Rhetoretician -- Fiction etc.

I was reading girlspell recent meme and saw the question, "Do you have any tattoos?" Up until this month, the answer would have been, "No."

But here is one more thing Clarion did to/for me:

Dunno how many of you saw this, but I'm curious as to what my romance-writer friends think of it:

Jackie Kessler's run-down of the Horizons development.

SFWA's public statement on Harlequin Horizons.

I had great fun at Albacon, really my first con in decades. (I've attended a few HP cons over the last few years, and I was at ComicCon, which is like visiting the Emerald City, but no straight SFF cons.) For me, the big deal was seeing five of my Clarion buddies, including enggirl, as well as both Paul Park and lizhand, both of whom were our teachers.

I've heard that Clarion grads have a reputation for being a bit cliquish, i.e., not talking to anyone else at cons but each other. In our case it was probably more true than it should have been. Observers probably put this phenomenon down to a misplaced sense of superiority, but it isn't that. We just miss each other. You spend six weeks living, working and suffering with someone, it's like they're family. So when we get back together, which (I gather) is mostly at cons, we're desperate to catch up, to stay up all night talking, to touch each other to make sure we're really there.

Having said that, I met a number of nifty new people at Albacon, including both parttimedriverand ianrandalstrock. If life at cons is anything like life at academic conferences (of which I have attended 'way too many), it will be joyous to meet these people again at other cons, and the circle of friends will grow...

Hooray! Shauna Roberts's new novel, Like Mayflies in the Stream, has just become available for pre-order on Amazon.

The first of the Clarion 2009 graduates to publish a novel has done herself proud. I've read it. I love it. Go out and get it.

Shauna's novel is part of a Hadley Rille Books series of "archeologically-accurate novels about the daily lives of ancient people living and coping with significant crises." This one is based on the tale of Gilgamesh.

A word of confession, here: I've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, except in summary form, and I had to look up the summaries to get an idea of how much Roberts has deviated from the original. Not much, it turns out. Like Marion Zimmer Bradley in The Mists of Avalon and The Firebrand, or LeGuin in Lavinia, Roberts takes the essentials of the legend as a starting point, and goes from there. It's a wonderful question: what real events in the lives of real people could have inspired a story like this one? The result is stranger, sadder and sexier than the myth itself. I especially like how Roberts imagines Enkidu -- how he became who he is, why he behaves as he does.

Although we get glimpses into the minds of Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves, the story is told primarily from the point of view of Shamhat, the woman sent to "tame" the wild man Enkidu. While various translations of the original suggest that Shamhat was a temple prostitute, Robert's archeological analysis suggests that that belief is an anachronism from the much later time when the Epic was composed. In Uruk at the time of the legend, Shamhat is more likely to have been a priestess of Inanna, and so she is in this novel.

It's fun to read stories told from alternative points of view. From Stoppard's Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead to Bradley's two books mentioned above, we love to think that we're getting the "inside scoop," the part the party-line didn't tell us, and that's one of the joys of this book.

Another is the archeological project itself. The Mesopotamian world of this novel is so real you can taste it.

The characters are well-drawn and compelling, especially Shamhat, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Zaidu, the hunter Shamhat meets on the way.

I knew that Shauna was a medical writer as well as an anthropologist before I read the novel, but it hadn't occurred to me how useful her medical knowledge would be in interpreting the Gilgamesh myth. I'll leave out explanations because they'd be spoilers, but suffice it to say that several things came into sharp focus because of physiological truths, never stated explicitly but clear as day.

All in all, this novel is a terrific read. I started it on the plane home from California, and couldn't put it down after I got home.

Not sure this is a great idea, but I've resolved to begin each class session this term with a poem read aloud.  Since I teach business law, this is rather a strange thing (you should have seen the looks I got on the first day), but my instincts say it's good for them.  I've brought all my poetry books to the office (was pretty amazed by how many I had), and  I'm taking other poems off the Web as necessary.

I only have a few minutes at the start of class to do this, so I can't be goin' into epics or Four Quartets or anything like that.  Each class meets 20 times during the term.  The first day I gave 'em "Ozymandias," which I can recite from memory. The second day it was Edgar Lee Masters's "Herman Altman," which wasn't ideal, but I wanted to read something about "truth."

So: anyone have any suggestions for poems to read aloud? Sad, insirational, moody, optimistic, whatever.  (But not sexy, please -- I'm a male professor, and we can't be giving people opportunities to claim harrassment...)  No fair nominating your own stuff, but if you want to nominate your friends' (and I can get their permission), great!

There are some people who think that the main advantage of Clarion is the networking. And, sure, it's neat to have seventeen new friends who are all great writers. But the theory is that doing 100+ critiques in six weeks (35,000+ words of crit, for me), plus listening to 80+ hours of 17 people doing 1,700+ three-minute crits of their own (not exaggerating; do the math) will create an "internal editor" for the student that will allow you to examine your own work with a more effective critical eye.

The theory is correct. Damn it.

The 2009 Clarionites have created an online crit group to continue to help each other with stories. I am slated to submit a story at the end of next week, and thought I would revise one I wrote in February-through-April. I liked it well enough before I left for Clarion, and I figured, hey, I'll do a quick revision and show it to 'em.

So I looked at it last night (after telling my classmates about it, of course), in preparation for that "quick revision."

WTF.

The characters are opaque and mostly cardboard, the narration utterly on-the-bloody-broken-nose, there's no sense of place, and the language is so wooden I could use it to build a gallows. I stared in disbelief, thinking "I really liked this?"

So I'm rewriting from scratch. I have no idea how much better the thing I submit will be, but at least I have some idea of the thing things battalion of things that is are wrong with it, and can take some aim at it them.

So thank you, Clarion, for this new critical eye -- a freaking raven on my goddam shoulder, croaking insults in my ear.

(...*sigh* Not really angry, just a little rueful and embarrassed...)

Take a look at what John Rogers, of Leverage, says about fanfic:

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/08/leverage-205-three-days-of-hunter-job.html
 
(Scroll down to the question posed by "619")

If only everybody in the various media industries had this attitude...

In an earlier post, I reported some of the good advice on writing I heard from the first three instructors at Clarion: Holly Black, Larissa Lai and Robert Crais.

Now I've had time to report some good things I learned from the instructors in the final three weeks. I have the sense that I didn't do as good a job with them, partly because I was so much more tired during the second half.

( Good Advice on Writing )

My report from the Clarion Writers Workshop, Weeks Five and Six

( Under the Cut )

My Report from the Clarion Writers Workshop, Week Three:

( Under the cut, because it's long )

My report from the Clarion Writers Workshop, Week Two.

( It's all under the cut )

This is long, so it's under the cut for those who aren't interested.

( Clarion Report, Week One )

I'm packing right now.

At 4:15 EDT tomorrow morining, I take the cab to the airport for Clarion.

I'll try to post periodically (maybe once a week or so) concerning the Clarion experience.  Feel free to comment, but I doubt that I'll be able to post replies to comments.  Similarly, I probably won't be responding to anyone else's posts.  But I'll be watching y'all, if only briefly.

'Bye!  See you all in August, if not sooner!

So, to keep my mind off Clarion (and because it's one of the things I promised The Ritual Artist I'd do) I'm trying to lay out our vacation in Montreal, second week in August.

Does anyone have any advice about Montreal? We're driving up with two kids (girl 15, boy 9); should be able to get there in a day. Planning to stay about a week. Anything at all about attractions, must-sees, pitfalls, accommodations, etc. would be welcome.

I hope to post periodic updates on my Clarion experience here, although not every day. What I'd most like to do is share the best writing advice that I hear from the instructors, and the insights that arise from the crit process.

I'll parallel-post on my other LJ, but anything that's friends-locked will be posted here.

I'll be arriving at La Jolla in nine days. blackholly, who's the Week One instructor, asked us to decide whether to use one of our submission stories for the Week One crit, or rather write a new one. This presented me with an opportunity. Of the two stories I submitted, one has had a lot of praise from editors, and there's one editor (you know who you are) who's been sitting on it for more than seven months, who says he might, might, just might publish it.

But the other story, which was singled out for praise by one of the Clarion judges (never mind how I know that), has been form-rejected from a handful of markets, and didn't even merit an Honorable Mention at WotF. That intrigues me -- Here's a story I know has merit, and which I also know has marked problems, but I don't know what they are. I can't imagine a better opportunity for a group-crit.

So I'm going into the Week One Crit genuinely hoping that my classmates will find flaws with my story -- and hoping especially that they'll all find the same flaws. Because then my job will be easy. :)

For some reason I'm fixating on the social aspect of Clarion, and worrying that I'll make an offensive nuisance of myself. Everyone says that the biggest benefit from these workshops is the strong community of loyal writer-friends you have when it's done, and I have repeated, unhappy fantasies of being so toxic that no one wants to know me when it's over. That's a very old fear of mine, and it's galling that it surfaces now, when I've got this once-in-a-lifetime, thrilling experience to anticipate. Grr.

This evening The Ritual Artist and I saw Laura Schellhardt's new play, Shapeshifter, at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence.

I have not been this blown away, this moved by a theatre piece for a long time.  I was utterly rivited from the first line to the last, and I was in tears by the end.

Schellhardt's 90-minute one-act is flawless in its craftsmanship.  It uses ancient (especially Celtic) myths of shape-shifting animals -- the selkie, the dragon, the swan -- as metaphors for the person (especially the woman) drawn into love, into family, into relationship.  In this jewel of a script we see all the variations: the one who flees, the one who is let go, the one who is trapped.  We see all of this through the eyes of a child who has lost her mother, as she befriends a selkie and witnesses all the variations before her eyes.  She speaks through fables, and through trying to learn her spelling book, and trying to understand her loss.  The weave is so complex, so subtle, yet so smooth it made my jaw drop.  How does she do that?  And where do i learn how?

Now, I don't know whether this play would have hit me so hard with a less brilliant cast.  I've known the work of Anne Scurria, Brian McEleney, Rachael Warren and Stephen Thorne for years. They were all dead-center on target -- Rachael was the best I've ever seen her, and that's saying a lot.  I don't know Miriam Silverman's work as well, but suffice it to say that when she left the theatre in her street clothes I didn't recognize her; she inhabited that little girl's body so completely that I was convinced she was that child, and the woman who went home seemed a different species.  (Fred Sullivan and Joe Wilson, two actors I admire greatly, were also quite good, but each of them has done better work recently.  I'll just mention Fred's Falstaff and Joe's Williy Stark, for a start.)

This play is going places.  If it doesn't become a repertory classic, I don't know anything

Some of you may be aware that there is a new phenomenon called the "twitterfic," a complete story that fits into 140 characters (call it 20-25 words), the length of a "tweet" on Twitter. Users of Twitter can follow various "twitterzines," such as Thaumatrope, Tweet the Meat and Nanoism, and see the fics as they come out. All of them also have Web sites on which you can read their fics. Some post fics once a week, some once a day, etc.

Anyway, I'm getting two such nanofics published. One (which I call "Without Sentimentality", although officially it has no title) will appear on Nanoism this coming Friday, May 29th.

The other (which I call "Same-Day Service") will appear on Thaumatrope on December 5, 2009.

I'm actually being paid for both. The amounts are miniscule, of course, but technically they translate as "professional rates" when you do the dollars-per-word calculation.

Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

( Am I a blockhead? )

I have this terrible habit of reading series in the wrong order.

It started with Robertson Davies. I picked up a copy of The Lyre of Orpheus and was halfway through it before I understood that there were earlier books. So I read the trilogy backwards, moving next to What's Bred in the Bone and finally to The Rebel Angels.

The interesting thing is that, with good series, you get just as much tension and anticipation reading backwards as you do reading forwards -- only it's tension/anticipation about what has already transpired, rather than what's going to transpire. Of course, anyone who's seen either Memento or Pinter's Betrayal won't really be surprised by this. (John Irving says that he writes his novels backwards.)

Anyway, it's happened again. In preparation for Clarion, I picked up Stan Robinson's Green Mars. Now, okay, it wasn't my intention to do the backwards-sideways thing again (it never is), I just wasn't paying proper attention, and Green Mars intrigued me more than Red or Blue. As a title. *shrugs* (Had I known what the "Red" in "Red Mars" stood for, I'd've probably been more attracted to it.)

( Reading  )

As a son of Wesleyan, I grieve with the students, the faculty, and the family of Johanna Justin-Jinich.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iSGJvuWvlpCL3tC4WtgEE590iRrQD981MH500

Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba
b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei
v'yam'likh mal'khutei b'chayeikhon uv'yomeikhon
uv'chayei d'khol beit yis'ra'eil
ba'agala uviz'man kariv v'im'ru:
Amein. Y'hei sh'mei raba m'varakh l'alam ul'al'mei al'maya
Yit'barakh v'yish'tabach v'yit'pa'ar v'yit'romam v'yit'nasei
v'yit'hadar v'yit'aleh v'yit'halal sh'mei d'kud'sha
B'rikh hu.
l'eila min kol bir'khata v'shirara
toosh'b'chatah v'nechematah, da'ameeran b'al'mah, v'eemru:
Amein
Y'hei sh'lama raba min sh'maya
v'chayim aleinu v'al kol yis'ra'eil v'im'ru
Amein
Oseh shalom bim'romav hu ya'aseh shalom
aleinu v'al kol Yis'ra'eil v'im'ru
Amein