Exile on Ninth Street

New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):

Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:

• The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
• Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
• Wild Cards, Volume One, edited by George R.R. Martin (A collaborative novel-in-stories about alien viruses, a foppish alien, jokers—and maybe some smoker and midnight tokers—and reluctant superheroes know as Aces. Currently reading this novel. Interesting that SF and fantasy novelists, as well as other genre novelists seem to collaborate and create. Something not often seen with “literary” fiction.)
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Who wouldn’t want to be as cool, well-fed and well traveled as Bourdain?)
• Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Metaphase by Vonda McIntyre (third in her Starfarers series)
• The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
• Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass (second in her Edge series)
• Marsbound, Starbound and Earthbound by Joe Haldeman (a trilogy)
• Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time by Jordan Rosenfeld
• World-Building: A Writer’s guide to constructing star systems and life-supporting planets by Stephen L. Gillett
• A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty
• Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

In the SF Masterworks series:

• Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)
• Gateway by Frederik Pohl
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (looking forward to reading this after reading the original short story)
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
• The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Books Read:

• The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman (Time keeps on slipping, slipping . . .)
• Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
• The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
• Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don’t expect Will Smith’s movie I Am Legend  (2007) if you read Richard Matheson’s original 1954 novel. As with any novel-to-film adaptation, directors take poetic license: the film’s vampires, for instance, are soul-less brutes.

Though the film holds up on its own, it’s no match for the novel.

Robert Neville is the only human left in a post-apocalytic world inhabited by vampires. To survive, he locks himself in a boarded, locked and garlic-filled home at night, and stalks around a devastated Los Angeles killing the vampires by day.

While the novel has vampires—a horror staple—it works just as well as science fiction (it’s in fact part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, the books of which I’ve been trying to find and read, in part as another reading project, as well as to learn from SF masters). The vampirism, Neville discovers, is a disease, and an apparently uncurable one.

And though Neville struggles to understand the disease, it turns out (spoiler alert) he’s the legend of which the novel’s title speaks.

The novel is a dark but philosophically powerful book, ultimately humanistic in outlook, despite its ending.

View all my reviews

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Through the eyes of protagonist William Mandella, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War gives readers a glimpse of what war in deep space and on distant planets might be like. It’s a theme taken up by countless science fiction writers — Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card, to name a few — and no telling how many SF films and tv shows.

Though set in the far future, this novel is comparable to any classic war novel. It’s gritty and unromantic. And given that Haldeman is a Vietnam vet, The Forever War is a novel as much about that war as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

The war Mandella fights against an alien enemy millions of light years from Earth has a spurious beginning — its Gulf of Tonkin incident. The soldiers in Mandella’s unit fight in hostile environments against an often unseen enemy.

Because of the phenomenon of time dilation caused by light speed travel, soldiers age months while Earth ages centuries. When they return home, they find the word vastly changed, an almost completely different culture: one ravaged by overpopulation as well as wars and violence. An experience not unlike that many Vietnam vets had upon their return to the United States. Haldeman in interviews talks about the feeling the went on without him while he was overseas.

The novel, however, is more than a metaphor of Vietnam: Haldeman is prescient about such things as overpopulation, violence and more tolerance of gays.

View all my reviews

Most of Walter Mosley’s advice in This Year You Write Your Novel is standard to almost every book on writing or writing class, explaining point of view, going over dialogue and description, and expounding the merits of showing versus telling.

The bulk of the book covers these elements of fiction in brief but useful segments, perfect for reference and reminders. Though brief, they are insightful.

His segment on showing versus telling, for instance, is one of the better ones that I’ve read. Mosley concisely explains why showing is preferable, in most instances, to telling.

I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.

For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic Moby Dick. Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”

. . . .

“His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.

The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately, it attempts to include the reader by engaging the reader on a personal level.

Besides drawing the reader into the novel’s world, Mosley explains, narrative that shows adds a “human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.”

Mosley’s book is also one of the first I’ve read that encourages fiction writers — or any prose writer for that matter — to study poetry seriously. Poetry teaches the writer, Mosley says, to appreciate the subtleties of language.

“Of all writing,” he says, “poetry is the most demanding . . . .In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.”

I was also impressed by Mosley’s differentiating between intuitive writers — those who basically plunge in and discover the story as they write —-and structure writers, who know the whole story from beginning to end, and don’t plunge in until they know it.

Some writing books, as Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, favor one method over the other. Butler suggests to some extent that the intuitive approach is the only approach that will allow a writer to tap into the creative zone necessary to write without restraint and create art.

“The intuitive and structured methods are equally valid,” Mosley says.

Truthfully, Mosley says, there are probably few writers who are strictly intuitive or structured.

One of my favorite sections of the book is a digression on genre. Mosley doesn’t stash any genre into the literary suburbs. It’s a refreshing outlook—in a refreshing book on writing — not always present in other books on writing, which seem to encourage writers to aspire only to literary writing, whatever that is.

“A novel is a novel is a novel,” he writes. “A crime story is a novel. A romance is a novel. . . .No one who is serious about literature would dismiss One Hundred Years of Solitude for being a fantasy. No one would write off The Stranger because of its courtroom or crime details.”

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Which do you prefer? Short stories? Or full-length novels?

To be diplomatic, I have to say I like both forms. That said, I like novels best. I like the depth of character in novels. I like subplots and side stories. I like digressions. I like getting involved in the writer’s world — most of the time: sometimes, of course, you can’t wait to get out!

At the same time, a good short story can be as involved as any novel. The characters can be well-developed. There can be subplots — though brief — and side stories. I am also fond of story collections and like hybrids such as the novel-in-stories.

A favorite form is the novella that lingers on the edge of genre.

OK, MSN has a fun Lit Lover’s quiz. How well do you know novel first lines. I got a 9 out of 10. I’m embarrassed about the one I missed. If you want to know, ask me in the comments.

After a disappointing attempt to read T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, I set that novel aside for Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

If you’ve read a short story collection or anthology in the past 10 or 15 years or so, you’ve probably read the lead story/chapter of this novel in stories, its cadenced sentences that lists objects, names, equipment, etc., that an infantry platoon in Vietnam carries through an episode of the war, the objects, etc. that define and characterize them and their experience as the war weighs itself upon them.

The rest of the stories/chapters follow from that story and congeal into a coherent narrative that follows the platoon’s experience during, before and after the war.

The novel itself uses postmodernist elements in the course of the narrative — many of the stories are narrated by a writer named Tim O’Brien who is reflecting about his war experiences about twenty years after the fact. From what I understand, much of what the narrator Tim experienced is similar to the real experience of Tim O’Brien the writer. And then the narrator plays Pilate, with his own “What is truth?” question in the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story.”

All in all, an excellent meditation not only on a particular war — a war that has had a long reach, especially in the way it polarized and still polarizes American culture and politics — but on war in general, and does what the best war novels do: it puts faces and names on the casualty lists and the abstract politics and history.

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On a lighter note: Always read the material on the dust jackets of your books. Four years after receiving Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel as a gift, after reading it twice, and after constantly referring to it and picking it up, I found on the dust jacket a companion Web site for the book:

www.smiley100.com

As you may or may not know, this book inspired my own 100-novels reading project. The Things They Carried is the 68th selection read for that project.

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Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
The first thing I ever read relating to the Arthurian mythos was Hal Foster’s Sunday newspaper comic strip Prince Valiant. Years later was the movie Excalibur. And in college I read Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. Recently I began reading The Once and Future King, and about halfway in decided to set it aside. It’s considered a classic, and the first section of the novel inspired the Disney movie the Sword in the Stone. The novel is epic in scope, following King Arthur’s life from young boy who yanks Excalibur from the stone to become king to the decline of the round table and Camelot and the death of Arthur. Curiously, White narrates the novel as he’s a museum guide, and it abounds in anachronisms. The device is intriguing, and lends to comic effect. But, overall the novel lost me. It doesn’t seem to hold up, especially its “war is bad” preachiness — the first sections of the novel were published as World War Two was beginning. Anyhow, it wasn’t an engrossing novel. Excalibur is a much better treatment of the Arthurian story.

View all my reviews.

I haven’t published a book . . . yet. But that’s my ultimate goal as a writer, and I’m not that sort of person who says he’s writing a book, but never does any writing. My inner Stewie badgers me enough to keep writing.

I do have a book, a novel, or rather a second/third draft — I’ve lost count of the revision. I’ve been working on the novel since 2005, when I began writing it. I finished a second draft, a full rewrite in 2007.

Since then, I had a beta reader read the manuscript, not a professional editor, but someone who might actually read the novel if it were published. She loved it, so I married her.

My next next step in the process — submitting the novel to an editing service — seems to get delayed every year for some reason or another (lack of money for various reasons the main culprit).

Anyhow, I did submit the first few pages for a free sample to one editing service recently, after I corresponded with debut novelist Karen Harrington about the value of using an editing service.

Even just that sample edit has given me valuable insights into the novel, and I’ve begun a third revision, restructuring the novel. Diving back into the process of writing, as I restructure, I’ve developed new insights into the characters, the plot, the whole narrative.

Taking the plunge into the writing process again has, in turn, revived my imagination, my whole drive to write, a drive that had begun to wane almost to nothing last year.

Now my goal is to finish this latest revision, and I want to finish it by April. After that, I hope I can afford to submit the novel to an editing service. From there, I hope to start submitting it to publishers.

In Joe O’Connell‘s debut novel Evacuation Plan: A Novel From the Hospice (Dalton Publishing, 2007), a young screenwriter, Matt, goes to a hospice “in search of a good story.” He finds several poignant stories as he interviews the hospice residents, their families, and the hospice staff. In turn, Matt discovers he has to come to terms with his own father’s death.

Told in a novel-in-stories style, the novel draws on O’Connell’s experiences as a participant in a project by visual artists and writers to tell the stories of the terminally ill at Christopher House in Austin, Texas.

You mention in your Acknowledgments that some of the stories in Evacuation Plan date back to when you were a student in the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University(now Texas State University-San Marcos). The other stories originated from your experience at Hospice Austin‘s Christopher House. How did the individual stories begin to merge into a novel?

When I did the Christopher House project—a group of writers and visual artists chosen to tell the stories of the terminally ill in a residential hospice—I wrote poetry about the experience. But I knew I wasn’t done with it. I was later chosen for a residency that allowed me the time to complete

Joe O'Connell

this work, and in many ways I adapted the poetry into the novel, as odd as that may sound! The larger narrative grew from one story, which is the main narrator Matt’s. I just kind of took it from there, figuring out which stories would work where. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle that I solved as I created.

You chose to present multiple narratives, a novel-in-stories form. What led you to chose this form?

I read Tim O’Brien’s novel July July, which is about a 30th college reunion, but digresses into the stories of what has happened to different classmates in the interim. I saw here a novel-in-stories structure that would allow me to tell the full story of the hospice. I wanted to make the place itself a character. O’Brien, by the way, teaches in the MFA program I graduated from, but came on board after my time, and I’ve never met him. I do consider him one of our best writers and a major influence.

I do know that the novel-in-stories format is tough for some readers, the same readers who have a hard time with story collections. We’re indoctrinated as novel readers to follow the same characters along the way, so it can be tough when we dip in and out of lives in this manner. But I urge readers to be open to something a little different.

The dough that holds the collection together is Matt’s narrative. How did Matt’s narrative come about? And why did he become the central figure that pulls the collection together?

Matt’s story is part of a novel I started and got stalled on, a coming-of-age story. The relationship he develops with an older man, Charlie Wright, who is dying in the hospice, gets at a lot of what I was trying dig into. This is really a book about family and how death often signals how we must forgive in order to move on. Matt looks to Charlie as a surrogate father in this area, and Charlie is looking to Matt as a scribe, a means of passing on his story.

Why did you choose to make Matt a screenwriter?

Matt also allows me to write a bit about the creative process and to take a broader look at the hospice. The notion is that he is in search of a story for his next script. I have what I call my Black Hole Theory of Writing. When I’m in the zone, anything that crosses my path can get sucked in. In this case, while working on the book I was also preparing to teach a course in screenwriting. Some of that got sucked in. But, again, I’m really into the notion of each of us having a unique story to tell. I wanted to write of those pivotal moments in our lives.

The subtitle for the book is “A Novel From the Hospice.” What do want readers to learn about hospice care?

The oddest review my book has received is that there’s not enough death in it. Exactly! Hospice workers will tell you that 10 percent of what they do is about death. The rest is about life. Hospice is about empowerment. The dying have the opportunity to be in charge of their own deaths and to say a proper goodbye. What else could we ask?

You work as a journalist and as a teacher. How do these professions affect your fiction writing?

As a newspaper reporter I had Saturday festival duty. The reporters would take turns working Saturdays and writing about the rodeo, the corn festival, the train festival—you name it. I learned some strong lessons in fiction writing from this. You can either tell the macro story—a good time was had by all—or the micro story, which uses individual people to tell the story of an event. Character is king, even in newspapers, and the stories of what makes people tick is where it all starts. I’m a free-lance film writer these days for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. I had a cover story in the Chronicle a few months back about the film industry’s problem in Texas, and the big compliment was when the former state film commissioner said I’d put a face on the film industry. I’d learned that “character” lesson!

As a creative writing teacher, I learn as my students learn. In a sense I get paid to be a student alongside the other students. It does very much help me to continue honing my own craft. I’m inspired by my students, and that’s a great feeling.

You’ve mentioned that Charles Baxter‘s A Feast of Love and Tim O’Brien’s July, July inspired Evacuation Plan, especially its form. How were those novels inspiring?

O’Brien was primarily about the structure, but he is a master writer. Baxter, whom I’ll go out on a limb and call the best short story writer alive today, is about going deep. Fiction writing is tough work, and we shouldn’t be easily satisfied as writers. I talk often about the search for the “little truths” of what it is to be a human being. O’Brien, Baxter and the late Andre Dubus, who was my long-distance mentor while I was in graduate school, do it better than anybody I can think of.

How important is reading to you as a writer?

It’s essential. You can’t expect to be a good writer without reading. My classes always include a lot of reading, which allows me to constantly uncover writers whom are new to me. See? I’m always also the student.

Who are some of your favorite writers? What are you reading now?

Along with the ones I’ve mentioned, I’m a big fan of John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Flannery O’Connor. Some folks I’ve been reading of late are the essayist Tony Earley and the fiction writer Dan Chaon, who really blows me away. I’m coming late to George Saunders, but his style is a challenge to take chances. Great stuff.

What projects are you working on now?

I’m writing this after a very interesting day. I spent the last couple of days in Jefferson, Texas, talking about my book at the Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club annual convention, Girlfriend Weekend. Today, I traveled to a small town in Louisiana that is home to my mother’s family and their secrets-which supposedly include a couple of murders. She died recently and this morning two of my brothers scattered her ashes in the Pampa River in South India. A few years before her mind faded with Alzheimer’s, she’d asked me to interview her about her life, which was quite remarkable. She wanted me to write her story, and I’m mulling how to do that. The result may be an odd mix of fiction and nonfiction, but the project is very much intriguing me. I’ve also got a completed mystery novel I’m trying to place, and I’m working on a sequel to it that’s set in the “weird” Austin, Texas, that is quickly disappearing.

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Joe O’Connell is an award-winning short story writer, who teaches
writing to graduate students at St. Edward’s University and undergrads at Austin Community College. Evacuation Plan is his first published novel, and is both a Violet Crown Book Award finalist and a Pulpwood Queen’s Book Club bonus selection.