Good Readers Make Good Writers (and Updates)

The title of this post pretty much says it all already.

It's my firm belief that a good writer needs to be a good reader.  Being a good reader isn't the ability to read fast or copiously, but rather understand the material, sort of what your teacher used to try and teach you in school with all those ridiculous interpretative essays.  Being a good reader is knowing what a story is about, and how the writer tells it.  It's probably about reading more than one kind of story, even if you have a favorite.

Basically, if you can't do any of that, you probably will never be much of a writer.  Being a good writer while being a good reader isn't aping your favorite material.  If that's your goal, then you will never be a good writer.  Being a good writer is about being inspired, and being a good reader will help you be inspired all over the place.  Being a good reader makes you observant, and not just when reading, but out in the world that is not specifically composed of words.

So that's what I have to say about that.

Recently I told you I would be working on a bunch of stuff, and some of that stuff I actually did finish, and when I said I hoped I would.  I finished the first draft of "Unsafe at Any Speed," and sent that off.  And then I wrote "Outliers - A Deep Space Nine Celebration."

I'm pretty proud of both, but can only show you one of them.  Here's links to "Outliers":

Part 1 (featuring Ben Sisko, Jadzia Dax)
Part 2 (Nog, Rom, Quark)
Part 3 (Miles, Keiko, Bashir, Odo, Kira, Worf)
Part 4 (Dukat, Kai Winn, Garak, Eddington, Kasidy Yates, Weyoun, Tora Ziyal, Female Changeling Damar - it should be noted that even though there are a lot of characters in this one, you should at least pay attention to Dukat and especially, as always, Garak)
Part 5 (Martok, Vic Fontaine)
Part 6 (Zek, Ishka, Ezri Dax, Molly)
Part 7  (Jennifer Sisko, Jake Sisko, Morn)

Enjoy!  Or not!

My Current Doings

Things I'm currently working on:

• "Unsafe at Any Speed" - This is a short story for a WWII era anthology that's being spearheaded by Brennon Thompson, started out as a proposal for comic books but has since shifted to at least initially a prose property.  This story takes its title from one of Ralph Nader's famed consumer advocate articles (that for some reason he never talked about while running for president), but features a character I first envisioned while I was in high (possibly middle) school, a youthful speedster who sucks at being a speedster.  I've been working out the whole arc of the story, and that's been fun, as well as started writing it, but for some reason I've known that this isn't one that I should just get over with, which is what I do with the majority of my short fiction.  Thompson's vision is known collectively as The Tarnished Age, and hopefully I'll have more to say about this, even though it's been a thing I've been helping develop for months now.
• In the Land of Pangaea - Perhaps I've got a problem of the impulse to write too many books, especially considering that I've had a "little" trouble getting them published by someone other than myself (though I'll be working on that with Seven Thunders in the coming days and weeks, submitting it to at least two potential outlets).  The book I'll be starting soon (because I've more or less written a manuscript a year since 2009) is something I hadn't even considered until earlier this year (thus postponing yet again some other stories), but the more I've thought of it the more excited I've been to work on it.  Pangaea is all about a fake pre-history of mankind, a previous era of great achievement that takes place two hundred million years ago (during the Jurassic period), and ties together a lot of obsessions I've had and want to work out in writing (which tends to be what all my stories are about, which I figure should be what every writer does), among them the continent of Africa, Hurricane Katrina, and the trickster god Anansi, who makes a cameo (along with other deities) in Minor Contracts.  And yes, in my mind, part of the whole reason for writing Pangea at all is to help justify both Minor Contracts and the earlier Modern Ark, because one of the other things I hope to accomplish with Pangaea is a further exploration of dragons, and our continuing obsession with them, but outside of a typical fantasy setting.  The story will unite the present and the past, and dragons will be that connection.  The biggest conceptual hurdle of Modern Ark is the fact that the main character is a dragon, although he is also a perfectly normal human being.
• "Outliers - A Deep Space Nine Celebration" - I've been writing Star Trek fiction for more than a decade now.  For most people, this stuff is known as fan fiction, but for me, it's just another form of my own particular work, that follows its own particular rules, and is not strictly just me mucking around someone else's playground.  Actually, my Star Trek work is a huge part of my formative development as a writer, and I'm particularly grateful to it for that reason.  This story will appear on my writing blog.  Although fun fact!  I've written at least one Star Trek story every year since 1999.  This one won't be this year's first, but it will be one of the few ones to feature the cast of my favorite series, Deep Space Nine, which premiered on TV twenty years ago this year.  "Outliers" will feature each of the signature characters just before we met them, some of them in the very first episode, and many well beyond that point.  Should be fun!  Hopefully this particular one will be done before the end of this month, as will be the first draft of "Unsafe at Any Speed."
• And yes, there are a bunch of other stories I said I'd be working on this year, and before my laptop developed issues, they were absolutely going to be done.  But life threw some curveballs, and this is what I did with them.

Big Pulp - The Kennedy Curse proofing

I just finished proofing my entry in the upcoming Big Pulp anthology The Kennedy Curse, which includes my story "The Cuban Exile Crisis."  For some reason, the editors capitalized the "p" in my last name.  I'm sure my far more French ancestors did that, and I know my brothers have done retrofitted it back that way themselves (while my sisters both sport married surnames now), but I'm carrying on a tradition here, and have for all my previous published work.  Retaining the exact spelling of "Laplume" proves all the more important to me considering a decade ago I was fully convinced that I would write under a pseudonym.

(This has always been something of a small joke for me, considering "Laplume" translates to, variously, "the feather" or "the pen."  My own name is a pen name!  I like to imagine future generations, should I be lucky enough to be remembered as a writer, just assuming that it's not my real name.  To those prospective fans, I will now reveal my true surname: Firefox.  My name is Tony Firefox.)

Another reason to be particular about my last name is that I come across very few French surnames in the world of books, excepting of course French writers themselves and the occasional Cajun. 

"The Cuban Exile Crisis" has another distinction that I've referenced in the past, in that it will be the first official publication of Space Corps material, "official" in the sense that I didn't release it myself.  Reading through the proof, I'm reminded that I took a very deliberate literary approach to the story, "deliberate" in the sense that it reads like ordinary prose, not exactly the style I normally use.  Even if this is ends up being the only Space Corps story published this way, I think it'll give people a small idea of what the rest of it was about. 

The anthology is centered around the Kennedy clan and its legacy, and so is "Exile Crisis" (the title of course is a pun on JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis), but it also reflects the basic struggle between humans and the alien menace known as the Danab that lies at the heart of the saga.  While approached obliquely, the emphasis on the human toll carries the weight I would expect from an Space Corps story.

I'm excited for this Big Pulp release.  I should be getting my contributor copy sometime this month, and the release is scheduled for September.  I'll keep you posted.

Writing Seuss (insofar as I can)

A few weeks back I finally wrote the script for a Dr. Seuss bio comic.  This is significant because "finally" can be extrapolated to mean "after about a year."

This was the third of three comic book biography scripts I've written for Bluewater Productions.  Early last year I wrote ones for Neil Gaiman and Mikhail Prokhorov, the latter of which was released last fall.  A few months after sending in those scripts I was asked if I wanted to do one for Seuss as well, and I quickly agreed.

That was the only quick thing about it.  For whatever reason (and I could certainly come up with a lot of excuses), I just didn't get into writing that one the way I'd done the Gaiman and Prokhorov scripts.  Those I was able to do the way I'd done the speculative work from the days when I was a regular on the Digital Webbing message board.  I could write a full (22 page) script in a day or two, without much development time at all.  That's exactly how I did the Gaiman and Prokhorov scripts, research and all.

Yet with Seuss I'd set myself up conceptually.  I didn't just want to write about Seuss, but rather do it in rhyme.  Chances are very good that you've read Seuss yourself.  You know how distinctive his work is.  I didn't want to mimic Seuss so much as evoke him.  There was a great FoxTrot homage to How the Grinch Stole Christmas that I'd read probably within a year of accepting the assignment, and I had also been reading Seuss again during infrequent visits back home in Maine where my nephew lives (he's since become a Big Brother).

This Seuss deal wasn't just an assignment.  I doubt any American who doesn't follow Nets basketball cares much for Mikhail Prokhorov (no offense!), and until his name was brought to my attention I'd never even heard of him.  Gaiman, of course, is a personal favorite, and that's absolutely why I was eager to write that one.  Seuss was different.  Gaiman is talented, but I'm not sure he's larger than life.  The only writers I would compare in terms of personal stature would be Stephen King and Dave Barry.  The key difference with Seuss is that he had a long life and has in fact ceased to be.  There are a lot of things that I got to learn and enjoy about him that I got to translate into the script.

For instance, I inadvertently duplicated one of his own creative experiences in the amount of time it took me to write the biography.  Seuss took a year to write The Cat in the Hat, his version of a more interesting classic primer being perhaps more of a challenge than he originally anticipated.  At this point in his career he'd already written numerous books and all of that followed earlier occupations such as advertising and the military.  The Cat breakthrough was followed in quick succession by The Grinch, arguably his two greatest and most enduring accomplishments.

I don't mean to compare myself to Seuss by any means, but I think I can understand what took him so long and why the way it played out was exactly the way it should have.  That's something anyone can appreciate, whether you work creatively or not.  I ended up pretty satisfied with the script.  What would it have looked like if I'd written it a year earlier?  I'm someone who believes there are specific moments where a specific work finds itself in a specific shape.  I was in a very different place a year ago.  I wouldn't say that my abilities are vastly different today than they were then, but the fact that I kept getting blocked tells me that it wasn't the right moment.  And I don't believe you can force your best writing.  (Although of course years of schooling certainly tried to convince me otherwise.)

Anyway, that was my big recent creative development, and I figured I should write about it here.

Song Remains the Same reminder, more on Ark obsession

I thought I'd pop in and give a little update and further thoughts on that last subject I talked about...

Mouldwarp Press Presents #2 "Song Remains the Same" is still open for submissions.  I originally posted the guidelines in January (find them here), but considering that the deadline is in fact in December, there's no giant rush.  If you've been considering, or even writing, a story for entry, thank you very much.  If this is the first you hear of it, then you still have half the year to work on it. 

Now, last time I was here I was explaining my breakthrough on a manuscript I wrote in the fall of 2009, originally entitled Finnegan but since rechristened Modern Ark.  This was the first book (and if I'm being honest, the only one) that I made a concerted effort to sell to agents and/or publishers.  Obviously I had no luck.  And part of the reason why, I've come to accept, is that conceptually it can easily be described as a hot mess.  I like to believe in a good way.  I like literary fiction the best, the truly expansive (I like it in movies and TV shows, too) material that subverts most expectations but at its heart speaks very directly to the human condition.

To me, there're very few stories that speak as directly to the human condition as Noah's Ark from the Bible.  There's also Adam & Eve (and Cain & Abel), but I wrote a manuscript about them, too (Minor Contracts), the year after completing Modern Ark, in part because there were always the troubling biblical episodes in that one, one of several elements that made it so hard for me to summarize in any kind of concise way what it was.  Noah does in fact appear in Ark this way. 

As a reader, I've been fortunate to read a number of fascinating fictional takes on Noah, and I talked about that before, but here I'll talk about Noah a little more directly.

And before I go much further, it's recently been made aware to me that hardcore 19th century racists in fact used the story of Noah to justify their beliefs.  This is plainly idiotic, using the wording of how one of his sons was punished for bad behavior to try and explain why certain races in general must in fact be inferior.  If you know much more about that, I beg you to forget it.  If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.  Suffice to say, my interest in Noah has nothing to do with that.

But Noah as a whole fascinates me.  As I related in the last post, you don't have to be particularly religious to care about his story.  There's a whole tradition that supports the basic narrative, and the idea of the flood is one that encapsulates a lot more than whether you believe in one god, many gods, or no gods at all.  The basic idea behind Noah's version is that the Hebrew god looked upon humanity and saw that it was very bad, and so he decided to press the Big Wet Reset Button.  But he spared Noah and his family (plus a lot of animals, all in their biologically considerate pairs).

If you want to think about that, there's plenty to think about.  Noah was supposed to be very old at this point in his life.  He had a wife and three sons, and those sons each had wives, too.  As with the Genesis account of all mankind being the offspring of two people, this is still a pretty small sampling to start from (but then, think of it as the old riddle of the chicken and the egg if you want), in a lot of ways an unlikely one.  Again, don't worry too much about that.

Noah is told that all mankind is going to be erased.  What does he do?  He builds the ark.  The dramatic elements that are commonly added to this part of the story are all Noah's neighbors who think he's crazy (see: Evan Almighty).  In fact, while it's common to consider the Superman origin story of his father Jor-El's efforts to warn his fellow Kryptonians that they will soon lose their planet is very much ...wait, if I explain it like that you already know where I'm going with it.  Suffice it to say, but observers normally consider Superman to be a modern version of Moses.  He's much more like Noah.

In fact, if you don't so much believe the biblical account, there's still the fact that the flood definitely happened.  Perhaps you can consider Noah to be the Superman who repopulated Jewish tradition.  (Superman was created by a couple of Jewish teenagers.  Read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay analogy from Michael Chabon, or perhaps even Brad Melzter's fascinating Book of Lies.) 

Either way, the books I've read based on Noah all agree that it was tough going surviving on that ark.  It was a true test of the human will, and spirit.  Noah isn't really just about getting on a boat of preserving the future of life on Earth thanks to and in spite of extreme divine intervention. 

If I tried to do anything like that in Modern Ark, again I wasn't originally conscious of that fact.  But that's exactly what I did.  All of this is also a way of saying that I've been experiencing a lot of breakthroughs in my life, realizations of what's really been going on and where it's been leading, and it hasn't always pointed in the directions I originally thought.  Maybe I'll talk more about that here at some point.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

The Ark in Modern Ark

Hopefully I've been babbling about my writing projects long enough that you get a sense that I've got a number of projects in the air.  One of them is the first book I deliberately wrote, which is currently known as Modern Ark but was historically entitled Finnegan (the switch is recent enough that I have a label for both on this blog, which only traces back to last summer).

I wrote Modern Ark in 2009.  I feverishly attempted to sell it to publishers or agents throughout 2010, with absolutely no luck at all.  I've periodically tried to sell it again since.  Now I'm wondering if the problem all along was that I'd never myself understood the story I'd written.

It began as a simple concept, my very own vampire story.  Twilight was still becoming a thing at the time.  I was working at a bookstore at the time, so I got to follow much of that develop (and then later tried to convince customers that The Hunger Games was a thing, which of course it later became in earnest).  Except when I told myself that I was writing a vampire story, I really had no idea what that meant.  I really set out with the intent to write a story about dragons, because I'd had the idea and phrase "The Dragon Scribes" for a while (which became the title of the second act in Modern Ark), but had no idea what to do with that, either.

So I sketched out the story and thought that was just as well.  When I sat down to write it as an actual book, I discovered how ill-prepared I was to write a simple vampire story.  Apparently I really don't do simple easily.  I incorporated the dragon thing as an incredibly metaphysical element.  I wrote chapters dealing with biblical parallels.  I wrote about Japan post-WWII.  I basically did everything in my power to do anything but write a simple vampire story.

This was something I never intended, but that's just what happened while I was writing it.  And yet by the end, I was still trying to conceive of it in terms of a simple vampire story, with unwieldy aspects.  It's no wonder that no one took it seriously.  It probably screamed incoherence.

"Modern Ark" is another phrase that I kicked around for a while, and originally it had nothing to do with the vampire story.  And yet at some point it just seemed completely natural.  Finnegan became Modern Ark.

Now I start a different kind of narrative.  When I was in college I took a course in Canadian literature.  It was probably one of several such classes I really didn't have to take, and part of the reason why I had to go back for another half a year to get the credits I needed to graduate.  Anyway, among the things I read (besides the poetry of Leonard Cohen, whom the professor was obsessed with and you might know from the song "Hallelujah," which was later affirmed as a great song by the late Jeff Buckley) was Not Wanted On the Voyage by Timothy Findley.  The voyage of the title was basically the story of Noah's Ark.

(And before I go much further, let me just confess that the phrase "Modern Ark" was obviously my version of the more famous phrase "modern art," just something that sounded clever.)

Anyway, Findley's take on Noah was a revelation.  It wasn't particularly reverent.  It didn't need to be. But it resonated.  We all know that the flood in the story was something that was based on a thing that went around the Mesopotamian world, and can also be found in the tale of Gilgamesh.  Finding Noah's ark was something the tabloids were pretty obsessive about in the '90s.  Findley's ark was the start of my own personal journey.

Another book was released early in the new millennium, The Preservationist.  This was also about Noah's Ark.  I kept it in mind for years.  The author was David Maine.  Eventually I read pretty much everything Maine has published, and his ark was also notably irreverent, and that was fine, too (though Fallen is a better book, and it's about Adam & Eve, who are also the stars of a book I've written and is floating around).

There's a boat in Modern Ark.  It was always there.  Originally it was just Quincy's boat.  Quincy is a modern pirate, and the substitute love interest for Fiona, who has become entangled with the nefarious vampire Eolake.  Fiona's brother is the formerly eponymous Finnegan, the man with the dragon complex everyone but him seems to identify.  My Van Helsing, Oliver Row, would be the one to put all the pieces together, if he weren't basically a fraud.

The whole thing is about faith.  By the time the good guys gather on the boat, I'm the one who distracted myself from seeing what the story was really about.  By this point, Fiona is immersed in a dream narrative induced by the vampire.  It stole my whole focus.  The boat is the ark in Modern Ark. It's where the characters gather in their peculiar two-by-twos, their dual roles finally coming into focus.

I realized this after I read Andrew Morgan's Noah's Ark.  Morgan's book isn't about the ark at all.  It's completely metaphorical.  That's how I realized what I'd done.  I'd told a completely metaphorical version of the ark.  Noah's story is all about faith.  Yes, it's about God becoming so angry with the ridiculousness of mankind that it seems like a good idea to do a soft reboot of creation (although "soft" would be a term only the survivors could really appreciate).  My book, I already knew it was about faith. But I'd never really known how it was about faith.  Like Noah, like Jonah, like Job, the characters in Modern Ark undergo an extreme test of faith.  They're not being tested by God so much as themselves.  They're all on personal journeys, and these journeys come together, much like what happens on the ark, and they have to figure out what it all means.

That's what Findley explored, that's what Maine did, and I guess I finally figured out that this is what I wrote, too.  Maybe next time I attempt to sell this book, that's what I'll try to explain.  Is there a market for that?  I certainly hope so...

The Iliad of Inconvenience

This is not strictly a nod to MOV's Curse of Inconvenient Things, but I figured this was still a good excuse to reference it.

Anyway, "Iliad of Inconvenience" is just one of the many memorable phrases I came across while reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, and I figured it was as good a description of the way I write (and live) as any I've come across.  Big Dramatic Developments are the bread and butter of fiction (and the only way the news knows how to report anything), but it's not really the way life works.  Though I do tend to include Big Dramatic Developments in my stories, they're not ultimately the point.  It's really how inconvenience affects my characters (and again, my life).

I don't know about you, but I obsess over inconvenience.  I think a lot more people do, too, even if they don't admit or realize it.  It's about things not generally going our way in small and subtle ways, how our lives end up being defined by the paths we end up taking because of the choices we make (or sometimes simply from the available limited options).  I say I obsess over it because this matter of inconvenience is a matter of perspective.  By all accounts I have a much better life than a lot of other people.  I'm writing this on a blog, on a laptop (yes, I still use a laptop), any number of elements in that being entirely unavailable or inconceivable to those who would consider my life the veritable lap of luxury.

When I write a story, I don't particularly care to write about people who are the best of anything, or the worst of anything.  Some of them may be in important positions, are be considered important, but I don't approach them that way.  They're just people, and their problems are matters of inconvenience that they have to work around.  I don't believe in writing the Big Dramatic Developments that place someone in peril, possibly because I don't live that kind of life myself, and I don't particularly want to manipulate my reader that way.  If they have a response it's because hopefully I've helped them have a sense of my character's relatability.

The famous axiom is "show don't tell," by which it's basically meant that you must present your reader with a vicarious experience, something they end up feeling like they've shared rather been told.  I tend to get bored with that kind of writing, because we happen to live in an age where the visual medium is not only extremely vivid but pointedly more popular.  Why should I care to compete with that?  The visual medium is all about Big Dramatic Moments.  A story is a chance to explore something else, an Iliad of Inconvenience.  Small Dramatic Moments, if you will.