Phraselet No. 107

Office women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations above their nylons. He was big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short. He wore a gray suit, limp with age and no pressing. His shoes and socks were both black and holey. The shoes were holey on the bottom, the socks were holey at heel and toe.

His hands, swinging crve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.

- Richard Stark, The Hunter

Fragment No. 6

Lucy squinted at the pacifier. It lay on a small, marble-topped table right inside the front door. It was made of translucent plastic and rubber, clear as glass and sleek as a bullet. It even had a protective cover that snapped over the nipple to keep it clean. Lucy had never seen one of those before. In her house, pacifiers had come in pastel pinks or blues or greens or yellows, whatever was in the pack. When one fell on the floor, mom would rinse it off in the sink. Or tell the dog to fetch if she was in a humorous mood.

Ms. Myers came around the corner, fussing with an earring, her three-inch heels clacking against the travertine as she strode. "Dating," Lucy heard her mutter, "is so inefficient." Then Ms. Myers looked up and saw her and said, "Ah, good, you're here. And early, too. Now, I know Cindy Teitsworth said you were the best babysitter she'd ever had. But I am not Cindy. I have certain standards. I've left Tommy's vital statistics, schedule and nutrition chart in the kitchen. If he varies from any of them at all -- and I mean at all -- I want you to call. Do you understand?"

Lucy nodded slowly.

Resonate

I kept hearing the same thing: To succeed in writing, I needed to do it regularly, to plunk myself down every day and (to swipe a corporate slogan) just do it. I took that counsel to heart and eked out an hour or so of uninterrupted compositional time in both my schedule and mind for every day of the week. During the appointed period, I filled pages, pecked them into the word processor and then filed all my ideas away in some dusty corner of my head when the clock said I should move on. It was textbook, exactly what the manuals commanded, disciplined, daily and segmented. And it got me nowhere.

Why not? Invariably, I would face the same problem -- a dearth of ideas. The well would run dry only two or three days into a new project. The hour would produce only a dozen rewritings (and re-deletions) of the same paragraph, a paragraph that in most of its iterations read suspiciously like whatever novel I’d recently picked up. I didn’t get it. Why wasn’t it working? What was I doing wrong?

The answer seems obvious now. I only had half of the equation. Yes, we need to ration our time, to dole out portions and pieces of our schedules to the physical act of writing. Nothing will ever happen otherwise. But we ought not to ration our writerly thoughts. After all, most of it happens in the mind, in the interplay of meditation and association, supposition and application. Such a creative spirit ought to always be bringing us the next nascent plot point or character trait or setting detail. It needs to hum so loudly inside of us that when we finally get our allotted hour it fairly resonates its own way onto the page.

(Picture: CC 2007 by linoleum jet)

VanderMeer on How To Write A Novel In Two Months

Jeff VanderMeer, author of the hardboiled fantasy Finch, lists what he learned from writing a novel in two months at his blog Ecstatic Days. Excerpts:

As someone who has never thought of himself as a fast writer, I had certain trepidations about this Predator novel gig, exacerbated by being sick for a couple of weeks when I'd planned to work on it and unexpected but lovely distractions (like Utopiales in France). The result is that I basically wrote Predator: South China Sea in two months. I had more than six months to work on it, but only spent about eight weeks at the computer and writing longhand. I'm almost hesitant to mention this because I think some readers and writers equate length of time spent on a project with quality. And it's certainly true that some ideas, some novels, require a long gestation period and an equally long time in which to revise, revisit, re-envision.

For example, long-time readers of this blog might recall that it took a decade to put together the stories that comprise City of Saints & Madmen and eight years to work on Shriek: An Afterword on-and-off. In my twenties, I was known to spend six months on a single short story or novella. ...

So, here's what I've learned.

Read the whole thing. What strikes me most about VanderMeer's concrete and very helpful advice is not so much the speed with which he wrote the novel in question, but the structure and preparation he put into composing it. Ask the average man on the street how big-name writers write, and you'll probably get a nebulous answer referencing "muses" or "inspiration" or "tapping life experience" or "just being born with it." And, yes, writing isn't exactly the same as accounting or plumbing. But it requires the same sort of skill, a dogged determination to apprehend arcane knowledge and master specific tools. It isn't some divine touch that teaches you how to construct plots or create characters. It's old-fashioned effort. First and foremost, writing is a craft, one we master with ink-spotted hands and wastebaskets full of crumpled drafts.

(Picture: CC 2010 by emma.kate)

The Outfit Finds Humanity In Flaws

What is it that makes an individual human to you? Bear with me, I’m not trying to get existential here. What is it about a person that inspires affection? It probably isn’t incredible talent. The gifted can draw your interest or admiration, but their proficiency doesn’t give us warm fuzzies when we bump into them at a party and have to make small talk. If anything, it’s a bit intimidating. No, what binds soul to soul is a touch of imperfection, the knowledge that no matter how skilled this person may be, he hasn’t washed his car in three months, his computer breaks out in the blue screen of death whenever he enters the room and he loves reading about sparkly vampires. Flaws foment caring -- no less in narratives than in real life. It’s a technique Richard Stark puts to good use in The Outfit, the third in his series of novels about the near-superhuman thief Parker.

Parker didn’t think the Outfit would call his bluff. He knew he’d irritated the national crime syndicate when he’d forcibly recovered some cash one of their associates stole from him. Still, he’d believed his penchant for mercilessness (and the resultant growing body count) would’ve served as a deterrent. But a late-night visit from an incompetent hit man with a silenced .25 proved it hadn’t. Now Parker’s got an idea. Independent types such as himself don’t typically rip off racetracks or casinos or drug dens, anything the Outfit might have its fingers in. And without interference, the Outfit’s gotten soft. The way Parker figures, it’s up to him and his friends to take advantage of that fact -- and to do it fast.

Stark turns this installment of Parker’s adventures into an ensemble show, trotting out all sorts of quirky criminal types. There’s Clemy, the Georgia chop-shop man on a quixotic quest to turn a tiny Volkswagen into an uber-speedy getaway car. Klee, a purveyor of semi-legitimate firearms, displays the sort of affection for his wares that’s usually reserved for members of the opposite sex. Salsa is an illegal immigrant who once subscribed to collectivist philosophy but has now awakened to “the Truth of Self-interest” (which he seeks with a loaded firearm and a well-charted getaway route). They’re a delightfully oddball bunch, a far cry from the calm competence of Parker. But even he gets humanized a little. While writing a letter explaining his plan, he complains that the Outfit “thinks it has a greevance on me.” And in reading that, you realize you realize this unstoppable criminal possesses only the most rudimentary formal education. An unexpectedly poignant touch.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Auzigog)

Gobsmacked, I Tell You!

Much to my stunned surprise, "Lammergeier" somehow snagged an honorable mention in The Clarity of Night's "Silhouette" Writing Contest. I am, er, honored at the honor! (And glad the short short didn't cause any friends or family to make a phone call to the nice people with the padded rooms.) Thanks to Jason Evans of The Clarity of Night for hosting the contest and to all of you who commented. I truly appreciate it.

(Picture: CC 2008 by vissago)

WSJ on The Death of Slush

In the January 15 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Rosman examines the accelerated demise of the slush pile and why it's harder than ever for new writers to get noticed:

Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot -- in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to legions of would-be novelists, journalists and screenwriters -- not to mention "D-girls" and "manuscripts girls" from Hollywood to New York who held the hope that finding a gem might catapult them from entry level to expense account -- the slush pile represented The Dream.

Now, slush is dead, or close to extinction. Film and television producers won't read anything not certified by an agent because producers are afraid of being accused of stealing ideas and material. Most book publishers have stopped accepting book proposals that are not submitted by agents. Magazines say they can scarcely afford the manpower to cull through the piles looking for the Next Big Thing.

Read the whole thing. Rosman lists a bevy of reasons why editors at publishing houses and film producers have completely shut out unsolicited manuscripts. A dearth of quality submissions and the expense of sorting through the glut both are high on the list. Some even cite plagiarism lawsuits and fears of a reprisal of the 2001 anthrax attacks. But the simple reality is that publishers have outsourced slush duties to agents, who now must wade through the flood of newbies looking their lucky break. And though Rosman is skeptical about writers' ability to break in nowadays, she admits that it still happens. Stephenie Meyer landed Twilight despite it being twice as long as the typical YA novel. Other authors have had success leveraging the new media; J.C. Hutchins, Cory Doctorow, Scott Sigler and Mark Jeffrey have all established or expanded their careers by podcasting their work. In the end, though, the game is remains the same, despite changes in the landscape. As Tony Cook of online-publisher ABCTales.com notes, it's all about writers finding "well read, interesting and interested editors who are willing, at times, to take a risk."

(Picture: CC by cwalker71; Hat Tip: How Publishing Really Works)

Jacobsen on Bad First Drafts

Roy Jacobsen of Writing, Clear and Simple muses over the need to write, er, less-than-stellar first drafts. Excerpts:

I don't like crappy first drafts. I want my first draft to be good, so that maybe it can be my final draft. But that never works. First drafts are just crappy, so I should quit wasting time editing myself as I write, trying to make it good right off the bat, or at least not-crap. Editing while you write is a waste of time and emotional energy. (Maybe it would help if I had a special "first draft" keyboard with the backspace key yanked off with a pair of pliers.)

I'm not alone in bemoaning the quality of my first drafts. Ernest Hemingway did, too, except he used a stronger word than "crap" ...

Read the whole thing. I stopped composing first drafts on computer long ago, mainly because it's so easy to consign hours of work to the electronic void with the pressing of a few buttons. As Jacobsen says, ugly initial attempts are just part of this writing enterprise. So I keep a three-inch stack of scrap paper near my desk, orphaned printouts and old blog articles and even a few first drafts themselves. No one cares if you fill a few pages with incoherent chicken scratch before consigning it to the round filing bin. The freedom to fail on such a humble medium is liberating -- or should be. My perfectionistic mind still requires fresh convincing each and every time I pick up the pen.

(Picture: CC 2006 by Lawrence Whittemore)

Plan Is Simply Devastating

In his The New Rhetoric, Chaim Perelman concludes, "The distinction of the different genres of oratory is highly artificial, as the study of a speech shows." He then goes on to cite Marc Antony's "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, noting how it "opens with a funeral eulogy ... and ends by provoking a riot that is clearly political." While Perelman sees this as an example of genre's artifice, I think it better illustrates its flexibility. All but the most obstinate critics note how speeches and poems and narratives naturally clump together in camps. It's interesting, then, when an author decides (like Marc Antony) that his work needs to become the genre-fiction equivalent of a citizen of the world rather than a longtime resident of a single locale. Which is exactly what Scott Smith does with his debut novel, A Simple Plan.

Hank Mitchell has a good life. The first in his family to attend college, he has landed respectable job as head accountant of a small, Ohio feedstore. His undergraduate sweetheart is also expecting their first child. It's a steady, if slightly dull, existence, but certainly better than that of his older brother, Jacob. Perpetually slovenly and unemployed, Jacob spends his days playing with his German shepherd Mary Beth and his nights drinking with his best friend Lou. The only thing that brings the two brothers together is a mutual pledge to visit their parents' graves on the last day of every year. And during the year it all begins, they are driving to do just that when a fox darts in front of Jacob's pickup and Mary Beth leaps out in pursuit. One long walk across snow-covered fields later, they discover the mutt amongst a copse of apple trees -- and a downed plane filled with over $4 million in cash. They hastily hatch a plan to keep the money until summer and burn it if anyone comes looking. Simple, right? But even the simplest plans can go so easily awry.

Current writing mores almost demand a whiz-bang intro, but Smith doesn't take that tack. Plan begins in literary mode, most of the action staying firmly between Hank's ears. From there it moves in a slow swell, gradually introducing characters, delineating their personalities and motivations, stringing out the moral deficiencies that will strangle them later. Only once the stage is fully set does it transmute into a crime-thriller. Alliances coalesce, then shatter. Laws get broken in the heat of the moment, then transgressed again with cold-hearted foresight. When attempted blackmail erupts into charnel-house slaughter, you suddenly see Smith's goal. It's taken so very little for these salt-of-the-earth people to move into the depths of depravity. "You're just a nice, sweet, normal guy," Hank's wife tells him. "No one would ever believe that you'd be capable of doing what you've done." How much would it require for us to follow them? In the end, Plan is the best sort of horror novel, a devastating examination of the darkness in every heart.

(Picture: CC 2005 by velo_city)

In Praise of Audiobooks

Last night, I went to my first Business Statistics class, one more step in the lengthy walk towards a graduate degree. It was also my first evening class, and though the school possesses a decent faculty and reasonable prices, it's also an entire county away. Which means lots of driving. In south Florida. During rush hour. Sure, I could take the Interstate, but I might be better off walking given how the flow of traffic congeals from four to seven p.m. So that leaves one of the spotlight-studded parallel streets, an option that’s swifter, although only relatively so. Seems I'm going to spend a lot of time in the car over the next few months.

I’m not complaining, though. I plan to fill that time with audiobooks.

Like those who lived back before printing presses, paperbacks and PDFs, we start life with stories being auditory objects. They’re crooned by our mothers when we’re still in the crib. They’re whispered by our fathers during dark nights around the campfire. Then something happens. We learn our letters. We gain literacy. We discover the library and used-book stores and Barnes & Noble. And stories go inward, become silent, stop being spoken or heard.

Now, no one should knock the delights of an hour alone with a good book. But we ought to recall the peculiar virtues of oral reading. A story performed slows us down. It gives us every word and won’t let us skip a jot or tittle. It lingers over riches of description, over the cadences of lovely wordings that the eye darts past so easily. It allows for performance, for letting the strongman sound like a lumbering hulk or permitting the femme fatale to truly smolder. And if the reader happens to also be the author, well, that’s something special indeed.

Thanks to the continuing death of physical storage media (and the concomitant demise of the accursed abridged version), you can find more audiobooks than ever -- and more that are free, too. The Escape Artists’ trio of podcasts offer up ear-tickling joy for lovers of SF (Escape Pod), fantasy (PodCastle) and horror (Pseudopod). TTA Press -- publishers of Interzone, Black Static and Crimewave -- regularly syndicates its best shorts at Transmissions From Beyond, as do the editors of the online magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Splatterpulp author Scott Sigler has podcasted over a half-dozen of his books. And Neil Gaiman has put up a live reading of his latest project, The Graveyard Book, at his official Web site, along with numerous stories and poems at Last.fm.

So what are you waiting for? Get to listening!

(Picture: CC 2008 by suchitra prints)

Stringer on Learning To Read Like a Child

Helen Stringer, author of Spellbinder, offers up her New Year's resolution over at Tor.com:

So, here we are again. That time of year when we're supposed to make resolutions for the coming twelve-months. Newspapers and magazine shows love it -- it gives them an excuse to run stories on weight-loss programs and basket-weaving classes, the kind of stuff that doesn't require ...well, anything in the way of actual reporting. I've always sort of wondered who these people are, the ones who make solemn promises about the year to come, but now I have joined their ranks. Not to lose weight, or improve myself in some unattainable way, but recapture something that I lost somewhere along the road from then to now.

It's easy to forget, in the rush to absorb information by any means necessary, that first absorbing, all-encompassing obsession that books once were and the sheer delight in discovering something new.

Read the whole thing. Stringer goes on to recount the childhood joy of sprinting into a bookstore and scampering through the stacks, on the lookout for narrative treasure hidden between flimsy paperback covers. And, goodness, how I remember those days. I would walk into Joseph Beth Booksellers, a cavernous, two-level store loaded with more books than my single-digit-old mind could comprehend, and lose myself for hours looking for the perfect title to take home. That isn't how I read now. Instead of delightful exploration, I procure titles online or through inter-library loan or surgical strikes on the local Barnes & Noble. And a dearth of free time (or perhaps, in my case, self discipline) has reduced my reading to, in Stringer's words, "a few snatched minutes at bedtime or a guilty pleasure on a beach in summer." The joy is still there, but it's a matchflame rather than a bonfire.

How to remedy this? I'm not sure. But learning to read like a child again seems a worthy goal to set while this year is still young.

(Picture: CC 2008 by kokopinto)

Friday's Forgotten Books: Mindswap by Robert Sheckley

Note: Friday’s Forgotten Books is a regular feature at pattinase, the blog of crime writer Patti Abbott. Log on each week to discover old, obscure and unfairly overlooked titles.

In a 2006 speech at Google's headquarters, fantasist Neil Gaiman recounted how his one-time editor Alisa Kwitney asked his opinion about Robert Sheckley. "I think that from the late fifties to the mid sixties he was probably the finest short-story writer actually writing in pretty much any field," he replied, "and that it's a terrible pity that he burned out his brain on recreational pharmaceuticals and sort of lost it. Why?" Kwitney's response: "I'm his daughter." Awkward social situation aside, Gaiman's evaluation of Sheckley's legacy was pretty fair. While Coleridge was the Romantic Period's poster boy for wasted potential, Sheckley could just as easily fill the position for the Golden Age of Science Fiction. And his 1966 novel Mindswap, ripe with fineness and foibles aplenty, exemplifies both parts of his career.

Marvin Flynn, native of sleepy Stanhope, New York, has always wanted to travel. Not to the Grand Canyon or the Egyptian pyramids or the North Pole or some such provincial, Earth-bound locale. Rather, Marvin wants to sail to the distant stars. But he has a problem: He's almost broke. So he opts for the next best thing, a mindswap with a Martian named Ze Kraggash. Marvin will get to experience Mars in a Martian body for a bit while Kraggash does the same on Earth. Only the situation turns sour as soon as Martin shuffles on his new corporeal frame. Turns out that Kraggash is a wanted criminal, a stealer of bodies, and the Martian authorities want to evict Marvin from his new form so that its proper owner can have it back. Marvin needs to find a new body -- fast.

Unfettered invention is both Mindswap's greatest asset and liability. Sheckley is a master of left-handed exposition, of dropping incidental details that gradually reveal the strange (and uniformly absurd) worlds where Marvin finds himself. For example, Marvin opens up about his desire to travel in Spanish/Afrikaans dialect to a friend while they sip LSD frappes at a soda fountain. A barker at the Free Market for host bodies offers a credit per month plus unlimited sacking rights for those willing to inhabit soldiers in the Naigwin Army, an army that has been losing the war for a decade, true, but you could be promoted to second-class Manatee Leader if you act now. During his adventures, Marvin also bumps into a verse-spouting hermit on a jungle world, an explorer whose Theory of Searches reads like advanced Calculus and a minor government official who may have a ticking bomb in his nose. But as delightful as Sheckley's imaginings are, he piles them on so thick that the narrative thread grows thin. In the end, it snaps altogether. Sheckley only manages a conclusion by employing the shaggiest of shaggy dog endings. A mortal sin for most writers, but here it accentuates the absurdity. Broken denouement aside, this one's worth swapping some of your time for.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Horrgakx)

"Lammergeier"

My entry into The Clarity of Night's "Silhouette" Writing Contest is up. It's titled "Lammergeier" and is ... something of a departure. If you're in the mood for sunshine and kittens, you might want to give it a pass. But if a combination of Dean Koontz's Intensity and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" sounds like your bitter cup of tea, by all means go read it.

(Picture: Copyright 2009 by Jason Evans; used by permission)

Well, I'll Be ...

Overlooking my utter ignorance about Errol Flynn, the kind folks at The Literary Lab have decided to include my short story "Bark" in the Horror/Crime section of their Genre Wars anthology. Huzzahs and many thanks all around! Genre Wars should be available for purchase at the end of the month.

Also, Advent Ghosts 2009 participant C.N. Nevets placed two pieces ("The Best Medicine" and "Death, Be Not Me") in the Experimental section. Offer your congrats to him at his blog, Nevets.QST.

(Picture: CC 2008 by vissago)

Pearson on Unsung Setting

At Tor.com, Mary Pearson (author of The Adoration of Jenna Fox) considers how setting rarely receives its due in narrative writing. Excerpts:

Characters? Everybody loves them. They sweep on stage, grab your attention, and demand the spotlight.

Plot? It's right up there with character, stealing the show, swishing around with twists and turns, dipping, soaring, and making you zip through the pages.

But the silent partner in the performance, the floorboards, the rafters, and even the music that makes plot and character shine is the one I want to talk about today. The silent partner doesn't get to take a lot of bows or many times even take any credit, but without it, character and plot would trip all over their feet, fall flat, forget their lines, and say stupid things. Heck, they would stop breathing altogether.

The humble partner I am talking about is

setting.

See? It doesn't even ask for a capital S.

Read the whole thing. Pearson proceeds to argue that setting is the soil in which stories grow, the empty stage on which they stride. I think she's right. Consider how a simple tale of cunning detective thwarts career thief changes when moved from New York to Botswana or to one of Jupiter's Galilean moons. Despite sharing similar plot arcs, Neuromancer feels worlds away from any of Richard Stark's Parker novels. That's because setting is more than color or icing, more than a chance for an author to wax poetic. It sets boundaries, draws lines, holds the course. It says, "You go this far -- but no farther."

(Picture: CC 2008 by elward-photography)

The Clarity of Night's "Silhouette" Short Fiction Contest

Jason Evans, proprietor of The Clarity of Night writing blog, is hosting his twelfth-annual flash fiction contest. The rules are simple enough: Write a 250-word short short or poem inspired by the above picture and send it to jevanswriter [at] yahoo [dot] com before 11:00 p.m. EST on Wednesday, January 13th. For further details and formatting instructions, go here.

(Picture: Copyright 2009 by Jason Evans; used by permission)

Middle Shelf Selection: Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle

I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.

I like stories whose protagonists cruise the galaxy in sleek starships or thwart devious djinns with only their wits or scavenge for weapons in order to fend off the angry undead. Genre fiction has made me burn many a quart of midnight oil. Literary works haven't, and I've especially never been drawn by personal memoirs. Accounts of failed careers, broken relationships and serious substance abuse have always felt self-serving to me and usually strained in the telling. At least that's what I thought before reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, a memoir which exemplifies that fundamental rule of storytelling: Show and don't tell.

I was on fire.

It's my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew. I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress my grandmother had bought for me. Pink was my favorite color.

The members of the Walls family aren't stupid. Patriarch Rex Walls loves studying higher math and dabbling in electrical engineering. His wife, Rose Mary, adores great art and all of Shakespeare's plays. No, lack of intelligence doesn't cause their problems. It has more to do with how Rex immediately disappears into the nearest bar whenever he gets a little money, or how Rose Mary would rather sketch a wind-blown Joshua tree or work on her collection of pithy sayings than ensure there's food in the fridge. So from earliest childhood, the four Walls children -- Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maureen -- live as nomads on the underside of America, surviving any way in which they can. And as the years roll on, they begin to realize that any hope of the family's survival falls directly to them.

A few days later, when I had been at the hospital for about six weeks, Dad appeared alone in the doorway of my room. He told me we were going to check out, Rex Walls-style.

"Are you sure this is okay?" I asked.

"You just trust your old man," Dad said.

He unhooked my right arm from the sling over my head. As he held me close, I breathed in his familiar smell of Vitalis, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home.

With such grim subject matter, The Glass Castle could easily turn maudlin or weepy. What holds it together is how Jeannette Walls offers precious little commentary on the proceedings. She doesn't tell you how terrible it is that her father met with a prostitute while her brother was in an adjoining room or how her mother would regularly feed them entirely on popcorn for days at a time. She doesn't have to; the occurrences serve as their own commentary. Her use of symbolism is also masterful, inserting seemingly off-hand accounts that gradually accrete significance through later allusions. In fact, the technique appears in the title itself, the Glass Castle being a huge, solar-powered, transparent house that Rex says will one day stand proud and self-sufficient in the middle of the desert -- a house that only ever gets built on paper. It's also a harrowing, heartbreaking and highly recommended book, no matter what sort of stories you love.

Lightning, Eh?

When I bring up this blog to most people for the first time, they usually end up looking a little confused. "What's it about again?" they ask. "And why lightning?"

Fair enough questions, I'd say, and deserving of answers. In a nutshell, I Saw Lightning Fall's purpose is summed up by the seven-word phrase in the masthead -- "narrative, genre and the craft of writing." To be more specific, ISLF is a place for people who like stories in general and genre fiction in particular. It's a place for folks who prefer to read and write fantasy and horror, science fiction and crime fiction. It's a place where we can talk about both the profound and practical parts of storytelling, from literary theory and technique to whether you find it easier to write first drafts with pencil, pen or word processor.

Regarding the lightning bit, some of you may think it sounds a little familiar. And you'd be right. It's an allusion to a rather famous text, a passage I find simultaneously beautiful and terrifying -- just like my favorite stories.

So thanks for visiting. Pull up a chair, settle in and join the conversation. Just be sure to keep the tone irenic. We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

(Picture: CC 2006 by nicora)