Chrononautic Log

April 28, 2006

Why does a one-way flight from Chicago to Zurich cost fifty percent more than a round trip? (Not fifty percent more than half a round trip. Fifty percent more than a whole round trip.)

I mean, it’s not like I’m surprised by this, but seriously, what is up with it?

I need an answer that does not assume that airlines are crazy, and does not assume that customers are too stupid to realize they could buy a round trip and not use the second half.

Comments (6)

Amazon is identifying Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s Rainbows End as a “Zones of Thought” book; that is, a book set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Given the book’s description, this seems unlikely (unless, say, the protagonists are all being simulated somewhere in the High Beyond or the Low Transcend). Anyone got the straight dope?

Comments (6)

April 27, 2006

Mr. Hulan:

The Chief looks up at him and suddenly reaches his hands for Willard’s throat, trying to pull Willard down on top of the spearhead, trying to skewer him, and pull him along with him to death.

(That’s as far as I go, though, Mr. H. Infecting other people’s comment sections with memes is already giving them a vector they don’t need.)

Comments (1)

April 26, 2006

Mary Anne on the Kaavya Viswanathan thing:

What bothers me the most about the whole thing is not what Kaavya did or didn't consciously do. It’s that if she had been paid $500 for the book, instead of $500,000, most of the people ranting about it clearly wouldn't care.

Exactly.

Comments (16)

So, a while back a friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way he could get ahold of my stuff without having to try to track down these out-of-print zines and whatnot, and I had some fun putting together a little “Unauthorized Complete Works” for him in InDesign. It came to a bit over 60,000 words; throw in the Irrational Histories (memo to self: write some more of those at some point) and maybe a hitherto-unpublished novelette or two, and that’s enough for a book.

But it occurred to me as I was doing it that just because I could put together enough words for a book didn’t mean that it would be a good idea to actually do that. I think about the kind of things I was thinking about when Susan and I were arranging the Twenty Epics TOC — pace, weight, ambience — and it just doesn't feel like there’s enough variety yet in what I’ve written.

Then there was this Crooked Timber piece about Wikipedia, prejudice against, one example of which was an aside in John Clute’s overall, highly positive review of Dora Goss’ In the Forest of Forgetting. (I quote slightly more of it than CT did, because I’m more interested in what Clute has to say about fiction than it what he has to say about Wikipedia.)

The first problem [that we need to address “before we can return to praise”] is not Goss’ alone. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no captaining of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop. So mutants tend to publish too much.

Now, whether Clute’s right or not (and I think there is an argument to be made that not all of us are at our best in the single-author collection mode, and also that selecting the best from a larger body of work may have advantages over including the entirety of a smaller body of work, whether or not one wants, like Clute, to blame ‘the net culture’), all this got me thinking: what makes a good single-author collection?

Clearly it helps to be brilliant. But if you look at, say, Stranger Things Happen, it’s not just that Kelly’s written a bunch of really excellent stories; she also does a lot of different, interesting things with voice and tone, and I think that makes a difference.

It doesn’t help, in trying to figure this out, that I’m not really a fan of short fiction, as a form, and I haven’t read hardly any of the recent collections that everyone says are so brilliant. But I used to read a lot of them, back in the dizzay (I think I read everything Larry Niven published in the 1970s), and there have been a few over the years that have made the list of favorite books (Stranger Things Happen, Globalhead, Burning Chrome come straight to mind) as well as a few that I keep around because enough of the stories in them are absolutely indispensible (generally retrospectives, like The Best Short Stories of JG Ballard or The Collected Stories of Greg Bear).

If you’re only going to read one story at a time, then mere brilliance is enough. But what does it take to make a collection that you can read cover to cover?

Comments (12)

Something that occurred to me during the latest fanfic kerfluffle:

All novels written for love are fanfic. The ones we call original are fanfic for the unrealized universe of works that exist only in the writer’s head.

What’s important to remember is that, as the writer, you are those works’ only fan, and it’s the non-fans, the readers of your actual novel, that your work needs to appeal to.

Comments (0)

My kind of president:

Due to the fact that Lincoln was the one who had been challenged to the duel, tradition gave him the privilege of choosing the time and location of the duel, as well as the weapons that were to be used. Being a man of humor and wit, and having no desire to kill Shields, or allow himself to be killed; Lincoln put together the most ridiculous set of circumstances that he could think of regarding the logistics of the upcoming duel.

Lincoln stated that the duel would be held on an island in the river near the city of Alton, IL. Some historians believe that it was “Sunflower Island”, while others believe it was “Bloody Island”. Bloody Island had long been a popular dueling spot because it was in the middle of the river and was claimed by Missouri where dueling was still legal. Either island would have allowed them to escape any legal implications.

Lincoln stated that the weapons he wished to use would be “Cavalry Broadswords of the largest size”. He figured that he could easily disarm Shields using the swords, whereas pistols would most likely lead to one of their deaths, if not both. He also added that he wanted the duel to be carried out in a pit 10 feet wide by 12 feet deep with a large wooden plank dividing the square in which no man was allowed to step foot over.

These “conditions” were designed not only to be ridiculous; but also to give Lincoln, who at 6’4” had longer legs and arms and towered over the much smaller Shields, a decided advantage. Lincoln hoped that these unorthodox conditions that gave him an almost unbeatable advantage would persuade Shields to withdraw the challenge and settle things in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Shields, however, was extremely stubborn and refused to yield despite the conditions that Lincoln had requested. He agreed to Lincoln’s conditions and no other negotiations were made. Much to Lincoln’s dismay, the two headed to the appointed island early in the morning on September 22 and prepared to do battle in their “Saber Duel”. . . .

At the last minute, Lincoln demonstrated his obvious physical advantage by hacking away at some of the branches of a nearby willow tree. The branches were high off the ground and Shields could not hope to reach them; while Lincoln, with his long arms holding a long broadsword, could reach them with ease. This final display was enough to drive home the precarious situation that he was now in, and Shields agreed to settle their differences in a more peaceful way. . . .

After the “duel”, both groups had the appropriate “after parties” and reflected on the fact they both could have met their ends because of a few sarcastic comments and hurt feelings. The two were civil with each other after this unfortunate incident and remained friends and political allies for the rest of their careers.

Lincoln was extremely embarrassed about the whole incident and refused to talk about it very often. Lincoln began to be more careful about what he wrote in letters and other papers, even those he wrote to his closest and most intimate friends. Never again did he so harshly use another person to try to further his political career.

(Via Making Light.)

Comments (0)

April 23, 2006

So Saturday Thursday [Saturday? What? — ed.] evening I caught the overnight train to Florence. Because this is Europe and you can do stuff like that here.

Figure 1. What I woke up to: the Bologna train station. Now you know where baloney comes from.

Figure 2. The view from the train. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Italy looks a lot like Mendocino County.

And also because my friend Fran and her family had flown over from the States and rented a Tuscan farmhouse for the week. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Fran since I’d figured out the train schedule — the best I’d been able to do was send a fax c/o the owners of the farmhouse, something like “I ought to make it to Montevarchi about nineish” — but I figured with a fair bit of Spanish and a little Latin, I could manage Italy on my own if I had to.

Figure 3. Firenze S.M.N. I don’t know if this was really the longest train platform I’d ever walked down, but I was glad I didn’t have much luggage.

Figure 4. It’s kind of like Penn Station, only without that whole freaky troglodyte cave thing.

The overnight train was about 45 minutes late, but because Europe is a civilized society I had half a dozen local train choices and made it to Montevarchi right on schedule. (I did have to pay an extra five euros on the train because I hadn’t figured out I needed to get my ticket stamped, but I’ve learned plenty more expensive lessons than that.)

Fran and her dad John met me at the train station just as if we’d planned the whole thing, and we drove up to the farmhouse. Fran’s mom, Linda, and her sister Jenny made breakfast. We sat on the front porch eating frittata and toast and fruit and drinking Sienese coffee and watching the fog burn off.

Figure 5. Nothing but rolling hills covered with grapevines and olive trees — I don’t know how Fran and her folks put up with this for a whole week.

Figure 6. I think Italy gets a better grade of sunlight than Switzerland.

The house they’d rented was one of half a dozen or so on the grounds of the Fattoria Petrolo, a working winery and olive farm that was at least a couple of hundred years old. After breakfast Fran and John and I hiked up to the office so John could get on line and try to find them a hotel room for their last two nights. (As it turned out, on line didn’t work — booked solid, or so they claimed — but accepting the Petrolo folks’ offer of phoning the hotel and being Italian at them worked fine.)

Figure 7. The road up to the main villa. Look at those flowers — you’d almost think it was spring, or something.

Figure 8. I figured it wasn’t fair just to take pictures of the back of Fran’s head.

While John was dealing with that, Fran and I went on over the hill to look at the rest of the Fattoria.

Figure 9. Looking from the main villa down toward the church.

Figure 10. The church.

Figure 11. I was trying to take a picture of the tower up on the top of the hill, but my phone doesn’t have a zoom lens.

Figure 12. Looking back toward the main villa.

Figure 13. And again.

We went back to the villa and cleaned up, and then Fran and John and Tony (Jenny’s husband) and I went wine tasting while Linda and Jenny and Jenny’s nearly-two-year-old daughter Josephine went into town.

The first winery we hit was only just open — the kid who ran the place (I say kid, but he was probably thirty) had to run up the road ahead of us and drop the chain between the gates, and he couldn’t find his corkscrew till Fran pointed out that it was sitting next to the sink where he’d just rinsed out four glasses for us.

Figure 14. I have a bad habit of photographing buildings and machinery instead of people. I’m trying to work on it. (Cool tractor, though, ain’t it?)

He’d just bottled the wine on Monday. Considering that, and that it was mostly Merlot, it wasn’t half bad — simple but drinkable. And only six euros a bottle. John and Fran both thought it was the sort of thing Linda would like, and John bought three bottles.

(Full disclosure: I was bored with Merlot long before Sideways. I never even saw Sideways. If you like Merlot, please drink it, and if anybody gives you crap about it, let me know so I can smack ’em for you.)

The next winery, I wasn’t clever enough to take any pictures of. It was a little more established, and the wine was a little more expensive — eight euros — but it was good stuff; mostly Sangiovese, with a bit of a couple of other varietals none of us had ever heard of. John bought two bottles and I brought one back for myself.

Then we kept going up over the hills toward Chianti proper, but we didn’t make it that far. The thing about traveling with Fran is, she works for the California Culinary Academy, and her job is arranging student internships. So when you’re with Fran it can be hard to throw a rock without hitting a five-star restaurant where she knows the chef and two or three of the chef’s student assistants.

In this case we didn’t have to throw a rock; we just happened on the sign for Badia a Coltibuono, a winery, restaurant, and B&B on the grounds of a converted monastery. Fran just wanted to stop and say hi, but once we made it as far as the restaurant it was hard to pass up lunch. I had an aubergine purée with sheeps-cheese gelato followed by pork chops with . . . well, damn if I can remember, but it was good.

Figure 15. Badia a Coltibuono. Did I photograph the part of the monastery with the restaurant in it, where we actually were? No I did not. On the other hand, there’s this great church tower.

Chianti’s heraldic emblem is a black rooster. We asked Chef Paolo if he knew the story behind it, and he didn’t, so we spent a while trying to make one up — I think a plague of weevils was involved somewhere — but after a little research he came back and told us that it was in memory of the rooster that alerted the Sienese to the approach of the Florentine army and saved Chianti from Florinese domination. (Which was suspiciously similar to John’s explanation of why the rooster was the emblem of Oporto in Portugal, but I suppose everywhere in Europe with a rooster for an emblem must have more or less the same story.)

Then I had some fruit flan with candied orange peel and pistachio sauce. And several bites of Fran’s chocolate torte. Plus we drank a couple of bottles of the estate’s Chianti Classico, since by that point it was pretty clear we weren’t going to make it to any more wineries.

Figure 16. Me, Fran, and Tony. Let’s try to figure out what kind of pictures my phonecam sucks at taking, and take those. But if you look closely you can see some barrels with that black rooster logo in the photographs on either side of my head.

We came back to the farmhouse and sat on the porch talking and drinking for four or five hours . . .

Figure 17. Linda, Jenny, Josie, Fran (a.k.a. “Auntie Beanie”) and Tony.

Figure 18. John, Jenny, Josie, Fran and Tony. The great thing about digital is that you can just take a hell of a lot of pictures instead of waiting for everybody to get settled.

Figure 19. John, Jenny, Linda, Josie, Tony, Fran. Getting a little closer to an actual family portrait.

Figure 20. Here we go.

Figure 21. Now let’s get me in there, courtesy of Linda. Josie’s wine is watered — yes, we’re giving a two-year-old her own glass of wine; can you tell we’re in Europe? — but she’s still more interested in it than in being photographed.

Figure 22. Okay, now everyone’s looking at the camera, except Tony. This is either just before or just after I managed to spill that glass of wine on Jenny and Fran simultaneously.

. . . after which Linda cooked up a feast every bit as satisfying as lunch, if simpler: lamb, chicken, pork, salad, risotto, pasta — it was their last night at the farmhouse, so there was a fridge to empty out.

Then we opened a couple more bottles of wine and sat and drank and talked some more while the sun went down and the stars came out.

Figure 23. Evening in Tuscany. Again: How could anyone put up with this?

It’s a difficult life.

The next morning, early, John took one of the rental cars and took Jenny and Tony and Josephine to the Pisa airport. Fran and Linda and I packed up the other car and followed about an hour later.

Figure 24. Man, I’d hate to wake up to this every morning.

Figure 25. Another of my photographic weaknesses, besides buildings and machines, is pictures taken through windows.

Figure 26. It didn’t really look much like this, but you take a picture straight into the sun with no filter, you don’t expect much.

I’d been a bit irritated, when I made my train reservations back in Basel, that I hadn’t been able to get a direct return train from Florence, and was going to have to change trains in Milan. But again things worked out just as if we’d planned the whole thing: Fran and John and Linda were headed in that direction anyway, and since my train from Milan didn’t leave till five, we had plenty of time.

When Linda said that I ought to get a look at the Leaning Tower while I was here, I kind of figured we’d take a quick spin around it in the car, like Brandon and I did with the St. Louis Arch, and then get back on the autostrada. As far as I was concerned, I’d already had a fantastic trip, and I would have been able to go home contented.

But, like I said, we had plenty of time.

Figure 27. Getting out of the car in Pisa, two blocks from the Leaning Tower. This is the moment when I finally turned to Fran and whispered “Holy shit, I’m in fuckin’ Italy.”

Fran and I were going to climb the tower, but they only let so many people up in it at a time, and it would have been a good hour before we’d have been able to get a time slot.

Figure 28. You’ve been seeing pictures of it all your life. Those pictures, let me tell you, completely fail to capture the reality of standing in front of it. Which fact I will attempt to demonstrate by showing you yet another picture.

It’s probably just as well, since from the top of it I doubt I’d have been able to keep myself from phoning everyone I know in the States and saying “Yeah, I know it’s three in the morning where you are, but I’m standing on top of the goddamn Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

(At this point I should note that this was only my second trip to Italy ever, and that when I took the first one I was about three years old.)

Figure 29. It’s not just the tower. The baptistry, left, and the Duomo, right. Why the top of the baptistry looks like a medieval Chinese helmet I’m not really sure. But according to John it was the baptistry that was supposed to be the architectural star of the place. Show-off tower.

Figure 30. Again, it’s not just the tower — look at the last five arches on the lower left. See how they don’t line up? It’s really too bad they invented all this beautiful architecture before they invented geology and structural engineering.

So instead we just walked around the Piazza. Fran and I bought some postcards. They were selling all kinds of other stuff as well — from your normal touristy stuff, like Leaning Coffee Cups and Leaning Tower refrigerator magnets, to your abnormal touristy stuff, like bad imitation Japanese swords and Playboy Bunny t-shirts. Plus there were some African guys selling watches — I’m pretty sure I saw a Seiko I lost in Tokyo seven or eight years ago. But Fran just bought a tote bag for one of her coworkers back home, and her folks bought some non-leaning salt and pepper shakers. I stuck to postcards.

Figure 31. Fran and me: circumstantial evidence that we were actually there. By this point Linda was getting pretty good with the phonecam.

Then we had another pretty good lunch, at some little cafe that was between the Piazza and where we’d parked the car. And then we got back on the autostrada.

From Pisa we drove up along the coast to Genoa, and then north to Milan from there. I don’t remember where all we passed through — other than Carrara, where we drove past yards full of enough marble blocks to build a medium-sized pyramid — but it was beautiful. I wasn’t clever enough to take pictures of the drive, but if you’ve driven Highway 101 in California, it looked a lot like that. Like all different parts of 101, from Santa Barbara up to maybe Ukiah, but without the ten-lane suburban nightmare stretch from San Jose to San Francisco.

Actually, most of what I saw of the Italian countryside, from when I first woke up on Friday, somehwere north of Bologna, felt like one part of Northern California or another. It felt like home. Except that all the towns were Italian, with monasteries perched on the hilltops and terra-cotta apartment buildings in the valleys, but I could live with that.

I think I need to talk my new employers into opening an office in Tuscany.

They dropped me off at the central train station in Milan. Milan didn’t remind me of California; it was more like Madrid, tree-lined avenues with lots of big blocky buildings with iron balconies and painted shutters and graffitti from ground level as far up the walls as a hand and a spray can could reach. I didn’t get any pictures of that, either, but I did get some of Milan Centrale, a Mussolini-era monster that by weight, at least, must be one of the world’s larger train stations.

Figure 32. Milan Centrale. I’m not sure they have enough kiosks.

Figure 33. The Fascists, like the Nazis, clearly had what William Gibson called “a scary excess of design talent.”

Figure 34. Viva Roma Nova Eterna.

Figure 35. Germany has western pulps, Italy has Diabolik comic books. Tells you everything you need to know, really.

Figure 36. Yep, it’s a train station.

I bought a can of Chinotto and sat and read for an hour or so till my train pulled in.

Then it was back to Switzerland. Which suddenly seemed a lot less isolated and a lot easier not to take too seriously.

Viva Italia!

Comments (8)

April 20, 2006

I’ve told the authors, but some of the rest of you are probably curious, too. So here’s an excerpt from the letter I sent them:

Some of you may have heard the rumor that Wheatland Press, our publishing partner for Twenty Epics, has run into financial trouble and had to cut back on pretty much all their projects other than the Polyphony anthology series. This rumor is true. Unfortunately there was an email mixup, and Susan and I didn’t hear about this as soon as Wheatland intended to tell us about it, so we’ve had to scramble a bit to make other arrangements.

After talking to a couple of other possible partners, we’ve decided that the simplest option, and the one that offers the best chance of still meeting our original goal of having the book out by the end of May, is just to publish it ourselves, directly. This shouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the book's availability or quality.

The main downside is that the book manufacturing service we’ve decided to go with (Lulu) doesn't offer a full range of print sizes, and we’ve had to reformat the book for a 6"x9" size rather than the 5.5"x8.5" it was originally designed for — this has eaten up some valuable time . . .

Plus there’s been the whole moving-to-Switzerland thing. :)

So, to make a long story short, that’s done now, and while the end-of-May schedule is a little tight, we still ought to be able to make it.

We’ve got a manuscript, and we’ve got a cover painting (pix soon). So we ought at least to have advance reader copies available at WisCon. An honest-to-goodness first edition if I can manage it, but that at the very least. If anyone has a really strong desire to proofread, now would be a good time to raise your hand. :)

Comments (3)

Shoot for the stars, and if you hit the moon, well, shit, you’re on the fucking moon.

— Kameron Hurley

Comments (1)

I tried to Flickrize these, but I ran out of bandwidth, so you’ll have to settle for the low-res versions for now.

First, the neighborhood. So far the only notable landmark I’ve discovered is this place . . .

. . . which at first I thought was a Swiss Army officer candidate school, but which turned out to be . . .

. . . a Salvation Army officer candidate school.

Now, on to the apartment. The first thing you see when you come in is, of course, the bathroom.

Aside from the lack of storage space (a theme to be repeated), it’s a clear win over the bathroom at my place in Seattle. Note the orange shower curtain. Orange (hi, Greg) is also going to be a repeated theme here. There’s an orange-and-white bathmat, too but you can’t really see it in the picture.

Turn right to see the main bedroom. This picture was taken after they delivered everything except the one piece of furniture I really needed, namely the bed.

This is the first wardrobe I’ve ever owned. Coincidentally, this is the first place I’ve lived (and that includes the 20 m² rathole I rented on my first solo trip to Japan) with zero closet space.

Note that at least one, probably two, and possibly all three of the doors are upside down. By the time I’d assembled it that far, though, I already had one Band-Aid on my thumb from using the can opener on my Swiss Army knife as a screwdriver. Plus, I’d burned through more than half of the second season of Futurama, and I wasn’t going to go through the rest of it taking those doors off and putting them on again.

Bed! Delivered yesterday, at long last. Exactly the same model I had in the States, only this time I didn’t screw up and slice through some of the straps holding the slats in place. I was going to get something cheaper, but once I saw this one again in the showroom I decided a little breath of familiarity would go a long way toward making me feel at home. Anyway, the frame wasn’t much of the overall cost and the cheaper mattresses all sucked.

Note the sheets, pillowcases and whatnot. This is how the orange thing got started. What can I say, it was dark, cold, and wet when I bought them, and Manor was having its Blaxploitation “Feel Africa” sale:

The sale runs through the end of the month, so after my next paycheck I’m definitely going back for more orange stuff. (Actual plates, for instance — eating off paper is entertaining for a little while, but it gets old. Besides, right now I’m not getting any mileage out of my dishwasher.)

The view from the bedroom’s balcony. When the weather warms up I’m going to get a little table and a couple of chairs for it. And a pitcher of margaritas.

Leaving the bedroom, or turning left from the front door, we have the living room. Was I smart enough to take a picture from an angle that would make narrative sense? No.

Instead we get this angle. That’s the door we came through to the left of the bookshelf, with the umbrella on the doorknob and the coat hanging from the back. Not a lot of books on the shelf yet, but I’m working on it. The other door leads to the guest bedroom.

There’s nothing orange in here yet, unless you count the orange logo on the Coop bag, but I’ll fix that before too long.

And another angle on the living room, this one taken from the kitchen and showing off my fancy metal-and-glass coffee table and my fancy cheap-ass chair that’s supposed to tide me over till I get a couch. (Note also the printer on the kitchen table — both power outlets and flat surfaces are in kind of short supply at the moment.)

If I stick my head out the living room window, I can see this clock. Don’t know what the building is, but the clock’s surprisingly handy. Not only can you set your watch by it, it rings out every quarter-hour (one ring on the :15, two on the :30, three on the :45, four on the hour) and tolls the hour. Kind of nice to be lying in bed and know that it’s only three AM without having to get up and look at a clock.

The kitchen! No garbage disposal, of course, but everything else — you can see the dishwasher peeking in to the right of the sink. Had a bad moment when I thought the oven was busted, but then I found the circuit breakers. Note again the printer. (Having my own printer again is almost as exciting as having my own bed.)

My enormous refrigerator. (Well, enormous compared to the tiny dorm fridge in the company flat. And while I’m sure it’s significantly smaller than the one I had in Seattle, it feels like there’s at least as much usable space. I think having it more or less at eye level — freezer underneath — is a nice touch.) Note the emphasis on packaged foods — kind of unavoidable when I haven’t got any pots or pans yet.

Now, leaving the kitchen and crossing the living room (hopefully remembering to close the refrigerator door), last but not least, we have the guest bedroom:

Okay, maybe it is least. But by the time you come visit there ought to be a desk and some more bookshelves and maybe even a guest bed. Also by then I ought to have gotten rid of this junk:

Actually, there’s even more junk now, since that was taken before I started in on the bed. But I’ll get it cleaned up — honest.

Finally, in case there was any doubt as to where all that furniture was coming from:

Comments (7)

April 17, 2006

Or, Kameron Hurley is a genius.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought myself for quite some time:

I don’t believe people live without friendship, without laughter, without any joy in their lives. Women who’ve had cliterodectimies do, in fact, still have a sense of humor and take joy (or not) in their children (maybe they take joy in flowers instead. Or making pottery. Or whatever). Even slaves dance. Abused women have been known to sing.

It’s important to remember that.

And not just when you’re reading Touched by Venom.

Comments (0)

The first night I stayed in my new place, I fell asleep trying to remember a book that was never written. I’d lived with that book once, waking and sleeping, for the better part of four years; between my eighteenth birthday and my twentieth wrote nearly thirty thousand words of it. Then some time later a different idea took hold of my imagination, and for more than a decade that was, more or less, that.

I don’t know what brought that unwritten book to mind. Some unlikely combination of sounds, scents, flavors; rain-wet spring air through the open window, the feel of a thin foam mattress on a hard floor. Probably I’ll never know.

But: ten computers and several versions of Word later, I still have the files. So last night I pulled them up, curious what this Moles kid might have written that could have made such an impression on me. Was there anything more than potential there? Was the book any good? Was he any good?

Well, he was no Meghan McCarron. He didn’t have much sense of character—his protagonist was a middle-class Everyman (Everyboy, really); his other characters could mostly be summed up in a word or two: the Girl, the Antihero, the Rival, the Father Figure, the Other Girl. His dialogue was occasionally good, occasionally over the top, often banal. His plots took a few twists and turns, but they were complications, not reversals. He had trouble with pacing, trouble figuring out which parts of a scene were unnecessary, where exposition was needed and where it could be dispensed with.

But he also had a flair for description, when there was an image worth describing; the beginnings of an individual style, built on a rhythm of short phrases and simple adjectives. He had an ear for made-up languages and specialized vocabularies. His invented mythology took the 80s’ medieval preoccupations and complicated them with 90s concerns like modernization, ethnic cleansing, religious apocalypse, cutting up and reassembling familiar tropes in ways that wouldn’t be completely foreign to readers of Steph Swainston or Jeff VanderMeer. His fight scenes weren’t half bad.

If I ran into him in a workshop, what would I say? You’ve got potential, kid—certainly. I could give him some advice on where to cut, how to decide which scenes to write and which to skip over. I could suggest that he dispense with some of the more florid ‘legends’ and ‘ancient texts’. I could point him to some useful reference books.

The deeper flaws, though—mainly they’re just the natural consequence of being a well-traveled but sheltered and introverted nineteen, having your talent outstrip your experience, knowing more about history and mythology than about how the world works and how people think and behave. I look back and I think my instinct—that if I’d finished that book when I was twenty, I could have sold it, but that it’s just as well that I didn’t—is the right one. The better part of a decade passed between when I stopped working on it and when I finished and sold my first short story, and I don’t think any of those years were wasted.

On the other hand, there are things about that Moles kid’s writing that I miss: the broad canvas, the obsessive worldbuilding, the reaching after high tragedy. The lack of pretension, and the un-self-consciousness of his imagination.

I have to put that unfinished book down again, now; I’ve got other things to do. But maybe when those things are done I’ll pick it up again. It would be a gift, of sorts; an homage, even. There are a handful of writers without whose influence I couldn’t have become the writer I am today, and that kid is one of them.

Comments (4)

So, the reason that I haven’t been posting much about the whole Swiss thing, the last two or three weeks, is that I’ve been increasingly stressed out over still being stuck in a company-rented studio after more than a month—not that there’s anything wrong with it, but last weekend I calculated that (figuring from when I left Seattle), I’d been on the road, living out of a suitcase, for seventy days. I’m not sure whether that’s a record for me or not—the time, when I was fourteen, between when my family left San Diego and when we found a house in Tokyo must have been almost as long, if not longer—but the inability to completely unpack or completely relax, the slight but undeniable conditionality of any privacy I might have, was really starting to get to me. I had a couple of weekends here and there where I decided I wasn’t really up for anything but sitting on the couch playing video games, and at least one Sunday where I never left the studio or even got out of my bathrobe, but it’s only in the last week or two that the idea I should have moved to New York or LA or Tokyo has (however briefly) crossed my mind, or that I had to remind myself that Switzerland Is Not The Enemy.

(It’s nothing, really; not even as bad as I expected it to be before I came over. You should have seen what I thought of Tokyo that first year. But I destroyed those notebooks, so you can’t.)

But! All that’s over now. (And just in time, since someone else was expecting to move into the company studio Sunday.) I have an apartment.

Figure 1. The top balcony’s mine. And no, the building next door doesn’t actually curve like that.

Figure 1. Floor plan. Both of these pictures stolen from the real estate listing site, since apparently the cable for my digital camera wasn’t in my bag like I thought it was. More later.

The address, for those interested in such things: Hagentalerstrasse 15, CH-4055 Basel, Switzerland. (Apparently apartment numbers aren’t used here—perhaps because that would encourage having one’s mail delivered even when one hasn’t made one’s name known to the building owners. Those following along at home will also note the use of ‘ss’ instead of ‘ß’. You think that’s odd, you should see the way they spell actual Swiss German.)

Anyhow: I haven’t really slept in my own bed yet, since IKEA managed somehow to deliver some important parts of it—like the mattress—to someone else and say they can’t get me a replacement till Wednesday morning. (I picked up a sort of minimal futon for 30 francs to use in the interim.) And I don’t have a couch since I used up most of my furniture budget for this month on the bed.

But I have an apartment! So I guess I’m staying.

Comments (8)

April 10, 2006

Wondering where all the Western pulps went?

Switzerland. Via Germany.

Figure 1. Unfortunately, from a quick google I infer that they’re all reprints. Might be some money in cover art, though.

Comments (3)

April 6, 2006

Shortly afterwards the conversation turned upon Hegel, and I maintained that his writings were mostly nonsense; or, at any rate, that there were many passages in them where the author wrote the words, and it was left to the reader to find a meaning for them.

— Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy

Comments (4)

If Futurama, Dune and Battlestar Galactica had a quick screw somewhere in the aisles of your local Wal-Mart, their mutant love child might be something like John Aegard and Kat Ayer’s new comic, Greeter. The complete Issue 0, “In Vitro Mobilization,” is on line at Greeter Comics.

Johnzo’s a crazy-talented writer and Kat Ayer’s a damn good artist; I can’t wait for Issue 1.

Comments (0)