...from down in Lucky Town

New blog! New website!

2011-09-12T05:13:00.000-05:00

Go here to visit my new website and a new blog. This blog will no longer be updated after this post. See you in my new digs!

Meg Coburn, the forgotten action heroine

2011-08-29T05:19:00.001-05:00

NOTE: THIS IS THE FINAL NEW BLOG POST AT THIS LOCATION. SUBSEQUENT BLOG POSTS WILL BE FOUND ON MY NEWLY REVAMPED WEBSITE AT ALEXBLEDSOE.COM.

I love action heroines. I've even put one in my next Eddie LaCrosse novel, Wake of the Bloody Angel. But my standards require, if not strict adherence, at least lip service to the laws of the natural world. That negates the whole concept of the the "ass-kicking sprite," wherein a tiny female character suddenly has the ability to overpower people (usually men) three times her size. No, my idea of an action heroine is someone like Xena, who has the physical size and strength to really do battle. And of course, the gold standard is Ellen Ripley in Aliens. She has no super, or supernatural, powers; she's merely tough, resourceful, determined and smart.

Which brings me to the great forgotten action heroine: Meg Coburn. Feel free to insert your own variation of, "Who?"

Meg Coburn, played by Mira Sorvino, was the heroine of Antoine Fuqua's 1998 film The Replacement Killers. Notable as the American film debut for Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat, it's a fairly simple story of hired killer John Lee (Chow), who decides he has a conscience after all. Meg Coburn is a forger he hires to make a new passport so he can return to China and protect his family. Unfortunately the bad guys intervene, putting Lee and Meg on the run together.

Two moments cement her appeal for me. One is visual: during the shootout in her first scene, she and Chow Yun-Fat arrive in the same room and drop into the same pose, only aiming in opposite directions. The image says it all: it's the mutual competence of equals. And in an action movie, if you're as competent as Chow Yun-Fat, you're doing all right.

The second occurs later, when John forces Meg at gunpoint to accompany him. She gives him a look that could freeze magma and says calmly, "Okay, if that's the way you want to play it. But when the gun is in my hand, we're going to have this conversation again."

There's a ton of other things that make Meg cool, but in some ways the things she doesn't do are more interesting. She never panics. She may yell, but she never once screams. She never stops trying to resolve the immediate situation. Yes, she's feminine and sexy, but it's incidental; there's only one fleeting shot I'd describe as actual Michael Bay-style pandering.

If you decide to see the film, seek out the "extended cut" DVD. Since it was made in 1998, when Hong Kong was about to revert to Chinese control, a crucial subplot was minimized in the theatrical release to avoid offending China and losing Chow Yun-Fat's hometown market. It's been restored here, and it fleshes out the motivations in a pretty substantial way.

It's obvious that we, the public, want different things from our heroines than from our heroes. It's why Supergirl dresses like a cheerleader, after all. But occasionally, amongst the pantings and leerings of the Bays and Favreaus, a real person slips through. Mira Sorvino's Meg Coburn was one of those. It's a shame more people didn't notice.

Love, Revenge and Conan: What's My Motivation?

2011-08-22T04:08:00.004-05:00

NOTE: THIS IS THE NEXT-TO-LAST POST FOR THIS LOCATION. AT THE END OF AUGUST, THIS BLOG WILL NO LONGER BE UPDATED. MY BLOG WILL BE FOUND AT MY NEWLY-REVAMPED WEBSITE, ALEX BLEDSOE.COM.

So there's a new Conan movie. And, if the previews are any indication, Conan spends the movie on a quest for revenge against the villain(s) who destroyed his village and murdered his family.

I won't go into how many ways this deviates from the original Robert E. Howard character (short answer: a lot). Instead, it got me thinking about screenwriters and how they think.

Consider the idea of "motivation." In movies, heroes are usually motivated by either love or revenge. And they must have a definite, solid, entirely personal reason for doing anything. I first became conscious of this trope watching The Skeleton Key, eighty percent of a great horror movie. Caroline, played by Kate Hudson, talks about how she became a geriatrics nurse after watching an elderly relative slowly die from Alzheimer's.

"Ah-HA! My motivation! Now I can act!"

Really? So she couldn't be a person who looked at possible careers and chose one that sounded good, or wanted to have a job with security, or any of the reasons most of us choose our jobs? No, there had to be a hyper-dramatic, entirely personal reason so that the audience will "sympathize" with her.

Giving Caroline such a background smacks of a "Screenwriting for Dummies" lesson. Sure, characters need motivation. But screenwriters seem unable to accept that "earning a paycheck," "providing for my family" or most crucially "the satisfaction of a job well done" are acceptable motivations. If the line "this time it's personal" doesn't apply, then it isn't valid.

Except that it is.

Here are two examples from the work of Oscar-winning director/screenwriter William Friedkin. In his 1986 film To Live and Die in L.A., FBI agent Richard Chance (CSI's William Petersen) sets out to bring down villain Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe) after Masters kills his partner. He even blatantly states, "I'm gonna bag Masters, and I don't give a shit how I do it." It's a textbook--well, a screenwriting textbook--character motivation. This time it's personal, and it encompasses both love (of the bromance kind) and revenge. It keeps an otherwise excellent movie from being truly great.

Conversely, in Friedkin's 1971 film The French Connection, New York cop Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) stays tenaciously on the villain's tail because, simply, it's his job. He needs no ulterior motive, nothing that says "this time it's personal." Through the course of the story it becomes personal, but only because the villain's success reflects badly on his professionalism. His ego is tied to his job, and he simply can't let the bad guys win. There's no hint that a childhood trauma caused this, or that a gangster (or Frenchman) once killed his family, or any sort of trite justification. It's realistic, and it's one of the elements that helps make the film a classic.

There are many useful things novelists can learn from screenwriters: get to the point, keep the action moving, craft witty dialogue and so forth. But this is one lesson they should skip. So make sure that you take away the right lessons, and stay grounded in reality where there are many other motivations besides love and revenge.

But....

As I read over the above, I realized my perspective is entirely one-sided. So for another point of view, I asked writer and USC film graduate Melissa Olson to comment on what I'd written so far. She responded:

"When I was at USC, nobody dreamed of being the next Michael Bay (well, maybe in the directing track(:). Everyone dreamed of telling the story they wanted to tell, to make the statement they wanted to make. But once you get out of school, the film industry is a tough business.

"Screenwriting is complicated, and in many ways it’s much more restrictive than novels. Maybe the screenwriters of Conan (there were three) didn’t want the movie to be about motivation; they wanted to get that out of the way and tell a different story. Shortcuts aren’t terrible things, they’re just easy ways out. Sometimes you gotta take one to get to where you want to go."

So there's two sides to this. What do you, the reader/filmgoer, think?

Celebrate Noir Week at Tor.com with me!

2011-08-18T12:21:00.001-05:00

As part of Noir Week at Tor.com, I'm blogging about Soylent Green.

New website!

2011-08-15T05:18:00.000-05:00

Go check out my new website! And let me know what you think!

Torchwood: For grownups, but not by them

2011-08-10T04:57:00.000-05:00

Captain Jack Harkness, who is VERY pleased to meet you.

As part of our immersion into the universe of Doctor Who, the management staff at Chez Bledsoe has been watching the first season of Torchwood. Basically an English (well, Welsh) version of The X-Files, it's about a super-secret team who deal with otherworldly and paranormal dangers that beset contemporary Cardiff.

It doesn't take many episodes before you realize that the Torchwood team is its own worst enemy. Whatever the qualifications for joining, they seriously need to be rethought: in nine out of the ten first episodes, the primary danger is caused by a member of Torchwood (and in that tenth episode, nothing happens. Pretty much literally). The cast is interesting, the budget more than adequate, and the premise rich. So what's wrong?

Torchwood tries very hard to be cutting edge, especially in its approach to sexuality. The leader, Captain Jack Harkness, will, ahem, shag anything that moves--male, female, or other--as long as it's gorgeous. Computer whiz Tosh has a lesbian fling with an alien disguised as a human woman. Gwen and Owen, two team members, have an ongoing affair, and it's implied that uptight Ianto and Captain Jack have an occasional after-hours tryst. None of these are bad ideas, but they're also not thought through. The writers have people shagging for no apparent, logical reason except that it's titillating.

And that's when I realized what was fundamentally wrong about the show.

Torchwood feels like a fifteen-year-old's view of how adults act. Since most teenagers are obsessed with sex, so are the Torchwooders. But since most fifteen-year-olds don't have a lot of experience with sex, the relationships feel forced and phony, more like masturbatory fantasies than real encounters. Most teens have never held jobs, let alone jobs with responsibility, so they imagine worksite conflicts that simply wouldn't occur among highly-trained and supposedly elite team members. Instead of professionalism, we get playground arguments transposed to Torchwood HQ. Fights break out, but like playground fights, the next day they're forgotten--even when one team member threatens another with a gun.

I doubt that the writing staff on Torchwood is seriously fifteen years old. Instead they're likely the same kind of "talent" you see everywhere now: people raised on movies and TV who have gone into the industry at such a young age that they have no real life experiences to bring to their writing, only bits and pieces of other shows and movies. In some cases, such as the films of Quentin Tarantino, that's enough. Here it's not.

We'll probably continue watching the show, alternating it with Doctor Who. I've heard from multiple trustworthy sources that season 2 gets much better. And perhaps it does; after all, fifteen-year-olds do eventually mature, even if only a little bit.

Publishers Weekly reviews THE HUM AND THE SHIVER

2011-08-02T06:53:00.003-05:00

In its review, Publishers Weekly calls my upcoming novel The Hum and the Shiver a "masterpiece of world-building." Hell, I'll take that.

Genre respect and the NYT

2011-08-01T04:45:00.003-05:00

It's an ongoing issue that genre fiction--mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror--is somehow less important than so-called "literary" fiction. That involves forgetting that in many cases the disposable genre fiction of yesterday (Jules Verne, HG Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, Louis L'Amour, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler) has become the acknowledged classics of today.

Still, it's frustrating to still see this play out right in front of me, as it did last month in the New York Times. I won't use the authors' names here, because it's not important; it's not hard to figure out if you feel the need, but it's utterly beside the point. To me, what's important is how this "corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals" (props to Spiro Agnew) pronounces and supports its judgment.

Here are two excerpts from the literary novel's review:

"So does the new novel deliver? I’m not so sure...the author seems a bit lost, adrift in unfamiliar waters, and the book feels less like a second novel than it does another try at a first."

"There is only so much we can read this way before we are overwhelmed by the desire to drop the pretense."

And here are two from the review of the genre novel:

"[The author's] novel has the stylized quality of books by Angela Carter like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and it displays similar pyrotechnics."

"Yet in a highwire act of her own, [the author] still raises the novel above the ordinary through her ability to convey the richness of the [characters’] emotional lives, coupled with impressive writing."

Clearly the first review was less than positive, while the second was close to a rave. Now, the kicker: which book got the three-page excerpt also published in the New York Times? That's right, after their reviewer says "There is only so much we can read this way before we are overwhelmed by the desire to drop the pretense," the Times decides to put that to the test.

As I said, I mean no disrespect to either writer. I do mean disrespect to this constant shafting of the genre in which I work, in which a lot of people do great work that readers actually want to read. How do I know? You don't get David Foster Wallace conventions; you do get Terry Pratchett ones.

But perversely I also enjoy this lack of respect. Like Superman and Lex Luthor, or Batman and the Joker, your hero is measured against the strength and cunning of the villain opposing him/her. And when you get right down to it, the Literary Establishment is actually a lot like Lex Luthor: powerful, entrenched, sophisticated, and--most delightfully--fundamentally threatened by those aliens in their brightly colored costumes.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go put on my cape and long underwear.

My favorite science fiction joke

2011-07-31T08:47:00.003-05:00

I'm guest blogging at The Night Bazaar about my favorite science fiction joke.

Age ain't nothin' but a...problem

2011-07-25T05:04:00.001-05:00

In a recent Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter talked about the dangers of having your literary characters, especially detectives, age in real time. She cites several examples of authors allowing their characters to develop the infirmities and declines that come with advancing years, as well as those who freeze their heroes in time so that while the world changes, they don't.

The original detective heroes like the Continental Op and Philip Marlowe didn't face this worry. Their series were relatively short compared to what we now consider a successful run: seven novels and some short stories for Marlowe, compared to 21 for John Sandford's "Prey" series; Agatha Christie's Miss Marple racked up 12 novels, against 40 for Robert B. Parker's Spenser. Sam Spade, the quintessential tough-guy detective, exists in only a single novel, The Maltese Falcon.

The appetite for series now requires at least a book a year, and authors with contemporary settings have to face the fact that the world changes around their heroes. Do the heroes change with it? Some do. James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, once young enough to be played in a movie by Alec Baldwin, is now 73. Michael Connelly's 60-year-old Harry Bosch has to deal with the vagaries of contemporary retirement. But some, like Spenser or Kay Scarpetta, don't. In fact, the biggest surprise in the article was how many authors began with their heroes aging, and then arbitrarily froze them in time when the series became successful.

It made me think about Eddie LaCrosse's age, and how that affects his ongoing adventures. I created his prototype character when I was 18, but I wanted him to be worldly and sophisticated, so I made him roughly 35, which is his age in The Sword-Edged Blonde. At the time I thought that was mature enough to give him the perspective I wanted. However, by the time the book actually came out I was over 40, which meant I was now writing about a character a decade younger than me. Further, and strange as it seems, I'm continuing to age. So I'm faced with the dilemma of what age Eddie should be in each book.

Luckily I'm freed from the worries of the modern world, since Eddie's world is fantasy and only changes when I change it. But I still want him to be believable, and part of that is aging. I don't have a set time frame, like Stephanie Plum (Kinsey Millhone ages one year for every 2 1/2 books, so she'll be about 40 when the series concludes). But he does progress. In the framing story of Dark Jenny I think he's about thirty-eight, settled into his relationship with Liz and established in Neceda. In the next book, Wake of the Bloody Angel, he's about the same age. Which works out to real-time again, one year per book, by default. But it's not deliberate, therefore I can't be held to it. Ultimately, Eddie's as old as I say he is.

A free market of idiots

2011-07-20T07:07:00.000-05:00

I'm enough of an ex-journalist that I've read with interest about Britain's scandal-plagued scandal sheet News of the World. Short version: to feed its tabloid readership, the paper hacked into the e-mails, phones and private records of politicians and celebrities, to great financial success. So far so good, but then they broke into the voice mail of a murdered teenage girl, even deleting some of her messages so that her parents believed (falsely) that she was alive. That was the line, and they crossed it.

This has been roundly condemned, as it should be, and it's brought a lot of attention to the nature of British media, also as it should be. Those on the left are trying mightily to attach the scandal to Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp and owner of News of the World (and of course Fox News here in the US). He's, of course, denying any knowledge of these actions.

But I don't think Murdoch is utlimately to blame. I think the blame lies here:

Let me be clear: it's not the magazines. It's the person buying them.

Murdoch and his kind do nothing more than obey the first rule of business: give the people what they want. From gossip to innuendo to outright lies, his various media outlets have one thing in common: success. If nobody cared about celebrities, he wouldn't be in the gossip business. If people turned off news that was repeatedly shown to be biased, and with occasional outright fabrications, his news shows would either straighten up or go dark. And if there wasn't a ravenous appetite for sordid details, the phone of a dead girl would not have been hacked.

Every person who buys a magazine with a Kardashian on the cover, or watches the Octomom on TV, or reads Perez Hilton online is as responsible, if not more so, than Rupert Murdoch for the state of media and so-called "news." These consumers have created the environment that promises economic rewards for hacking the phone of a dead girl. The defense is that these magazines are "harmless," that celebrity gossip is "just for fun," but now we've learned that "fun" might extend to the private e-mails, voice mails and medical records of 9/11 families (the FBI is investigating that). Is that "harmless?" Because once you've exhausted celebrity culture (and please, God, I hope we're close), the only things left are private citizens with the bad luck to suffer public tragedy. And that could be any of us. Our worst nightmare could be marketed as "just for fun."

So, let me be plain: supporting this crap with your money and time makes you the problem, not the people who produce it. Stop buying it, and they'll go away. That's how an intelligent free market works. But a free market of idiots leads to this:

Review: the anti-western Doc

2011-07-18T04:58:00.002-05:00

I love movies about the 1881 showdown in Tombstone, AZ between Wyatt Earp and the Clanton gang. My favorite is Tombstone, but I won't sleight Gunfight at the OK Corral, My Darling Clementine, or Hour of the Gun (which actually starts with the gunfight and follows the events afterward). I can't stand Kevin Costner's epic, sprawling Wyatt Earp, which demythologizes the central character to the point that you actually wonder why anyone would make a movie about him, yet still holds him up as a hero.

But it ain't nothing compared to the demythologizing in Frank Perry's 1971 film, Doc. Even the poster brags about the tear-down:

Stacy Keach plays Doc Holliday, former dentist and current tubercular gambler, drifting across Arizona to join his friend Earp in Tombstone. Earp is played by Harris Yulin, a ubiquitous character actor who you'll instantly recognize even if the name doesn't register (he even played a Cardassian in Deep Space Nine). Also co-starring is Faye Dunaway as Kate Elder, aka "Big Nose" Kate, Doc's mistress.

With Doc as the central character, we're given the legend from the side. Earp may be the marshall, but he recognizes that in Tombstone, it's the sheriff who runs things. He runs for that office, and makes a deal with the Clanton gang to turn over one of their own at the appropriate time to secure Earp's victory. This view of Earp as not just a brutal man but a corrupt one leaves Costner's arrogant misanthrope in the dust. Doc is Earp's friend, but when he realizes what Earp's done he's caught in a quandary. How that resolves is one of the most cynical depictions of human nature I've seen; it makes Glengarry Glen Ross look like Amelie.

Stacy Keach and Faye Dunaway.

But unlike the Costner film, which seems to think Earp is still deserving of heroic status even after he's shown to be pretty much a total prick, Doc earns its cynicism. Doc is a flawed man who sees himself honestly, and allows himself a brief respite of thinking his life might be salvageable despite his tuberculosis. When he realizes it isn't, he goes with the flow and accepts his fate. The story takes place in a Western world that goes Sergio Leone one better: everyone is dirty and dusty, and at times you can almost smell their unwashed bodies. And the music, by songwriter Jimmy Webb ("MacArthur Park") is low-key and based in period sounds; there's no Elmer Bernstein flourish here.

Harris Yulin as Wyatt Earp.

Doc isn't a feel-good Western, for sure, nor a flawless one: many scenes seem cut too early, as if they needed another few moments to play out. But Keach's performance is so open and minimal that it draws you in, and Yulin's take on Earp never fails to surprise. If you're a fan of Westerns, or just of familiar tales told in new ways, I highly recommend it.

Interview: Genevieve Valentine, author of Mechanique

2011-07-13T04:27:00.002-05:00

Recently I reviewed the debut novel by Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. I thought it a brilliant and intriguing book, and as a writer, I wondered about the thought process behind some of the concepts. Genevieve was kind enough to answer some questions for me.

The bones (in the story, circus aerialists have their human bones replaces with light, hollow copper one) represent different things to each character who receives them. What inspired them, and what did they represent for you, the author?

Appropriately enough, bird skeletons were a large part of the influence on the bones. I was looking them up for something unrelated, but the physiology was really interesting and stuck with me as I started writing about what exactly made the performers in the Circus Tresaulti so different. For me, the bones were always a tangible symbol of the sacrifices you make for something you love, though the self-destructive aspect of it often goes hand-in-hand, depending on the character.

The narrative jumps among several voices and points of view. Why did you choose that form?

When I sat down to begin I just started writing, and the scenes I wanted to get down first came first, in the perspective I thought made the most sense. By the time I had the breathing space to sit back and worry if it was going to work, I loved how it was coming together too much to think about stopping.

The story doesn't have a specific setting, either geographically or in time. Why did you decide on that?

I approached it with the idea that the deep aftermath of a war takes on this air of inevitability and surreality, as if it both defined and took place outside of the world now. With a war as big as the one that's implied here, that devastates natural resources and completely shifts the practice of government, old nations and eras slowly cease to matter. It doesn't help that the Circus operates in this landscape as they themselves are a bit unstuck in time by the magic that holds the Circus together.

How well did the artwork by Kiri Moth capture your sense of the story?

SO WELL. Sorry for the caps, but it's awesome. The cover alone is so detailed and evocative that no one could ask for more, but for me, some of the interior art pieces truly hit home. My two favorites are probably the griffin, which is so perfect it's become an emblem for the Circus in earnest, and Elena on the trapeze. The grace and introspection and loneliness of that moment is exactly how I had pictured it when I was writing, and seeing the recreation in my inbox the first time, I clutched my pearls like a dowager.

Thanks to Genevieve for answering my questions. You can find Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti at all the usual outlets.

Review: Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine

2011-07-11T04:36:00.002-05:00

Bruce Springsteen says his classic song "Born to Run" is about people looking for "connection." The great crime novelist Andrew Vachss fills his stories with people forming "families of choice" to retain their humanity against the brutal outside world. And in the same vein, the heart of Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti shows how the bonds of family can form between and among people who otherwise have nothing in common.

If you have to give it a genre, I suppose Mechanique counts as steampunk. Or fantasy. Some aspects verge on science fiction. But it plays with these conventions as much as it does with narrative form. It's not set in the past, like steampunk, and it's not about technology, like science fiction. Its landscape is post-apocalyptic, but with no set time frame (or even confirmation that it's actually set on Earth). And there is a sense of magic to what happens, but it's so grounded, so organic and mundane, that it's as far from the standard tropes as you can get. None of this really matters, though, because ultimately it's about people-building, not world-building.

Via a fractured narrative point of view, we learn that the circus, led by the enigmatic woman known only as Boss, features performers that are part metal, with hollow copper bones to make their feats that much more astounding. One even features the enormous metal wings shown on the cover, but he's dead when the story begins. Which doesn't mean he doesn't figure in things, because Valentine jumps back and forth, changing point of view and time frame whenever it suits her. The story is most often told by Little George, a boy of indeterminate age who works as Boss' go-fer. Through him we learn the complexities of the Tresaulti personalities, and a bit about how some of them came to join the circus. It's a real tribute to Valentine's skill that this is never confusing or disorienting.

If there's a criticism to be made, it's that the plot takes so long to get going, it almost seems like an intrusion. For its first half Mechanique is a brilliant high wire act of a mood piece; the events of the second half jar only because of their relative normality. But that's minor, and ultimately the second half wouldn't work without the emotional investment of the first.

I've known Genevieve for several years now, mostly as a delightful raconteur at conventions and a deliciously snarky columnist. I'd read some of her short fiction, but nothing prepared me for this, not even hearing her read the first few chapters at last year's World Fantasy Convention. She's created a unique world here, and made a brilliant debut as a novelist.

Come back Wednesday for an interview with Genevieve Valentine.

Guest blogging on why I'm no longer a Star Wars fan

2011-07-10T18:31:00.002-05:00

At the Borders SciFi blog, I talk about why I'm no longer a fan of Star Wars. It has nothing to do with who shot first. Read about it here.

Guest blogging on the (re)claiming of Lois Lane

2011-07-06T15:01:00.004-05:00

I'm guest blogging at SF Signal about Lois Lane, and how she changed between the original cut of Superman II and the 2006 restored "Donner Cut." Stop by and leave a comment!

Look back in chagrin

2011-07-04T07:43:00.000-05:00

Recently I've been revising an old manuscript that I originally wrote over a decade ago, and haven't touched in at least seven years. It's an interesting window into the past of my own creative process, and some lessons I've since learned are vividly displayed in all their teeth-gnashing glory. Here are some examples.

1) A little description goes a long way. I described the physical settings in great detail, thinking at the time that the action wouldn't work without it. I try to always make my action scenes use the specific geography I've set up, so that the reader gets the sense that these events could happen nowhere else. I now know that back then, I seriously underestimated the reader's ability to comprehend. For example, I had this as a description of a creek:

"The creek occupied an open ribbon of ground fifty feet wide, and the grass beyond it grew high enough to hide anything."

I thought that readers needed to know that the width of open ground would accommodate the events about to occur. However, in revision I realized this was didactic overkill. Whatever image of a "creek" the reader conjures will work quite well, and has the virtue of getting the reader to contribute to the story's reality.

I also tended to give exact measurements when they weren't necessary. For example, "[it] landed hard on its belly ten yards away." In context of the scene, knowing the precise distance is pedantic and unnecessary.

2) There's a fine line between ambiguity and confusing lack of information, and I often have trouble seeing this line until someone points it out to me. In this story, the plot was set in motion by a man wandering out of the desert and promptly dropping dead. We never found out who he was, where he came from, or why he carried the McGuffin he brought. In re-reading I realized this was a huge dangling plot point that might--and probably should--annoy the reader. So while I liked the ambiguity and wanted to keep as much as possible, I filled in some more detail and implication, so there's at least some sort of explanation.

3) Elmore Leonard, a man who should know, advises, "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." I had clearly not grasped that concept. If the tone of the dialogue isn't clear from the dialogue itself, then in most cases you need to back up and rethink the words. Certainly I did.

4) My chapters have gotten shorter. The first five chapters of this book averaged 17-18 manuscript pages, while my more recent ones are between 13-15. This is an observation, not a value judgment, since in one sense a chapter is as long as it needs to be. But evidently mine need to be shorter than they used to.

And finally,

5) The chapters may be longer, but this book was short. Really short. 350 manuscript pages, when my average for the Eddie LaCrosse series is between 400-420 (and even that's short compared to most fantasy novels). As I revise, I've found places to legitimately add more detail and incident, but I internalized too much journalism to tolerate any padding. And that's another important lesson: like a chapter, a story is as long as it is. Some stories might need multiple volumes of a thousand pages each; then again, some might just take 400 or so pages. Maybe less.

Yes, a lot of these lessons caused me to wince, clench my teeth and look away in both disgust and horror. The urge to think, "I can't believe I wrote something so bad" is pretty strong. But it's also incorrect. I wrote this story the best that I could at the time. I improve with each story I write, with each comment and suggestion I get from my editor, and with each book I read. The process doesn't end. So if you're an aspiring writer out there, and you resurrect an old manuscript that makes you want to give up writing forever, remember two things: a) it was the best you could do at the time, and b) you're better now.

And that should always be true.

Interview with Teresa Frohock, author of Miserere

2011-06-29T05:03:00.000-05:00

Teresa Frohock is both a friend and the author of Miserere: an Autumn Tale, a book I enjoyed so much that I gave her the following blurb:

"Miserere is about redemption, and the triumph of our best impulses over our worst. It's also about swords, monsters, chases, ghosts, magic, court intrigues and battles to the death. It's also (and this is the important part) really, really good."

You can read my full review here.

Teresa graciously agreed to answer some questions for me about the book.

You and I have both recently written books that include people of genuine, true religious faith (my book is The Hum and the Shiver, out this fall). The pitfalls of this are enormous: the danger of sanctimoniousness, of preachiness (literal and figurative), of simply alienating readers who don't share whatever faith the characters embody. How much did you worry about this, and how did you overcome it?

Thanks so much for having me here, Alex, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of this.

Truth be told, I’m still worried about some of those things. Although I think people who read speculative fiction are open-minded and much more amenable to experimentation than other genres, I still worry that some may suffer contempt prior to investigation. I hope not.

It helps that I have no agenda here. I’m not out to push a viewpoint, Christian or otherwise. I just wanted to tell a story, and as I constructed Woerld, I realized the focus would be on Lucian, who happened to belong to the Christian bastion. From that point forward, I had to educate myself about Christianity and I was really surprised by the facts I found.

The version of Christianity that I present on Woerld is gleaned not just from Biblical sources, but also from the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypa. I wanted to see what Christianity might have been like before the Schism of 1054 when Rome split from the Byzantine Church. I approached all the religions on Woerld strictly from a scholarly angle at first, then I eased the spiritual elements inherent to the practices of the religion into the story.

I focused entirely on the growth of the individual character and not the dogma of the religion. And that was hard, showing how the adherents struggle with their faith from personal viewpoints. When we speak of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, we tend to think in terms of groups, not individuals. I wanted to put the focus on the individual and show that
personal growth doesn’t come from automatically joining a group, but comes through the internal work of the individual.

If you read most religious texts closely, they emphasize a personal contact with a higher power, not group-think. So I did very much what you’ve done with Reverend Craig in The Hum and the Shiver—I simply had Lucian live his life in accordance with the dictates of his beliefs. I’ve always loved Emerson and Thoreau’s writings and their emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to contact the divine within and bring that light into the world through action. That is a concept inherent to all religions and I wanted to illustrate that philosophy in Miserere.

You incorporate a young woman, Lindsay, who must learn both to be a warrior (a common fantasy trope) and to truly believe in God (not so common). What did she represent for you?

Lindsay represents our twenty-first century’s society secular thinking about religion, our preconceptions and our misconceptions. Her exposure to religion comes primarily through the media, meaning she understands the various religions through the extremes of the worst possible examples of the adherents: politicians who mouth their version of Christianity while they actively engage in immoral behavior; a Catholic Church hiding child-molesting priests; jihadists that believe their way to paradise is paved with the bodies they leave behind; Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Jews constantly fighting one another either in rhetoric or with guns.

This is what Lindsay is exposed to day after day, then she is taken to the obligatory church service, plunked in a pew, and told God is love. Needless to say, she’s a tad cynical over the whole thing. Kind of like the rest of us.

So I like having her as the voice of the reader, to question Lucian and the adults in Woerld about how things work. That way I can gently ease my readers into Woerld yet not make the picture too rosy. It’s not. There are serious conflicts among the bastions and the governments in Woerld—it was never my intent to present a Utopian society.

Children aren’t afraid to question the status quo, and they see things very clearly, more clearly than adults want to admit. Lindsay is the perfect lens to view Woerld and its imperfections.

Your novel is definitely a fantasy, and many fantasies create their own religions. You chose to use actual existing world religions. What was your thought process behind that?

I thought about Tolkien and Lewis and wondered what The Lord of the Rings would have looked like if Tolkien had written it as a Catholic story instead of embedding the religious tenets beneath Middle Earth’s mythology, or what Narnia would have looked like if, instead of a lion, Aslan was the Christ. Not being as much of a fan of Tolkien as I am of Lewis, I really started reading Lewis’ works; he had a talent for rooting out the spirituality of Christianity and getting to the essence of its beliefs without sanctimony.

I checked out some other current fantasy titles that used fallen angels, and while they addressed the fallen part of the situation, very few showed it from a Christian angle. I think God’s Demon by Wayne Barlowe was the closest novel to presenting hell from a Christian viewpoint, and I love what Barlowe did with that story. The language he used, the characterization, and his perception of hell as an actual, physical place just knocked me for a loop.

Barlowe took the war in heaven and showed how the fallen angels fought. I’ve always been fascinated by the war in heaven and often wondered: what if it’s still going on? I’m sacrilegious like that.

In the end, I fell in love with the absolute challenge of it. This is my own ego talking now, but I wanted to prove you could write a fantasy with Christians in it without the story becoming insipid or preachy. I began constructing Woerld and realized that all religions have some form of hell or purgatory, so realistically, it wouldn’t be just Christians. I mean why would heaven only use a fraction of its forces to combat evil?

So the other religions started seeping in and with that there must be a hierarchy, and the structure of Woerld evolved until it became what it is in Miserere. The more I worked on it, the more detail seeped in, and again, I just loved the challenge of using real religions.

You have a male hero torn between and among a group of women: his sister, his former lover, and his new protégé. Was there a deliberate thought process behind the gender roles for these characters?

I wanted to step outside of a few of the standard fantasy tropes and twist them. The most common trope from the fairy tales of my youth was that of the beautiful princess who was captured by the evil warlord or witch and rescued by a handsome prince. I wanted to turn that trope upside down and show the handsome prince who was captured by the wicked queen and rescued by the beautiful princess. Only in Miserere, the prince takes a real beating from the wicked queen, the beautiful princess is mauled and half-mad, and the wicked queen isn’t strung too tight either.

That was my primary thinking, then everything sort of got away from me. Most people are conditioned to see men in one of two roles: protector or aggressor. Lucian sees himself as the protector, even though it is Lindsay and Rachael who end up saving him more often than he saves them. He is determined not to abandon them, though, and that’s important, that desire to be a part of someone’s life even if it means constraints on his existence.

Nor did I want the women to be perfect. Rachael had her part in her own downfall; Catarina is a grand case of self-will run riot; and Lindsay thinks they’re all being horribly unfair to Lucian while she downplays his crimes in her own mind.

When I got the cover art for Miserere (by the wonderful Michael C. Hayes), I just cried, it was better than anything I could have imagined. I had been dreading what an artist’s conception of Miserere would be, but more than anything, I feared chain mail bikinis on the women and Lucian standing with Catarina and Rachael kneeling or the women pictured lower in the foreground.

Instead, Michael got exactly what I was doing and busted the tropes with me: they’re all standing with their backs to one another; Rachael and Catarina are wearing the armor they would probably choose; Lucian is on his knees between them; and the walls of the Citadel rise behind them. Catarina’s face is cunning, Rachael is distrustfully looking at Lucian, and Lucian—my
poor Lucian—looks to Heaven, because when you’re trapped between those two women, your only salvation is from above.

Thanks to Teresa Frohock for answering my questions. Miserere: an Autumn Tale is available now from Night Shade Books.

Review: Miserere by Teresa Frohock

2011-06-27T04:49:00.002-05:00

It's not easy working religion into fantasy. Actually, that's the wrong word: I should say "faith." Anyone can invent a religion: both L. Ron Hubbard and George Lucas have made millions selling their made-up beliefs. But to depict the way faith works for people, the inner process of how belief gives strength, is hard. It always runs the risk of triteness if it's a fictional belief, or prosletyzing if it's not. And its very inclusion makes the reader question the author's motives.

Which is what makes Teresa Frohock's debut novel Miserere: an Autumn Tale that much more remarkable.

She creates a cosmology that includes our own world, as well as the alternate reality known as the Woerld. The fallen angels exiled from Heaven want to leave Hell and get their revenge on humanity, but to do so they have to get through the Woerld, a semi-medieval society where children plucked from our reality grow up to be the warriors of their new world. One of those warriors, Lucien, has betrayed both his order and his lover, abandoning her in (literal) Hell to aid his evil twin sister. He sets out to make amends, only to find himself saddled with a ten-year-old girl snatched from earth and fated to be a warrior-exorcist like him. Now he must battle to save her, convince his demon-possessed former love that he's changed, and prevent his twin from precipitating the final war between Heaven and Hell.

As anyone who's read my Eddie LaCrosse novels can tell, I'm a sucker for the warrior-battling-his-own-failures trope, and Lucien really delivers. He has done some truly ghastly things for all the wrong reasons, and ended up middle-aged, with a bad leg and a positively Wagnerian guilty conscience. Yet he's held on to a kernel of integrity, and he uses that to start his path to redemption. Rachael, his lover who is now possessed by a low-level demon that's taking her over bit by bit, is also seeking redemption for her own foolish trust and impulsiveness. And Lindsey, the girl fated to be a warrior-exorcist like Lucien, behaves and acts like a real ten-year-old, with all the strengths and weaknesses that entails.

These warriors call on their faith, reciting prayers to work magic. And their faith is unabashedly Christian, although it's made explicit that in Woerld all religions are represented equally and get along, the exact opposite of how they do here. And I suppose if God made swords glow and the earth open up to swallow enemies on request, faith would be a lot easier for the rest of us, too. But God isn't like the Force (which, with the advent of midichlorians, seems to be merely the static charge thrown off by viruses rubbing together): faith aids the warriors, but doesn't do the job for them.

And don't let all this talk of religion put you off, because Miserere is not a book with an agenda. First and foremost it's a fantasy adventure, with battles and chases and monsters. The extra depth and thoughtfulness Frohock brings to the story is gravy. I was asked to blurb this book, and after I read it, I did so with no reservations. I recommend it whole-heartedly to any fans of my books.

Watch for an interview with Teresa Frohock here in the near future.

Just in: cover art for The Hum and the Shiver

2011-06-23T15:57:00.003-05:00

Here's the final cover art for my next novel, out this September. The preliminary illustration used on Amazon featured a male figure, but since the book's protagonist is a young woman, Tor's awesome art deparment redid it.

What do you think?

Advice to writers: swing for the fence

2011-06-20T05:21:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I get asked for advice about being a writer.* Usually it's a general question such as, "How can I become a writer?" or "What should I write about?" The answer to the first is easy: you either are or you aren't, and deep down you know. But that second question is a tricky one. Conventional wisdom says "write what you know," but since I know nothing about being a sword jockey in a mythological world or a vampire in 1975 Memphis, I can't really get behind that answer. But I do have an answer. Sort of.

In the liner notes for his 1995 Greatest Hits compilation, Bruce Springsteen calls the song "Born to Run":

"My shot at the title. A 24 yr. old kid aimin' at 'the greatest rock 'n roll record ever.'"

In a 2003 interview, he elaborated:

"With that one I was shooting for the moon. I said, 'I don't want to make a good record, I want to make The Greatest Record Somebody's Ever Heard.' I was filled with arrogance and thought, I can do that, y'know?"

When I was a kid, the cliche was that anyone who wanted to be a writer presumably also wanted to write The Great American Novel. I never knew what that was exactly, but I assumed it was some sort of book that encapsulated the American experience in such a universal way that anyone who read it would immediately connect with it. There were contenders presented in English classes: The Grapes of Wrath and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were the two most common. But neither connected with me. Either I was un-American, or the definition was essentially meaningless. Which it was, and is.

But it serves a purpose. Like "the greatest rock 'n roll record ever," it's a goal that we should have the arrogance to shoot for. Yet we don't. If anything, we're taught not to attempt it.

What passes for "serious" literature nowadays is often the result of multiple generations of writers going through MFA programs, publishing first novels of thinly-disguised coming-of-age autobiography, returning to academia as teachers and showing the next generation how to write and publish first novels of thinly-disguised coming-of-age autobiography. It's a recipe for institutionalized boredom that goes a long way toward explaining why you don't see so many bookstores anymore (and explains why something like David Foster Wallace'sThe Pale King, a novel literally about boredom, can gain such critical acclaim). The Great American Novel will never be produced by someone whose entire life consists of such limited experience.

Genre fiction, at least, is still popular (and believe me, I'm hugely grateful for that), but will never overcome the stigma attached to it (after all, it's "merely" science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc.). And that's okay: we'll be happily serving our readers while the rest of the literary world wonders why no one reads anymore.

So where will the Great American Novel come from, then?

Beats me, but I do know one thing about it.

It will come from someone with the arrogance to shoot for the title.

So take your shot, man. Have the arrogance. Swing for the fence.

That's my advice.

*and that's especially funny since I've been writing all my life and my first novel didn't come out until I was over forty. Perhaps they'd be better served asking one of those hot young things with a best-seller at 25. But hey, people do ask me.

Eddie LaCrosse IV has a title!

2011-06-14T15:42:00.003-05:00

At last! I'm proud to announce the title of the fourth adventure of Eddie LaCrosse, out in 2012 from Tor Books:

WAKE OF THE BLOODY ANGEL.

What do you think?

Kurosawa meets Eddie LaCrosse

2011-06-13T05:14:00.003-05:00

Quite a while ago, I posted the trailer to Akira Kurosawa's crime thriller High and Low, and mentioned it was one of the influences on my novel Dark Jenny. I never got around to explaining that until now.

High and Low is based on one of Ed McBain's "87th Precinct" series of police procedurals, in this case King's Ransom. And although the film changes many of the details of plot and setting to make it work in postwar Japan, the central dilemma remains the same. A wealthy businessman is sent a ransom note saying his son has been kidnapped, but it's actually the son of his chauffer, taken by mistake. Does he pay the ransom anyway, even if it means financial and professional ruin?

But it wasn't the plot of High and Low that influenced my novel, it was its structure. The first hour of the film takes place in the businessman's apartment, mostly in the living room that overlooks greater Tokyo, making it the "high" of the title. The claustrophobia adds to the tension, as Kurosawa invokes the sense of evil forces watching from below in the labyrinthine streets. The police must crawl on the floor to avoid being seen at the windows, and each time the phone rings everyone stops dead.

I wanted some of that same vibe in my scenes at Nodlon Castle, which occupy the first fourteen chapters of Dark Jenny. I tried keeping everything in the great hall, but since I'm not Kurosawa, I wasn't quite able to make it work. Still, I hope I conveyed some of the sense of cabin fever, of Eddie trapped within stone walls and ceilings, unable to do much of anything except wait and hope for a break.

SPOILER ALERT! Both for my book and Kurosawa's film!

Once the ransom has been paid, the police are free to use all means at their disposal to track down the kidnappers. The film then turns into a documentary-style chase through the city's rougher sections, the "Low" of the title. It's as different from the spacious, sparsely-furnished apartment as it's possible to be: "a sordid sin-market filled with mixed-race couples and manic frugging, squabbling sailors and cat-eyed slatterns, ravaged junk-zombies and undercover cops from Hell," according to the DVD liner notes by Chuck Stephens.

Similarly, when Eddie is finally allowed to leave, he travels across the breadth of the island of Grand Bruan, visiting towns, villages and manor houses all very different from Nodlon Castle. I wanted to get the sense of freedom and relief Eddie feels at finally being allowed to do something, the same way Detective Tokura and his men do in the Kurosawa film.

Part of the fun of writing any Eddie LaCrosse story is finding a way to use influences that are about as far from sword and sorcery as you can get, so working in elements of a sixties Japanese crime thriller appealed to me immensely. It also provided a structure for my faux-Arthurian story that let me deal both with court intrigue and full-on battles without bogging down in either. Without it, Dark Jenny would not have been as lean and fast-paced as I hope it turned out to be.

Blinded by the Dark: chiaroscuro and Eddie LaCrosse

2011-06-07T05:15:00.001-05:00

Recently a reviewer was kind enough to say this about my latest novel:

"Dark Jenny is a fast-paced mystery with plenty of action; it’s also intelligent, original, and satisfyingly chiaroscuro."

You don't encounter the word "chiaroscuro" every day, and several readers asked me what it meant. Quoting from Webster, it's a "pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color." In other words, it's the use of darkness to let you see the light, and vice versa.

I first encountered the term with regards to one of my favorite genres, film noir. It's a great example of turning a flaw into an asset. Many of these movies were shot on very low budgets, which often meant cheap sets. To disguise this, the cinematographers would keep the sets dark, so that their flaws were hidden. Many of these same cinematographers, and the directors they worked for, were also expatriates from Nazi Germany, which meant they learned their craft during the Weimer Republic days of the great Expressionist films like M, Nosferatu, Metropolis and The Golem. This meant that not only did they know how to light for darkness, so to speak, but they knew why.

Peter Lorre in M. The film is actually shot in this weird vertical aspect ratio.

Chiaroscuro thrived in black and white film noir. Witness the use of shadows during the fist fight in Out of the Past, or the scene between Jonesy and Canino in The Big Sleep with only their dark silhouettes on the frosted glass. Watch the way Mike Mazurki appears behind Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet. You could spend the day listing scenes that apply.

Dick Powell and Mike Mazuski in Murder, My Sweet.

So how does such a visual term translate to prose, specifically to the world of Eddie LaCrosse? It's a modification of the "innocent abroad" trope, in which the moral status of various characters (i.e., their shades of darkness) are made plain against the spiritual and moral purity of the innocent main character. Treasure Island, for example, uses the boy Jim Hawkins as the moral yardstick against which all the other characters are measured.

But in crime and mystery, it goes a step further, in that it allows the reader to interpret not just the people but the world. Raymond Chandler famously said of his genre, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." In other words, he is the light going down the streets of darkness (no Biblical reference intended).

Harrison Ford and Sean Young in Blade Runner, which transposes chiaroscuro to the future.

That's how I see Eddie, and how I hope he's used in the stories. He's not mean in the sense Chandler uses the word (both vicious and ignoble), but he has been in the past, and he knows how easy it is to cross that line. He's tarnished, certainly, but he's in the process of polishing that away. And he's not afraid of the walk, although he has sense enough to be scared of what might live in the shadows he passes through.

Without his light, we could never see what dwells in the shadows. And without the shadows, we'd never know the value of the light, of the hero, of our guy Eddie. And that's how chiaroscuro fits into the world of Eddie LaCrosse.

Win an ARC of THE HUM AND THE SHIVER

2011-06-06T05:14:00.000-05:00

Curious about my next book, The Hum and the Shiver? Here's your chance to check it out before it hits shelves. I have five advance reader copies; leave a comment on this blog post before midnight Sunday, June 12 for chance to win one. Be sure and leave an e-mail with your comment.

Here's the video teaser trailer to wet your whistle:

The "Don't Say Gay" bill and being "tender-hearted" in TN

2011-05-30T04:51:00.003-05:00

So Tennessee, my home state and the setting of many of my stories and novels, has again made the national news. The State Senate passed a law dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill which outlaws even mentioning the existence of gay people in elementary and middle school. I doubt this also includes not mentioning the various slurs and code words Tennesseans have always used for gay folks; in fact, I'm sure the sponsors of the bill often employed those terms in closed-door meetings prior to presenting the bill, right after the opening prayer.

As a child with little aptitude in sports and an interest in literature, science fiction and movies, my schoolmates often teased me with those same slurs. A cousin, in fact, once taunted me with some of them for reading Star Trek: Log Five, just before he beat me up. The fact that I wasn't gay didn't particularly matter, as it never does in such situations. But it was, and remains, the way kids often are, and while I disapprove of it I also comprehend the reasons for it, especially in the South.

Still, it was nothing compared to the contempt adults showed for kids they deemed "different," "odd" or "weird," and that included a term of such surpassing brilliance that I still marvel at it: tender-hearted. It sounds almost like a compliment, much as does "Bless your heart," which is now generally known to be Southern code for, "You're so stupid." In the same way, "tender-hearted" is code for "gay." Or more precisely, it's synonymous with one of the pithier terms used to derisively describe gay males.

The first time I cursed (we called it "cussed") in front of other people got the term "tender-hearted" applied to me. When I was about ten or eleven, some older good ol' boys dragged a turtle from a pond and cut off its head in their driveway for no reason other than to do it. I told them I found it ignorant and cruel, and when they laughed at me for that, I let fly with every curse word I knew. I was also so mad I started crying. Between the tears and the general knowledge that I liked to read books, I was quickly pegged as "tender-hearted," and to this day (nearly forty years later) the people in my home town still think of me that way.

So the "Don't Say Gay" bill disappoints and saddens me, but it doesn't surprise me. Good ol' Tennesseans have a long tradition of not saying "gay." Instead, depending on the situation, they either use slurs or euphemisms, as they do for everything else. Bless their hearts.

(Please visit and support It's Okay to be Takei, George "Mr. Sulu" Takei's brilliant response to the Tennessee law.)

Mamet's Theatre: an extended whine

2011-05-23T05:36:00.000-05:00

Recently I had the unmitigated pleasure of discovering Beginnings, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote's memoir of his years as a young man in the theater. It started me on a little run of books about American theatrical thought, such as an immense collection of Lee Strasberg lectures, and made me eager to see a live theatrical performance, something I haven't done in a while. Then I came across David Mamet's recent book Theatre. I may never go see a play again.

Mamet, like Foote, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross) and a successful screenwriter (The Untouchables, Hoffa). But there the similarities end. Beginnings was a warm, kind tale of people devoted to their art; Theatre, supposedly the culmination of Mamet's forty years in the trade, feels like the extended whine of an entitled old man who thinks that not enough people listen to him. In it, Mamet comes across as a combination of South Park's Eric Cartman and Patrick Swayze's "My way or the highway" speech from Road House.

I've never been a theatrical person, so my first-hand knowledge is limited. Still, the contempt Mamet shows for anyone who thinks differently than he does shoots way beyond arrogance into a kind of pathological egotism that must originate from some childhood humiliation. It's not just, "This is my way, and it works for me," it's "This is my way, and it's the only way that works, so shut the fuck up and listen."

Here's is a typical passage:

"But there is no inner life of the character, as there is no character. The character is only a few words of speech delineated on the page, and that's all there is--and the Method's concern with the character differs not at all from the daydreams of a twelve-year-old girl, e.g., 'I wonder what Rhett Butler would do if he lived now?'"

As a writer, I can understand the wariness with which he approaches those involved in producing his plays (actors, directors, designers, etc.). I sometimes feel the same way about editors, marketing departments, and so forth. The difference is, I recognize the value of their jobs. Mamet never does. For him theater begins and ends with the play's text; directors are next to useless, and I suspect if he could get rid of actors somehow, he would. He certainly doesn't want their input: "The actor's true talent and job is...to stand still and say the words--in order to accomplish something like the purpose indicated by the author."

And the fear behind this minimizing of actors? Rejection. "The persistence of an interest in the inner life of the character is a form of deconstructionism, which is to say a rejection of the text." His text.

The pragmatist in me wants to agree with many of his tenets, but they come laced with such vitriol that I instinctively side with those he chastises. Even a bully who's right is still a bully. The contempt laced through Theatre must come from a place of supreme, intractable unhappiness that no amount of success will ever ameliorate. I feel sorry for the guy, because I doubt he's ever enjoyed any of his success the way Horton Foote clearly did (and God only knows what Mamet thinks of Foote). Still, none of this is surprising for a man bitter and misanthropic enough to write Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna.

In the commentary for the Hoffa DVD, director Danny DeVito relates the following joke (paraphrased by me):

An English professor comes out of a Broadway show and is approached by a bum asking for change. The professor haughtily says, "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' William Shakespeare." The bum replies, "Yeah? 'Fuck you.' David Mamet."

Yep. Fuck you, indeed. That's the core statement at the heart of Mamet's theatre, and Mamet's Theatre.

Teaser trailer for THE HUM AND THE SHIVER

2011-05-16T05:15:00.001-05:00

Here's a glimpse of my next book, The Hum and the Shiver, out this September.

Help the southern storm and flood victims (and get cool swag)!

2011-05-13T13:32:00.003-05:00

I'm donating both a signed copy of DARK JENNY and my personal DVD of "Excalibur" as part of the HELP WRITE NOW auction to aid victims of the recent southern storms, tornados and floods. Bidding starts at $5!

The Betrayal of Arthur and the scent of disdain

2011-05-09T05:23:00.000-05:00

About five years ago, when I was first thinking about the story that became Dark Jenny, I began looking for books that dealt in a critical and scholarly way with the meaning of Arthurian stories. I'd read the basic, classic fiction texts--Le Morte d'Arthur, The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, The Wicked Day--but I wanted to understand what about these stories kept them in society's consciousness for over a thousand years. This lead me to Sara Douglass' The Betrayal of Arthur.

Finding the book in a local used bookstore was utter serendipity, since it's never been officially released in the U.S. Douglass, a noted Australian fantasy author (The Axis trilogy), is also a scholar and brings both perspectives to bear on the Arthurian tales. She traces them from the eariest oral traditions up to the present (or rather, 1999 when the book was pubished). As her title implies she sees betrayal as the central theme, but not in the simple way you might expect. She acknowledges the Lancelot/Guinevere duplicity, but sees it as just one more example of a life sunken in perfidy. From the moment of conception--Uther Pendragon raping Ygerna, whether by deception or force--Arthur's life is doomed. Sexual betrayal becomes the central theme. She explains why the various eras have responded to Arthur, how and why they've changed it to suit their times, and what it means to them.

I was so fascinated by all this the first time I read the book that I missed what is actually a sizable undercurrent: her utter contempt for anyone since T.H. White who has dared to write about Arthur. From Marion Zimmer Bradley to Rosemary Sutcliffe, she implies that these authors simply lack the capacity to understand the material with which they're working.

On her web page, she devotes a fair bit of space to describing the process behind this book. Even here, her disdain for modern versions of the story is plain:

"Firstly (and uncomfortably for our modern age which doesn't like such things), the Arthurian legend as it was developed in the medieval period was a moralistic tragedy...Secondly (and this is bound to be an unpopular theme), Arthur failed because he was himself a flawed king and man."

There are other examples, but if the disdain is so thick it comes through in the author's own web page synopsis, you can imagine how it permeates the book.

And that annoys me, both because I've written my own "Arthurian" novel, and because despite being a modern fantasy author, I feel quite capable of understanding any aspect of folklore or mythology that interests me. I have no doubt Ms.Douglass would dislike Dark Jenny for several reasons (that I can't go into because they're spoilers). But the elephant in the room that she seems to miss is that we (contemporary authors) are doing the same thing Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and TH White did in their times: creating Arthurian tales for our audiences. We may not recite ballads around campfires, or perform with lutes for royalty, but we know our readers as well as those great storytellers of the past knew theirs. In a thousand years, who knows which current works will be held up alongside Malory, et.al.? Bradley certainly seems well on the way to standing the test of time.

In the conclusion of her webpage synopsis, Ms. Douglass says, "The Betrayal of Arthur is not a sop to popular culture, expectations or needs." No kidding. It remains, for me, a classic and a crucial step in the development of Dark Jenny. I wish it didn't also, after my recent re-read, leave such a sour aftertaste.

The Best Thing Ever! (and a side order of WTF?)

2011-05-02T05:03:00.007-05:00

Recently I read a review of the Doctor Who season premiere that suggested the show is essentially creating an entirely new nonlinear form of storytelling. With all respect I think this is excessive praise, much like the folks who claim Ron Moore reinvented SF television. But whether or not you agree with this idea, I'm more interested in the critical subtext that insists any currently-fashionable genre permutation must be the best thing ever!

I love Doctor Who, and I trust that the show will eventually explain most, if not all, of the nonlinear moments the series premier gave us. But this nonlinear (i.e., WTF) quality of the episode "The Impossible Astronaut" is certainly nothing unique in SF, especially British SF that makes it to America. The first season of Space: 1999 is my touchstone for WTF, and that was done thirty years ago. In fact, for many years, when SF was being produced for fans but not by them, the attitude was most definitely, "It doesn't have to make sense! It's science fiction, they'll swallow anything." (An example: the unapologetic interview with screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., included on the special edition DVD of 1980's Flash Gordon. Semple, a veteran of the Adam West Batman TV show and the 1976 King Kong remake, seems astounded and a little insulted that anyone would expect him to take a subject like Flash Gordon seriously.)

So what's behind this desire to overpraise whatever is currently popular? The need to instantly comment on and review things in the internet age is part of it, since these reviews are often written in the full flush of ardor following a new book/movie/TV show. More to the point, in many online critical commentaries there's a definite urge to preach to the choir, which means that the critics mirror rather than challenge the enthusiasms of their readers (which, after all, is how you keep readers coming back). And ironically in an era when the great works of the past are more accessible than they ever have been, there seems to be a real need to establish that the Next Big Thing is also the Best Thing Ever (witness the lavish praise heaped on the reboot of Star Trek).

And that's the opposite of real, thoughtful criticism. One purpose of critical evaluation is to remind readers that the Next Big Thing may not, in fact, be the Best Thing Ever. For example, Elizabethans experienced Macbeth as the Next Big Thing, but calling it the Best Thing Ever looks foolish when you realize Shakespeare wrote Hamlet three years earlier.

So whatever the Next Big Thing is, perhaps we need to wait until we have some critical distance before claiming it's also the Best Thing Ever.

New cover art for Burn Me Deadly

2011-04-26T13:19:00.005-05:00

Here's the mass market paperback cover art for Burn Me Deadly, from the same artist who did Dark Jenny. What do you think?

(Don't yet have the official release date, but I'll post it ASAP.)

Horton Foote's Beginnings: A Memoir

2011-04-25T04:29:00.001-05:00

Like pretty much everyone I know, I have a massive TBR (To Be Read) pile of books filled with probably awesome literature. Some I've started, and for whatever reason never quite returned to. Some I know I'll have to make myself read one day. And some--often the unexpected ones--I pick up and literally can't put down.

That's the joy of reading that professional writers can lose track of. We have books we have to read for research, books written by friends, books that we've been asked to blurb..."reading for fun" often gets pushed way down the stack. And a lot of these books are fun to read, even if the reading is prompted by one of these ulterior motives. But there's nothing like being captivated by something you didn't expect to grab ahold of you so quick, and so tight. Horton Foote's second volume of memoirs, Beginnings, did that for me.

Foote (1916-2009) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter. When Beginnings begins, he's a 17-year-old just arrived in Pasadena to study acting. Before long he's in New York, starting to write plays and begin his subsequent momentous career. He name-drops a lot of people you've probably heard of, and a few you haven't, but what's interesting is that he never presents anything remotely gossipy or aggrandizing about these people. They're just the folks he met along the way, most of whom treat him kindly. There's no backstage romance, no backstabbing, and not much back story: the book starts, tells its tale and ends. Heck, he even covers meeting his wife, courting her and their marriage in one paragraph. Simple, sure, but it's the kind of simplicity that is as rare as spring in Wisconsin.

He also uses a lot of dialogue. This might seem odd in a memoir, because truthfully, who remembers that many actual conversations from years ago? Yet because he's a playwright, and because he doesn't present anything that sounds remotely "speech-y" or false, it becomes a non-issue. Most of the conversations simply convey information, the way they do in real life.

In fact, what makes Beginnings work so well is that Foote's style is so minimal, and so realistic, that it's virtually nonexistent. He does an extraordinary job of simply getting out of the way of the story, a lesson more authors (including yours truly) could probably stand to learn. If you've seen the 1983 Robert Duvall film Tender Mercies (source of one of those Oscars) you have an idea of what he does, and how well he does it.

Beginnings reads most of all like an elaborate "thank you" to the people who helped that young man from Texas make his way in show business. Its Texas-flavored graciousness is part of its considerable charm. I read a fair number of author biographies (most recently Low Road, about Donald Goines), and usually they seem to succeed despite their personalities, not because of them. Foote seems the opposite: he's decent to everyone, and everyone is decent in return. It may not be entirely true, but I'd like to think it is.

The horror of pink toenails

2011-04-13T09:19:00.000-05:00

I'll warn you up front, this is a rant. My last one was about the deification of Ron Moore. This one is a lot more personal, and also thankfully much briefer.

Apparently this J. Crew ad has been pissing people off because it shows a woman painting her five-year-old boy's toenails. The ad quotes the mom as saying, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink.”

Some of the outrage from experts:

"Propaganda pushing the celebration of gender-confused boys wanting to dress and act like girls is a growing trend, seeping into mainstream culture. --Erin Brown, the Culture and Media Institute.

“This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” --psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow for Fox News.

And a couple of representative comments from the public, courtesy of TODAYMoms:

"Ah yes... another unhappy mother who wanted a little girl but instead got a boy. Now she is trying to change him into what she always desired. Either that or she is a closet lesbian and she is trying to ruin her kids child hoods."

"Shame on that mother and how dare she want her SON to wear anything feminine. He is a boy and should be treated and reared as such..PERIOD!!"

Thankfully, lots of moms and other experts have stepped up to challenge this nonsense; but now, because you're here, you get to hear from a dad.

My oldest son is six years old. He loves swordfighting, playing soccer, Godzilla movies and the Green Bay Packers. He also loves Stevie Nicks and, as part of his fannish excitement, for a brief period he liked dressing up in billowing skirts and scarves while lip-synching to "Edge of Seventeen." He also occasionally wants his mom to paint his nails.

Now, do the last two things cancel out the first four?

I understand that this "controversy" is basically the result of trolls looking for something to be offended by, rather than any real substantial issue. But it still irks me, because it's one more example of adults co-opting aspects of childhood for their own ends. In my experience a five year old boy is incapable of gender confusion unless his family forces the confusion on him. He's simply unconcerned with accepted gender roles, and has the wide-open ability to enjoy things whether they're traditionally "masculine" or "feminine." We lose that when we become aware of things like social embarrassment, shame and peer pressure, three joys of adulthood waiting in my son's near future. And we lose some of childhood's magic every time these trolls do something like this.

In the meantime, though, he's free to enjoy whatever aspects of gender he wants, up to and including nail polish and billowing skirts. He gets the magic as long as he can.

Giants of West Tennessee: Dale Watson

2011-04-11T04:23:00.002-05:00

Recently a family emergency prompted a visit to my hometown of Gibson, TN. It has a population of around 300, with no school, newspaper, public library or sit-down restaurant. It's a notorious and unapologetic speed trap. And judging from the condition of a lot of the houses around town, it's fully embraced Tennessee's status as number one in the nation for meth labs. But surprisingly, two artistic types emerged from this town: yours truly, and noted roots-country musician Dale Watson

I grew up in Gibson, but Dale was only there for a year, when we were both fifteen. Born in Birmingham, AL, he's since been claimed by both Texas and Bakersfield, CA. Still, I consider the year he lived in Gibson to be just as formative, even if at the time he was more into Hendrix than Haggard. His father and older brother continued to live there after he left, and he's written at least one song specifically about a long-lost Gibson institution:

(The location of the former Jack's Truck Stop in Gibson.)

At the time we met, I was at the height of my Star Wars obsession, and wanted to be the next George Lucas. I was determined to use my Super 8 movie camera to make THE definitive movie about Bigfoot using stop-motion animation for the monster. Dale was the only friend I had who understood this, and his older brother even starred in the one scene I managed to complete (alas, like Orson Welles' cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, my film has been irretrievably lost).

(The site of Dale's former house; Jack's Truck Stop is just down the hill through the cedar trees behind it.)

One high point of our friendship was the summer night he and I walked from Gibson to the nearby town of Humboldt along Highway 79. There's a quirk to this trip: the sign in Humboldt says Gibson is four miles away, while the sign in Gibson says Humboldt is six miles away. Either way, we walked about five miles, talking about whatever it is teenage boys talk about (use your imagination), until a local older teenager known as "Bird" (a.k.a. "Big Bird," because she was very tall; oh, we were witty) saw us just as we reached Humboldt and offered us a ride back in her car.

The fallout from this was predictable. Dozens of people passed us, of course, and my mother was mortified that her son was seen walking along the highway at night like some common...well, highway-walker, I guess. Propriety had much more importance back then than it does now. I don't know if Dale got in trouble, but I somehow doubt it: I suspect his father understood just how maddening Gibson could be to boys not old enough to drive, but certainly old enough to understand that they lived in a town that considered them weird and therefore hated.

Dale and I lost touch over the years, and while I've followed his music and exchanged some e-mails with him, we've only spoken once. He's had a tragic life that I won't get into here, but he's also produced a body of work that at times astounds me with its depth and honesty. While I was home this past weekend I was forced to endure part of the Academy of Country Music awards show, and realized how pandering and shallow today's mainstream "country" music is compared to what Dale does. I wish Dale the best, and hope someday to have a chance to sit down and seriously catch up on things. In the meantime, I can wholeheartedly recommend his music.

Release day for DARK JENNY

2011-03-29T06:37:00.004-05:00

Today is the official release day for the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, DARK JENNY. It drops as a trade paperback, e-book for all the usual platforms, and audiobook, read once again by Stefan Rudnicki.

And how, you ask, does this novel stack up to the previous ones?

"Bledsoe skillfully combines humor, action, deduction, and emotion to make the material fresh and engaging for fans of both fantasy and noir." --Publishers Weekly starred review

"Bledsoe’s clever combination of noir and myth makes for an engaging story, and placing investigator Eddie at the center offers a fresh twist."--Booklist starred review

"The third Eddie LaCrosse adventure delivers a skewed version of the King Arthur legend that is at once both tongue-in-cheek and strangely powerful."--Library Journal

"Dark Jenny is unlike any fantasy novel I have ever read before."--Bookworm Blues

"Bledsoe's latest is a superb work of fantasy; he treats the Arthurian Legend template with respect, and does some great imaginative updates."--The Agony Column

"Dark Jenny is a lot like the movie Clue on a twisted date with The Princess Bride."--The World in the Satin Bag

"(It can) heal the sick, raise the dead, make the little girls talk outta their heads."--Jerry Lee Lewis (okay, he was talking about himself, but I like to quote the Killer whenever possible)

DARK JENNY is available at all major online and brick-and-mortar outlets.

The Wicked Day: the weight of legend

2011-03-28T04:26:00.005-05:00

It's no secret that my new Eddie LaCrosse novel Dark Jenny (which hits stores tomorrow, March 29) draws its inspiration from Arthurian sources. So on the eve of its release I'd like to write about the straight Arthurian novel that's so good, I wish I'd written it: Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day.

Stewart's first three Arthurian novels (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) were about Merlin, who I find the least interesting of the major characters. There's something ineffably smug about him as he toys with destinies and then fails so spectacularly he takes Camelot down with him. In a sense he's the Karl Rove or James Carville of the Arthurian world (or maybe Lee Atwater, if you want to stretch a point), and a novel with that approach might be fun. As it is, and despite Stewart's skill, after three books I was ready to seal Merlin in a cave myself.

But Stewart switches gears entirely for The Wicked Day. This novel is about Mordred, Arthur's bastard son by his half-sister Morgause. Unlike the first-person narration of the prior books, this one is in third person, so all the characters we've previously seen through Merlin's eyes are now shown from a different perspective. Stewart makes Mordred a complex, driven but honest young man who both fights his destiny and embraces it. His relationship with his father is fascinating, since both know of Merlin's prophecy that Mordred will bring down Arthur's kingdom, and yet they forge a close friendship.

The first time I read the book, I admit I was disappointed in the ending. Not that it was a surprise: it's the ending that the Arthurian legend must have, one way or another. But up until then Stewart had fleshed out the characters and situations so well that the inexplicable events actually came to make sense. And then comes the final battle at Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred meet, and die. Instead of giving us their final confrontation, held in a futile attempt to make peace, she retreats and falls back on:

None of those watching was ever destined to know what Arthur and Mordred spoke of.
(first edition, p. 302)

This sudden distance from the climactic moment is jarring, and when I first read it, it well and truly pissed me off. I felt cheated, all the more so because I loved the rest of the book. For years I called it "99.9 percent of a good book."

But as time passed (and I made my own run at Arthurian-ish characters) I realized her choice made sense. No matter what she came up with for this climactic scene, it pales next to the weight of a thousand years of legend. By leaving this moment to the reader's imagination, she gives the story the sense of inevitability and tragedy that a more literal depiction could never have done. Ultimately it doesn't matter what they said, because the end of the story was written by Fate long before either Mordred or Arthur came along.

So I've come to fully love The Wicked Day, to the point that I'll probably never attempt a straight Arthurian novel. And besides, Dark Jenny covers all the bases I wanted to touch. It's my Camelot, skewed and tweaked to fit in the world of Eddie LaCrosse, sword jockey.

The Sword-Edged Blonde eBook for only $2.99!

2011-03-24T06:07:00.004-05:00

Right now the good folks at Tor Books have the eBook of my first Eddie LaCrosse novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, on sale for $2.99. So all you Nookies/Kindlers/iPadders, there's never been a better time to see what a mash-up between high fantasy and hard-boiled pulp looks like.

Review: Alice Hoffman's The Red Garden

2011-03-21T04:56:00.001-05:00

If Alice Hoffman was a painter, her brush strokes would barely touch the canvas, yet her pictures would be as vivid as Monet's. She crafts delicate stories that always seem on the verge of wafting away until they come back to earth with some devastating, perfect detail.

The Red Garden is something new from her: a book pitched somewhere between a short story collection and a novel. The individual tales stand more or less on their own, but the cumulative effect is much more novelistic. The continuing character is Blackwell, a Massachusetts town that she tracks from its settling in 1750 through the present day. Founded by a woman so tough and determined that she milks a bear to keep the settlers alive, the town remains home to strong-willed women who either choose duty over love, or find love's solace fleeting. The men are often confused, aimless, seeking a direction in life that many of them find in the wilderness of the nearby mountain. Bears are a recurring motif, as are bees and eels in the river. The titular garden grows plants that inevitably turn red for reasons that the reader knows, but not the inhabitants.

And there are elements of overt magic, specifically in the story "The Fisherman's Wife." But for the most part, the supernatural elements remain subtle, hidden, easily explained to the characters with more mundane explanations. Only the reader, with the perspective of history, sees them for what they truly are. And it's that gentle, cobweb-light push/pull of magic and reality that defines the book's tone.

Stylistically, Hoffman goes for something equally subtle. Characters weave in and out of the stories, and Hoffman plays with narrative voice when it suits her ("The Truth About My Mother," for example, is told in first person). There's a sense that the penultimate story, "The Red Garden," resolves threads left from the very first tale, "The Bear's House." But then there's a final story, "King of the Bees," that thematically says no story ever ends, not even when we think we understand it. Blackwell's tales go on, just as life continues past our own moments of epiphany.

As a reader, I try to expose myself to things vastly different from what I write. The Red Garden has virtually nothing in common with my own stories, but I hope it teaches me to be a hair more subtle, or to risk a moment of delicacy amongst the swordplay and carnage.

The Rio Bravo approach to world-building

2011-03-15T04:28:00.005-05:00

I’m often asked about “world building,” the term for creating the environment for fantasy novels. Most tend to be much more elaborate than mine, which may be one reason why my books are so much shorter. I usually respond with some variation of, “I’m more interested in people building,” which is true but can understandably sound a bit facile.

Still, I can't deny I’m far more interested in the details of character than in aspects of society that don’t impinge on the story. So I cast about for another example of that approach, and found it in one of my favorite movies, Howard Hawks’ classic western Rio Bravo starring John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson.

The setting is as generic a Western town as you can imagine: it's nameless (although it's assumed to be "Rio Bravo," no one ever actually says so), isolated, and the only institutions shown are the jail, the hotel and the saloon. Contrast this to the unique, incredibly detailed sets of The Wild Bunch or the specific geographical settings of The Searchers. At the time (1959) television was filled with Western series the way we now have reality shows, and nothing about Rio Bravo's setting is substantially different from the backlot towns people saw every week for free on Bonanza, Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. So what did the movie have to make them pay to see it?

Characters. Archetypal to be sure, but developed with detail and skill, played by actors at the top of their games and laced through with humor. In other words, the exact opposite of world-building. People-building. And if I have to err, that's the direction I'd rather go. I can live with an underdeveloped or generic setting, as long as it's populated by compelling and interesting characters.

What do you think? How much setting is enough, and how much is too much?

Admit it: this picture really makes you want to see the movie, doesn't it?

Read the first chapter of DARK JENNY

2011-03-09T08:20:00.003-06:00

Check out the first chapter of Dark Jenny here.

Reality...what a (necessary) concept

2011-03-07T04:38:00.003-06:00

Reality may seem a strange concern for a writer who focuses on fantasy and horror. After all, how can you claim anything is "real" in tales of faux-medieval warriors, disco-era vampires and supernatural hillbillies? Yet it's an overwhelming concern to me, and one that leads me repeatedly back to the films of John Cassavetes.

His work--among them Shadows, Faces, the seminal A Woman Under the Influence, my current favorite Opening Night--created the American independent film movement. Their sometimes ragged natures are often perceived as the result of improvisation, in the same vein as the films of Christopher Guest or Henry Jaglom, but that's a misperception: Cassavetes may have based his screenplays on rehearsal improvisations, but the final films are the result of tightly scripted and deliberately constructed performances. Within them, of course, are moments of invention, but not so many as you might think.

This approach is made clear in A Constant Forge, a lengthy (140 minutes) documentary by Charles Kiselyak. Cassavetes died in 1989, so the majority of the interviews are with people who worked with him, along with excerpts from print interviews read by Sean Penn. It's also obvious in Cassavetes Directs, a fly-on-the-wall account of the filming of his last movie, Love Streams, in 1984.

So what's the point of this approach? Simply, it allows an almost total breakdown of the line between performance and documentary realism. There are moments in A Woman Under the Influence that feel so real, so uncomfortably genuine, that even with famous actors like Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands onscreen, you can forget you're watching a movie and feel like you're spying on real people. For an audience used to dramatic signposts (THIS is a serious scene, THIS is a humorous line, you should feel TERROR here), a movie like this can be a hugely uncomfortable experience.

So what can a prose writer get from this? I hope it serves as a reminder that no matter what's happening in the story, whether your hero is facing a dragon or a vampire is learning that sunlight will not destroy her, the reality of the moment lies in reactions that are unanticipated but undeniably genuine. In Cassavetes' work, he strove to get beneath the surface responses people give, the "performances" that get us through real life, in order to present something original that the audience nevertheless responds to as genuine. As writers, we should do the same. As writers of fantasy, horror and science fiction, it should be a priority.

Here's a clip of Cassavetes in action, talking about the release of Opening Night but finally going off on some interesting tangents.

Hundreds of little people living under his skin.*

2011-02-28T05:00:00.003-06:00

Coming up with character names is, as the master Charles Dickens probably knew, one of the most fun aspects of writing. Unlike real life, where you're named long before your identity is formed, you have the chance to give someone a handle that reflects their personality. Villains can be named "Uriah Heep"; plucky young urchins can be "Pip" or "The Artful Dodger"; Doomed girls can be "Little Nell." For a current master of this sort of thing, check out the films of Larry Blamire (for example, in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra his alien couple is named "Kro-Bar" and "Lattis.").

But sometimes naming gets...tricky. As I've said elsewhere, I first invented my Eddie LaCrosse character in high school, except back then I named him "Devaraux LaCrosse." It was my attempt to play the high-fantasy, high-falutin' name game so prevalent in the genre of the time. My villain, who ultimately bore the much more reasonable monicker "Andrew Reese," was then known as "Kakorian Shay." Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with these ten-dollar names, I suppose, and perhaps a better writer could've made them work. But my bad guy certainly benefitted from a more normal name, and my hero never truly came alive for me until he started answering to the much less grandiose "Eddie."

In another, so far unfinished work, I used a placeholder name for the heroine, simply because I didn't want to stop writing long enough to think of the right one. "Bailey Nichols" was a play off a character from WKRP in Cincinatti, Bailey Quarters (Quarters/Nichols, quarters/nickles, get it?). There was no reason for this association within my story, which is a Southern Grand Guignol set during the eighties; consciously at least, it was entirely arbitrary. But as I worked on it, the name "Bailey Nichols" suddenly seemed to fit. I can't say for sure if it was merely the familiarity of repetition, but I was no longer able to think of her under any other name. So Bailey Nichols she remains.

Sometimes names present themselves, and there's no question they're right. Fauvette, the heroine of Blood Groove, was named after the song of the same name by Duncan Browne, whose music accompanied my writing process. She never had another name. The same with Bronwyn, protagonist of my upcoming novel The Hum and the Shiver. However, the names of the vampire sisters in The Girls with Games of Blood, Prudence and Patience, were arrived at by a deliberate process of pairing up names in search of ones that looked, sounded and felt right.

I started thinking about these issues after reading about another writer, Chelsea Main, whose critique group recommended she change the name of her protagonist. It turns out my response to "Bailey Nichols" wasn't unique. Chelsea said, "To me, names are not arbitrary labels for my characters. Names carry meaning and symbolism. The feel of a name says a lot about a character's personality to me. Choosing the correct name is a big deal - and letting go of one I've become attached to is not easy."

So what are your favorite character names, both from other's work and, if applicable, your own? Everyone who replies here will have a shot at my last remaining ARC of Dark Jenny.

*Full quote: "Every human being has hundreds of little people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names.” (Mel Brooks)

Bad Influences from Good Sources

2011-02-21T05:12:00.001-06:00

As writers, we all own up (or should) to the things that influence us in a positive way. For example, I acknowledge the debt I owe to Robert B. Parker for my understanding of how to make a first-person narrative entertaining. But what about negative influences? What about the things that we tried to incorporate into our own writing that turned out to be huge, big mistakes?

I have two examples from my own career. One is Joe R. Lansdale's Drive In novels, particularly The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels. I read this one in the late 80s, when I was trying to develop my own voice and style, and it completely threw me off course for what turned out to be several years. It wasn't just that I liked the style, which I did up to a point; it was that it was so different from my own work, I took it as a sign that I was doing everything wrong. Clearly sincerity and forthrightness weren't what people wanted; they wanted irony and robust humor (I was half right, as the subsequent rise of uber-ironic Joss Whedon proved). What I missed was the meta-level of Lansdale's work, which was far more important than either the irony or the farting tyrannosaurs. So I spent years--no kidding, years--trying to work in a style for which I was entirely unsuited, and which I completely misunderstood. It was probably 1994 before I regrouped, found my own voice and began producing things that, whatever their overall merit, at least sounded like me.

The second example is the Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money, with a screenplay by novelist Richard Price. At the climax, veteran pool shark Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) finds himself about to shoot a game against his own protege, Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise). The whole film seems to have come down to this game, and the audience is breathless to see who will win. That is, until this exchange of dialogue:

Vincent: Eddie, what are you gonna do when I kick your ass?
Eddie: Pick myself up and let you kick me again.
Vincent: Oh, yeah?
Eddie: Yeah. Just don't put the money in the bank, kid, 'cause if I don't whip you now, I'm gonna whip you next month in Dallas...And if not then, then the month after that in New Orleans.
Vincent: Oh, yeah? What makes you so sure?
Eddie: Hey--I'm back! (shoots the break, screen fades to black)

This final minute of film completely realigns the story we've just watched. What seemed to be a standard, if well-done sports drama about the fall of the old and rise of the new becomes, in that moment, a story of the reclaimed self-awareness of Fast Eddie Felson. It's significant that we never even see the results of the break Eddie shoots, because in that moment the game of nine-ball, the whole impetus of the story thus far, becomes immaterial. Much like the first Rocky, it no longer matters who wins the game, because that's never been the real story. Only unlike Rocky, Scorsese and Price manage to hide that from us until literally the last minute.

I saw this as a challenge. I resolved to make every story I wrote hinge on this sort of twist, which is a whole lot trickier than it first appears. I think I only succeeded once, in a so-far-unpublished short story about jaguar hunters in South America. My other stories from this period left readers with a sense of "Huh? What?" Luckily I came to realize that the film's ending worked so well because it was unexpected, unusual, and rare. The moment people start expecting a twist at the end, whatever you come up with lost its potency (this was also later proved true by the flame-out of twist-meister M. Night Shyamalan). So I went back to writing stories that ended appropriately for themselves, which often meant just as the reader expects. That's not always a bad thing.

So let's hear from some other writers. Who influenced you in what turned out to be a bad way?

Lancelot du Lac: hiding meaning in plain sight

2011-02-14T04:42:00.003-06:00

Recently I blogged about how John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur awakened my love for Arthurian stories. And while I continue to adore that film, I've also grown to love its polar opposite, an Arthurian film so minimal, as stark as Excalibur is voluptuous, that it's hard to believe they basically tell the same tale: Robert Bresson's 1974 film Lancelot du Lac. I grew to love it during the time I was researching and writing Dark Jenny, so you might find its influence in my latest Eddie LaCrosse novel.

Bresson, like Boorman, created a cinematic body of work notable for its extremes. He seldom used real actors, instead looking for faces that expressed the soul of his characters (he termed his performers "models"). Then he bled any sort of overt emotion from their performances, resulting in flat, declarative line readings. This may sound boring, but it's actually the opposite: with so much space between the words' meaning and their expression, the viewer is drawn in, supplying the emotions the film deliberately omits.

The film is in French, appropriate for a story of Lancelot, who was added to the Arthurian canon by French writers. It begins with a series of ridiculously over-the-top conflicts involving blood that spurts like it's being shot from a hose (and yes, a possible inspiration for Monty Python's "Black Knight"), followed by a stirring, martial main theme:

(The first three minutes of the film.)

This is kind of a bait-and-switch, though, because the film proper is almost inert by comparison. The Knights of the Round Table return to Camelot after failing to find the Holy Grail, and Lancelot attempts to break free of his love for Queen Guinevere. Guinevere insightfully tells him, "It was not the Grail. It was God you all wanted. God is no trophy to bear home." But this is little consolation for the decimated, downhearted knights, and before long Lancelot and Guinevere are back in each other's arms.

Everything in the film is low-key, and that's a crucial part of its effectiveness. The knights wear their armor constantly, and the soundtrack is alive with its creaks and clangs. Horses whinny in terror, whether from new frights or memories of the Grail quest. The central action scene, a jousting tournament, is shot using shadows and oblique angles so that the individual knights fail to take on any individuality. Books could be written on what all this means symbolically (and certainly chapters in books have been, as well as many scholarly articles), but they add up to probably the bleakest Camelot ever put on film.

(Lancelot [Luc Simon] and Guinevere [Laura Duke Condominas])

And yet the relationships at the core of the story remain true to what we've come to accept as the legend. Arthur is still king, Gawain is still torn between loyalties, Mordred skulks in the shadows plotting treason. Merlin is long dead, and there's no Morgan le Fay, but this isn't a movie about that kind of magic anyway.

Instead, to me it's a film about hiding: behind armor, behind vows, behind despair. Lancelot competes in a joust wearing a disguise. The failure of the Grail quest leads Arthur to hide behind prayer. Guinevere hides her love for Lancelot. And Bresson hides the story's tragic heart beneath the flat performances and skewed frame of his brilliant film.

Return of the REAL King

2011-02-07T04:11:00.001-06:00

There are many books on Elvis, from treatises on his sociopolitical influence to muckraking autobiographies by those on his payroll, but it's rare to find one that understands his impact, yet takes the time to delve into the human being behind it. Gillian Gaar's Return of the King does just that, using as her sources mainly interviews with musicians and others who worked with Elvis from just prior to his 1968 comeback TV show through his death in 1977. This is not a book that tells how a simple boy from Tupelo turned into a sex symbol and superstar; instead, this explains how the acknowledged King of Rock and Roll briefly took back his career and showed a jaded Sixties audience just why he was the King.

The arc of Elvis' career is well known: hillbilly cat, Army service, movie star, Vegas act, bloated corpse on the bathroom floor. It's in that gap between "movie star" and "Vegas Act" that Gaar begins, detailing Elvis' dissatisfaction with his career and the music he was forced to record. Elvis was the very embodiment of the saying, "Wham, Bam, Thank You Ma'am," combining unsettling sexuality with Southern politeness, and it was the latter quality that kept him from breaking free of people like Colonel Tom Parker, the manager who had guided his rise but had no interest in insuring his continued growth as a performer and artist. But eventually even Elvis had enough, and he supported TV auteur Steve Binder in the creation of a TV show that was much more than the Colonel's intended simple "Christmas special."

Gaar devotes her pages exclusively to what other biographers deal with only in passing: the creation of the music. There are riveting accounts of recording sessions from the musicians who played them, revealing the disheartening reality of Elvis' career. This makes his moments of triumph all the more powerful, because he had to overcome the very machinery that supposedly created him in the first place. What comes through is both Elvis' humanity, his kindness and decency to the players he worked with, and the loneliness that a man surrounded only by payroll sycophants can truly feel.

(One non-musical highlight is the account of Elvis' meeting with then-president Richard Nixon, as related by members of Nixon's staff and Elvis' inner circle. What is often depicted as a possibly drug-addled adventure becomes clearly a moment of utter showing-off by the King, for a surprising reason.)

I've read a lot of books about Elvis, and this is one of the few that makes no apologies for either his accomplishments or his failures. Gaar does not pass judgment, and although she does imbue her tale with authorial sympathy, she doesn't gloss over failures both musical and personal. If you've ever wondered why Elvis mattered, you'll understand after reading Gaar's book.

Io9, Battlestar Galactica, and the American Idol culture

2011-01-31T04:10:00.004-06:00

"Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?"--"Conjectures on Original Composition" by Edward Young, 1759

***

I'll tell you up front, this is a rant. I try not to do them often, and usually delete them after I write them. If you're reading this one, it means I'm still fuming even after an acceptable cooling-off period.

Io9, the go-to website for SF news, recently ran this article by site managing editor Charlie Jane Anders about Ron Moore's "bible" for the series Battlestar Galactica. In these notes for series writers, Moore claims he's after "nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series."

That's all well and good, except for one thing: it was a remake. All the heavy lifting of creating the concepts, the basic spaceship designs, the names of characters and their home planets, even the all-purpose curse word "frak," was done by Glen A. Larson back in the seventies. Whatever you may think of the original show (and you won't hear me sing its praises, believe me), you have to acknowledge that Moore is, in effect, putting a new coat of paint on the house Larson built. Painting a house is hard, but it's not nearly as hard as building one from scratch. Or even more harshly, you could say that Moore is pissing off of Larson's shoulders, and judging from the article's final line--"And it's definitely a reminder how fresh and exciting the show was when it launched."--there's quite a few people standing below with their mouths open.

That's a crude judgment of creators and fans, I realize. People are entitled to make what they want, and like what they want. But goddamn, people. In her review of the movie Burlesque for Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum nails it: "[In] these American Idol times...we agree to pretend that mediocre mimicry of better artists is good enough to keep us entertained." I make no case for the original Battlestar, but its remake is certainly not unique or different enough to count as "the reinvention of the science fiction television series"; it may not be mediocre mimicry, but it's still mimicry.

(Glen A. Larson's Battlestar...)

(...and Ron Moore's "totally reinvented" Battlestar)

If Ron Moore really wanted to reinvent the science fiction television series, he could've taken the original Battlestar as an inspiration and come up with his own ideas for setting, backstory, names, etc. In other words, he could've MADE UP HIS OWN SHOW. It's okay to 'fess up to being influenced; everyone has influences. To claim originality while doing a remake is both inane and arrogant. But really, what frustrates me most is that he's being celebrated by an audience that apparently doesn't know or care what originality is. Anders barely acknowledges the new show's status as a remake; the article in question is even headlined, "The original Battlestar Galactica series bible..." To paraphrase Douglas Adams, this must be a definition of "original" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

In a New York Times article on rethinking "open source" culture, Jaron Lanier may have pegged the origin and continuing source of this level of cannibalism. “It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump."

The next logical step--praising salvagers as creators--has apparently begun as well. For a generation now coming of age, they literally have no concept of what constitutes "creation." Mash-ups, remakes and "re-imaginings" are all they get. And, if Moore can be praised for essentially claiming he built a house that he only repainted, they may never know the joy of encountering something truly original.

Well, except for Pixar.

Since I ranted here, feel free to rant back at me in the comments.

Low Road: Donald Goines and urban tragedy

2011-01-24T04:54:00.002-06:00

I discovered the novels of Donald Goines when I worked for a book distributor that sold collections to libraries. Often this meant orders for all the books by a particular author, as was the case with Goines, whose novels bore vivid titles like Whoreson, Black Gangster, Swamp Man and White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief. Goines' first novel appeared in 1971, and he died in 1974 at age 37 after writing sixteen books, a meteoric career by any standards. And they're all still in print today.

Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines is an attempt to put his life and accomplishments into the context of their specific times. Occasionally it seems like author Eddie B. Allen, Jr. is more interested in the context than the man, but ultimately his approach pays off. Allen describes the Detroit in which Goines grew up, as well as the racial situation throughout the country. Goines, son of a successful middle-class black family, faked his way into the air force at fifteen, served in Korea and returned at seventeen a veteran and heroin addict. He tried careers as pimp and hustler, served time in prison and then, inspired by former pimp turned literary darling Iceberg Slim, decided to pursue writing. He wrote what he knew, but he wrote with a blinding honesty and the kind of grit you can't fake. His street hustlers weren't glamorous or admirable, and even when they tried to do the right thing, they still had past sins that needed atonement. But it was more than a transcription of his own experience; these were stories, crafted and polished, by a man who too late discovered his true calling.

It isn't until the penultimate chapter, "Prodigal Son," that Allen goes in depth into Goines' work, connecting characters and situations among the books, and with Goines' own life. Here he presents an analysis of what Goines tried to accomplish, his motivations and why he connected with readers. The first Goines novel I read, Swamp Man, turns out to be an anomaly, set in Mississippi and dealing with a brother's revenge for his sister's degradation at the hands of repulsive rednecks. The rest of Goines' output is urban and concerned mainly with survival, although a little vengeance gets had as well.

Oddly Allen, also a Detroit native like his subject, seems unable to fully accept that Goines, untrained and unschooled, could have simply imagined the stories, going into great depths to find real-life sources and qualifying observations with statements like, "[Goines] might not have intended it, but the symbolism in the story is conspicuous." Or, "Whether Donnie did it consciously or without thought, he gave several different characters in his books identical names." This skepticism seems strange in a book about a man who, we assume, fascinated Allen enough to write about him.

(I think this is the profound lesson of Goines' work to other writers: the fact that you don't need formal training, no MFA or fancy residency in Iowa. You can simply decide be a writer. The technical skills will come with practice and help, but the core drive requires nothing but the desire to tell a story uniquely your own [and figuring out that part can be harder than it sounds]. Goines had that desire, which is why we still remember him.)

Still, Allen does a good job of presenting Goines' ouvre in detail, qualified or not. In the epilogue, he explains his own connection to Goines, his attempts to solve the writer's 1974 murder (no one was ever arrested or charged), and thoughts on Goines' legacy from academics.

There is, ultimately, a lot of Allen in the book. Whether this detracts from the reading experience is something for each reader to decide. It didn't bother me; it was like having a tour guide, and given the areas that the book explores, it was handy to have someone along who knew the territory. Ultimately Low Road gives as much insight into Goines as we're likely to get at this late date, and if the man remains an enigma to the reader, it's probably because he was one to himself as well.

Thirty years of Excalibur

2011-01-17T05:01:00.004-06:00

Thirty years ago the Arthurian myth first grabbed hold of me when I saw Excalibur on its initial release. Prior to that, I'd encountered King Arthur only through the Disneyfied Sword in the Stone, or the bloodless Technicolor epic Knights of the Round Table. John Boorman's 1981 film was different: limbs were hacked off, breasts were bared and there was a timeless sense of a blood-and-thunder past throbbing with life. Sure, it was stiff in places, and the acting was stylized to the point of ridiculousness, but it was still a movie in the pure sense, loaded with unforgettable images.

Thirty years on, I still love the film, and not just for sentimental reasons. There's a sure hand at work, one that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish with every shot and sequence. Boorman, who'd once tried to wrangle Lord of the Rings onto the screen as a live-action epic, is a fearless filmmaker as notable for his daring successes (Deliverance) as his audacious failures (Exorcist II: The Heretic). He depicts Arthur not as a neat or elderly monarch, but with the long hair and scruffy beard of a biker. Guinevere is an earthy princess who knows herbal remedies as well as courtly dances. Lancelot, in gleaming silver armor, has the curls and square jaw of a laid-back surfer. Boorman uses green backlight to give even the metal armor a hint of the organic, most beautifully during the emergence of the sword from the lake. The actors don't perform so much as embody their roles, as the film tends to show them only at moments of high emotion.

But the wild card is Nicol Williamson as Merlin. Whatever the behind-the-scenes process that arrived at this interpretation, Williamson is both the focal point and the most entertaining thing in the film. Using every possible range of his voice, clad in a silver skullcap and black ragged robes, he's a buffoon one moment, a sage the next, and never less than enthralling. Whenever the film seems about to take itself too seriously, Williamson saves the day with a pratfall or a goofy line reading.

I can understand why contemporary viewers might find it overblown and silly. In an age of ironic detachment, when everything has a wink-wink element, the worst offense is to take something seriously, and to unapologetically present a unique vision.

Excalibur does exactly that. And if you let it cast its spell (which goes something like, "Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha") I think you'll find yourself watching it again in another thirty years, too.

Who, at the Beginning

2011-01-15T05:01:00.001-06:00

I have a soft spot for the current incarnation of the British show Doctor Who that can be distilled down to a comment made by the title character during the recent Christmas special. When told by a villainous type than someone "wasn't important," the Doctor replied, "I've never met anyone who wasn't important." That sort of unabashed optimism and compassion, especially when so much TV SF tends toward the downbeat and dystopian, really appeals to me.

So I decided to check out the original episodes of the original show, made and broadcast in 1963 (the same year I was made and broadcast). The first episode, the Ur-Who if you will, is called "An Unearthly Child." And in it, you will see nothing of the show that's so popular now.

Well, that's not true. There's the T.A.R.D.I.S., still in the form of a police call box. But there's no sonic screwdriver. The Doctor is revealed to be an alien, but he's a crotchety old man with an equally alien teenage granddaughter in tow. Susan, for reasons not really revealed in the first eleven episodes (where I stopped), is enamored of Earth in the twentieth century and tries to blend in at the local school. Two of her teachers, Ian and Barbara, decide to find out why she gave the school a phony address, and end up antagonizing the Doctor (not hard to do) into proving the T.A.R.D.I.S. is real. First they travel into the past and run afoul of cavemen, then to the future where for the first time they meet the Doctor's greatest enemies, the Daleks.

The dynamics are so vastly different that it's hard to believe the current Doctor (Matt Smith) is actually supposed to be part of the same continuity. Made as a children's show, the audience identification figure is Susan, while authority is represented by Ian and Barbara, two gigantically annoying companions. The Doctor is the anarchic wild card, omnipotent one moment and completely at a loss the next. Further, the humanistic determination to help those in need that characterizes the recent Doctor(s) is completely missing. This original Doctor is quite willing to run away, abandon Ian and Barbara (can't argue with that, really) and look out for himself and Susan at the expense of anyone else. And yet he's not the total dickweed this makes him sound like; he abhors violence, is resourceful in a pinch and, as played by William Hartnell, is generally a hoot to watch. There's none of David Tennant's wide-eyed lunacy, or Matt Smith's quirky body language, but he conveys how fast the Doctor's brain works and how tedious normal people must be to him.

Ten Doctors later, there's virtually nothing from this original conception left in the show beyond the T.A.R.D.I.S. The new show has a budget, terrific special effects and casts that can bring this goofy universe to thrilling life. Yet there's something delightful in the original concept of a bad-tempered, super-intelligent alien dragging his granddaughter's snooty teachers through space and time for no good reason. While it seems unlikely that the current run of young, handsome Doctors will end anytime soon, I have a sneaking wish for a return to Hartnell's conception. It's in the same wish box that has Michael Keaton in a film version of The Dark Knight Returns and Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Lucas' original concept as Ben Gunn from Treasure Island. None of them will ever happen. But thinking about them sure is fun.

This is me and Suzie Hunt on the campus PBS station circa 1983, hosting a fundraiser during the broadcast of The Five Doctors. I was chosen for this because I was one of the few people at UT-Martin who'd ever heard of Who.

The Finn Substitution

2011-01-07T05:25:00.002-06:00

Some have brewed a ha-ha about a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that removes what is euphemistically called "the N word" and replaces it with the word, "slave." This has brought all kinds of interesting trivia to light ("the N word" is used 219 times in Finn, "slave" is not actually a synonym for it, Finn is the fourth most-banned book in the country, etc.). But as I read the ever-increasing attempts to be the most offended by this, I can only think: what's the big deal? It was done twenty years ago, too, and no one thought anything about it. In fact, it's been done multiple times.

The one with which I'm most familiar is part of the Great Illustrated Classics series that takes well-known (and public domain) novels and repackages them for young readers, simplifying the stories and adding illustrations on every facing page. We have a shelf of them, and I've enjoyed reading them aloud to my kids (my oldest son's favorite is Journey to the Center of the Earth). And we've read both Finn and Tom Sawyer. Finn was published in 1990, and to my knowledge has never stirred the least bit of ire.

Now I admit, in reading Sawyer, it annoyed me that villainous Injun Joe was now "Crazy Joe." I understood the impulse to change it, but I disagreed with it. Similarly, in their version of Finn there's no "N word," and the dialogue has been rewritten so that no one-for-one substitution is needed. Jim is a slave, and that's enough.

So why all the outrage about this new edition that boldly goes where...well, many have gone before?

Probably for two reasons. First, the recent release of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, a volume he stipulated could only be published a century after his death. It's both a best seller and a critical darling, so Twain is back in the public eye.

And two...well, now there's the internet, and people on the internet love to be offended. Any time there's an issue like this, people rush to show how outraged they are, in a pile-on usually as distasteful as whatever the original offense might've been.* You can see some of it here and here. Even Roger Ebert, who should really know better, chimed in with a particularly crass and tasteless tweet.

Yes, rewriting Finn bugs me, but I'll respond in the proper adult fashion: by not buying this edition. That's all any of us need to do, to register our disapproval. I won't rant and rave about the greater social ills its existence reveals, or try to show how much more it offends me than it does anyone else.

I'm not defending this editorial bowdlerizing by any means; I disapprove of it, and think the concepts behind it are both shallow and wrong. But it's not real censorship as long as the original text is available. And I'm pretty sure it still is.

*(And yes, I recognize the potential hypocrisy in saying this in the context of a post that could be interpreted as doing exactly that. If you think so, please disregard anything I say.)

Saved by Darkness

2010-12-26T10:48:00.005-06:00

In 1978, I was as hardcore a geek/nerd/dweeb as a boy could be. Star Wars had come upon the world, legitimizing those of us who read books with spaceships and monsters on the covers (and got beaten up by our cousins for it, but that's another blog post). Starlog magazine was hot. TV had The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and the original Battlestar Galactica. Even music was jumping on the star wagon: Styx had spaceships at the climax of "Come Sail Away" and a Tolkein tribute song on their album Pieces of Eight. Heck, the entire British progressive rock scene owed as much to fantasy literature as it did to rock and roll. The time was right for me to undergo the final metamorphosis into the kind of genre fan and writer who lives, breathes and dreams about spaceships and dragons, lost in a world of imagination and whimsy.

But I was saved at the last minute from this darkness, by Darkness.

Bruce Springsteen's fourth album appeared in 1978. Prior to this, I knew him primarily from FM radio, which had introduced him via "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)." But now I was right there for the new album, and because of it, nothing would be the same.

The music on Darkness is solid and muscular, made up of snarling guitars and surging keyboards. But the lyrics are what make it special, and what made me connect with it. The romantic escape of his prior work is gone, burned out and swept away. Every song is about people trapped in small-town lives, in soul-crushing ennui where dreams no longer matter. Yet in each song is a kernel of something that might be hope.

What really spoke to me were the songs about fathers and sons. By its very title, "Adam Raised a Cain" states its purpose, and musically recreates all those arguments between every dad and every son. "Factory," which at first seems so slight it might be filler, actually described my own father's life in painful detail. In fact, for the first time I realized it was possible to make music--and by extension, any kind of art--from someone's own life. Not in the literal autobiographical sense, but through feelings that everyone understood and experienced, emotions other than the "love/escape/party" music on the radio. Or the "heroic destiny/good vs evil/love conquers all" tropes at the heart of what I read, listened to and watched.

Because of this music, I stayed connected to the world in a way I otherwise might not have, and often against my will. No matter how much I wanted to disappear into the Federation, the Rebellion, Pern or Shannara, the Boss would drag me back. Because I became a long-term Springsteen fan, I couldn't ignore or escape the real world. And when I began to synthesize the things I loved (horror and fantasy) with this real-world connection, I found my voice as a writer.

This is all fresh in my mind due to the release of The Promise, an exhaustive 3 CD/3 DVD set chronicling the making of the album. But I'd steer anyone interested simply to the album itself. Everything I talk about is there. And if you're a fan of my books, then you'll be able to share the moment when I turned onto the path that eventually led to the stories you enjoy.

Meet the Queen of the Lot

2010-12-03T05:07:00.003-06:00

This is the final post on films I watched over the Thanksgiving holiday. I watched other films (Leatherheads, Pandorum, Coffee and Cigarettes), but there isn't much to say about them. I'm ending on a high note, though.

A while back I stumbled across the work of Henry Jaglom, a filmmaker who's been forging his own indie path for forty years. He existed on the periphery of my cinema consciousness until I saw Last Summer in the Hamptons on cable and suddenly realized here was this totally original artist, untouched by any popular trends, with a consistent (and consistently fascinating) body of work.

His latest film is Queen of the Lot, a follow-up to 2006's Hollywood Dreams. Both star Tanna Frederick, an actress notable for her total emotional clarity; she communicates everything her characters feel with her whole being. There's a moment in her previous collaboration with Jaglom, Irene in Time, that is probably one of the most amazing bits of non-acting acting I've ever seen. For her to have such a response, she would have to genuinely feel the moment to a degree most film actresses wouldn't dare, and couldn't pull off.

In Queen, Tanna is back as Margie Chizek, an actress on the make who hides a will of steel behind a "gosh-shucks" Iowa farmgirl exterior. Yet the Iowa farmgirl isn't exactly a put-on, either. As "Maggie Chase," she's the star of a successful action franchise, and is dating a hot established star, but wants more (she compulsively checks her Google points). She's also under house arrest after two DUIs in one week.

Jaglom's films are as much about locations as they are characters, and the film divides itself between two main spaces: the opulent home of Margie's managers (Zack Norman and David Proval), and the family homestead of her boyfriend Dov (Christopher Rydell), scion of a fading clan of Hollywood royalty. In the first setting Margie knows her role; in the latter she's afloat, especially when she meets her boyfriend's normal, sane brother Aaron (Noah Wyle). She gets into everyone's good graces by taking them at face value, something these crass, jaded, sophisticated people almost can't comprehend. But is she showing her true face to them?

That probably makes the film sound more serious than it feels, because ultimately it's a pretty amusing story. Jaglom's improvisational methods allow the actors to essentially make up the dialogue as they go, and since many of them are playing performers as well, they know the territory. Frederick and Wyle have great chemistry together, and though she's the star, he becomes the story's center; he sees through Margie, but at the same time responds to the parts that feel genuine, just as we do. A real surprise is Jaglom's daughter Sabrina, who gives genuine bite to her performance as a resourcefully conniving teen.

But the show belongs to Frederick. Jaglom tends to make his films around specific actresses; he had an extraordinary run with his wife Victoria Foyt, and his collaborations with Frederick have brought him into new territory. He's found a context for her unique energy and given her strong co-stars to bounce off, something many filmmakers (and actresses) would avoid. As for Frederick, she brings a level of emotional intensity and honesty to Margie that feels at times like a documentary. I've never seen another performer consistently seem so absolutely unaware of the camera's presence and risk the kind of things she does.

I'd love to see Jaglom and Frederick revisit Margie every few years, in between other projects like Irene in Time. If the funny, touching Queen of the Lot is any indication, the character and milieu are far from exhausted, and Ms. Frederick remains a wonder to watch.

Do I want to know Me and You and Everyone We Know?

2010-12-01T04:13:00.003-06:00

Madison, WI poet Lisa Marie Brodsky recommended Miranda July's 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know, and I finally watched it over the holiday weekend. It's an indie film in the broadest sense, made by an outsider artist and about outsider people, some of whom do things so confoundingly odd that you wonder if they exist anywhere but in a film like this.

It's a film about relationships, about people reaching for meaningful connection in all the wrong ways. The central character, Christina (Ms. July), is a conceptual artist who sends positive messages out into the universe in the (so far) vain hope that they might bring love and happiness into her own life. She meets Richard (John Hawkes), a divorced father of two who barely functions and perpetually looks quite literally stunned. Richard's two children have inherited this inability to make appropriate decisions about closeness, leading them to odd connections with some of the other characters. It's one of those films where everyone turns out to be far less than six degrees away from everyone else, whether they know it or not.

July herself, as Christine, is a touching screen presence, so delicately lost and lonely that her art-inspired attempts to reach out seem incredibly brave. As a writer, she has penned not just this script but a collection of short stories, and knows how to structure multiple narrative lines so they flow and resonate. And as a director, she gets amazingly unaffected performances from the younger actors.

The issue I had with the film was how I felt about some of these connections. It's clear what the movie wants me to think, as every shot and music cue is used to cast a wistful, hopeful glow over things that perhaps shouldn't be considered as such. Some of the connections--for example, between a first-grader and an unknowing adult woman via online sex chat--are just inherently uncomfortable, and no amount of sensitive scoring or empathetic performance can overcome that. So I tried to decide: do I give in and feel what the film wants me to feel, or do I stay true to my own deep-seated and possibly Philistine responses despite my wish to like the film's view of the world?

Speaking of these same issues, Rogert Ebert in his review says, "I know this sounds perverse and explicit, and yet the fact is, these scenes play with an innocence and tact that is beyond all explaining." In Variety, Scott Foundas says these things "...sound puerile or even irresponsible, then it is all the more to July's credit that she embellishes such moments with a whimsy and melancholia that makes them seem less about sex than about making meaningful connections with other human beings." So should I admire this, the way Jessica Winter does in the Village Voice ("...July ascribes sexuality to persons under the age of consent without coyness or moral hectoring") or should I go with my emotional reaction, driven by my feelings as both a parent and a writer ("The movie engendered the kind of uncomfortable, crawling-out-of-your-skin feeling I get when I'm subjected to bad performance art," as said by Sam Adams in Philadelphia's City Paper).

Even after a few days pondering it, I'm still not sure. I know what Ms. July wants me to feel; I just don't know if I'm ready, willing or able to feel it. I asked Ms. Brodsky, who'd originally recommended the film, for her thoughts and she summed it up pretty well: "Miranda July is a brilliant voice in contemporary literature and film. She seems to do everything. She'll also make you squirm in your seat with the uncomfortable truth, so beware."

What lies (er, hops) at the heart of The Maze?

2010-11-29T05:00:00.004-06:00

One of the best thing about holidays? Catching up on movies! Over the next few days I'll be writing about some of the more interesting flicks I saw over the long weekend, starting with 1953's The Maze.

I remember watching The Maze at my uncle's house in Columbia, TN when I was a kid. I was too young for post-modern irony, so I took it at face value, and two things stayed with me: the nature of the monster at the end, and the "rational" explanation given for it.

Recently a friend found me a copy (it's never been "officially" released), and I was pleasantly surprised. The Maze is a low-budget little gem, full of surprisingly good things that balance out the...well, the undeniably goofy premise.

Kitty (Veronica Hurst) is engaged to Gerald (Richard Carlson), who is suddenly called back to his ancestral Scottish estate. Soon he breaks his engagement, but Kitty doesn't go down without a fight. With her spunky Aunt Edith in tow, she crashes Castle Craven and demands answers, especially when Gerald seems to have aged 20 years in a few weeks. When she doesn't get them, she sets out to find them on her own. What she turns up is...unexpected. WARNING: spoilers to follow.

Carlson, a veteran of It Came from Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon, is adequately emo as the tortured Gerald, but Hurst is a surprisingly tough-minded and resourceful heroine. She never falters in her determination to help Gerald, even when he insists he doesn't need it. She isn't one of those easily frightened scream queens, so when she does finally shriek, it's for a good reason. She's a welcome relief from the distressed damsels of so many similar films.

The film was originally made in 3D, and the depth of composition is interesting even in a flat image. The weird framing device (Aunt Edith narrating as essentially a disembodied head at the bottom of the frame) might have made more sense in 3D. And the use of the titular maze is creepily effective, on a low-budget par with what Kubrick did in The Shining.

But nothing compares to the nature of the monster, or the villain, or whatever one would call Sir Roger, the Baronet McTeam. He is, in fact, a 200 year old, sentient, man-sized bullfrog.

Yep.

The film handles this in the only way possible, by keeping Sir Roger out of sight for most of the story, and almost gets away with quick glimpses during the climax. It's only the long shots, where the whole unfortunate costume is seen, and his rather silly demise that break out the giggles.

And much like the postscript of Psycho, we get a scientific explanation for what we've just seen. Seems that there was once an accepted theory called "phylogeny," which said that the human embryo goes through all the stages of evolution from invertebrate to mammal. Sir Roger, unfortunately, didn't develop past amphibian.

Sure, it's goofy. It was probably goofy in 1953. But it's also delightfully creepy, if you can put aside your post-modern irony.

Thanks to Bobbie at Junkyard Films for sending me this jewel.

Pictures from World Fantasy Convention 2010

2010-11-09T04:58:00.000-06:00

A few pictures from World Fantasy. I was too busy to take very many, unfortunately.

Me and my tablemate Travis Heerman, author of Heart of the Ronin, at the mass signing Saturday night.

Me and Amelia Beamer, author of The Loving Dead (which I reviewed here). Amelia also interviewed me for Locus magazine.

Me with Tom Doherty, head of Tor Books.

From left. Anthony Huso, author of The Last Page; author Brandon Sanderson's assistant (his name escapes me); Tobias Buckell, author of Halo: The Cole Protocol; Tobias's twin daughters; Tobias's wife Emily; Tor editor Paul Stevens; Marie Brennan, author of A Star Shall Fall; and me.

A treasure found in the hotel parking garage.

The Loving Dead: zombies with one thing on their minds

2010-11-05T04:26:00.002-05:00

When it comes to the living dead, I'm strictly vanilla. I want my zombies slow, shambling, mindless and prolific. I have no time for zombies that run, or speak, or suffer from a virus and aren't really zombies. So I began reading Amelia Beamer's The Loving Dead with a bit of trepidation, since her zombies are not only virus-spawned (and thus not technically dead), the virus is an STD. These zombies are both hungry, and horny.

But there's more at work here. For while the book breaks a lot of my zombie preference rules, it does include one thing I believe is essential for every good horror story: a level of metaphor. The Loving Dead may be about individual characters, but it's also about a specific class of people: disaffected urban twentysomethings so unused to having anything truly matter that, when the first zombies appear, their initial reaction is to pop in a DVD of Night of the Living Dead. Not to get survival hints, mind you, but just because of the association.

Michael and Kate are platonic housemates and co-workers at a San Francisco Trader Joe's. They throw a costume party the night the zombie apocalypse begins, and initially think it's all part of the game. When they realize it's not, but can find no corroborative evidence on TV or the internet, they're completely at a loss. Separated for most of the story, the twin narratives draw them together at the safest place they can imagine: the island of Alcatraz.

The book reminded me most of a fairly obscure Japanese SF film called Matango, or in America, Attack of the Mushroom People. In it, a shipwreck maroons a bunch of 60s-era affluent Japanese on a strange island, where they contribute absolutely nothing to their own survival before they apathetically mutate into the titular mushroom people. In its native country it was seen as a mocking attack on middle-class complacency; recut for the States, it came across as a big helping of WTF? But The Loving Dead shares its sense of a generation so unaccustomed to anything geniune that, when real danger arrives, they can only ignore it, or relate to it through pop culture. By the end, it's an open question whether the zombies or the humans are the most adrift in their world.

The Loving Dead is published by Night Shade Books.

Helsinki Homicide: ice cold crime without "girl" in the title

2010-11-01T00:31:00.001-05:00

Scandanavian thrillers are all the rage right now thanks to Steig Larsson, but I've been a fan of this sub-genre since Peter Hoeg's novel Smilla's Sense of Snow and the original Norwegian version of the film Insomnia. Larsson's Millenium trilogy may be the Hunger Games of its moment, but recently I discovered another Scandanavian author, from Finland, whose crime novels are much more to my taste.

Jarrko Sipila is a novelist and crime reporter whose "Helsinki Homicide" series has just begun being translated into English. The first one, Against the Wall, won the 2009 award for Best Finnish Crime Novel. It details the investigation into the murder of a young hoodlum mixed up in customs fraud, and follows parallel paths as both the criminal underworld and the police force seek the motive behind the crime.

It does something I love, best exemplified by the Michael Mann film Manhunter: it makes you hope that real cops are as smart, resourceful and tenacious as the ones in the story. The team under Lieutenant Kari Takamaki is unified by their dedication to duty, a Hawksian professionalism that needs no trite character justifications. These men and women do their job because it's their job, and they get their satisfaction from doing it to the best of their abilities. This is what separates them from the criminals, who are equally smart and resourceful but prey to disloyalty, greed and complex bonds of loyalty and revenge. The cops win by essentially maneuvering the bad guys into tripping over their own worst tendencies.

It's a bit hard to evaluate Sipila's style, since it's translated to English from Finnish; apparently the only word the two languages share is "sauna." He started as a journalist, so I imagine in his native Finnish his prose is punchy, succinct and vivid; if it's a little clunky in English, I can live with that. I had no issue with one common criticism, the complex Finnish names, except where two very similar ones (Lindstrom and Lydman) were concerned. Still, the cleverness of the plotting, the broad strokes of character and the unique milieu come through just fine. And what connects with the reader is the universality of it all: criminals have the same motives in Helsinki that they do anywhere else, and cops want to catch them for the same reasons they do in New York or LA.

Against the Wall is followed by Vengeance, which is near the top of my to-be-read pile. Hopefully more of the series will make it into English as well, because tough, honest crime novels are always welcome.

Sipila's novels in English are available directly from the Minneapolis publisher, Ice Cold Crime.

Help! I need a catch phrase!

2010-10-25T04:54:00.000-05:00

One of the most fun parts of being an author is signing books for readers, but I often find myself stuck for clever wording. Sure, "best wishes" and "thanks for reading" are acceptable fall-backs, but I want something unique and fun. George Romero, for example, signs everything, "Stay Scared!" My problem is I write both horror and fantasy, so I need a catch phrase that works for both.

So help me out, you brilliant folk. And for incentive, I've got a copy of The Girls with Games of Blood on unabridged audio for the person who comes up with a workable catchphrase before I leave for the World Fantasy Convention on Thursday.

The Two Jakes: the past never goes away

2010-10-11T04:41:00.003-05:00

I love detective movies, and my tastes pretty much line up with the accepted canon of greatness: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Out of the Past, Laura, The Thin Man, and so forth. And I have a soft spot for cross-genre mashups: Blade Runner, In the Mouth of Madness, Angel Heart.

But one of my favorites almost always gets blank looks.

The Two Jakes is the 1990 sequel to Chinatown, one of the major works of both the seventies and the detective genre. The Two Jakes isn't a defining classic like its predecessor, but neither is it the total failure of popular assumption. Instead it's a commentary on both the first film, and on the way the past is always with us in general. It's a sequel in that it involves the same characters, but in a greater sense it's a standalone story that uses Chinatown as a metatext. Normally I have a low tolerance for all things "meta," since they usually also involve wink-wink irony and nudge-nudge breaking of the fourth wall to let the audience in on the joke. But The Two Jakes plays it straight, and honest.

The film begins with JJ "Jake" Gittes, again played by Jack Nicholson, helping Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel) catch his unfaithful wife in the act. I won't get into the plot, since it's a) really convoluted and b) part of the fun, but it does eventually tie into the events of Chinatown, so much so that a refresher viewing might be in order. The film is gorgeous to look at, feels authentically of its period (1948) and brims with great character actors in supporting roles. The script is again by Robert Towne, but instead of Roman Polanski directing, this time it's Nicholson himself.

I enjoy rewatching The Two Jakes a lot more than Chinatown. It's not just the earlier film's ghastly plot twist, or its nihilistic, almost mythically-depressing ending. The characters in The Two Jakes, both good guys and bad, are more fun to hang out with. A big reason for that is Nicholson's actor-centric direction, which gives the cast plenty of room to work. This could be interpreted as padding, and some critics berate the film for it, but those critics mistakenly expect another Chinatown. The Two Jakes is a different story, with a different point to make, and judging it against the earlier film does it a disservice.

Read a New York Times article on the film while it was in production here.

If you've seen The Two Jakes, or if this article prompts you to check it out, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The cover of Dark Jenny

2010-10-05T04:20:00.002-05:00

At long last, here's the cover art for Dark Jenny, the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, due out next spring. The artist is Larry Rostant. As you can see, it goes in a whole new direction for the series.

So what do you think?

Meet the One-Eyed Monster

2010-10-04T04:22:00.002-05:00

(Lily's shelter mug shot)

This summer I mentioned we got a cat. Apparently my prior comments on cats made this news surprising. So here's the scoop (and the litter box is over there! Badda-BING!).

I've gone on record many places as saying I hate cats. The last cat I lived with introduced herself by launching claws-first at my crotch (I was jingling change in my pocket at the time) and peeing on my leather jacket whenever possible. I adore dogs, want a dog, wish I had a dog. But instead I have a cat.

And the worst part is, I picked her.

We decided the boys needed a pet for the new house, so we went to the Shelter from the Storm adoption fair. I had every intention of taking home a dog, but clicked with none of the ones available. The cats, meanwhile, were displayed in a vast row along the outside wall of PetSmart, two and three cages high in places. Most had kittens or playful adolescent cats in them, and the cries of delighted children filled the air. Whoopee, I thought. As someone once said, "If you have a cat in your house, you also have a box of shit in your house."

And then, at one end, in a big cage all by herself, sat Lily.

She was fat. She was old. She had one eye. And no one was paying any attention to her. I saw a kindred spirit.

"We're taking that one," I said.

My family was so startled that I even wanted a cat that they gave me very little argument. We picked her up the same day we moved into the new house.

The decision has been eminently justified. She is sweet-tempered, quiet, affectionate and serene. She never lashes out at the kids for being too rough with her, even when the C-in-C poked her in her empty eye socket (yes, we took her to the vet, and no, there was no damage). She's still overweight, but we're working on that (having her litter box on the second floor helps). She's not a kitten, so I don't know how long she'll be around (her papers say she's seven years old), but she's settled into the family in a way I never expected.

I still hate cats, don't get me wrong. But every rule has an exception.

Lily sharing her bed with the Squirrel Boy. Oh, wait, it's the other way around....

If it'd been an Ellison, it woulda bit me

2010-09-27T05:38:00.000-05:00

There's an old bit of wisdom that says, roughly paraphrased, if you pick up a snake and it bites you, it's not the snake's fault.

My wife is an avid science fiction reader, but she's never been to an SF convention. When her favorite SF author Harlan Ellison was announced as the guest of honor for local convention MadCon, she decided to make that her first convention experience. We signed up for the con, including the guest of honor banquet and speech.

The banquet was scheduled for 7-9, including Mr. Ellison's after-dinner speech. To allow enough leeway, we told the sitter we'd be back by 10:30. We were lucky enough to sit with Onion writer John Krewson, which made the evening even more entertaining.

Now, for those of you who don't know about Ellison, he's legendary for both his writing and his cantankerousness (see this recent interview). I'd never met him before, but the stories that preceded him made him sound a lot like the devil, in the sense that you were better off if he didn't know you existed. Just the day before the banquet, at a local bookstore signing, he snatched a cell phone from a fan who had been filming him and stomped on it. He's that sort of extreme personality.

Mr. Ellison did not begin his remarks until about 9. Keep in mind he's both legendary and elderly, and wasn't even sure earlier in the week that he'd be able to show up. I certainly don't begrudge him taking his time and enjoying what he says will be his last convention. Hell, I got a backpat from him for being the only person in the room* who knew the source of his "Phlegm Snopes" joke. But he rambled, went off on tangents, and abused people at will (usually to their delight) until we realized he wasn't going to finish before we had to leave. Still, this was Harlan Ellison, my wife's favorite author; it seemed impossibly rude to just get up and walk out in the middle of his speech.

Then he made it easy for us.

He abruptly stopped, pointed at my wife and said "You. You're making me nervous." He added (I'm paraphrasing) that he could read body language, could tell she need to leave and that she should just go ahead and do so. She told him it was due to the babysitter, and he joked that we should bring the kids the next day so he could make them cry. Left with no other graceful choice, we departed as quickly as possible. The crowd applauded and sang us out with "Aloha ʻOe," which I suppose is better than the chorus of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."

We laughed about this on the way home. After all, if this truly is his last convention, we may be the last people he chases from a room. It certainly gave us a great story. Still, when she asked how I'd feel if Bruce Springsteen (one of my heroes) had done the same thing, I got a glimpse of how she really felt.

I don't talk about my wife much online, but she's a very intelligent woman, at least 20% smarter than me. She's also a person of immense dignity. I certainly don't think I should've made a scene, or engaged Mr. Ellison in any way, since the evening was all about him, not us. But I'm sad for her. She has a vast collection of Ellison books, and knows his work intimately. I can only imagine how it feels to be publicly dismissed by him.

This is not an indictment of Mr. Ellison. He is who he is, and that persona is well known. We bought the tickets; in effect, we picked up the snake. That it bit us is unfortunate, but not really the snake's fault.

Addendum

I want to give a special-shout out to the fan (I'm sorry I don't recall your name) who said how disappointed she was to learn I wasn't on any panels at the con. I was disappointed, too (being on panels is why I go to these things), but she made up for it. Fans, if you ever doubt a kind word to someone whose work you admire matters, let me assure you, it does.

Well...it does to most of us.

*It was a room full of scholars and writers, too. Come on, people, no matter what genre you work in, you should know Faulkner. I'm just sayin'.

"The process is its own reward" *

2010-09-21T21:40:00.014-05:00

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." --W. Edwards Deming

I get asked about my writing process a fair bit, so I thought I'd share an example of how I work, from initial draft to final revision. I'm not making any claims that this is the only way, or even the best way. It's just, as Elvis and Sinatra would say, my way.

Here, then, are the opening lines from Dark Jenny, the third Eddie LaCrosse novel due out in spring 2011.

This is how it read when I first wrote it:

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s tavern accompanied by a blast of snow-laden winter air. An irate chorus demanded he close the door at once, some with pithier language that implied carnal relations with livestock.

Gary was used to that sort of response. He kicked the door shut, shook snow off his long coat and looked around until he spotted me. “LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

Things I like: the initial description of Gary Bunson.
Things I don't like: everything else.

This does describe the scene as I saw it in my mind. But the writing doesn't have any rhythm. It leaves a lot unclear, and the humor doesn't work at all.

So here's the same passage, revised:

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s Tavern accompanied by a blast of winter air. An irate chorus erupted at once, some with language that implied Gary had carnal relations with livestock. Gary was used to that sort of response, and it stopped when he closed the door behind him. He shook snow from his long coat and looked around until he spotted me sitting with my girlfriend Liz at the bar.

“LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

Specific changes:
Moved the paragraph break to the beginning of the dialogue.
Removed the overkill phrase "snow laden" as a modifier for "winter air."
Changed "demanded" to "erupted" to make it clear that the tavern's patrons were particularly put out.
Removed the word "pithier," because that was clear in context.
Changed "he shook snow off his long coat" to "he shook snow from his long coat," because it just sounded better (sometimes that's the only reason you have for making a change, and it's perfectly legitimate).
Clarified where Eddie was while this was happening: seated at the bar with his girlfriend Liz.

This is definitely better, but it still jars in places. So, third and final revision (and how the text will appear in the book):

Gary Bunson, Neceda’s slightly-honest-but-mostly-not magistrate, came into Angelina’s Tavern accompanied by a blast of winter air. Immediately an irate chorus erupted, some with language that implied Gary had carnal relations with livestock. Gary was used to that sort of response so he paid it no mind, and it stopped when he closed the door behind him. He shook snow from his long coat and looked around until he spotted me sitting with Liz at the bar.

“LaCrosse,” he said. “There’s somebody outside looking for you.”

This time the revisions are minor, but no less important. They include:
Changed "An irate chorus erupted at once..." to "Immediately an irate chorus erupted..."
Added a phrase to the third sentence so it now reads, "Gary was used to that sort of response so he paid it no mind..." It both clarifies the character's reaction and establishes his attitude.
And finally, removed the words that identified Liz as "my girlfriend." I want my books to be wide open, so that even if this third one is the first a reader picks up, he or she can easily follow the story. But "my girlfriend" felt awkward, and the relationship is established within the next few pages anyway.

Not every passage gets three revisions. Some get none, some get a dozen. And there's no way to tell until you start working on them. One trick that never fails to show me problem spots is to read the text aloud to myself. Not in my head; out loud, using my voice. I recommend that to anyone.

So, writers out there: how does this compare to your process?

*Amelia Earhart

Working titles (and titles that don't. Work, that is.)

2010-09-14T04:23:00.000-05:00

My most recent novel, The Girls with Games of Blood, was the first one to hit shelves with my title on it.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Titles are funny things, and they have to be balanced between appropriateness, marketability and simple comprehension. But I thought I'd describe the titling process as I've experienced it, since I've just settled on a working title (The Two Eddies) for my fourth Eddie LaCrosse novel. Keep in mind, though, that the whole point of this post is that the book may very well come out under a different (and hopefully better) title in 2012.

My first novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, spent two decades under the simple title, Rhiannon. Yes, after the Fleetwood Mac song. And the Welsh legend which provided the original inspiration, and survives in the story if you dig deep enough. But my editor at Night Shade Books requested a different title because he felt the original one was too Fleetwood Mac-y. Since it was my first novel sale and I wasn't about to do anything to jeopardize it, I agreed and began listing alternate titles that combined pulp noir sensibilities with something recognizably high-fantasy (like the book itself). Between my editor and agent, I narrowed it down until we all agreed on The Sword-Edged Blonde. It catches the tone, and to me symbolizes the character of Rhiannon in the story (she is blonde and she does have two sides, or edges, to her personality).

My next novel, Blood Groove, started with the working title Oceans of Time. At that stage I hadn't settled on a 70s setting. When I did, I chose a phrase from Parliament/Funkadelic as the new title: Sadistic Groovalistic. Yeah, I know. Cooler heads, notably my agent, gently suggested a different title, something that didn't sound like a twelve-year-old made it up (that's my evaluation, not hers). Again various alternatives were considered, until she said, "I'm going to shop this under the title Blood Groove." To this day I prefer the title Blood Funky, but I can't argue with her wisdom, since the book got out there under her title.

The second Eddie LaCrosse book, Burn Me Deadly, was originally titled Lumina, after one of its characters. After the first novel established its precedent, it was a snap to come up with a new title for book two, tweaked from Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly. Everyone liked it, including me.

But I think I've gotten better at it. As I said, The Girls with Games of Blood was entirely mine, and the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, Dark Jenny, never had a different title. If there's a third vampire book, my title is Blood Will Rise (or Blood Will Rise Again, perhaps). I don't know if The Two Eddies will end up on the cover of Eddie LaCrosse's fourth adventure, or if the manuscript will even leave my desk with that title. But I have to call it something other than Eddie 4.

That is, unless I can figure out a way for him to fight Ivan Drago....

I walked into a bar...and he saw the end

2010-08-30T04:45:00.001-05:00

Recently I read a novel that annoyed me no end with its capricious disregard of its own genre rules. And I worry that in it, I saw the end of the current boom of fantasy/paranormal novels crossed with the hardboiled detective form, which depresses me because hey, I write that kind of book.

The novel (unidentified here because it's symptomatic of something larger) is told in first person by a detective figure who battles unseen paranormal creatures all around us. He's tough, world-weary and driven, with a core of decency but a sense that he's the only just man in an unjust world.

There are two reasons authors use first-person for protagonists like this. First, the character puts on a deliberately unappealing and difficult front, and by hearing his inner voice we see the sympathetic hero behind the bluster. Otherwise, we'd be spending 400 pages in the company of a jackass. The other is that, as a detective, he pieces together the clues as they're discovered, and allows the reader to share his insights and discoveries is a big part of the fun.

You mess with this fundamental dynamic at your own peril. For example, Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice tries to mock this convention by telling the story in a weird third person singular voice that keeps tricking the reader into thinking it's first person when it's not. The result is a novel almost impenetrable in its tone, and certainly no fun to read.

Occasionally a writer will use multiple first-person points of view, to convey differing perspectives or information that one narrator wouldn't know. That's a valid technique, and the result depends on both the writer's skill and the structural support for these switches. Most common, though (and endemic to the book I just read) is the lazy approach of starting a novel in first person, but when a plot point becomes too tricky to convey that way, simply switching to third person for a chapter or two.

This sort of arbitrary voice change completely negates the reason for choosing first person in...well, in the first place. And it puts the author's limitations front and center, when the goal should be to hide those as much as possible. I'm not saying these sorts of literary tricks should never be used, just that they should never be used simply because the author doesn't want to take the trouble to think a little harder about how to make his or her point. Or, and I suspect this is often the case, the author uses a first person voice because he or she thinks it's a genre requirement without understanding its actual function.

Genre conventions are definitions, and when they lose their meanings, so do the genres. And one big way they lose their meanings is by being used without being understood. Western films lost their power when Europeans began mimicking all the accoutrements without understanding their relevance; pure science fiction fell apart when George Lucas mixed in fantasy elements with the hardware. The self-narrating hardboiled detective, already too ironic to ever be successfully post-modern, is a very specific creature that can change backgrounds but must retain its inherent justification for its existence. Without it, it's just a pose, entertaining but empty.

So what do you think? Am I seeing a true sign of the genre apoclaypse, or am I just another doomsday prophet whining about the end of this minor literary world?

Survival of the Dead and how to keep a series interesting

2010-08-25T08:10:00.000-05:00

Some background on me and George Romero's zombies:

I saw Night of the Living Dead one Saturday afternoon when I was in high school. The Memphis TV station, apparently thinking it was some innocuous old B&W horror movie, did not edit it. Forget the graphic intestine-eating: I'd never before seen a movie where the hero died such a pointless death. Later, when I got to college, I discovered there was a small community of people who'd watched that exact same broadcast and been similarly marked by it.

I saw Dawn of the Dead at the Cabana Theater in Jackson, TN. When the famous shotgun-to-the-head effect came up, a woman in a nurse's uniform got up and proclaimed to her date, "I see this shit in the ER all day, I ain't paying to see it now!" She stomped out. Her date stayed.

I saw Day of the Dead on videotape, alone in my college apartment. When the heroes were herded into the zombie enclosure, I had to stand up and pace around my chair for the remainder of the film. That's one way I handle suspense when I'm alone.

I saw Land of the Dead at a packed preview showing in Madison, WI. Cheers greeted Tom Savini's momentary cameo. Bigger cheers greeted the zombie biting out a girl's navel ring.

I saw Diary of the Dead at the late Westgate Art Cinema in Madison, with six other patrons (which explains why it's "late," I suppose). I stayed all the way through the credits to see if there was a stinger. There wasn't.

And now, Survival of the Dead, on blu ray in my living room, once again all alone.

You can find synopses of the film online, so I won't bore you with one here. What I will say is that Romero once again subverts expectations by giving us a zombie movie that's almost a western, with wide-screen photography, galloping horses and lots of gunplay. It's also the first true sequel in his series, featuring a character introduced in Diary of the Dead. At the same time you get the expected tropes: an isolated setting (in this case an island), survivors enmeshed in petty squabbles while missing the big picture, plenty of gore (most of it CG enhanced to the point of [deliberate] ridiculousness), and zombies doing things they've never done before.

Is this as good as Dawn of the Dead? No. You don't hit that sort of pinnacle more than once. John Ford made a lot of westerns, many of them great, but he only made one The Searchers. At the same time, it's impressive how Romero, working in such a narrowly defined form, continues to find new ways to present his zombies. A lot of web critics dismiss his newer films as lacking the chops of his earlier work, but that's missing the point.

After you revolutionize the genre with your first two horror films, it's impossible to keep repeating the trick. The fact that Romero doesn't simply rehash the same old thing is both admirable and exciting. As a novelist who writes a series, I see this as an example of how to do it right: name another series where the individual films are so hugely different from each other,and yet (to me at least) still give the people what they want.

Return of the Verdilak

2010-08-23T08:03:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been reading multiple books at once, a chapter here andc there of completely unrelated things: the second Denton novel by Kenneth Cameron, No-Man's Lands by Scott Huler (about retracing the journeys of Odysseus), an unbelievably detailed book on the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a novel for which I've been asked to do a cover blurb. Usually I'll get into one of these at the expense of the others and read it through to the end before returning to the pile, but in this case I got pulled off-track by something I unexpectedly found in a local used book store: the 1996 graphic novel Verdilak, by Bo Hamtpon and Mark Kneece.

The title, one of the many European terms for "vampire" (specifically one who preys only on loved ones) caught my eye first. I first learned the word from the middle section of Mario Bava's 1963 anthology film Black Sabbath; when I opened the book, the artwork clearly referenced the Bava film, so at first I thought it was an adaptation.

But it was actually something more subtle. It uses the Bava film as metatext, taking its visual clues not just from I Wurdelak but from other Bava films such as Black Sunday. It covers some of the same narrative ground, but with a far different beginning and resolution. And ultimately it becomes an epic, unlike the Bava film's intimate familial horror.

In the film, a young aristocrat stumbles on a family in the process of being consumed by the curse of vampirism. He tries to save the beautiful daughter, but it doesn't go well. In the graphic novel, this simple tale is backstoried with an account of Ramash, a deformed dwarf who takes in a beautiful peasant girl (the other daughter of the doomed family), showers her with affection only to have her run off with the first handsome man who comes along. And at the end, Ramash's father (Satan) shows up to aid his son in his revenge. It's a simple story, carrying the weight and atmosphere of folklore, and it broadens and deepens Bava's original by providing motivations and explanations the film never really needed.

But for me, what makes it special is the watercolor artwork by Bo Hampton. He recreates Bava's imagery without pandering to it, making it work in a different medium. He also adds enough of his own touches that it feels original, not merely a recreation. His most crucial change is rethinking the image of the family patriarch. In the film Boris Karloff's kindly eyes provided an eerie contrast to his actions. Here the character bears a greater resemblence to Josef Stalin, which is appropriate given the revised context.

I asked Hampton, who also co-wrote the text, what inspired him to undertake such a project. He said, "I love Mario Bava and his version in the movie trilogy Black Sabbath had a huge influence on me. I wasn't happy with the logic of some events and went back to the A.K. Tolstoi source, and after translation to English it wasn't much more help. So I came up with an idea [and brought in] co-writer Mark Kneece to flesh it out."

Verdilak is out of print, but worth the effort to find. It's a powerful introduction to the concept of the adult fairy tale, and lacks the annoying tendency to blatantly "meta" its source; in fact, it's "meta" only if you already know the source. If you don't, it's a sincere, irony-free horror story with the kind of moral basis found in real fairy tales, the ones that stick in your memory long past childhood.

The profit motive (or, the prophet motive)

2010-08-15T12:45:00.004-05:00

Recently on my Facebook/Twitter feed I posted a bit of Roger Ebert's review of the new Julia Roberts movie, Eat Pray Love: "[To like the movie] I guess you have to belong to the narcissistic subculture of Woo-Woo." I quoted it because I found it funny, and should make clear right now that I have neither read nor seen the book/movie in question.

In his review Ebert also said, "She [author Elizabeth Gilbert, played by Roberts] funds her entire trip, including scenic accommodations, ashram, medicine man, guru, spa fees and wardrobe, on her advance to write this book." This got my attention, so I checked around. Sure enought, the New York Times book review confirms it: "Her trip was financed by an advance on the book she already planned to write, and Eat, Pray, Love is the mixed result."

Really? Gilbert gets an advance (significant enough to allow international travel, yet) to write a book about her spiritual quest prior to setting out on it? So before starting she knows that a) the quest isn't really going to cost anything materially, and b) she'll need to create a narrative of it compelling enough to justify the investment. Clearly she did the latter. But my question is, doesn't the existence of the former invalidate the whole thing?

Consider another literary account of a real-life spiritual quest, Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Its protagonist exists barely above the poverty line, and suffers numerous indignities (many of them self-induced) as a result. His quest has no real agenda, no goal, and his insights occur only at his lowest points. His conclusion is that to live in that society he has to abandon the very things that drove him to the quest in the first place--i.e., grow up. He then writes about it, and only then is he rewarded materially for it.

The obvious difference between the two is one of gender, but I don't think that's the crucial one. I think it's more about the integrity of intent. I don't believe you can embark on a spiritual quest intending to profit from it, at no substantial cost to yourself, and emerge with any meaningful insights. All great quests, from Siddhartha to Moses, from Ghandi to On the Road, begin from a level of desperation that goes much deeper than, as the Washington Post says in its book review, being "a plucky blond American woman in her thirties with no children and no major money worries" who "is going through a really bad divorce and subsequent stormy rebound love affair."

Or, to put it more concisely, On the Road inspires people to emulate it. Eat Pray Love inspires a Julia Roberts movie.

To be fair, I've often been accused of cynicism when it comes to other people's motives, particularly famous and/or successful people. So what do you readers think? Is this a valid point, or just sour grapes from a writer who hasn't yet gotten a big enough advance to finance a fun week in Wisconsin Dells,* let alone an epic journey into the meaning of existence?

*(Okay, that's an exaggeration for effect. My average advance would buy me quite the time in the Dells.)

"The Somber Enemy"

2010-08-09T04:36:00.004-05:00

Thanks to Rita Mae Reese for suggesting this blog post.

One side-effect of being a full-time writer is that I'm also the stay-at-home parent for my two sons, ages 5 and 2. They impinge on every single moment of my day, especially the younger one, since he's underfoot almost constantly. My wife works in an office 45 minutes away and spends her days conversing with adults; I know way, way too much about The Fresh Beat Band.

A famous poet--I've searched and searched, but can't find the actual quote--said something to the effect of, "My poems are short because I have children." Man, do I sympathize. I've gone from entire days of sitting lazily in my underwear writing page after page, to scrambling to get my thoughts down during the twenty-three minutes of Ni Hao Kai Lan. Most everything you read by me these days (including this blog post) started as a brief note typed into the body of an e-mail on my tiny Acer, chosen because it fits in the younger son's diaper bag. I've had to master the trick of writing amid hoardes (okay, only two, but they're overachievers) of children screaming, running, drumming and fighting. I can stay reasonably on task while simultaneously shouting things like, "Get the lightsaber out of your nose!" But I wouldn't call it easy.

(The Squirrel Boy, pre-nasal insertion.)

Of course I worry that it's going to show in the final product. A writer's greatest tool is his/her ability to concentrate, and mine is dangerously overextended. Will my next novel be a sloppy compendium of half-assed ideas that I simply lacked the energy and opportunity to polish before deadline? Obviously I hope not, and I'll do my best to make sure that doesn't happen. But I have no problem imagining that to be the case. Cyril Connolly said, "There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall," and on my worst days I see the chilling wisdom in that.

But luckily, there's a significant upside. One is motivation: knowing that you have tiny helpless human beings dependent on you is great for kicking your ass into gear. The other, surprisingly, is clarity. When you realize that what you write today is part of the legacy you'll leave your children, then it helps keep you focused on what you really need to do. I may never write a best-seller, but I feel that my published work will let my sons know me better when they're adults.

And if I do happen to write a chart-topper, I'll have a clear conscience about it.

(The C-in-C expresses his critical opinion of one of my first drafts.)

It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines

2010-07-28T04:43:00.002-05:00

Is there a more famous opening line in all literature than, "Call me Ishmael"? It introduces a mystery (the narrator doesn't say, "My name is Ishmael," he says you can call him that), it sets up the tone, and it tells us that the narrator has a wry, dry wit. It's brilliant. So brilliant that even people who've never read Moby Dick know it, and it's been used as both a joke (in the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and a pick-up line (in the novel Ahab's Wife).

I love Melville's book: I'm not a scholar, mind you, but a fan. I've read all about the symbolism, what the whale represents in Melville's cosmology, and so forth, but I love the book because it's an ass-kicking adventure with a monster and a strange, compelling protagonist. I even like the outdated chapters on whale biology, because it tells me what the book's characters knew about the beasts they hunted.

Stick with me through this next bit, because it all pulls together.

There's a subgenre of books that retell classic novels in simplified terms for young readers. Some are more obvious choices than others: you can read my interview with the author of a kid-friendly edition of Dracula here. But Melville's classic, featuring as it does a genuine monster, an obsessed peg-legged maniac and loads of exciting seafaring action, is a favorite. We own several different versions.

Our go-to version is the Great Illustrated Classics edition, "adapted" by Shirley Bogart. She retains the classic opening line. So does the Dalmatian Press Children's Classic version, "condensed and adapted" by W.T. Robinson, which also includes a neat disclaimer/mission statement that says, in part, "...this is not the original version (which you really must read when you're ready for every detail)." The Treasury of Illustrated Classics version, "adapted" by Donna Carson, goes a bit askew, changing the line to "My name is Ishmael." That immediately jettisons Melville's ambiguity, which I know kids can understand because my five-year-old and I have discussed it.

But in the Oxford Illustrated Classics edition, award-winning children's author Geraldine McCaughrean adds two entire paragraphs before the famous line:

There is a whale in the sea, as white as a ghost, and it haunts me. It haunts me on winter nights, when the sky tumbles like a grey sea, when the sun overhead turns the grass sea-green, and the almond blossom rears up white over my head.

Sometimes, when I'm afloat in sleep, like a drowned sailor, he swims toward me--a nightmare all in white, jaws gaping, and I wake up screaming and salt-water wet with sweat. Somewhere out there in the bottomless ocean lives Moby Dick, a great white winter of a whale, and I shiver still at the thought of him. Even in summer.

Call me Ishmael.
(p. 7)

When I read this, I thought: why did Ms. McCaughrean feel that one of the classic opening lines in literature needed a little more set up? So I asked her.

She responded, "Given the huge and leisured length of the original, I knew I had not only to get the story moving quickly but also state my intention on the first page - this is going to be a book about a whale, a really big, scary, menacing nightmare of a whale. Structurally, it's my promise to the reader - 'Look, even though you can't smell salt just yet, and I'm going to take a while introducing you to an assortment of oddballs, this is where we are heading - to an encounter with a damn great killer of a whale.'

"I also thought, given that this whale is at the centre of the book, the hub at the centre of the wheel, he ought to have 'first billing'. Naturally, I couldn't do without the famous line, but I thought if anyone is going to step into the room first, it ought to be Moby."

So it seems she had a reason, and I appreciate her taking the time to explain it to me. And I can see her point, were this any other book. But I think she missed something crucial: Moby Dick isn't a book about a whale, it's a book about a whale's effect on its human characters. Ishmael is our guide and proxy, leading us into the story not of a whale, but of a man (Ahab) whose sacriligious single-mindedness destroys everyone around him except Ishmael. And it may very well be that Ishmael's slightly aloof nature, the fact that he observes rather than fully participates in the madness around him, is what ultimately both saves him and lets him tell the story. He was "floating on the margin of the ensuing scene," as Melville puts it.

My point is, Ishmael earns his place at the story's introduction. And to begin any version of this story any other way is, in my opinion, to miss a whale-sized piece of the point.

Solving the Murder at the Cheatin' Heart Motel

2010-07-19T04:45:00.001-05:00

Longtime readers of this blog will know I have a somewhat unresolved relationship with my home region of West Tennessee. It's not the most scenic area: the state of Tennessee slopes downhill from Appalachia in the east, so the western end is the lowest, muddiest and flattest part. Except for Memphis, there are no notable cities (I suppose you could count Jackson, but it's always felt like a city consumed by its own worst interests). And the people? Well, let's just say that when I lived there, they thought nothing of beating up a kid for reading a book. Because reading was weird.

So the last thing I expected to do was to find that this dull area had inspired hard-boiled genre literature. But damned if it didn't.

I ran across Art Bourgeau's Murder at the Cheatin' Heart Motel in the late Eighties, when I lived in Huntsville, AL. It was written in 1985, and concerned Claude "Snake" Kirlin, a freelance reporter for Ultra Suave magazine, and his buddy F.T. Zervich, trying to solve the murder of Snake's aunt, proprietor of the titular motel. The establishment is located on Chocktaw Lake, which Bourgeau describes thus:

"Anyway, in the winter of 1811 three earthquakes hit right where you're sitting. Each one was several times worse than the famous San Francisco earthquake. It was so bad that a land area of about a hundred miles simply fell into the earth. The banks of the Mississippi broke down, and the water rushed in to fill it. That's how Chocktaw Lake was formed."
(p. 13)

Wow, I thought. That sounds familiar. It sounds, in fact, like Reelfoot Lake. According to this entry on the ever-reliable Wikipedia:

"Popular history says that the lake was formed when the region subsided after the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812, and that the Mississippi River flowed backward for 10–24 hours to fill it."

Someone wrote a mystery set on a fictionalized version of Reelfoot Lake, a place I'd gone fishing and on picnics and visited my whole life! It was, for me, a world-shifting realization. And it got better.

Bougreau introduced the book's villain, Sheriff Casper Denny, with this:

"I'd heard of him before. Everyone had heard of him. He was a genuine, bona fide legend. A twentieth-century Wyatt Earp who had single-handedly taken on the west Tennessee mob, a group whose roots went all the way back to Jean Boquin. They had tried to move into his county, and in the process, the sheriff had been shot, had his house bombed, and his wife and son had been killed."
(pp. 17-18)

The resemblance to Sheriff Buford Pusser seemed unmistakable.

Recently I spoke to Art Bourgeau about his book, and to my surprise he said, "The sheriff character wasn't modeled on Buford Pusser. Sheriff Pusser was a heroic figure, my character wasn't. The two things that could make you think it was Sheriff Pusser was his haircut and him fighting the mob. I used the Glen Campbell haircut which he and many other sheriffs of the time wore as a metaphor to show he was a very uptight, stressed-out, anal type of person. The job didn't make my character this way, it was his nature. You can tell a lot about a man by his haircut...As to the nastiness of the personality of Sheriff Casper Denny, that was not a reflection on Sheriff Pusser. Quite the contrary, I never met the man. As far as I know, he was a saint. The character of Sheriff Casper Denny was an extension of my own life. My father was a Tennessee Deputy Sheriff and he was a shit."

So for twenty years, I'd had that wrong. But by the time I found out, I'd learned to look at the world of my youth with a writer's detachment instead of a ex-pat's ambivalence. Hints of that world have shown up throughout my work, and will probably always do so.

And at least I was right about Reelfoot Lake. Bourgeau told me, "The idea of the lake comes from reading about Reelfoot Lake and thinking it must be one of the neatest places on earth, but I've never seen it. However, I have seen the bayou of Louisiana and the wetlands of New Jersey, so I am familiar with how it might look. Still, it is darn fascinating. The New Madrid Fault and all that. It is larger than history. It belongs in fantasy."

Fantasy, huh? Hey, I write fantasy. Hmm....

The Last Mile(s): a review of King of the Road

2010-07-15T06:38:00.003-05:00

Recently I wrote about Miles O'Keeffe, movie star and former resident of west Tennessee. Thanks to that post, I corresponded with Monica Surrena, the writer-director of Miles' most recent work, a short film titled King of the Road. You can see the trailer here, and she was kind enough to send me a DVD.

King is the story of Wild Bill, an aging biker who simultaneously loses his dog and his favorite bar. He challenges the bar's new owner to a bike-off in a bid to regain both his watering hole and his self-respect. As the poster's tag line says, "A man without a bar is no man at all."

As I said, this is a short film (20 minutes) so it makes its points quickly and clearly. It also feels like a movie, something a lot of short films (and I was a judge for a local film festival last year, so I'm speaking from experience) don't accomplish, or often bother to try to achieve. There's humor, pathos, and narrative surprises that come out of left field and yet feel perfectly right for the story. And there is a story, well-constructed and effective. The film's also shot in widescreen format, and Surrena gets the most out of her means, resulting in that rarest of qualities in today's flash-cut film world: King of the Road actually has real movie sweep.

And Miles? He's dead-on. The rapport with his best pal Igor (John Bigham) is perfect. Plus the cultural weight he brings to the part (former big-screen actor now working in student films) is exactly right for a once-famous outlaw biker. I admit to teasing his image a little in my prior post, but his work here, while definitely amusing in places, is no joke.

Surrena is currently shopping King of the Road to film festivals, so if you're involved in one, let the organizers know. There are enough navel-gazing one-joke short films out there; your audience deserves a film that's also a real movie.

"I've got a lot of patience, baby": the story behind the dedication of The Girls with Games of Blood

2010-07-12T04:19:00.001-05:00

My first Memphis vampire novel, Blood Groove, was dedicated to the memory of Duncan Browne (read why here). Browne remains a fairly obscure musical figure, although I hope I've nudged a few people toward seeking out his work. But The Girls with Games of Blood is dedicated to one much better known, whose songs helped define the Sixties, even if those songs were performed by other people.

Laura Nyro wrote classics: "Eli's Coming," "And When I Die," "Stoney End," "Wedding Bell Blues." And while her versions languished in relative obscurity, cover versions (Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Barbra Streisand, The Fifth Dimension) were enormous hits, insuring both her reputation and her economic security. Safe from the pressures of commercial hitmaking, she created a piano-driven, soul-based body of work that, in its willful difficulty and self-referential symbolism, predated similar performers (most notably Tori Amos) by twenty years. Tragically, she died of ovarian cancer in 1997 at age 49, the same age her mother died of the same disease.

In The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce, Fred Goodman describes her thus:

"[Laura] Nyro, who resembled a chunky Morticia Addams, was both unusually talented and just plain unusual. Dressed in black with her long hair reaching down to her thighs, Nyro wore purple lipstick and used Christmas tree ornaments as earrings." (p. 122)

I had written an early draft of Blood Groove just before Goodman's book came out in 1998, and was toying with the idea of a sequel based on the idea of two girl vampires fighting over Zginski. There was no story yet, and no clear concept of the new characters. But the description in Goodman's book stuck with me.

I had a passing familiarity with Nyro's work, but I followed my new obsession where it took me and began listening intently. In the larger sense, it exposed me to a lot of awesome music I might otherwise have missed (does anything evoke a lazy, woozy summer afternoon better than "Stoned Soul Picnic"?). And in the song "When I was a Freeport and You were the Main Drag," I found this:

Well I've got a lot of patience, baby
That's a lot of patience to lose

Somehow the image from Goodman's book clicked with this snippet of lyric and created, full-blown in one burst, the character of Patience (as well as providing her onstage catchphrase). She's not a direct copy of Nyro, of course; in fact, she ultimately has very little in common with her inspiration beyond a basic physical resemblance. But without Laura Nyro, there would be no Patience Bolade. And without Patience, there would be no Girls with Games of Blood.

Nyro performing "Save the Country" on TV in 1969:

Leave a comment on the last vintage musician you rediscovered and you might win a signed copy of the new book.

Release day for THE GIRLS WITH GAMES OF BLOOD!

2010-07-06T04:01:00.000-05:00

It's release day for The Girls with Games of Blood, the follow-up to my first Memphis vampire book, Blood Groove.

When Blood Groove came out last year, I of course checked at my local Barnes and Noble to see if they carried it. I was disappointed at first not to see it among the other vampire novels in the Sci Fi/Horror section, so I asked if they planned to stock it. The clerk said it was in stock, shelved in the Literature Section.

Literature?

Okay, first let me say, that's flattering. Certainly I'd like to think I write literature. Still, Blood Groove is about vampires: hard core, drink-your-blood-and-toss-your-wasted-carcass-aside undead. It's not romance, it's not light, and it's certainly not heartwarming. The audience for the average literary novel would be blindsided, I fear, by its contents (see this recent review).

I asked how this classification was determined, and was told it was done at the corporate level. So apparently someone at Barnes and Noble HQ thinks I belong just before Lucy Jane Bledsoe (The Big Bang Symphony: a novel of Antarctica). Which, again, is flattering. Publisher's Weekly says about her book, "Bledsoe finds the spark of life amid the ice and desolation." Heck, that could almost work for mine as well.

The point to this little post is, if you go to Barnes and Noble to find The Girls with Games of Blood (and you should; you know you want to), don't look with the other vampire books. Check in literature, under "B," next to Lucy Jane.

Exclusive new Memphis Vampires short story

2010-07-05T04:41:00.000-05:00

As a thank-you to all the folks who enjoyed Blood Groove, and in anticipation of the release tomorrow of The Girls with Games of Blood, here's the first part of a short story that takes place between the two books. You can read the whole thing on my website here.

J'OUBLIE

(c) 2010 Alex Bledsoe

Memphis State University, late summer, 1975

"You again," the sour librarian said as she looked up.

"Yes," Alisa Cassidy said, "me again." She struggled to smile despite the stab of pain. Six months, the doctors said, and that's if she put herself in their hands, which she refused to do. Lying bald in a hospital bed was not how she wanted to go. She had no patience for this wrinkled old crone's little power trip, but it was a barrier that had to be negotiated if she wanted to reach her goal. She added helpfully, "I called ahead."

"Oh, I know," the librarian said as she rose from her seat. Her long, spindly limbs made her resemble some insect unfolding; her tall beehive hairdo added to the effect. "I have it ready for you."

Alisa dearly wished Mrs. Cutlip, the former librarian, was still alive. For that matter, she supposed, so did Mrs. Cutlip. This replacement, brought in from one of the state system's outlying campuses, seemed determined to make Alisa's remaining time as miserable as possible. Whereas Mrs. Cutlip was always glad to see her and never insisted on the protocol of appointments, this bitter artifact was a stickler for meaningless details.

Alisa followed her to the Special Collections reading room, where the book waited for her. It sat on the pristine table like a fat, well-fed slug, its leather cover swollen with mildewed padding. The metal clasp and hinges were green with corrosion, and a black patch on the spine showed where someone had once attempted to burn it. The antiseptic confines of the rare book reading room made it look even more rancid. The thought of touching it again always made Alisa's stomach turn.

"Wear these," the librarian said, indicating a box of disposable cotton gloves. She looked disdainfully at the book, then at the woman who dared to consult it. "This book is the work of the devil, you know."

"So I've heard," Alisa said. Every time I talk to you, she added in her head.

"You can't study it and not be affected by it. It wouldn't surprise me if that's why you got cancer."

Alisa's head snapped up, and the glare she gave the old woman was the first thing that had ever cracked the hag's smug superiority. "If you'll excuse me," Alisa said through her teeth, "I have work to do."

The librarian scurried out. Alisa trembled with suppressed rage and almost dropped the contents of her briefcase all over the floor. She sat and took several deep breaths, fighting the tears burning behind her eyes. It was a small campus, so naturally word got around about things like a faculty member with a terminal illness. Still, how do you justify calling yourself a Christian when you say things like that?

Alisa struggled to concentrate on the book before her: the Festa Magotta, a.k.a. the "Feast of Maggots." She put on the gloves and turned the pair of metal clasps. She lifted the cover and scowled at the puff of noxious odor that escaped.

She consulted her notes and began turning the heavy, stiff pages. Translating this book was her life's goal, and since that timetable was now significantly shortened, she had no time to waste.

She reached the point where she had stopped at her last session and turned the next page. Tucked into the fold was a thin stack of paper, of a much more recent vintage and covered with handwriting in English. She held her breath and leaned close, discerning the words "horror," "insanity" and "poodle."

She looked over her shoulder. If the mantis-librarian saw this, she'd snatch the papers away and Alisa might not see them again for months--months she didn't have. So she carefully pulled them out, hid them among her own papers and began to read....

Read the rest of the story here.

And you can order your copy of The Girls with Games of Blood here.

Going the extra Mile(s)

2010-06-29T05:01:00.003-05:00

After I wrote yesterday's post on Miles O'Keeffe, I spoke with with Monica Surrena, the writer/director of King of the Road, Miles' most recent film. She said:

"Miles is a really easy going guy. Kind of soft spoken and was delightful to work with. Even though it was a student short, he took it very seriously, did many of his own stunts (except the outrageous bike stuff - that was done by Monte Perlin), and shared a lot of anecdotes about some feature films he'd been in. When he wasn't on camera, he spent most of his time sitting by himself, getting into character. 'Wild' Bill was based off of my dad. If you ever met my father, you'd see how well Miles took the real person and adapted it to the fictional down and out hero. Both he and John Bigham (who played Bill's sidekick, Igor) also worked together well and did quite a bit of improve on set. I've kept in touch him since the film, and if I do anything else, I'd like to use him again. He's a real pro."

Here's the trailer, showing Miles in action (love the spinning motorcycle bit):

The film's official website is here. Thanks again to Monica Surrena.

Giants of West Tennessee: Miles (and miles) O'Keeffe

2010-06-28T05:02:00.006-05:00

NOTE: This is the latest in an ongoing occasional series about notable figures from my home region. These are personal reminiscences and opinions; where available, I'll include links so interested readers can find out more.

"My name is spelled with two e's, two f's and another e, and nobody ever spells it right."

If you're of my generation, you remember Bo Derek as the epitome of beauty, codified and made official by the movie 10. But if you're a genre fan of my generation, you also remember her next film, a project so godawful it still provokes open-mouthed amazement. 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man borrowed its title from Johnny Weissmuller's debut film but everything else came from some bizarre other dimension. Directed by Bo's husband John Derek, it featured Bo as Jane, an unrestrained Richard Harris as her egomaniacal father, and as Tarzan, newcomer Miles O'Keeffe.

That would be the former Miles Keefe of Ripley, TN.

Genre fans also know Miles from a pair of roles later in the 80s. In Sword of the Valiant, he played Sir Gawain to Sean Connery's Green Knight. Sporting a blond pageboy wig, Miles shows us things you never knew you wanted to know, like how to use a can opener to urinate while wearing armor.

In the Italian film Ator, the Fighting Eagle, he's a fantasy swordsman battling evil, but it's the sequel, known in some places as Cave Dwellers, that really keeps him on the map. This film, riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000, is available in the Volume 2 set. And on page 37 of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, actor/writer Mike Nelson pens a tribute to his vision of Miles.

I've never met Miles, but he comes across as a solid actor whose basic dignity survives even the worst of his films. My buddy Hays Davis (fans might spot him as the person to whom Burn Me Deadly is dedicated) grew up in Ripley and provides this Miles-related anecdote:

"My friend Kathy went to the senior prom with Miles, and they graduated together from Ripley High School in 1972. I remember seeing Miles play the lead role in that year's senior play, Li'l Abner. After graduation they went their separate ways. Years later, in 1978, Miles went to a party at Kathy's house. He had missed out on an opportunity to try out for a Chicago rugby team, and wanted to try out in San Francisco. Their friend Billy made plans with Miles to drive there, and before the night was over Kathy had signed on as well. The three drove to San Fran in a Pinto, which was a real feat, as Miles was a big fellow. Miles stayed out west, and not long after, while at work one day, Miles was spotted by some industry folks who sized him up for the Tarzan role.

"I remember going with friends a time or two to the Keefes' house in Ripley. Their daughter Kelly was three years older than me, and their brother Coleman was another couple of years older, and all nice folks. While I knew them as the Keefes, the name O'Keeffe was the original family name, which had been revised years back. By the time Tarzan was released, Miles had reverted to O'Keeffe, along with at least some of the rest of the family, if I remember correctly."

I'm not sure if Miles is still acting; his IMDB credits stop in 2005, although he's listed as the star of the 2010 short film King of the Road. But like Mike Nelson, I am sure about one thing.

The man could beat me up.

I've got a VHS of MST3K's version of Cave Dwellers (a.k.a. The Blade Master, a.k.a Ator the Invincible 2) for one lucky commenter.

Gone (but not forgotten) in 60 Seconds

2010-06-21T05:47:00.004-05:00

If one cinematic trend defines the 1970s, it's not the summer blockbuster (Star Wars, Jaws), the "New Hollywood" grit (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) or even grindhouse exploitation. It's the car chase movie. And the undisputed king is H.B. Halicki's 1974 film, Gone in 60 Seconds.

To make an independent movie in the 70s was a sign of drive and willpower far beyond those of independent filmmakers today. Indie directors didn't want to make navel-gazing talkfests like Juno or Garden State. They strove instead to give the people what they wanted: action, destruction, and anti-establishment heroes who, even when they fail, go out in a blaze of defiant glory. And it took more than a few thousand dollars and a digital camcorder: movies were shot on film and needed both big cameras and the raw stock. Then there was distribution. "Home video" did not exist, so except for television, the only market was theatrical.

H.B. Halicki was not a filmmaker. He was a raging self-starter who owned his own auto body shop at 17. And he bought cars. Lots of them. In fact, all the cars crashed in the film (93) were personally owned, and in most cases driven to their demise, by Halicki himself. He applied the same resolve to filmmaking, utlimately writing, directing, producing and starring in both this film and its 1982 follow-up, The Junkman. He personally took both the film and the wrecked Mustang known as "Eleanor" (touted as "the only car to ever receive star billing") to drive-ins across the country--including one patronized by a certain fictional vampire trying to learn his way around 1975 Memphis.

In Blood Groove, my vampire Zginski was introduced to the modern automobile via the film Vanishing Point. By the time of my new novel, The Girls with Games of Blood, Zginski has seen Halicki's film and is ready to find his own Eleanor. You'll have to read the book to find out how he does it, and what name he chooses.

In 1989, Halicki was accidentally killed on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds II. The footage he'd already shot showed he most definitely hadn't lost his touch. And although the clothes, music and scenery of the original film set it firmly in 1974, the visceral thrill from the 40-minute final chase is timeless.

What's your favorite car chase movie? Leave a comment before midnight on Sunday, June 27 for a chance to win an advance copy of The Girls with Games of Blood (and for one lucky commenter, I'll throw in a DVD of Bram Stoker's Dracula)!

Heroic Fantasy Challenge contest

2010-06-14T04:11:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the awesome folks at Rogue Blades Entertainment, I'm one of the judges for their heroic-fantasy Challenge! contest.

The contest is open to submissions from June 1 to September 1, 2010. And the challenge is to base the story around this illustration by V Shane:

The basics (from the Rogue Blades website):

"The RBE Challenge! is a competition anthology open to anyone who writes heroic action adventure of ANY genre! Using V Shane’s above artwork and the title Discovery as inspiration, pen me mighty and mysterious tales of action and adventure. Speculative fiction is NOT required for Challenge! themes! Sword & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, Soul & Sandal, Western, Mystery, Dark Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Sci-Fi, even Horror and Romance! You name it, so long as it’s heroic fiction, you can submit it."

You can find more information at this link.

Sailing through Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes

2010-06-07T04:40:00.002-05:00

After my recent dire experience with The Island, Peter Benchley's 1979 pirate adventure (see my post here), I was leery of another "best-selling" author tackling the same subject. I was doubly leery when that author was the late Michael Crichton, a writer whose brilliant and innovative ideas are invariably balanced by a nonexistent sense of pacing, characterization and style.

And yet, his 2009 novel Pirate Latitudes surprised me, much as his 1976 novel, Eaters of the Dead. This new book was discovered as a completed manuscript among his computer files after his death, and it has the feel of a pet project. As such, perhaps he paid more attention to crafting a plot that pays off, rather than a series of incidents that simply stop when the book runs out of pages (i.e., Jurassic Park). Whatever the reason, both Latitudes and Eaters avoid the pitfalls of Crichton's books set in the contemporary world.

Charles Hunter is a privateer in Jamaica's Port Royal, attacking Spanish ships under the protection of the British governor. When he gets word of a Spanish galleon anchored in an impregnable harbor, he hatches a plan to steal it, and its considerable treasure.

And that's really it. There's not a lot of digression, just a straightforward plot with lots of action and damn near every pirate cliche you could want. There are hurricanes, attacks by giant squid, sword fights and cannon broadsides. Hunter is as smooth with the ladies as he is with the waves. Each member of his crew has a specialty, and they all manage to save the day at least once. The villains are suitably rogueish (all could be played by Basil Rathbone), and only the sex and violence make it an adult book. It's Pirates of the Caribbean for grownups.

Crichton (or his staff) did their research as well, because there are plenty of obscure historical details worked into the story, mostly legitimately. But even at that, there's something thin about it, a sense that it's more a film treatment than an actual novel. We learn only enough about the characters to justify their actions, and although the settings are vivid, they still don't feel like places real people live. Still, perhaps that's enough. No one should expect depth from the guy who wrote The Lost World.

Here's the British book trailer (much cooler than the US one):

I finally answer THE vampire author question

2010-06-04T06:33:00.000-05:00

As an author of books about vampires, I get asked one question more than any other, at signings and conventions and neighborhood cookouts: "So, what do you think about Twilight?" It's become a litmus test of sorts.

So I thought I'd answer it here, for the record, in handy condensed form. What do I think of Twilight?

I haven't read Twilight. None of them. My wife read them, but I haven't. So I can't speak to Stephanie Meyer's skill (or alleged lack of) as a writer.

I have seen the first movie. I thought Kristin Stewart was too intelligent and powerful an actress to play such a passive role, and it appears her recent performance as Joan Jett has proven me right. I thought the high school scenes really felt like high school. I thought the Cullens, in their albino-ish glory, were ridiculous, and as a parent I was appalled at both the way Bella's mother treated her, and the way she treated her father. But I was clearly not the intended demographic. In fact, never in my life have I felt less like the target audience.

But....

I understand the appeal. It's the same thing that lies behind the enduring presence of Dracula, and Lestat, and even Bill from True Blood. Whatever her other shortcomings as a writer, Meyer understands that vampires are at their best when they function as metaphors.

When Dracula was first published, the grim Count personified the fears of his time. Women were beginning to demand rights, including the right to enjoy sex, so rigid traditionalist Stoker demonstrated what happens to women who do so. London was inundated with immigrants, so Stoker showed the dangers of foreigners. I'm not saying he was right about either of these things, or even that he did this consciously. But Dracula stood in for the real-world terrors of its English readers in a way that his literary predecessors (Polidori's Lord Ruthven, Varney the Vampire, LeFanu's Carmilla) never did.

It was nearly a century before another literary vampire appeared who managed the same trick. Anne Rice's Lestat, in his loneliness and narcissism, perfectly captured the alienation of the "wide-open" Seventies when he appeared in 1976. Using vampires to address the AIDS crisis never really created a single unifying figure, but True Blood equates vampirism with the issues of homosexuals trying to fit into society, especially in the alternately embraced and ostracized Bill Compton.

And significantly, in none of these stories are the vampires our point-of-view characters. Dracula is told from many perspectives, but never from the Count's. We see Lestat through the eyes of his protege', Louis (I know this changes in later novels, but that's a different topic). True Blood's main character is psychic waitress Sookie Stackhouse.

Which brings us to Twilight.

It's beyond obvious that Edward Cullen represents Bella's desire for, and fear of, sexual intimacy. What gets missed in a lot of the "I hate Twilight" discussions is just how powerful a metaphor this is. It taps into a universal experience--well, universal for half the human race--and presents it in a way that allows the reader (and it's safe to say most of them are female) to identify with Bella on a fundamental level. We see Edward through her eyes, and if parts of the relationship seem a little squirrelly from our perspective (he's how old, and he's watching a teenage girl while she sleeps?), we understand why she feels like she does. Thus the criticism of her as a weak, passive character is really beside the point: this story couldn't happen to anyone else.

So at the risk of taking a beating, I'll make the statement that Twilight works for readers the same way Dracula, Interview with a Vampire and True Blood works. It personifies what they fear most in a way that lets them safely work through that fear.

There. And for reading this far, here's a little tune as a reward. My friend Fred Schepartz first alerted me to this.

No treasure in The Island

2010-05-28T05:09:00.003-05:00

I started reading Peter Benchley's 1979 novel The Island sitting in a waiting room, for lack of anything better to read. And the sucker hooked me.

For those who don't know, the late author was the son of Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Robert Benchley, both literary figures of high reknown. He was also the author of Jaws, the novel that was the Twilight of the early Seventies.

Jaws the book is nowhere near as exciting as the classic film adapted from it: it's a potboiler, filled with contemptible characters that even the author doesn't seem to like very much. But it sold like gangbusters, and set Benchley on an unsuccessful quest to replicate its success with a series of water-based thrillers (The Deep, Beast and White Shark, one of the worst books by a so-called "major" author I've ever had the misfortune to read).

The Island was his second novel after Jaws (following the sunken-treasure tale The Deep) and centers on magazine writer Blair Maynard (a typical name for a Benchley hero; the main character of The Deep was named "Romer Treece," Beast's hero was "Whip Dalton," and so forth). Maynard and his twelve-year-old son, Justin, head into the Caribbean to investigate ship disappearances, but what should have been a father-son lark turns unbelievably grim. They run afoul of an isolated population of inbred descendants of 17th-century pirates who co-opt Justin into their ranks and plan a grisly end for Maynard when he's no longer useful. These are not the rollicking buccaneers of Errol Flynn and Jonny Depp, but disgusting, bloodthirsty killers with appalling levels of hygiene.

The first third of the novel is a crackling good mystery-adventure with a surprisingly realistic father/son relationship. It was this aspect that caught my eye and kept me reading. Maynard wants to be a good dad, and tries very hard to stay connected to Justin despite being divorced from the boy's diffident mother. He's conscious of his status as a role model, and even if he never quite lives up to it, he sincerely tries. And Justin is depicted as a normal kid, neither precocious nor infuriatingly dense.

Unfortunately, once the Maynard lads are captured by the pirates, the novel's considerable momentum slows to a crawl. Justin vanishes from the story for long stretches, and we spend our time with Maynard senior and the pirate woman who wants him to impregnate her (yep, you read that right). And here's a tip to you would-be adventure writers out there: if you want to keep your readers on your hero's side, don't have the villains give him an enema. In graphic detail. Really. For any reason. If your plot demands it, then you should seriously re-evaluate. Sometimes your fetishes should stay private.

Eventually Maynard realizes that Justin likes the bloodthirsty pirate life, and so the battle becomes one for the boy's soul. I won't give away the ending--hell, if you slog through the last third of the book, you deserve the suspense--but its impact is considerably lessened because we don't see Justin's gradual transformation from comic-reading 'tween to Blackbeard-in-waiting. I don't know what Benchley was after, exactly, but what promised to be a neat modern twist on Treasure Island becomes instead one more sad artifact on the trail of a writer trying to reclaim the buried treasure of his debut novel.

Want to be in Eddie LaCrosse 4?

2010-05-14T18:59:00.000-05:00

As part of Do the Write Thing for Nashville, I'm taking part in a charity auction to help the victims of the Tennessee flooding. In addition to signed copies of my two Memphis vampire books, I'm including a Tuckerization in my fourth (so far untitled) Eddie LaCrosse novel, due out in 2012. So jump in and help the good folks of Tennessee get back on their feet!

Literature so tough it survives force majeure

2010-05-13T05:09:00.004-05:00

During the recent storms in Tennessee, my friend Thom had a house fire. That's the kind of rebel he is: in the midst of a flood, he burns. He's fine, no one (human or animal) was hurt, and the destruction was contained. But he sent me a photo of one very significant item that escaped with only soot damage:

Titania needs your help

2010-05-11T07:19:00.005-05:00

My friend filmmaker Lisa Stock, who did the promotional film for my novel Blood Groove, is raising funds to complete her next project, Titania. Even $5 will help, and I can say from experience that Lisa is a serious artist who will use these funds wisely to produce a beautiful, unique film.

To see a trailer for the proposed film, find out more about the project and make a donation, go here.

To find out more about Lisa, here's an interview I did with her about making the Blood Groove film.

What I love most about vampires is...

2010-05-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Madison Vampire Coven consists of...wait for it...authors based in and around Madison, WI who write about vampires. Currently we have four members, and I asked each to complete the following statement.

What I love most about vampires is...

Jordan Castillo Price, author of Hemavore:

"What I love most about vampires is their vulnerability. I think the ways in which vampires can be harmed are much more interesting than their powers. Depending on which mythologies you draw from, your vampire characters could be vulnerable to sunlight, running water, garlic, or holy relics, just to name a few things. Spin these vulnerabilities into your storyline and you could end up with some really fun elements. What about a vampire who makes a living selling "native earth" to other vampires online? Or maybe an As-Seen-On-TV acupressure bracelet that allows vamps to cross bridges over streams and rivers without freaking out? Vampire weaknesses allow for really compelling world building."

Anna Black, author of "The Temptation of Mlle. Marielle Doucette," found in The Sweetest Kiss: Ravishing Vampire Erotica:

"What I love most about vampires is that as humans we can both envy and pity them. We can envy their immortality, fantastic strength, hypnotic power and, in some cases, their preternatural beauty. We can yearn to be like them and yet, at the same time, shun and even dread becoming one of them. That is where pity comes into play. We can pity their isolation from humanity and, possibly, each other. We can acknowledge that even as they are envied they are also hated and hunted. They are the shadowy reflection of our most impassioned and fearsome desires."

Fred Schepartz, author of Vampire Cabbie:

"What I love most about vampire is that they're so damn sexy. Even when they're not sexy, they're very sexy. They're hideous, but they're beautiful. They are that thing that we fear most, a creature above us on the food chain, a creature that means sure death or worse. And yet, they are so fascinating, we would just love to meet a real vampire sometime."

And yours truly, author of Blood Groove and, coming this July, The Girls with Games of Blood:

"What I like most about vampires is they can represent things in a way that makes us see them anew. Whether it's xenophobia and superstition (Dracula), loneliness and narcissism (Interview with the Vampire), or the terror of sexual relationships (Twilight), vampires stand in for things we otherwise don't want to acknowledge or discuss. In fact, I'd make the case that if a vampire isn't a metaphor for something else, there's no point in writing about them. The vampires that last are the ones who are more than just monsters."

Leave a comment completing the statement, "What I love most about vampires is..." for a chance to win a signed advance reader copy (ARC) of The Girls with Games of Blood. Deadline is May 14!

The winners of signed copies of Blood Groove are...

2010-05-09T01:54:00.005-05:00

The Darth Vader cup came down off the shelf, the names were placed inside, and the Squirrel Boy did the random selecting. The winners are:

Milo H. Tomb

Angel 28140

Penny

Sara

Bookwench

Since none of you winners have e-mail contact info on your profile, please drop me a line (alex at alexbledsoe dot com) with your mailing address and to whom you'd like the book personalized.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and watch for more giveaways leading up to the July release of The Girls with Games of Blood!

Three questions with Alaya Johnson, author of Moonshine

2010-05-05T01:06:00.002-05:00

I reviewed Alaya Johnson's new novel Moonshine here. Alaya was also kind enough to answer some questions about the book.

When you and I first discussed Moonshine back in 2009, I got the sense that it would be a much darker book than it turned out to be. Did the tone change, or did I just project my own atmosphere onto it?

I'd already finished it at that time, so I suppose that it was as dark as it was going to get. I'd conceived of Moonshine as a fun vampire book that was still very much aware of social disparities and justice issues that are often completely missing from urban fantasy/paranormal novels. Those are also issues that interest me in general, so it's entirely possible that I focused on talking about those aspects just because they were important in my formulation of the book, despite its other (possibly more prominent) elements. I never meant for the generally fun tone of the book to minimize the social realities of the era (and my re-imagining of it), but to complement them. My success at this endeavor, of course, is entirely up to the reader.

One difference between the racial and immigrant human minorities, and the "Others" as you depict them, is that the victims of vampires become, against their will, part of a despised underclass. Since many of them have experienced how the other half lives, so to speak, did you consider making Zephyr one of "them" instead of a sympathetic outsider? Why or why not?

Most of the vampires depicted in the book start out as immigrants or members of the lower social classes. That wasn't a coincidence: generally, disease disproportionately affects the poor and disenfranchised, and vampirism is no exception. So they may know how the "other half" live, but only in the limited sense that as human immigrants they had more rights than vampire immigrants (as an example).

I think I used a human outsider as my viewpoint character mostly because it was important for Zephyr to be able to "pass" in the various strata of human society. As a vampire (or as a non-white person), she wouldn't have been able to so easily navigate them. And while that viewpoint would certainly have resulted in an interesting story, it wasn't ultimately where I decided I wanted to take the book.

And, related to the second question, why did you choose to make Zephyr a non-native New Yorker?

Partly because I liked the idea of the outsider perspective, and partly because so much of the power and mystery of New York City comes from its transplants, the non-natives who learn to make it in the city and call it their home. That experience was such a powerful one for me that I pretty much had to use it for my first New York City novel. NYC is also a place to shed your old identity and remake yourself. Zephyr is a few years post-transplant, and the fact of her self-reinvention plays a fairly important role in the story.

Thanks to Alaya Johnson for taking the time to answer my questions. Moonshine will be available May 11.

And go here before Friday, May 7 for a chance to win a signed paperback of Blood Groove.

How to help Tennessee

2010-05-04T13:30:00.005-05:00

I'm from Tennessee, as are both sides of my family. I'm familiar with a lot of the places that are now flooded. Memphis, Nashville, Smyrna, I-24, I-40...these are places I could almost navigate in my sleep. It's a region that gave the world an awful lot of cool things.

And with the horrible damage likely to be revealed as the waters recede, I wanted to pass on information on how you (and me) can help.

Keep up to date at the Middle Tennessee Red Cross Chapter. Information on where to send donations or, if you're close enough, volunteer will be posted (for those who don't know the geography of the region, Nashville is in the middle of the state where Interstates 40, 65 and 24 meet).

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation on your mobile phone.

Call (615) 250-4300 to make a donation by phone.

Mail a check to the Nashville Area Red Cross at 2201 Charlotte Avenue, Nashville, TN 37203.

If you can spare it, please do. If you can't, please send good thoughts.

Review: a vampire suffragette in Alaya Johnson's Moonshine

2010-05-03T01:02:00.001-05:00

I first heard about Moonshine when I was on a 2009 convention panel with its author, Alaya Johnson. The central conceit--in 1920s New York, a woman battles for the rights of vampires much as other suffragettes stood up for women and immigrants--fascinated me. My own vampire novels, Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood, also draw parallels between the racial and gender tensions of the 70s and the identity crises faced by my vampires.

According to Johnson, Moonshine was originally titled Vampire Suffragette, which is a much more accurate, if unwieldy, title. Zephyr Hollis is a Montana girl trained to kill vampires (and various additional creatures grouped under the name "Others") who has a change of heart and begins fighting for their right to co-exist with humans. A genie named Amir wants her help in tracking down the mysterious vampire gangster Rinaldo, who is flooding the city with Faust, a blood-based drink that leaves vampires addicted and vulnerable to the sun.

The book works because of the narrator's delightful, spunky voice. Zephyr is a compelling character, and her drive to help others (and Others) is blessedly devoid of self-pity or martyrdom. She stays true to her principles no matter what. Whether teaching a night class for vampire immigrants, helping the father of a part-fairy child get the illegal surgery his offspring needs, or defending an injured vampire from an angry mob, Zephyr demonstrates remarkable courage and resourcefulness. Some of her language seems disconcertingly modern, though (her use of "fuck," for example, or the word "clone"; at one point she threatens to kill "all your sorry asses" and says an opponent "face-planted into the cold rock").

The one big disappointment for me--and it's a matter of my own expectations rather than a failure by the author--is the overall lightness of tone. After talking with Ms. Johnson, I expected something darker and heavier. The dreariness of Zephyr's existence and the inherent hopelessness of her cause(s) are glossed over by clever banter and rollicking action scenes (since she's been raised to be a slayer--here called Defenders--there's a lot of swordplay). Zephyr's voice never allows the true despair of the ones she tries to help to come through, and thus her nobility seems somehow...shallow. She remains outside the true tragedies around her. Further, romance is a big element of the story, and while I have nothing against that (and it's handled well here), it again works at cross-purposes to the depth I expected. A male hero can have a cause so important it makes romance incidental; why not a female hero?

But this is judging the book against standards it never tries to meet in the first place. Moonlight is a fun read, with an engaging heroine and a world rich enough to sustain several subsequent adventures. If those adventures grow darker, make the parallel between immigrant and Other more tied to reality, and break down the barriers between Zephyr and her charges, then so much the better. But at least next time, I'll have a better idea of what I'm getting.

Moonshine will be released May 11, 2010.

Just in: the cover for The Girls with Games of Blood

2010-05-01T05:56:00.002-05:00

Here's the cover for The Girls with Games of Blood, the sequel to Blood Groove.

Leave a comment before May 7 for a chance to win one of five signed paperbacks of Blood Groove, my first novel about vampires in Memphis in the Seventies.

The Girls with Games of Blood will be available in July!

So, at last we meet...

2010-04-26T07:42:00.003-05:00

One massive fringe benefit of teaching at the Wisconsin Writers Institute this past weekend was that I finally got to meet my agent Marlene Stringer in person. That's right: although she's been my agent for five years and listened patiently while I whined, kvetched, bitched and wheedled, we've never actually met. Now we have, and here's the photo to prove it:

Notes from Odyssey Con (OddCon) 2010

2010-04-19T01:33:00.002-05:00

Just back from Odyssey Con 2010 in Madison, WI.

High points:
--meeting guest of honor Harry Turtledove for the first time.
--hanging out with other guest of honor Tobias Buckell who I haven't seen in over a year.
--dinner with Toby, Steven Silver, Sarah Monette and Lynne and Michael Thomas.
--premiering the first chapter of The Girls with Games of Blood.
--participating in a great panel on the resurgence of sword and sorcery.
--and an end-of-con Thai outing with Toby, Sarah, Nayad Monroe, LaShawn Wanak and Karen Babich.

Low point:
Discovering that none of the dealers had any of my books for sale. They also stocked none of Toby Buckell's original work, only his "Halo" tie-in, and he was a friggin' Guest of Honor. Seriously not cool.

I did a pretty poor job of photographically documenting the convention, but I managed to get a few shots.

From left: Sarah Monette, Harry Turtledove, me, Kathryn Sullivan, Tobias Buckell.

Sarah and I wait for Harry to be brilliant. We didn't wait long.

Harry ponders one of my bon mots. I appear to regret it.

Me with Lynne Thomas, co-editor and contributor to the Dr. Who essay collection, Chicks Dig Time Lords.

Tortoise cosplay.