don’t especially care for the show tend to like that one.
But if that’s all you’re familiar with by him, then I urge you to correct that lack. David Gerrold is one of the best SF writers in the business. I pointed that out last Friday to a packed house.
Donna and I had dinner with David prior to the evening’s performance. We’d met him long ago so could not say we knew him. Conversation ranged over the map, but kept coming back to writing and voice. I sometimes find it hard not to go on about how much I liked someone’s work, but the fact is he wrote some stories that stuck in my head, chief among them being The Man Who Folded Himself. We talked short fiction, novels, politics, the ill-fated St. Louis Worldcon of 1969 (which he attended and I didn’t) and then did a quick tour with the estimable Jenny Heim of the St. Louis Science Center. The Star Trek exhibit really is very good and it amazed me how much there was, just how long we’ve been living with this fictional universe.
I did a quick minute or two song-and-dance to introduce him, then he took the stage and regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of working on the original Star Trek and related minutiae (for instance, the episode was initially called A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me but had to be changed because of a potential conflict with H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy stories).
I still pay too little attention to the credits on television shows, a habit from a childhood like, probably, most others in which the stars of the show were the most important aspects. I did not know till that night that he had written one of my favorite episodes of Babylon 5, one called True Believers, which I thought then and still consider one of the most powerful of a strong series.
Anyway, it was a great evening and I am thrilled to have been invited to be part of it.
Oh, and please note—the photographs were taken by Robert S. Greenfield. You should check out his online galleries.
My To-Be-Read pile. Not everything is here, but this is a sort of “wanna read” for the coming year. I plan to follow up in December with a picture of then. We’ll see.
That’s all for now.
I’ve been having a productive month. This morning I polished up and submitted the fifth short story in two weeks. Granted, most of them are rewrites, but a couple of them are such thorough redrafts that they might as well be all new, like the one I finished today.
Normally, I let a story sit for a while before sending it out, but right now I just want material in submission. It has been a long time since I’ve had this kind of productivity in short fiction and I want to take full advantage of it. Of course, it would be nice if some (or all) sold, especially to the markets they’ve been sent.
Soon, now, I’ll have two novels to start rewriting, once the notes are finished from the two people going over them. Then I will set the short fiction aside and bury myself in the lengthier pieces. There was a time I could finish a novel and write a few short stories with the left-over energy, but since about 2004 I have been in full novel mode almost continuously. (The last brand new short story I sold was Duty Free for Lee Martindales Ladies of Tradetown anthology.) During these past years, I either haven’t been able to finish the stories or they’ve come out crooked, sorry beasts requiring much T.L.C. and more time than I’ve been willing to devote.
Plus there have been the almost nonstop worries that are deadly to the creative process. For whatever reason, those worries seem to have receded for the nonce. Oh, they’re still there, they haven’t been solved, but they aren’t looming over me with Damocletian malevolence.
For the time being.
The other thing that has been distracting me, of course, is this thing here. This. The blog. It seems my need for short work is satisfied by spinning out the varied and sundry expository forays here. Granted, I usually pick a topic that I’m interested in, that I have, I think, something to say about, but really, I am no pundit, and if I were really good at this wouldn’t I be doing it for money?
But I do it and since it’s my blog, I say what I please, and that serves a need. Sometimes I do this in order to codify my own feelings. There’ve been a few times I’ve written something and found that I’d changed my mind about the subject by the time I finished. Not often, but it’s happened.
However, I want to say thank you to any and all who come visit me here. Whether you agree with me or not, even if I piss you off, the one thing I hope I never do is bore you.
I have another non-boring, froth-fomenting post coming up soon, but I wanted some breathing space between the last and the next.
Have a good weekend. I’m going to do some more fiction now.
There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s. They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage. Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.
They had me in their line-up on February 28th. I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well. It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up. Right here.
I had a good time and the other readers were fine, I recommend them. An evening of good readings and fine company.
One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before. It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet. All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.
Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.
Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E. 37 to 68, emperor of Rome from 54 to his death by suicide in 68) became emperor after his uncle, Claudius, died. He has been portrayed in popular fiction and some histories as a self-indulgent libertine. The great fire that destroyed huge sections of the city in July of 64 has been laid at his doorstep for many reasons. He was, in fact, a big urban renewal guy and one of the few theories circulating at the time that has any traction of being real was that he was doing some rather brutal slum clearance in preparation for a new construction project. Even this seems unlikely, since the fire began very near to the Circus Maximus, which would be stupid if it were intentional, and also it began in a commercial area. No one knows how it began. It is much like the great Chicago Fire for which Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has been forever blamed, an assertion invented by a reporter that has become such a staple of the popular folklore that even people who “know” it isn’t true still cite it.
In the case of Nero, however, it appears that he wasn’t even in Rome when it began and when he heard he returned and immediately began organizing relief efforts. The source of the “fiddled while Rome burned” is Suetonius and others who hated Nero. Apparently it never happened and in this instance the exact opposite seems to be the case—he worked hard to save Rome and do what was possible after the fact.
But such is the power of bunk that people still talk about the callous and depraved Nero playing his lyre and singing The Sack of Illium in costume while the city burned. It is a baseless piece of folklore, an urban myth of the first order.
There are two important things to take away from this. The first is, of course, the power of images to fix the imagination in such a way that fact and truth have no chance of getting around the preferred myth. The second is, such myths serve as distractions from genuine problems and redirect our attention from what is truly important onto fabulations that are easily manipulated and manipulative—because people who buy into them are more easily directed by such bunk in the hands of spinmeisters who would rather they didn’t pay attention to reality.
Because there was plenty about Nero that deserves serious ignominy. Just not this.
The other thing such bunk does is paint a figure wholly one thing or the other. There is no gray in such portrayals, no room for the ambiguities that are the way people really are. I said Nero was a big urban renewal emperor, and this is true. He was something of a reformer in this early reign and he did many public works that made him quite popular. He successively extended the Empire and established rules over certain abuses by the Senate, and so forth. Rome did not materially suffer under Nero.
But he had inherited the trend in Roman imperial life toward assassination as a means to consolidate power and even acquire it and apparently had his mother killed, who herself may have killed Claudius in order to secure the throne for her son. As his reign progressed, an evident paranoia took hold and he became more and more erratic until finally there was an uprising in Iberia and he read the writing on the wall and took his own life.
He left a mixed legacy.
But all we remember him for now is Rome burning, bad singing, and orgies (which were more evidenced in his Uncle Caligula’s reign than Nero’s). All the nuance is leached out and any lessons of value from understanding his reign are absent.
The other problem with bunk—you can’t learn anything from it.
I took some time with this business of Nero in order to lay the groundwork for my more contemporary point. See, we can all of us pretty much talk about things that happened two thousand years ago with some dispassion. (No one, I think, has a stake in falsely portraying Nero anymore.) We can step back and look at the false picture and see where it came from and how it happened and understand something about how popular animosities have always given rise to distortions and outright falsehoods.
The reason we should always be aware of bunk like this is so we are not distracted from what may be far more important. Bunk is noise, it is in a perverse way camouflage. Not only does bunk mask what may be good about someone or something, but it works just as well as a mask for what may be significantly worse. And for the one buying the bunk, it seriously erodes credibility, so that any valid criticisms he or she may have are suddenly given the same weight as the bunk—which is to say, none at all. Bunk cheapens everything.
But there has always been bunk. We love it. Often we prefer the legend to the truth. Legends are more colorful and certainly have the distinction of offering explanations that validate prejudices— but they do so without adding one worthwhile bit to any serious discussion. Often just the opposite happens. People who maintain the bunk version of events often impede constructive understanding and, if pressed, may actually turn on those trying to educate them out of the bunk. Bunk can be very hurtful. At the very least by taking up space where something useful might exist. But also by providing a convenient test for determining who is or is not a friend or enemy.
I don’t think I need list the various manifestations of bunk that currently make the rounds of the internet and fill people with rationales for their displeasure and explain absolutely nothing. We’ve all seen it. Worthless allegations, unsubstantiated accusations, constructions of arguments that miss the real point, false comparisons, and outright slander. We can recognize bunk because it always fails two major tests—logic and Occam’s Razor. I suppose, though, that those tests are really different sides of the same one. To put it simply, if something requires too many parts and demands the silent participation of too many people, or is simply far more complicated than seems reasonable, it is likely bunk. (It’s best not to attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by oversight or incompetence. History, after all, shows us that, with very few exceptions, most conspirators are incompetent—and they usually always overlook something.)
Anyway, I wish you all a bunk-free day. It’s too much to hope for a bunk free year.
Watch this TED video from economist Larry Smith, then continue.
I have done almost all the things in his presentation to excuse my failure. I have done them (except for having children of my own) and then fought like the devil to get out of the trap in which they’d ensnared me.
I’m a procrastinator. I’m doing it now. I have a novelette open right now that I should be working on, but here I am, writing about my terrible penchant for procrastination instead. Why? I have never figured this out. It’s as if there is a subroutine in the deepware of my brain that presents as continual distraction, like one of those little bugs on the internet that no matter how hard you try to get to this page, it always takes you to that one.
I have thousands of little tricks to keep myself from doing the hard, important work.
But somehow I’ve written over 15 novels, published 10 of them, along with many short stories. My failure, such as it is, will not be seen in my production (though I see it, indeed I do) but in Follow Through.
I’m terrible at self-promotion, self-marketing, all the little component parts of conducting a Career that are necessary but, to me, intimidating. After all, I’m a writer—dealing face to face with people is not what I do, not what I want to do. If I wanted to do that I’d get a job as a salesman. I’ve been a salesman, I was even good at it long ago and far away, but I loathed it.
That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.
The one element Mr. Smith did not discuss is an intrinsic failure of finding the right way to do what you want. I have the passion, I have the drive (though I’m getting a bit frayed around the edges) but I somehow keep driving off the road into a ditch. I can see the road, I just can’t seem to stay on it. All by virtue of producing product that has, in the past, not attracted the right attention.
Or so it seems.
Even this, I know, is an excuse, but sometimes a necessary one to maintain sanity. These are the nibbling ducks of chance—the right publisher, the right agent, the right window for publication, the right reviews, none of which are in your control.
Nevertheless, you need to do, and do well, the one or two things that are in your control, so that when the stars are right and the planets align, the work is ready. The most necessary and often hardest thing to do to facilitate that is to ignore all the other stuff. It is the Work that matters. Never mind the market, never mind the dwindling bank account, never mind the critics who were boneheaded about your last book, never mind all the ancillary shit that is certainly important but only serves to distract you from the Work.
That’s hard to do. It takes practice. And it’s wearying.
But I do recommend hearing Mr. Smith out. Because what he’s talking about are all the things people do before they even get to the Work to sabotage themselves.
What you have to do is take a chance on yourself. Just…take a chance. Regret is a terrible thing on which to end your days.