Write Now

The reading and subsequent interview at Capitola Book Cafe on Saturday went very well, though there was some danger of there being more participants than attendees.

Writer Joshua Mohr read from his novel Damascus. He’s an excellent reader and I thoroughly enjoyed the selection he read. I’m looking forward to reading the novel. Like me, Josh likes to poke his nose into dark corners. Unlike me, Josh pokes his nose into dark corners accessible via BART. Which is all the more scary, really.

Following the readings Rick Kleffel interviewed us for his Agony Column podcast and website. Rick is an excellent interviewer. I was grateful for Josh’s eloquence and intelligence, because for whatever reason my focus knob was broken that night — I was all over the map.

I recorded the reading & interview but am holding off on posting them, because Rick videotaped the proceedings and it’d be much cooler to post that when he puts it online. And also because I’m going to be reading essentially the same piece from Mortality Bridge at several venues in the next few weeks, and I think I’ll be more “on” — especially at the upcoming LitCrawl reading at Borderlands.

 

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be reading from Mortality Bridge at Capitola Book Cafe near Santa Cruz, California, tomorrow, October 8, at 6:30 PM.

Following that, Rick Kleffel will be conducting an interview for The Agony Column.

San Francisco writer Joshua Mohr will also be reading.

Capitola Book Cafe
Saturday, October 8, 6:30 P.M.
1475  41st Avenue
Capitola, CA 95010
831-462-4415

I consolidated the audio I have posted here and on my writing site to a new Audio page on this blog (see above). You can play or download any of my readings, lectures, classes, and interviews.

I’ll continue to post links on my regular blog posts as they occur, and I’ll update the Audio page accordingly.

Ain’t much video, really, but I’ll get around to it when it seems worthwhile.

I was writing the second go-round of Toy Story 2 at Pixar. This was when they were in Point Richmond, before they moved to a much larger facility in Emeryville.

I used to wear a suit to work at Pixar. People would say, You know you can dress however you want, right? I’d say, This is how I want to dress. I think a lot of them thought I was wound a bit too tight.

I had two reasons for wearing suits. One was because everyone at Pixar dressed alike. Geek-chic hipster nerd. A CG studio is basically a cube farm, and everyone’s cube looked like everyone else’s cube: Toys and posters for animated movies. The one certain way to not look like everyone else in that environment was to wear a suit & tie. And I didn’t want to look like everyone else.

Animation studios are full of distractions. Pool tables, ping pong tables, pinball games, massive amounts of munchies. I wore a suit so that I would feel like I was at work. So that I would maintain some kind of professional demeanor and get a lot done. I’m not saying people who don’t do that are somehow not as professional as me. I’m saying that this is something I felt I had to do to crank out the amount of script I needed to. I got the movie written in three months, so it must have worked for me.

Okay, so:

One day they call everyone into the courtyard for a big announcement. Steve Jobs is there, in his jeans and turtleneck and sneakers. Pixar was a small company back then. They weren’t part of Disney. They’d made title sequences and short films.

Then they made Toy Story, and Disney had distributed it, and it had kicked box office ass. Disney was absolutely vexed. For the first time since their founding they’d been spanked in their home court, and spanked double plus good, too. Pixar was the Little Production Company that Could, and they were proud and a bit surprised.

So we’re all out there in the courtyard.  It’s a bright day and I’m wearing my shades and leaning against a post. Jobs is directly opposite me, and he announces that Pixar has just signed a co-production deal with Disney that will allow Pixar to make features as they see fit, and Disney would fund and distribute them. And they would split the revenue 50-50. This was huge: Disney had never let another company produce its films, and certainly not allowed any creative control (that lasted about ten minutes, of course).

So everyone’s psyched about how wonderful this is. Me, I’m thinking this is Disney’s first step in eating and absorbing a competitor before it can own the landscape.

Jobs is very excited. He’s pacing back and forth and saying, “So we did it! We went down there and we sat down with a bunch of suits and we were just as good as them. We got what we wanted! We beat the suits!”

He pauses. Clearly he’s expecting cheers, or applause, or some reaction. He looks puzzled because there’s this sort of awkward silence. He frowns and looks around. People aren’t looking at him. They’re looking at me. The guy in the suit. With the black sunglasses.

Jobs looks at me like, What the living fuck is this guy doing here? And I’m grinning, I just can’t help it. I write novels, I’m eccentric as hell, I’m a flaky artist, I’m writing their next movie, ferchrissake – but none of that matters, because all Jobs is thinking is that I’m a suit. Just as I’m supposed to think he’s some bohemian because he wears a turtleneck.

I do a pretty good Mickey Mouse imitation. So when Jobs had been staring at me an uncomfortable few seconds and it was clear the very presence of a coat & tie had put him off his stride, I waved and did a Mickey laugh and said Golly gee! And a few people laughed and Jobs went on.

And that’s my Steve Jobs story.

I have a great many problems with Apple’s business practices. The walled garden of their ecosystem, what I consider to be an illegal restraint of trade in preventing me from playing music I buy on whatever device I want, DRM, censorship.

But it’s very easy to set that aside and remark on the astonishing impact and influence Jobs had in his 56 years. Wholly aside from the obvious computer and smartphone innovations, he changed the music industry. He changed feature animation. He played a role in the change the publishing industry is undergoing. The only two people I can think of offhand who’ve had that kind of impact in the last hundred years are Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

It’s intriguing to think of what else Jobs might have affected had he lived another 25 or 30 years. I don’t have to like someone to respect and admire him, and even discounting the deluge of Apple fanboy eulogizing that’s already gushing forth, the truth is Steve Jobs deserves the praise he is receiving, and the place he secured for himself in history. We should be lucky enough to have a thousandth of the impact on the world that he had.

I’ll be reading from Mortality Bridge at Capitola Book Cafe near Santa Cruz, California, next Saturday, October 8. Also reading will be San Francisco writer Joshua Mohr, who is promoting his new novel Damascus.

Following the readings we’ll be interviewed by Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column. Rick conducted the best interview ever after my SF in SF reading last year, and I believe he’ll be recording this for The Agony Column as well. I’ll link to it here if he does.

If you’re in the area, it’d be great to see you!

Capitola Book Cafe
Saturday, October 8, 6:30 P.M.
1475  41st Avenue
Capitola, CA 95010
831-462-4415

Mortality Bridge has won this year’s Emperor Norton Award. Woo hoo!

Two Emperor Norton awards are given every year, one for the best novel by a San Francisco Bay-area writer, and one to an individual who has contributed to Bay Area culture. Rudy Rucker won the latter award.

The Emperor Norton Award is named after a colorful San Francisco eccentric who proclaimed himself emperor of the United States and even had his own currency printed (which some shops would accept, including, apparently, the printer who printed the currency), and is given to works “for extraordinary invention and creativity unhampered by the constraints of paltry reason.” Previous winners include Cory Doctorow, Kage Baker, Doug Dort, Jack Vance, and more. (Nice company to be in!)  Judges are Alan Beatts (owner of Borderlands Books), Jacob Weisman (Tachyon Books publisher), and Richard Lupoff (terrific writer).

The award (a framed certificate) was presented at Tachyon Publications’ 16th Anniversary celebration at the wonderful Borderlands Books in San Francisco. The party was terrific, Borderlands staff is just great, and I was startled by how many people I knew there, considering how relatively few events I’ve attended since moving to the Bay area about a year and a half ago. I was also very moved by how welcoming and open the community is here, and my undoubtedly incoherent acceptance speech said words to that effect.

Thanks to everyone at Borderlands and Tachyon Press, and to everyone who came for the party. It was a terrific day.

The Burning Man festival ended tonight (the Temple probably just finished burning as I type this; the Man burned the night before), and I’m a bit surprised to find myself missing it this year. Not that I don’t think it’s an amazing event — I definitely do, though interestingly I haven’t blogged much about its impact on me. It’s just that I found myself indifferent about going the last few years, and given the expense and level of commitment involved with the event, “yeah, maybe I’ll go” definitely isn’t the attitude to have. Ya gotta really wanna go.

I honestly think there is profundity to be found there. But I don’t want to make a habit of profundity (I know, I know: not a problem, Steve). As I said once about major hallucinogenics, you talk to God once and it changes your life. You talk to him every weekend and it’s not long before you’re both going, So what’s new? Ehh. Yeah, same here.

Given the scale of the event and the magnitude of its impact — individually and, I believe (with what some will probably regard as surprising idealism), societally — it’s weird to think of it going on as I type this. I get the feeling I should go next year. And that I should spend a bit of time here talking about why Burning Man was important and a bit transformative for me. (And no, it’s not cuz I did drugs out there. I didn’t. That seems kind of … redundant.)

Okay, so in future posts I’ll talk about why Burning Man was important for me. Meantime, enjoy this picture I took of the Temple burn from my first year (2007), from my Picasa web album.

The St. Petersburg Times & Tampabay.org have a regular feature called Nightstand where they ask authors what they are currently reading. They interviewed me a few weeks ago and the feature is up today, prominently headlined What’s Steven R. Boyett Reading?

(I don’t know why, but something about the headline makes me grin and shake my head.)

Writer Piper Castillo spoke with me for at least an hour for this piece, and considering that she had the formidable task of condensing my ceaseless blather and invective into a 400-word article, I think she did a great job. I doubt I sold any books (any of my books, anyhow), but I don’t think I embarrassed anybody, either.

In case you are interested in what Steven R. Boyett is eating, I’m having a scrambled egg sandwich.

I just learned that the signed, limited hardcover edition of Mortality Bridge has sold out at Subterranean Press. Thanks so much to everyone who bought one.

And if you’ve been thinking about getting one, now’s the time! Subterranean’s books tend to quickly become quite collectible, which is fancy-talk for “it’ll cost ya to get hold of one after they sell out.” Amazon still has copies listed for sale at this writing.

I’m working on contracts, cover design, typography, etc., for the e-book & softcover throughout the week, and I should be able to give a publication date soon. More than likely it will be out before the end of the year, though, which is nice.

UPDATE: The e-book and large-format paperback are now available.  (Woo-hoo!) Please see here for more info — and thanks for your support!.

 

A “word cloud,” in case ya don’t know, is a visualization of the most frequently used words in a given text. The total number of words are analyzed and then the most common ones are moved to the top of the list. A graphic is created that weights the words by size and color to demonstrate how often they occur.

Some people have gotten downright creative with wordclouds and offer wordcloud generators that let you pick a shape, colors, relative sizes, and more for your wordcloud. I like the Tagxedo website because it lets you do all that, has a ton of eye-pleasing options, and lets you omit words if you want. You can also give it a URL instead of pasting in a bunch of text.

Plus, on Tagxedo if you like the result you can share it on social networks or have it printed on a cup, shirt, or mousepad on Zazzle. (The products are all censored to be G-rated, though — if someone knows how to subvert this, please tell me.)

The image above is a wordcloud generated using the entire 134,000-word manuscript of Mortality Bridge. I omitted “Niko” because it owns the image otherwise (Niko being the protagonist and all like that). I like the color scheme a lot.

I find it interesting that a novel already garnering a reputation for its graphic and visceral intensity doesn’t have much in the way of violence- or profanity-related words in the cloud. In fact, “scream” is the only one I can see here. So I gotta guess it’s not objectionable language but how language is used that hits a nerve.

I find that reassuring.

Just for yucks I separately fed in several novels and looked for patterns — words that cropped up frequently in my work — thinking maybe it’d say something interesting about me. I was surprised to find that the wordclouds are pretty different for each book. The only common word among them (apart from character names and ignored common word such as “and”) was “looked,” which isn’t really surprising. The lack of commonality makes me think that each book has its own context, its own environment, in which different words thrive that contribute to the overall effect each book wants to achieve.

I find that reassuring, too.

There’s something cool about the idea of making framed posters and/or coffee mugs of all my published novels in themed word clouds. I might just do that little thing.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that headline. Mortality Bridge is garnering some wonderful reviews, but a common thread is that my depiction of Hell is violent, disturbing, graphic, and not for the faint of heart. To which I reply, Well … yeah. I don’t think the Land of Eternal Damnation and Torment comes with a PG rating.

That said, here’s some recent Net niceness. Benjamin Wald at SF Revu wrote that

Mortality Bridge has something for everyone: great character-ization, vivid description, pulse pounding action scenes. But it is also more than the sum of its parts. It is a story of human weakness and redemption, a story that is even older than the myths that the novel draws upon, a story we can all relate to. This is an incredible, touching, exhilarating work, and one that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Which I am certainly not gonna take issue with! Read the full review.

Kelly Lasiter at Fantasy Literature found it “Depressing. Disgusting. Brilliant.” Which I also ain’t gonna take issue with, and which my friend Scott liked so much he had it made up on shirts & hoodies at Zazzle. (I think it sums me up so well I’d consider it for my epitaph if I didn’t already want You Kids Get Off My Lawn.)

Ms. Lasiter also wrote that

Mortality Bridge is a very well-written book that made me feel intense emotion. I recommend it, but only to the strong of stomach.

Ms. Lasiter writes that the novel pushed her to her limits, yet she is considering reading it again. Which is a heck of a compliment, when you think about it. Read the full review.

Also in the review department, in a recent review of The Urban Fantasy Anthology the unimpeachable John Clute wrote that “Talking Back to the Moon,” my excerpt from Avalon Burning (which, yes, I’m still diligently working on, thank you for asking), is one of six “superb” stories in the anthology, and that it’s

set in an intricately characterized post-holocaust Los Angeles [and] told in a dense muscular what-next gonzo tone that (one hopes) will not flag in the full novel this tale must be a portion of.

To which I say, first, thank you, John, and second, I hope it won’t either.

I also quite like Mr. Clute’s stipulation that, if a story is to be classified as “urban fantasy” (a category I resist because I like to think I write a fiction that resists categorization), it must “be set in locations that mattered to the stories told. […] If it’s the same story wherever it happens to be set, it isn’t Urban Fantasy.”

As a writer and a reader for whom setting and sense of place are enormously important, I can only say Bravo, Mr. Clute.  Read the full review.

 

In Conjunction with the previously issued List of Words decreed Unlawful in the Titles of Works of Fantasy, the following Words are Hereby Decreed Unlawful in the Text of any Work of Fantasy Fiction:

Thus
Thusly
Beseech
Morrow
Fair (as an adjective)
M’Lord
M’lady
Sire
Anon
Sooth
Troth
Alas
Mettle
Sward
Dirk
Wench
Goodly
Hale
Well met
Hamlet

Overexposure symptoms include numbness, fatigue, loss of mental acuity, shortness of temper, and a fondness for the works of Terry Brooks.  Verbal kelation therapy via heavy doses of nonfantasy literary fiction are indicated. Withdrawal may be severe if exposure has been prolonged.

The Urban Fantasy Anthology (eds. Peter S. Beagle & Joe R. Lansdale) is shipping from Tachyon. Along with stories by all kinds of luminaries in the field, it contains my novelette “Talking Back to the Moon,” which is an excerpt from Avalon Burning, the Change novel I really should have finished by now.

According to the UFA the story is an example of “noir fantasy.” Who knew?

If I’m not mistaken from my reading of Joe Lansdale’s excellent introduction to the section, he doesn’t care all that much for such sub-subgenre labeling. Good for you, Joe. Neither do I. Or for such subgenre labeling. Or really even genre labeling. But clearly plenty of writers have no problem at all with such designations. I imagine they sleep better than I do.

My cumulative fantasy, SF, & historical film viewing, coupled with my attempt to read the latest Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, has made me adopt the following rules:

• Stop reading a science fiction or fantasy story the moment it references other science fiction or fantasy stories. (This ruled out literally 75% of the Year’s Best anthology.)
• Stop watching movies when the aliens, Romans, or Greeks have British accents (unless the movie is itself British, in which case it is merely on probation).
• Immediately distrust a science fiction movie that begins with a crawl. (Crawls are the written-out exposition that opens Star Wars, Blade Runner, and a bajillion other SF movies.)
• Immediately distrust a science fiction or fantasy novel that begins with a prologue in italics, or an ersatz chapter epigraph that ends in a future date and purports to be some kind of report filed post facto.
• Stop reading any novel (especially SF, fantasy, or horror) in which the chapters end in separately paragraphed sentence fragments (Or so he thought.) or ellipses (So why not make two stakes…?)
• For SF, if dialogue is heavily expositional (“As a physicist, Don, you know that the inertial dampers are subject to vibrational distortion within half an AU of a singulartiy,”), or if the page is chock full o’ made up words (Since the Hegemonic Coflation Gralf had been forced to manually grid the vidscreen upward to hi-rez the psy traffic on the prole monitoring apps), I put it back on the shelf. For a fantasy novel, if the dialogue is bullshit Medieval or Elizabethan (“M’lord,” he exclaimed, “the Fjordik barbarians are aswarm the battlements!”), or the page is full of capitalized words (“In the Fargone Lands lie the Darlk Wyrmholds deep within the ancient Fells, where the Scrolls of Nepthar were first beheld by Basalt the Agglutinator”), I put it back on the shelf.

Most of this means I don’t watch a lot of movies or buy a lot of books. And I feel my life is none the worse for that.

I’m delighted to announce that Mortality Bridge will be available in e-Book and trade paperback formats fairly soon. Agreements are being drawn up now, and I believe the editions will be available within a month or two after the contracts are finalized — pretty speedy, considering the limited hardcover was published about six weeks ago.

If you’d like to be notified when the e-book & trade paperback are available, please visit this page on the Mortality Bridge website and enter your email address. (Your info will only be used to notify you — I definitely don’t believe in spamming my readers!

I’m gratified at the reaction the novel has received from readers. If you enjoyed it, please leave feedback on Amazon. (Well, if you didn’t enjoy it I suppose you can leave feedback on Amazon, too. But I cheerfully admit my bias here.)

My essay on what it took to write & publish Mortality Bridge is up on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. Take a look — and thank you, John!

On a related note, I’m delighted to announce that there will be a trade paperback & e-book of Mortality Bridge very soon, probably within a few months. Meantime, you can sign up to be notified when they are released at the Mortality Bridge website. And thanks!

I have not & will not open a Facebook account because I take serious issue with that company’s privacy (or lack thereof) policies, and I basically feel that a fundamental disrespect of and disregard for their user base is ingrained in the company’s DNA. I’m sure that for many users — indeed, for most users — Facebook is helpful, useful, and valuable. That doesn’t mean it ain’t evil.

But to be honest, a more direct reason I won’t traffic with Facebook is that I absolutely don’t understand social networking. I already blog (hi!). I email and IM and SMS and phone my friends. I belong to a few forums. (I don’t Tweet because if you want to follow someone 144 characters at a time, or whateverthehell it is, knock yourself out. I ain’t that guy.)  So I feel that I’ve got a lot of ground covered.

I admit that some friend from third grade who’d be more likely to find me on Facebook isn’t connected to me in any of the above ways. But it ain’t exactly hard to get in touch with me on the web (Googling “Steve Boyett” and “Steven R. Boyett” gets you there pretty darned quickly, albeit from some different directions), and in any case, if my third-grade soul buddy can’t be bothered to look anywhere but on Facebook to find me, I figure he doesn’t really want to contact me all that badly.

So I don’t remotely feel the absence of Facebook in my life.

Enter Google+. I got invites and kind of shrugged, and then took one of them up and opened an account a few weeks ago. I figured, well, Google isn’t necessarily any more concerned about my privacy than Facebook, but they’re at least more transparent in what they’re doing with my information. A bit.

My misgiving is that Google’s motto is “Dont Be Evil.” Some people think that’s a very cool credo. It gives me the creeps. I mean, think about it. What does it tell you about a guy when has to tell himself every morning, “Hey, don’t kill anybody today”? Ya think maybe he kinda always wants to? Yeah, I think so too.

In any case, I opened a Google+ account and quickly ran across some friends & acquaintainces, current & from back in the day. But I find that I have nothing whatsoever to say on my own G+ account that I don’t already either say here or tell my friends. I find that I don’t give a gnat fart in a hurricane about adding “LOLZ — COOL!!!” to the pile of comments on someone else’s post. I find my day is in no way bettered by checking my stream to learn learn about the tasty egg sandwich someone in my circle just ate.  In fact I find the whole thing an enormous waste of time.

I also find it kind of stoopid that you have to have a gmail account to participate in G+ in more than an “I’m getting emails about this” capacity. Does Google want to compete with Facebook or don’t they? I have a Gmail account and I check it about twice a year, largely because I don’t especially like Gmail. I think it’s ugly.

So mostly I log on to G+, look at the thing a minute, and log off. Maybe somebody can explain to me what I’m missing. But I sorta think that what people get from online social networking is utterly absent for me. And I kinda get the feeling my G+ account is gonna get very dusty.

I have released Podrunner: Shift, an iPhone/iTouch app for my Podrunner podcast, which means I have joined the iNation of Appistan, an e-country with a clearly liberal immigration policy.

Podrunner: Shift lets Podrunner listeners change the speed of any Podrunner workout mix to whatever BPM they want, plus or minus 50% of the original BPM — opening up the entire Podrunner catalog to people who want more mixes at their own speed, and putting the mixes into the range of those whose workouts were previously outside of Podrunner’s offerings (e.g., slower walkers, speed runners, bicyclists, spinners, etc.).

Since Podrunner mixes are available from 130 to 180 BPM, Podrunner: Shift gives an effective range of 65 to 270 BPM — yikes.

Podrunner: Shift also has an “Intro Skip” button that lets listeners bypass the two-minute intro and go straight into the mix.

The free version is a self-contained manager for Podrunner listeners, letting users search, sort, download, & play Podrunner mixes directly, without any need to sync via iTunes.

Producing an app was an educational experience. Design- and function-wise it isn’t that huge a deal — except for the core function of beatshifting on the fly, which is pushing right at the limits of what the CPU of these phones can do (and that it can do it at all is amazing). That took forever.

The whole process has got me thinking about interesting ways I can implement apps as a writer. I got some ideas, I tell ya.

The latest issue of SyFy Channel’s Sci Fi Magazine has a review of Mortality Bridge. Mostly it’s a straightforward account of the story, but they also said that it’s a “mad mixture of Orpheus, Faust, and Dante” that’s “vividly rendered.” They also write that it has

expansive, gonzo encounters with the rulers and torments to be found in Hell–all of which are so vividly rendered, at such expansive length, that folks with a low tolerance for such things may want to forego this read entirely.

(That last is true, and though it seems obvious to me, I guess I should point out that there are indeed a lot of vivid and painful torments depicted in this book, its primary location being, you know … Hell.)

They compare it to Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno, saying

“Duh; it has the same source material, Dante. But it’s darker, funnier, and more heartfelt than the Niven & Purnelle work.

And the last paragraph:

Does it end happily? That would be telling. I will say that it ends with a killer-diller final sentence. Again, the language is all. Mortality Bridge is, you should only excuse the expression, a Hell of a read.

Thank you, Sci Fi Magazine.

John Scalzi, long may he wave, has posted a simply wonderful review/recommendation of Mortality Bridge on his ridiculously popular Whatever blog.

As I already owe John a lifetime supply of Coke Zero for his life many kindnesses to me, I have to think of some additional tribute and/or obeisance to make. I know that John just bought a BMW Mini Coop, and my mad scientist scheming wheels are now turning. Moo hoo, hah hah.

And thank you, John.

Some quick notes:

• The French edition of Ariel will be published by Bibliotheque in January 2012. No cover yet, but I will post as soon as I get it. Can’t wait to see it.
• The French edition of Elegy Beach will follow in June 2012. Is it weird to have entire books full of something I wrote that I can’t understand? Yes. (The pundit in me feels compelled to say that my books in English are probably full of writing that no one can understand either.)
• Mortality Bridge is apparently in print and shipping. This is six weeks ahead of what I expected and I’m caught a bit offguard, as I had geared my relentless media onslaught for the end of July. (Curse you for going off the air, Oprah!)
• I am late turning in the next Mortality Bridge audio chapter for the website. Yes. I plead extenuating circumstances.
• My Big Idea essay on Mortality Bridge for John Scalzi’s wonderful Whatever blog will be posted on July 28.

The audio recording of “Chapter 2: Crossroad Blues” from Mortality Bridge is online. I had to replace my normal audio player with a freebie version till I can figure out why my preferred one’s playlist functions aren’t working. Meantime this one seems perfectly spiffy.

In case anyone’s curious about how these get created, it takes me about an hour to record 30 minutes of spoken narration, and probably four to six hours of post-recording editing and audio processing after that. Because of my DJ career I have a decent little home recording setup. I use an MXL condensor mic connected to an ART Studio V3 tube pre-amp and an SE Electronic Reflexion Filter “portable vocal booth” (pictured). I record & post-process using Sony Sound Forge Pro 10 on my laughably large (21″) Acer 9800 laptop.

After the raw narration is recorded I do “gross edits,” which is a colorful way of saying that I delete the bad takes and pick the best of any alternate readings of lines. I mark any pops or clipping that will either need to be eliminated or re-recorded. I mark any lines that just plain didn’t work for one reason or another. Replacement recordings for these are called “pickups,” and are recorded in a later session.

I use a chain of Waves audio processors for post production — a noise gate to get rid of background hiss, a de-esser to squelch hissy “s” sounds that spike the meters & stand out, a de-breath plugin that figures out when you take loud breaths and mutes the volume on these so it isn’t distracting (what an amazing timesaver this thing is), a 16-channel EQ to enrich the lower end & add some sparkle to the top just a tiny bit, and the L3 Multimaximizer to normalize volume levels so that they are more consistent.

I get rid of any extraneous noise — swallows, smacks, pops, thumps, etc.; it’s always surprising how much of that there is even in ideal conditions. I do a “tightening” pass, which is simply eliminating longer pauses and finessing the timing so that it scans more naturally.

I don’t usually add sound effects or apply weird fx to the vocals, but it seemed like a good idea in Chapter One to add a short plate reverb to Jemma’s dialog while she’s in the CAT scan, and a “phone line” EQ to the med tech on the intercom. Since there are three people talking in that scene, it helped to differentiate them, and also to distract from the fact that I probably don’t do a woman’s voice very well. (For Chapter 2 I did some slight panning to add some subtle emphasis to one character interrupting another a few times — along with the different character voices, it helps to distinguish them. A little of that goes a long way.)

I do final volume tweaking and then another light normalizing pass to add a bit of compression and even out the volume levels just a little bit more. I save the file in stereo (most recorded books are mono) as an mp3 at a bitrate of 192K. A lot of the narration you hear online is recorded at 96 and even 48K, which makes for smaller files, but introduces a lot of distortion and artifacts — I can’t stand to listen to that for very long, and I don’t want to make anyone else listen to it either.

I add information & cover art to the ID3 tags on the mp3 file and upload it to the website and then update the site page.

Good lord. Seeing all of the above makes me wonder why I go to all this trouble. And truthfully I have no earthly idea. But then I’m not entirely sure why I write the things in the first place. But why make anything? Cuz it’s fun, it’s challenging, it teaches you, and it feels good to make stuff.

In any case, I’m very happy with how this turned out.

Bill Schafer reports on the Subterranean Press website that only 30 trade copies remain of the Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2 anthology. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy — and if you’ve been meaning to get hold of one, better do it soon!

The Mortality Bridge website just went live. It’s got three sample chapters you can read online or download as PDF, ePub, or MobiPocket files for your e-Reader.

It also has playable/downloadable audio of Chapter One (with more on the way over the next few weeks), and some background information on the novel’s origin and history.

Following publication in July the site will have Google Earth maps of the routes taken at the novel’s beginning and ending. (The middle’s going to have to wait until Google’s mapping cars complete their survey of Hell — I’d say a year or two, given the rate at which Google is digitizing the universe.)

I’m considering putting up some deleted scenes after the novel’s release as well.

I like each of my books having its own website, but since my writing website and blog weren’t designed to be an umbrella over these, I’m starting to feel spread a bit thin. So over the next few weeks I’ll also be updating this blog and my website with a view to centralizing and consolidating a lot of these disparate sites. The book sites will remain the same, but the blog & writing site will be fused and better designed to act as a hub.

Meantime, please take a look at mortalitybridge.com and let me know what you think!

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer, is in print after a slight delay due to a printer’s error attended to by Bill Schafer. He’s a stickler for quality control, which is why the books he publishes are highly prized — they’re gorgeous, and they just plain feel like great books.

Anyway, S:TDF2 (to be all cool-title-sounding) contains my novelette “Not Last Night but the Night Before,” which is in some pretty august company. Check out this table of contents:

Joe Hill, “Wolverton Station”
Jay Lake & Shannon Page, “The Passion of Mother Vajpai”
Kelley Armstrong, “Chivalrous
Glen Cook, “Smelling Danger: A Black Company Story”
William Browning Spencer, “The Dappled Thing”
Steven R. Boyett, “Not Last Night but the Night Before”
Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Hydraguros”
Bruce Sterling, “The Parthenopean Scalpel”
David Prill, “A Pulp Called Joe”
Norman Partridge, “Vampire Lake”
K.J. Parker, “A Room with a View”

S:TDF2  got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. You can pick it up from Amazon for a pretty darned good price. I just got my copies yesterday and it’s an awfully good-looking book.  I’m looking forward to reading it!

So now whenever someone asks me, “What’ s the best meal you’ve ever had,” I get to say, “A can of Spaghetti-O’s and a vanilla pudding pack.”

Cuz then I get to follow it up with, “On the edge of a 2500-foot drop near the top of Yosemite Falls during a two-and-a-half-hour climb.”

Yessir. Best Meal Ever.

What a glorious couple of days. It was so fun to go alone and just explore. And I’ve heard rumors that there are several other interesting, memorable, and attractive geological features worth visiting in my very own country. I may have to investigate this further.

 

I’ve written here and elsewhere about how I have difficulty setting fiction in places I’ve never been. This is especially true for fantasy, which for me apparently needs to be solidly grounded in reality and concrete detail to give a firm foundation to the bullshit I must necessarily shovel.

Some of the sequences in the last act of Avalon Burning take place in the Yosemite Valley, which I’ve never been to. I caught myself trying to fake it through armchair research, and then said, Really, Steve? You’re going to fake Yosemite? Aren’t you the guy who said that the reason you go to these places is for the One True Thing you’ll find there that absolutely and unequivocally sells the rest — that thing you wouldn’t have experienced without going there? Plus, I’ve lived in California since 1984 and claim to love love love it, and I’ve never been to Yosemite? Yeesh.

So: Three days in Yosemite it is! Not purely research — I could definitely use a little getaway. I tend not to be very good at vacations. I always need to be doing something — making stuff, making stuff up, whatever. So making myself stop making stuff takes a bit of effort and some time to decompress. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve actually enjoyed my vacations until I come back from them. Silly, innit?

The Mortality Bridge website will be ready for launch in a week or so. I’m definitely looking forward to that. John Scalzi, bless his heart, sent in the most wonderful blurb ever for the book:

Luminously tragic, darkly funny and deeply moving, all in turns and sometimes all at once. Steven Boyett is one of the very few writers who will make you eager to go into Hell, and not worry about whether you return.

Yowza! John is signing at Borderlands in SF on May 16, and I intend to be there scattering rose petals before him as he passes by bestowing his blessings upon the gathered throngs.

Publisher’s Weekly has just given Mortality Bridge a Starred Review, saying:

Dark, grotesque, and eerie, Boyett’s behemoth reimagining of Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld blends Faust and Dante with Greek myth. Through unusual turns of phrase, violent and bloody imagery, heartrending introspection, and mythic tone, Boyett  explores themes of betrayal, redemption, and personal sacrifice in a tortured landscape of bedlam and pandemonium.

I think that’s Pretty Spiffy. Standout words for me are behemoth and heartrending.

If you’re curious, the entire review is here. I’m a smiling lad today.

So after recording myself talking in my sleep (I have no idea why that sounds grammatically incorrect) for a couple of weeks now, I’ve learned some interesting things.

1. I don’t talk as much as I thought I did. A total of a few minutes a night, but I do seem to say something almost every night.

2. Half of what I say is totally indecipherable. Mubble zubbla wug wug, and out.

3. I seem to be a very nice and polite guy in my sleep. This threatens to make me the polar opposite of Sleeptalkin Man Adam, who is apparently very nice and polite when he is awake. (He is also far more articulate, inventive, and funny than I am in his sleep.)

4. I laugh a lot in my sleep, and I also say, “Oh, thank you very much” a lot. Maybe I’m just insecure and I give myself a lot of compliments in my sleep.

5. Sometimes I sound eerily like my father, who also talked in his sleep. My father was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and had a pretty strong accent. The other night I laughed at something in my sleep and then said, “Shee-it.”

6. I’ve read that sleeptalking does not happen when you are dreaming at all, but in hypnopompic states — that is, the sort of twilight consciousness when you’ve just gone to sleep and especially before waking. Supposedly when you sleeptalk you are actually responding to external stimuli being incorporated into your consciousness.

Far as I’m concerned this last one is bullshit. I’ve heard too many snippets now that caused me to remember a dream I’d had that I hadn’t thought of until the lines triggered it. Last night in my sleep I said, “What? A Samoan narrator?” and started laughing. I remembered that I had dreamed about my boss from back in the Internet Bubble days, Tasi Ponder, a very interesting woman who had been a competitive bodybuilder. Tasi’s mother was Samoan. (Don’t ask me where the narrator bit came from.)

Later in the night I said, “What the hell are you talking about? I never lived with her. She was an actress. She worked really hard.” Hearing that, I remembered that I had dreamed about an old girlfriend, Marilyn Chin, who had indeed been an actress (she was on an episode of Stargate, and I campaigned for her to play Deanna Troi when ST:TNG was in preproduction) and a model. Someone in my dream had been disparaging Marilyn as an actor in some way and I had leapt to her defense.

The best was a couple of nights ago when I not only sang, I sang in a weird voice with this huge vibrato. I realized I was imitating Anthony Newley singing “Candy Man.” Weirder, in my dream I had been telling someone how David Bowie had been influenced by Newley (which is true; even Bowie said so), and I was demonstrating by singing “Candy Man” as Newley but exaggerating the Bowie qualities. (I mashup imitations all the time. The other day I caught myself [not in my sleep, which in a way is weirder, huh?] doing Gollum imitating Christopher Walken, and then did Christopher Walken playing Gollum. It’s a percentage difference. It was pretty funny, though:  Five hunnrid yeeuhz … I carried dis ring … up my ass … an’ now it’s yours … little man.“)

Here’s the final version of the J.K. Potter cover for the Subterranean Press hardcover of Mortality Bridge. Pretty spiffy, I think. Pub date is end of July.

I haven’t been blogging about the book (or anything else!) lately because I’m working on the Mortality Bridge website. It’s coming along nicely and I hope to launch it in mid May. It’ll have sample chapters, Google Earth maps, audio, and more. I’m playing with the idea of an “outtakes” section of cut scenes. It’s a cool feature on DVDs, why not a book’s website?

I’m still not certain about going to Worldcon in August. I better make up my mind fairly soon.

Unbelievably, World Fantasy Con sold out a month ago (probably because Neil Gaiman is the Guest of Honor), so that’s probably out for me. Shame; it’s in San Diego this year. A nice drive and a pleasant town. Oh, well. Of course, I can always go anyway and hang out in the hotel bar. It’s where everything happens anyhow.

I wonder if “camera shy” is an anachronism. It’s hard to imagine anyone under thirty being camera shy. A generation born with the camcorder and raised on increasing megapixels and direct-digital recording to the extent that pictures and videos are routinely recorded by telephones (!) and placed on a global bulletin board, a generation whose fawning and narcissistic Baby Boomer parents insisted on recording every diaper change and Gerber’s yark before handing that torch off to the kid’s own grasping hand — camera shy? Yehright.

So perhaps I set myself on the other side of some techno-immersive media-chic line of demarcation when I say that I am camera shy.

Well, not camera shy.  More like camera conscious. When I know a camera is pointed at me I get self conscious. Either my face tightens up or I start to mug — the headshot equivalent of William Shatner’s acting.

Mostly this isn’t an issue. The world isn’t really clamoring for artful pictures of Steve obscuring famous landmarks, or looking all writerly and authoritative on a convention panel, or whatever. But then there’s the issue of the Author Picture. Publishers want a picture of you on the book jacket, especially if it’s a hardcover, and when you promote the book you want a good headshot for interviews. Then it’s an issue. Mostly because very very few people can get a good picture of me. It’s not their fault; some of them are very talented photographers. It’s that camera-conscious thing.

Now here’s the deal. I’ve gotten to where I want my Author Shot to reflect the book it’s on. To be similar in mood and theme. Because of that, and because I seem to change my look a lot, I want a different author shot for each book.

Enter Ken Mitchroney. He’s been my friend for 28 years. I could write a book about him, and if he isn’t careful, I will. Ken is a director, animator, comic book publisher, modified sportsman-class race car driver, pinstriper, car customizer and pinstriper, friend of and collaborator with the legendary Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, railfan and classic locomotive restorer, steel guitar player, official illustrator for the Oakland A’s and the Baltimore Orioles (he redesigned their logo a few years back), and god knows what else. I have been blessed with great friends with whom I have had the good fortune to work on a number of memorable and creative projects, and Ken is most definitely one of them.

Ken somehow manages to take good pictures of me. He took the author shot for Elegy Beach (the same photo session that yielded the shot on my writing website banner, as well as one of the main shots I used on my podcast newsletters for a long time). So I asked Ken if we could do a shoot for Mortality Bridge. “Sure,” he said, “it’ll be fun.”

I’d planned to come down to L.A. and get some shots in some of the locations in the novel. Then Subterranean moved the pub date up from November to July and I needed to get some shots fairly soon. “No problem,” sez Ken. And next time he comes home to the Bay Area he takes me to the Point Richmond Ferry Tunnel. Which was perfect.

As a director Ken’s very aware of the ambient light throughout the day, and we got there in the late afternoon when the tunnel’s textures would really pop. We took a ton of pix, but it soon became evident what the best location was and we concentrated on that. Cars zooming by and honking in the tunnel, pedestrians and cyclists streaming across the walkway, and us grabbing as many shots as we could in between. Ken saying, “Follow my finger. Don’t look that way, look over my shoulder. Chin up. Smile. Not that much. Hold that.” Click click click.

I mention all of this not out of egotism — believe me, when it comes to photographs of me I got nothing to be egotistical about — but because author pix are one of those things you see all the time but maybe don’t think so much about (and I see a lot of author pix that I don’t think the author thought so much about, either), and it seemed worth talking about what goes into getting one. For me, anyway.

You run all over the location and take about 100 pix to find the 4 or 6 that really stand out. You crop them to accentuate the composition. You color correct and sharpen. You try them in black & white and adjust light & contrast. You bother the crap out of friends like some ophthalmologist (“Better this way, or this way?). Then you pick one and send it off. And with any luck the other contenders can be used as publicity stills.

Here’s the one we picked for the Subterranean Press dust jacket of Mortality Bridge.

Sometimes I talk in my sleep. That means that a part of me is conversing while the thinking part of me — the part I usually think of as me (during the day, anyhow) — is unconscious.  I find this a bit creepy. It’s like being possessed, or operated by remote control, or having multiple personalities, or something.

Yet it’s also perfectly in character as well. My forebrain often has a monkey grip on the rest of me. It lets go during yoga, martial arts, great sex, and great drugs, which of course has made all of those things fairly appealing over the years. Not, you know, that some of them wouldn’t be appealing anyhow. But even during some of these I tend to be pretty high-verbal. (I’ll leave it to you to decide which ones. But you can probably rule out yoga.)

I’ve awakened myself more than a few times, either yelling something or just laughing out loud, and I’m told that if you respond to me while I’m talking in my sleep, I’ll reply. Apparently if I’m contradicted, though, I get all flustered. At least I’m consistent asleep or awake.

I recently subscribed to the Sleeptalking Man blog. If you don’t know what it is, I urge you to run over and take a look. (Go ahead; I’ll wait.) If I lived a thousand lives I could not be as consistently creative, brilliantly narcissistic, and entertainingly belligerent as Adam is in his sleep.

But the blog made me slap my head in one of those “D’oh!” moments. Adam’s wife records his nightly utterances with a voice-activated recorder. Whythehell didn’t I ever think of that?

I immediately switched the little Sony voice recorder I use to record readings & lectures to “voice activation” and set it by the bed that very night. And the next morning I listened to myself say, “Oh, thank you very much!” twice, with genuine pleasure in my voice, as well as “I know I can do it; I saw it in a movie!”

Hearing myself talk in my sleep is both more and less creepy than I thought it would be. More, because I’m saying shit I wasn’t there for. Less, because what I’m saying isn’t all that creepy. In fact, I seem to be kind of a nice guy in my sleep. Perhaps I am the temperamental opposite of Adam, who apparently is a very nice guy while awake. Hmm.

The next night yielded “Oh, no, I read her obituary in the L.A. Times,” and, “Great to see you, man!”

The Sony’s battery doesn’t like to last all night on voice-activation, so I bought a nifty little iPhone App called Audio Memos 2 that records in .wav format and has threshold, limiter, volume, and decay controls along with voice activation and stereo options. I used it last night and it’s even better. (Afterward I learned that there is a dedicated Sleep Talk Recorder app that seems pretty nifty, too. I shoulda known.)

I realized that there some other potential benefits (and pitfalls) to recording yourself in your sleep. Increasing awareness of sleep apnea, for one. Making your partner believe he or she snores like a bathtub sucking down jello, for another. For me, though, I’m fascinated with these little glimpses into brief and unaccompanied journeys a part of me takes most nights.

Here’s the cover for The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale. It contains my story “Talking Back to the Moon,” an excerpt from my upcoming Change novel Avalon Burning.

Beagle & Lansdale are two very different (and extremely talented) writers, and the fact that the anthology contains me, Charles de Lint, Patricia Briggs, and Neil Gaimin gives some indication of the interesting variety to be found there. (Apparently I am “old school” urban fantasy. Who knew?)

Urban Fantasy will be published in August, 2011, from Tachyon Publications.

I’m delighted to present the cover art for the Subterranean Press release of Mortality Bridge. Vincent Chong had originally been slated for the cover but his work schedule was insane, so the artwork was handled by the legendary J.K. Potter.

Here’s the description of the novel from Subterranean’s website:

Decades ago a young rock & blues guitarist and junkie named Niko signed in blood on the dotted line and in return became the stuff of music legend. But when the love of his damned life grows mortally and mysteriously ill he realizes he’s lost more than he bargained for — and that wasn’t part of the Deal.

So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the redlit plain of the most vividly realized Hell since Dante, to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love.

Mortality Bridge remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more in a beautiful, brutal—and surprisingly funny—quest across a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem; and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption.

Saturday night’s reading at FogCon went wonderfully, and thanks so much to everyone who attended.

I read two sections from my upcoming novel Mortality Bridge. The first is a brief soliloquy; the second is from one of the core chapters, “Floating Bridge.” I make an effort to memorize my readings so that I can perform them and not just read them, as I think that people prefer feeling as if they’re being told a story over feeling as if they’re just being read to. And because if people take the effort to attend your reading, I think they should get something out of it that they wouldn’t get if they just stayed at home and, you know … read. I also don’t like looking at a page when there are people there wanting some kind of experience. I like looking at the people.

That said, I was only able to memorize the soliloquy. I had big chunks of the chapter down, too, but I really hate having to refer to the page. There’s something about the contact, the immediacy, the rhythm of having internalized the narrative that makes the experience very different for the audience and for me.

A thin wall separated the reading room from a panel in progress, which accounts for what may seem like inappropriate laughter in places. I cleaned up the audio, but there’s not much I can do about the occasional crowd noise. The video clips are brief excerpts from both pieces.

I’ve gotta say, the reaction to these was pretty terrific.

MORTALITY BRIDGE – Soliloquy [06:45]
[audio:http://www.steveboy.com/audio/steven_r_boyett_-_mortality_bridge_(soliloquy)_-_fogcon_03-11.mp3]
Download MP3 (192K, 9 MB)

MORTALITY BRIDGE – “Floating Bridge” [21:17]
[audio:http://www.steveboy.com/audio/steven_r_boyett_-_mortality_bridge_(floating_bridge)_-_fogcon_03-11.mp3]
Download MP3 (192K, 41 MB)

Publication of Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by Bill Shafer, is only weeks away. This anthology contains “Not Last Night but the Night Before,” my first short work to be published in a loooong time (well, relatively short; it’s a novella), and I’m excited about it.

Bill Shafer of Subterranean has kindly let me put up a substantial preview of the novella. You can download the preview in PDF, ePub, or MobiPocket format by right-clicking the relevant icon, or you can read the preview online on its own page on my website. Enjoy!

READ ONLINE

 

 

I’m delighted to report that the release date for Mortality Bridge has been moved up from November to July. I’ve done a teaser page on the Mortality Bridge website and will be putting more info & goodies up there as pub date nears. This also pretty much guarantees that I’ll be going to this year’s World SF Convention in Reno, and makes World Fantasy Con in San Diego more likely for me as well.

I will be reading from Mortality Bridge at FogCon on Saturday, March 12, at 9:30 PM.

I’m very jazzed about this. But the real Gift from On High came in the mail yesterday: Advance Reading Copies (ARCs, also known as bound galleys) of Mortality Bridge.

It was an odd and affecting moment for a number of reasons. First (and most superficially), because I have a bit of a reputation for being a big proponent of digital media and the possibilities it creates for writers (and also changes that are both liberating and wrenching). I’ve seen this book in electronic form a bunch of times now. Word-processed in at least 30

drafts (not remotely an exaggeration). I typeset it & laid it out in two-up format for a limited edition of 10 handbound copies with endpapers and matching bookmarks that I marbled, back when it was called Ferry Cross the Mercy (a title whose loss I confess I mourn). I’ve seen it professionally typeset and sent to me in PDf from Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press for my input on layout and design, then for a couple of proofreading rounds (and for which I am forever grateful to Bill — do you know how often writers get input on layout & design of the text? Ace was wonderful about this on Elegy Beach, and Bill has been a God Among Men).

So you’d think I’d be all, Oh, look, here are the bound galleys. How nice.

Not even close. Here it was, the thing itself, which I have worked on harder and believed in more completely than anything I’ve ever written. And suddenly I’m holding it. It weighs something, and every ounce of its inconsequential weight in my hand is suddenly worth every bit of effort I have put into it. Will put into it.

I’ve been told it’s an age thing, that below a certain line (let’s say 35), the physical book doesn’t hold any more weight (yuck yuck) than the digital. I’m sure there must be some merit to that. I fully recognize the irony of my arguing for all of this cutting-edge, paradigm-shifting, grassroots-empowering digital technology and yet not feeling that my book is real until it’s its own thing in my greedy little hands.

Which leads me to the second reason the unexpected arrival of the bound galleys was an odd and affecting moment: Because this book is the product of twenty-five years of work (not remotely an exaggeration; I started it in 1986). Because I literally wrecked my life to write it (not an exaggeration, either — the six years it took to write the first draft, this thing owned me, buddy, and it made me work shit jobs and trash relationships that demanded more attention, and wouldn’t let up until it was done.) Because my agent — no slouch in the taste or reputation department (and bless you eternally, Richard) — believed in it utterly and championed it completely. Because as much as I think this is the best thing I’ve ever done, I had to grow into it, had to become something more to step up to what the book wanted to be. And just as important, because ultimately I needed years of distance from it to understand what it needed to be apart from my blind obeisance and obsession. Sometimes you have to be able to cast a cold eye at what you love most to see what it really needs to make it realize itself.

All of that between generic covers without artwork in my hand, all unexpected on a Tuesday. I took it to Starbucks to give it a quick look while I worked on Avalon Burning, and I sat down with my cup of coffee and pulled it out of my book bag and all of a sudden I’m choking up. I mean if I give it half a chance this dam’s gonna break, baby.

I was startled by that. I remain amazed that it’s possible to be startled by how you feel about something. I mean, who is it who’s startled and who is it who’s feeling? And why don’t those two communicate better?

Anyway.

I’ll record the FogCon reading and post it here. And god knows what quivering mass of instant pudding I’ll be reduced to when the final hardcover shows up.

In music, a mashup is when two different songs are made to work together. Sometimes it’s when a DJ plays different records at the same time (instead of simply beatmatching them to transition from one to the other), such as the amazing work by DJ Z-Trip.  Sometimes the mashup is a studio production, involving segments of two (and sometimes many more) tracks aligned and messed with using production software such as Ableton Live.

By way of demonstration, this is about the best example of a piece that stands on its own, is funny, and demands a complete reconsideration of both tracks, that I’ve heard:

I was doing mashups before I even heard the term. One of my first compositions was a mashup of a live version of Bowie playing “Heroes” with the big guitar lead melody from Eno’s “Here Come the Warm Jets.” (Another one was “New York, New York” to the staccato orchestration of the Wicked Witch’s Guards’ “Oh Wee Oh” march from the Wizard of Oz — a good idea, but nothing like Ableton existed at the time to let me line up the beats. Hmm….)

But the main thing I used to do was sing one song while another was playing on the radio. I would find common elements — timing and melody being the biggies, of course — and go at it.  You can interpret the point of this a couple of ways. On the one hand, I was pointing out how amazingly malleable music is. On the other hand, I was pointing out how interchangeable pop music can be. Mostly, though, it was just a lot of fun and a little challenging.

Which brings me to the point of today’s post: Why have I not heard of anyone doing Mashup Karaoke? The form would seem to almost demand it: Instrumental versions of well-known songs could not be better suited to singing some other song over them. Rap’s a natural, of course (to me, mashups with rap vocals are a no-brainer; I put acapellas over other tracks in live situations all the time). But the opportunity to recontextualize, re-present, reconsider well-known music seems irresistible to me.

I wish I could say I invented it, but it’s too natural and inevitable an idea. Someone’s gotta host a mashup karaoke night somewhere!

Will It Blend?

By now there’ve been mashup videos, movies, novels, posters, technologies, commercials, comedy acts – digital media let everything go in the blender. Mashups, sampling, and remixing are an incredible launching point to discuss copyright law and intellectual property, creativity and (or vs.) originality, and a host of creative and technological abilities and legal & ethical issues that face us nowadays. Here’s where we get into the overlap and influence DJing has had on me as a writer. I hope talk about these things a bunch.

UPDATE
Aaaannd no sooner do I post about hit than I find karaokemashup.com — “Singing simultaneously since 2007.” Feh. Neophytes. Gotta give em credit for that “Take the Money and Run” vs “Sweet Home Alabama,” though. I’ve never been able to listen to the Steve Miller without hearing the Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I also see that DNA Lounge in San Francisco held what purported to be the “world’s first mashup karaoke” in 2009. I’m crying here. Still, I’m claiming zeitgeist, y’all.

Rick Kleffel has a wonderful review of Elegy Beach on his Agony Column website.

He also put up the audio interview he did with me after my reading at SF in SF. Rick is an amazingly good interviewer — you don’t know how rare it is to be asked questions (a) that you’ve never heard before, and (b) that you’ve often wished interviewers would ask you. I loved this interview — thanks, Rick!

Just found out Subterranean Press has a pre-order page for Mortality Bridge.  This is the limited hardcover of the best thing I’ve ever written, from a publisher renowned for the beauty and quality of its editions. So order early and often!

No cover art yet (the illo here is just something I slapped together for posts about MB). Trust me, I’ll put the cover up here the moment I’m able to. The Subterranean order page says July publication; last I heard it was November. I think maybe the page isn’t current.

I’m proofing the galleys right now and I am One Happy Camper. I’ll be posting a lot more about this book as publication nears.

I will be at the FogCon SF Convention in San Francisco on March 12 & 13. I’ll be on panels Saturday & Sunday, and will read from Mortality Bridge.

Schedule:
Saturday, March 12:
3:00 – 4:15: “Inside the Sausage Factory”
Pro writers talk about their process: how they write, what works for them, what doesn’t work for them.

4:30 – 5:45: “Happily Ever After? Are You for Real?”
Do happy endings feel unrealistic? Have you run into unrealistic tragic endings? Are “realistic” endings more satisfying to readers? Or do they just get more critical respect?

9:30 – 10:10: Reading from Mortality Bridge

Sunday, March 13:
10:30 – 11:45: “Reclaiming Urban Fantasy — But for Whom?”
Much has been made of the emergence of the “new” urban fantasy — primarily written by women, about women, and focused on a city’s inhabitants rather than the city itself. This opposes the “old” urban fantasy, which was mostly by men and starred men, and was as much about the setting as the characters. Are these two types of fantasy incompatible? How can fans of one form of UF find satisfying reads in the other? Can anyone think of a work that successfully blends the two — or if never the twain shall meet, is that a good thing?

Here I don’t just start a line with a sentence fragment beginning with “and,” I start a whole paragraph with it. Again, not something I would want to do regularly, but here I think I get away with it because of the momentum of the previous paragraph, which is a single sentence delineating the features of the characters’ immediate surroundings.

The next line is the only one here with actual marked corrections. I want to replace “raised border” with a two-syllable word followed by a one-syllable word, so that the rhythm changes from “A small low wooden platform with a raised border” to “A small low wooden platform with a blah-blah blah. The meter of that sentence just sounds better to me, and I will do some searching to find the two words I want there.

Sometimes I ignore these suggestions to myself, either because the words that are there are exactly the right words regardless of their meter, or because I realize I am sacrificing clarity or precision for the sake of meter. But  sometimes that sacrifice is okay. It’s a judgement call — as is every word and punctuation mark in the entire book. For instance, that second sentence omits a comma between “low” and “wooden,” entirely because in this case I don’t want to sacrifice the meter of the sentence to the pause the comma would interject. Here the comma’s absence doesn’t make the sentence ambiguous or confusing. Its addition would be entirely for the sake of form, and I’m happy to dispense with form if it interferes with my intent. Omitting the comma isn’t a rule, either — I’m happy to use the comma if I like what it does to the sentence.  Again, my loyalty is to the line, the image, the flow, and not to some sense of propriety for its own sake.

Finally (yay!), I’ve embedded a note to myself in the manuscript, bracketed and bolded. When I revise the entire manuscript I do a search for brackets to be sure I haven’t missed any of these. It’s easier to do than you think. A friend of mine told me about a book he read that somehow got one of these printed — it slipped past the author, editor, copy editor, and proofreader — where a character in the Navy was described as serving on the [INSERT BATTLESHIP NAME HERE]. This thought gives me the straight-up willies. Talk about showing up in your underwear.

For me this is about the most naked moment in this whole series on revision, because it doesn’t just show some things about my process and how I go about establishing or reinforcing elements of style. It shows how sometimes the most gut-wrenching, emotion-laden, and even linchpin images and incidents in a book can be mostly unknown to the author during the entire process of creation. The author knows he wants something here. He knows its significance and he knows how he wants to establish it, reinforce it, and pay it off later. He trusts his instincts. But what he doesn’t know is what that thing is. So he makes a placeholder. Imagine Tolkien chewing on the end of his pencil and thinking, Should it be a bracelet? A music box?  A paperweight?  ‘The Lord of the Paperweights.’  Hmm. I better just bracket this and come back to it.

So the note here says Chay objective correlative. “Chay” is a character in the novel. “Objective correlative” is a term coined by T. S. Eliot to describe the emotional associations an object can acquire through its context in a dramatic form. The lazy cliche objective correlative used in movies is a music box: Guy gives girl a music box at some point. Later guy is dead and girl finds music box and weeps as it plays. This objective correlative is so hackneyed in Hollywood that the moment someone in a movie gives someone else a music box, he might as well paint a bullseye on his forehead.

In Avalon Burning I have a moment where Chay’s uncle undergoes a ritual death, and he bequeaths several things to Chay, whom he has mentored since the death of Chay’s parents. Among these is an object that I want to evoke a sense of the relationship between them. I want it to have a sense of history and imply that it might have been hard-won. And I want it to be something that vividly conjures that uncle and that association and all those years of learning and struggle and companionship whenever the object resurfaces.

To do this you have to introduce the object properly — it must be revealed in circumstances that are emotionally charged, and it must clearly imply its history without exposition, and especially without cheap sentiment. It must be subsequently reinforced at least once, to provide a throughline in the narrative, and usually in a context that is not emotionally charged, but often more introspective or casual. And finally it must be reintroduced in a way that laminates our associations with Chay and his feelings toward it with our previous associations of how it was originally received and what it originally meant.

In a way it doesn’t matter what the object is. It could be a knife, a bracelet, the last Godiva chocolate bar in the world. The meaning isn’t in the thing itself but in the way we associate it with its circumstance and history. The important thing is to avoid the obvious and cliche, and to carefully pick something that implies an interesting history and isn’t at odds with the role you want it to play. (I hope it is clear here that I am not talking about a “McGuffin,” which is an object that propels a plot [the Maltese Falcon, the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man], and not an object intended to evoke certain emotions through association with events we have witnessed.)

The power of the objective correlative is in our brain’s ability to abstract. “Abstraction” may be defined as “the ability to consider a thing apart from itself.”  We are able to abstract to the extent that we actually confuse a symbol for the thing it symbolizes, even in direct contravention of the original thing. Think about the paradoxical irony of passing laws against flag burning. A flag is a piece of cloth. Burning it does nothing to your country. Burning an American flag manufactured in China would be comical without the emotional associations with which the flag is imbued. But passing a law to prevent the burning of an American flag (manufactured in China) essentially contravenes a fundamental law of the country the flag symbolizes (freedom of expression).

All of this litigation and emotion and controversy exists entirely because of our ability to abstract. To make virtually anything into a symbol. Artists take advantage of this by working carefully to lend a sense of meaning to chosen objects. This is the bread and butter of a propagandist (and there’s a case to be made that artists are propagandists, in that they are using media to manipulate audiences toward some goal).

In the case I’ve noted on the page I’m very publicly revising, I simply want something that will add a solid emotional line and payoff in the book, a tangible way to concretely represent some emotional situations without resorting to exposition (which would carry no emotional weight at all) or forced sentimentality (which is so cheaply laden with lazy adjectival manipulation that it is off-putting [though, unfortunately it also seems to work for a lot of audiences]). I simply don’t yet know what that object is. But I will. The book itself will tell me.

There is a lot of power in the notion that you can turn a dinner fork into something that can make an audience gasp, or cry, or mourn, when it is produced. If you do it right.

The handwritten —-| symbol before “Their” is my way of saying “no break” — that is, join this up with the |—- symbol that ends the previous paragraph. It’s useful when you’re cutting stuff and joining sections.

I added “to her halting drone” after “listened” to provide more concrete detail and accentuate the rhythm. I deleted “stacked” as redundant and am asking myself if I want to add “compiled” after “wood.” This would make the portion go from “and they took in the stacked bonfire wood behind her” to “and they took in the bonfire wood compiled behind her.” I see why I want the change — it just plain sounds better. I also see why I bracketed the insertion at “compiled.” I’m telling myself I want a word here but I’m not crazy about “compiled,” probably because it doesn’t feel as accurate as I’d like, and also because that “c” really sticks out. But definitely a two-syllable word belongs there.

I indicate that I want a three-syllable word — [_ _ _] — to replace “behind.” The reason is clearer if you say it out loud (I’ll replace it with in back of as a placeholder for now):  “upright and firm behind that” vs. “upright and firm in back of that.”

For the same reason I also want to replace “objects” with a one-syllable word — [_]:  “enigmatic offerings and objects accumulated” vs. “enigmatic objects and stuff accumulated” (with “stuff” as a placeholder).

I suppose there are grounds for saying I’m more obsessed with rhythm than is necessary for prose. But all language has some built-in musicality, different no doubt for each. I only speak English, but I always find in it an underlying musicality that I want to make more overt. It happens to me when I speak sometimes but much more often when I write. The rhythm owns the line. I’ve wondered sometimes if this is because I’m not a terribly fast reader. I don’t just see the information on the page the way you need to if you want to haulass through it. I hear the words in my head, sound them out.

I can play devil’s advocate and make the case that, since writing is communication, if the rhythm takes precedence to the extent that meaning is lost or obscured, the communication has failed. And that’s absolutely true if you think of the words as printed symbols and not as sounds. But music is communication. And I think I’m imparting information through the use of rhythm in a musical sense. Even more, I think that, unlike the printed word, such communication isn’t received in a terribly rational, forebrain way, but in a deeper, more emotional way. Somewhere beneath articulation. And that’s okay with me, because in the arts, words themselves — stripped of inflection, nuance, facial expression, tone, the support of any other medium — are rational vessels often laboring to convey emotional cargo.

Music mostly works the other way around: it goes straight to the heart without the intervention of the brain (if you’ll pardon the metaphors; it’s all happening in the brain, of course). The exception to this is jazz, notoriously the most cerebral of musical forms. Given how I am reconstructing language conventions for my own purposes you’d think I’d love jazz, but mostly I don’t. I appreciate it but I don’t like it. But I’ll definitely be using some jazz metaphors as I talk about the differences between ignoring rules, adhering to rules, and breaking the rules. Jazz is, if I may be glib here, music for musicians. It’s about messing with the pocket, the timing, not just playing the groove but playing with the groove, with the idea of groove.

Fiction can’t help but live in its head. I want it to listen to its heart too, but without resorting to the tawdry tricks of cheap sentimentality that often demonstrate how cheaply audiences are willing to be bought.

This is all starting to seem a bit of a manifesto, which was never my intent. And for all I know I’m not making a lick of sense anymore. But lately something in me feels compelled to demonstrate there is some kind of madness to my method. Believe me when I tell you I don’t sit back and marvel at my intent. I don’t want to put technique at the forefront of feeling or meaning (and that’s why I don’t like a lot of jazz). What I marvel at is that all of this happens automatically, seemingly without volition. I suppose it’s just the often-accessed and -trained series of muscles and sequences and reactions that an Olympic high-diver develops over countless hours of training and brings to bear in five seconds of beautifully configured descent. She doesn’t think about anything once she leaves the platform. She reacts. Her body does it.

The marvel for me, I guess, is how much can be internalized, rendered to a process I call neural grooving. And how much of that can be so abstract as the kind of things I’ve been talking about.

Here the focus changes to Bob, a centaur from Elegy Beach. Clearly the phrasing of the first sentence deliberately departs from a more standard, declarative narration. A flat statement would be “Bob raised a hand and the tribe stopped behind him.” Nothing wrong with that. But once again it’s a line that rises to the level of utility and no further. The interjection of rhythm into the sentence continues the sense of musicality, and I like that it lets the sentence and the action end on the word “stopped.”

There’s a sort of archaic tone to the line as well. I might as well just say that I want the narrative itself, not just the events it depicts, to rise to the level of myth. Whether or not it succeeds is in a way not really up to me. But to some extent I don’t really care about that. The point is to aim high. I’d rather do that and fall short than feel some satisfaction in the security of reiterating what everyone already does.

So after that comes one of my patented sentence fragments: “The sight before them beautiful and sad and wholly unimagined.” It’s funny, I can explain a lot about what I do to achieve certain effects, and why I go about doing it, even though I’m not really conscious of the underlying reasons at the time I do it (what, you think all this analysis goes on as I write this stuff? Good god no. That would be horrible). But I’d be hard pressed to explain why this sort of unpunctuated run-on fragment crops up all the time in my work. Lemme think about this a bit. But not too much.

So I cut “legend” out of the next sentence cuz it goes too far. One word too many, especially given the odd construction. Even with it out, the phrasing of “The girl their former nightmare sat upon the ground” demands a certain attention from the reader. It’s basically a dependent clause integrated into the sentence through the absence of punctuation. But if I’d set it apart the way most proofreaders would mark the thing up — “The girl, their former nightmare, sat upon the ground,” I’d end up with something that feels clumsy, with no rhythm whatsoever, and rendered merely descriptive. What an anvil drop of a sentence that would be. Argue about commas and people think you’re some kind of micromanaging OCD prima donna. But look at at the difference in that sentence without the commas. My loyalty is to the beauty or effectiveness of the sentence, not to its grammatical correctness.

Okay, so: Interestingly, I defragment the next line and render it grammatically correct. I think probably because too many fragments in a row starts to sound like a grocery list, but also because it’s a long sentence, and a long sentence fragment is kind of unfair, as the reader starts looking for subject/verb/predicate. (Well, initially readers look for these in short fragments, too, but I kind of teach them how to read me as I go. I don’t mean that to sound didactic, I simply mean that I try to ensure that the narrative provides clues to its interpretation: the cipher contains the decoder.)

Adding the word “real” doesn’t really add anything to the sentence in terms of meaning or focus — but it makes the rhythm more appealing (really). I changed this sentence still further later on.

I added a phrase to the last line because I didn’t like the clunky way it ended:  “and her intent was clear.” Clunk. I also didn’t like the way the narrative intrusion stood out. But “and they all stood mute amazed and honored” really wakes that sentence up, and doing it without commas causes a kind of image fusion, a connective association, between the words “mute” and “amazed” that wouldn’t exist if it were punctuated.  “They all stood mute, amazed, and honored” is just a list. There’s no music there. No resonance. No sense of mythic aim.

No poetry.

I won’t attempt to define poetry here (or anywhere). But I will say this: I want poetry in my prose. I want the poet’s sensibility present there. Because despite all the technique I’ve talked about, poetry isn’t in the words or their order or the way they are or aren’t punctuated. It isn’t in the sequencing and juxtaposition of images. It isn’t even in the meter or the sound. Poetry doesn’t happen on the page at all. It happens before the words ever get there. Because poetry is a way of looking at the world. It’s a lens that colors (or distorts, or diffracts, or magnifies) the language that goes through it.

What I’m talking about when I talk about writing or revision, when I vivisect those lines and show my tricks — elegant or shabby, obvious or invisible — is poetry.

Here I’ve simply transposed the two sentences because the order makes better sense: She hears them coming and it spurs her to action. Now the sentences have momentum, whereas before the correction they were just a series of details.

Note the absence of quotation marks in the dialogue following that. I hope my publisher doesn’t get too mad at me about this.  To be honest I’m torn about whether I should talk about why I avoid so much punctuation, because it just invites argument and distracts from the reasons why I avoid it in the first place. It would also have to be a separate post or two. I have to think about this.

Starting two sentences in a row with “and” isn’t something I’d usually do, and is definitely something best not done often. I did it here because it ends a section and leaves off on a note (literally) almost cinematic in its segue to the next sequence. Which we’ll get to tomorrow.

Okeydoke, so above “did” I’ve got “had done” as an alt suggestion mostly because I’m questioning the tense in a recollective indirect discourse (which is when the narrative is simulating an internal monologue but remains outside the character, sort of looking over her shoulder).

That single bracketed underline after “her” — [_] — is my way of telling myself that I want a one-syllable word here. The sentence has a certain meter, and that’s partially why I’m looking at that tense change and that added one-syllable word. (If I read it out loud with the corrections the preferred meter becomes apparent:  “How much of what transpired had done so through her blank coercion?”)

I also welcome the opportunity to have a word that modifies “coercion” by rendering it either more specific or more evocative. It’s another example of how to leave your fingerprints on a page: Something like “dread coercion” or “glad coercion” (though neither of those is gonna go here) helps render a worldview, combines words not normally put in sequence to convey a more unique sensibility.

After “It would be terrible to be her” I’ve inserted a bunch of stuff to elaborate on the point, because the narrative is referring back to an exchange that’s a while back, and while it’s nice to think your readers have photographic memories (and to be honest, sometimes I do rely on an ability to remember an image or a certain sequence of words. The technical term for this is “trust”), when it comes to more abstract or conceptual details it’s sometimes a good idea to reinforce their presence when they show up again. I note that I’ve set a three-syllable marker [_ _ _] above “Whatever,” which tells me that I want another word besides “Whatever” here. The arrow at the end of the insert means I’ve continued the insertion on the back of the page.

A long time ago I adhered fairly strictly to proofreader’s marks and proper manuscript format regarding corrections. Now I realize that these notes are to me and no one else, and it made sense to evolve a kind of shorthand that would help me on revision. I use syllable markers and placeholders (if I bracket words in the MS it means I’m not sure about the words here and I should look for a better or more precise way of saying what the bracketed words say. Sometimes I redline), marginal notations like “awk” for “awkwardly phrased” or “cons” for “consistency” (meaning I need to search the MS to be sure the indicated details are consistent throughout). And so forth.

So right off the bat I see “lineaments” and “nascent” in the first line. I think to myself, Okay, Steve, are you sure you want to fire them there big guns? And both in one sentence? Cuz the noise they make might drown out the other words there. And do you really want to send a percentage of your readers running for a dictionary? But “lineaments” is exactly the word that fits here. “Features” is too general, too imprecise, which is a shame because a two-syllable word there would maintain a better rhythm. (Listen to the beats:  “She nodded at the blah-blah of this nascent shrine.”) Same with “details.” “Characteristics” would pretty much own the entire sentence and turn any semblance of rhythm into something that sounds like sneakers in a dryer.

I like “nascent” because it’s a two-syllable word that fits the meter and says just what I want it to say. “New” would be ugly — a one-syllable word here would sound like when you’re going down a flight of stairs and you expect one more step but there isn’t one. “She nodded at the lineaments of this blah shrine.”  Whump! And it would create a possible implication that there’s another, older shrine, which there ain’t. What I’m going for here is “She blah-blah at the blah-blah of this blah-blah shrine.”

By now it ought to be apparent that the sound and meter of the words together are as important to me as what they mean or how concise they are. In Steve’s world, good writing sounds good. And I may as well just say it: In Steve’s world, sometimes how it sounds is more important than what it means.

Okay, so let’s look at the actual markings on that sentence. The stet version (that is, the version prior to marked correction) basically tells you “she nodded at this and turned her back.”  But that’s an implication of simultaneity, like “He walked and chewed gum.”  Whereas what I’m really trying to say is that she nodded, then subsequently turned her back. I have arguments with myself about ways to go about this. I could write what I just told you:  “She nodded, then subsequently turned her back.” If your view of fiction writing is that it’s basically a list of events, then that line is perfectly serviceable. In my view, if that’s your view of fiction, then you should write Ikea assembly instructions. Because however precise and concise it may be, it’s also ugly as hell. A turd in a punch bowl. I don’t want anything to do with it.

But once your criteria go beyond the utilitarian, the merely descriptive, you start having to make decisions. My choices here are basically “she nodded and then turned,” “she nodded, then turned,” and “she nodded, and then turned.” In my corrections I picked none of the above, opting for dropping both comma and “and”:  “she nodded then turned.” I know why I did it: The elimination of a comma and the word “and” gives the sentence a much nicer rhythm and flow. I also know that I’ve changed the correction on a subsequent revision because of the likelihood of the reader tripping on the word “then” without a helpful comma or “and then.” But what I won’t do here is put in a comma followed by “and” even if it’s grammatically correct to do so. Because it fucks up the way the sentence flows.

I’ll talk in a later post about why I drop a lot of punctuation. This post is already much longer than I’d intended.

Okay, so:  “The copper javelin before her.” I like the meter and I like the fragment. I use a lot of sentence fragments. Once again not grammatically correct. Once again I don’t give a shit. My loyalty is to the line itself.

Next sentence is also a fragment:  “Painted dots and painted eyes.”  I like the rhythm and I don’t mind the repetition of the word “painted.” Sure, taking the second occurrence out is more concise. It also takes all the air out of the sentence, and makes it unclear whether the eyes are in fact painted as well.

Above “Painted dots” I’ve drawn a line, and above the line is written “Dots and lines and”. This is my way of indicating an alternative. I’m leaving a note to myself that I might want the sentence to read “Dots and lines and painted eyes.” I can’t decide right now, but when I go to enter these changes into the computer, the decision is almost always clear to me. Sometimes you need some distance.

Okay, last sentence [insert thunderous applause]:  “A mile away the tribe had seen her now and had slowed.” Good god what a clumsy clunky sentence.  That “now” just sits there like a fart in church, don’t it? So I cut it.  I also cut the “had” but then changed my mind, both for the rhythm and the parallel construction. (I write “ok” instead of “stet” cuz it doesn’t take as long.)

So we started with this:

She nodded at the lineaments of this nascent shrine and turned her back to them and sat. The copper javelin before her. Painted dots and painted eyes. A mile away the tribe had seen her now and had slowed.

And ended with this:

She nodded at the lineaments of this nascent shrine then turned her back to them and sat. The copper javelin before her. Dots and lines and painted eyes. A mile away the tribe had seen her and had slowed.

Maybe the changes don’t seem like big improvements, or worth all this verbiage. But I think (or at least I hope) that if you read them out loud, you can hear the difference. (I’ll cheat and tell you that I reinstated a comma after “shrine” on the next pass.)

I’m sure I’ll get comments saying, I liked the first way better, or Why don’t you say it this way? I would like to pre-empt these by saying that my point is not to crowdsource my work but to try to present a kind of cross-section of the decisions I make in the revision process that contribute to an individual sense of style.

When opportunity presents itself in a writing class or workshop, I like to teach a section on revision. I’ve never really seen a class devoted to revision, other than the ones I teach, and it surprises me, as I think revision is where the real writing takes place. And even if you think that first draft is the real creative nugget, it’s still important to know what to look for when you re-read the thing with an understanding that you intend to inflict it upon an unsuspecting world.

For classes, I like to print out a page of first draft onto a transparency sheet and revise with a Sharpie using an overhead projector. But as overhead projectors are becoming fossils in a digital world, I guess I will have to come up with some other way. It’s kind of a weird dynamic when I do this. I mean, I’m supposed to be an authority, teaching starry-eyed writers about Art and The Business, and all like that, and here I am basically standing in front of them in my underwear. Cuz that’s what first draft can look like. I’ve had students actually laugh out loud when they realize that I make some of the same dumb mistakes on first go-round that they do.

But I also think that’s one of the implicit values in the lesson — that professionals aren’t standing on some Olympian height creating perfectly polished prose on the hurling of a single thunderbolt of inspiration (though, okay, yeah, it happens like that sometimes). The idea is to impart the notion that one of the duties of a professional is knowing how to recognize and remove those mistakes, and how to re-read his own stuff with a view toward improving every word that’s there — cutting or expanding, rearranging lines, reordering words, substituting words for the sake of meter, drawing threads of theme and sound and image through the narrative, ensuring naturalistic dialogue, ensuring that the point of the scene is not lost, and much more.

So I thought it would be fun and maybe instructive to talk for a few days about how I revise. I’ll use a marked-up page from Avalon Burning, and I’ll try to explain why I made some corrections the way I did. In my view, all of these decisions are as contributory to the perception of style as the decisions that first put the words on the page. Maybe there’s an element in here that’s too much like a magician revealing how he does his tricks. I don’t know and I don’t care. This shit isn’t magic, it’s work. It’s not just a matter of just tell what happens, it’s a way of looking at language.

Here’s the marked-up page. I’ve revised it even further since, but we don’t have to worry about that now (though it might be fun to show how far I take it, maybe focusing on this one stretch of prose throughout the entire writing process. Hmm. Lemme think about that.). I’ll go over it a piece at a time in subsequent posts. If you think this is about as exciting as watching glaciers drag race, I won’t be insulted if you take a pass.

This is a piece of coal from the Titanic‘s debris field. Around 1994 a company called RMS Titanic, Inc., took out an ad soliciting pre-orders of these, claiming they would use the revenue to fund a scientific expedition to Titanic, and claimed the ship itself would not be disturbed. Then they promptly used the money to obtain sole salvage rights and sell berths on a cruise ship that sailed to the site, where passengers witnessed another ship the company had hired make a total botch of trying to raise a massive section of the hull, which promptly broke loose and planed back down far from where it had originally been.

Then they mounted a traveling exhibit of items they had pretty much indiscriminately raked up from the debris field. They charged admission, naturally.

I wrote them a really nasty letter because I felt my money had been ill-gotten and used for this debacle. And I admit I have really mixed feelings about the fact that I think that it is so cool that I own something from Titanic.

This is a piece of trinitite. That’s the name given to the desert sand that was fused into glass by the heat from Trinity, the world’s first nuclear detonation, in White Sands, New Mexico, in July 1945. So yes, I own an artifact produced by the first atomic explosion.  And no, I am not going to tell you where I got it, except to say that I did not buy it.

This is the Gregg Press hardcover edition of Samuel R. Delany’s novel Dhalgren. I’ve posted at length about the novel itself, but the short version is that Dhalgren is the book that made me want to write for a living. It has a pretty solid claim as science fiction’s first legitimate bestseller; as I recall over a million copies of the paperback original sold when it first came out.

But there were only 300 of the Gregg Press hardcovers produced. These puppies go for about $1500 nowadays — if you can find one. I didn’t buy mine. But I ain’t telling you how I got it. (Okay, okay: It was a present from someone who did some serious dickering & favor-trading to get hold of a copy.)

I have several books that would be hugely valuable if it weren’t for the fact that my books are read. I beat the shit out of them and I don’t feel remotely bad about it. But I wuv this thing. It’s my fav-o-rite material possession. You can’t have it.  Don’t even touch it. In fact, I think you’ve been looking at the picture a little too long now.

This is a fragment of the Zagami meteorite,a 40-pound hunk of rock that fell from the sky and into a cornfield in Zagami, Nigeria, in 1962. What makes it unusual is where it’s from.

A billion years ago, give or take a few, there was this piece of volcanic basalt just laying around on the surface of the planet Mars. Things went going pretty swell until about 2.5 million years ago, when a comet or asteroid slammed into the surface of the planet so hard that it blew chunks out of the atmosphere entirely — including our little basalt hero. It went tumbling through space for a couple million years and 35 million miles (give or take a few), until October 1962 when it  landed 10 feet away from a farmer in Nigeria. Gasses from veins of the original impact melt scattered throughout the meteorite matched the atmopsheric composition of Mars.

Yeah. I own a piece of Mars, beeyotch.

(A coda to Zagami’s long journey that I find absolutely wonderful: A little piece of the Zagami meteorite was only on Earth for 34 years — because a geology professor named Phillp Christensen attached it to the plaque on an instrument on board the Mars Global Surveyor. That’s right: He sent it back. Little Zagami is, best I can determine, history’s first recorded interplanetary round trip. And hardly anyone knows about it. That’s heartbreaking, I swear.)

Yeah, I know, this looks like the last picture. It’s a fragment of lunar tektite, a little sliver cut from a piece of impact ejecta that probably landed in Antarctica. Or, to make it simpler (and much more cool-sounding): I own a piece of the moon.

Of course it’s entirely possible these last two objects are crap some dude found in his back yard and shucked off on some sucker. But I bought these two items from a meteorite dealer, and all meteorite dealers have to trade on is reputation.

There are some other things I admit I really really want. One is a nice piece of cuneiform. I just think it’s amazingly cool to own a piece of the first writing. I don’t care if it’s a laundry list. I would go nuts if I had a protohominid fossil. A teacup from Titanic.

Some people have told me they think my passion for these things is dorky. Maybe so.  But I’d rather be a dork than be immune to the poetry of an object’s history.

The signature pages for the limited edition of Subterranean 2 arrived the other day, all 500 of em.  I spent two sessions putting my John Hancock on the dotted line.

I envy people who dash out some distinctive, elegant scrawl.  Not only does it look all grownup and fancy when they do it, but they can get through that stack of signature pages in about ten minutes. But something in me doesn’t understand a signature that doesn’t look like the name it represents. My signature clearly says Steven R. Boyett. I think maybe I’m unimaginative.

My signature is also laughably ornate.  I sign it very slowly, and if I think about it too hard I swear to god my hand mutinies and I make some mistake.  It takes forever for me to get through these pages.

In my twenties my signature was hilariously over-the-top girlie.  It had loops and curlicues and looked like some kind of wireframe sculpture of a rollercoaster.  It took me about a day and a half to sign it.  Then I did my first stack of signature pages, for Dave Schow’s Silver Scream anthology.  It took me about four hours to sign 500 pages and my left hand was killing me by the end of it. That was the end of that: I set out to change my signature.

What I ended up with looked a lot different and was faster to sign, but still light years from some quick and distinctive scrawl. Oh, well.