On An Anniversary

On this day in 1936 Robert E. Howard took his own life.

I have been trying for a long time to capture my love for him and his writing. I've mentioned it before on this blog. Though there are plenty of writers who work I feel very strongly about (Michael Ende, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Oscar Wilde, among many others), it's Howard who keeps coming up in my mind as the one I want to express my deep devotion to. Perhaps it's because, as a pulp writer, he's generally not as well respected as what we would call literary writers (a distinction that in itself is a product of the last hundred years). Perhaps it's because his most famous creation, Conan, has been thoroughly misrepresented in media, to the point that I fear the average person has lost the sense of who Conan really is. Like with so many other icons, the average person isn't getting the real creation, but rather a blurb version with none of his complexity or fire. To them, Conan has lost his brooding and philosophy, and has become an ape in a loincloth.

Part of it is also that I regularly recommend some of my favorite stuff to people, and I've never met someone I recommended Conan to who reacted to it anywhere nearly like how I did all those years ago when I picked up my first Conan pastiche. I repeatedly recommended "The People of the Black Circle" to a fellow student who showed interest in fantasy and even showed him where he could find it, but I don't think he ever read it. When I worked at a bookstore and I talked someone into buying a book of Conan stories, he returned it within a week.

I'm not out to try to prove that Robert Howard was a fantastic writer or that Conan is a brilliant work of art. I believe both of those things, but I also know (after spending too much time dragging myself through the tiers of academia) that REH's fantastic work doesn't need a defender such as I to recommend it; it speaks for itself, and I can neither add to it nor take away. If one day we fans manage to convince the literati that Howard has a vital place in the canon, I will be jubilant, but that's probably beyond my meager power. Now, I just want to be able to express what about his writing I find so compelling.

But every time I try, I feel ridiculous. When I admitted my devotion to Howard to a wonderful poet, he gave me a disappointed look and changed the subject. When I mention my hope to write criticism about his work to colleagues, they suggest I should try popular culture instead of literature. And yet I can't give up.

If we look at writers such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Rudyard Kipling, who have been accepted into the canon (though I could argue that, unfortunately, their stars have waned over the years), they write about many of the same themes as Howard does: exploration, survival in harsh environments, the triumph of humans over their environment, civilization versus the wild. They might have done so without murderous resurrected mummies, but the exploration of themes in Howard is every bit as rich.

And Howard talked about other themes. Love, mortality, personal fulfillment, science, loyalty, theology, sexism, tradition, and many more.

The writing is strong on a sentence level, too. The descriptions are vivid but economical, the language eloquent, the pacing fantastic. Howard's writing is a model for how to craft an intricate and gripping plot. His characters reveal surprising, even sublime, complexities and contradictions.

Talking about barbarism, conquest, and the bloody truths of steel and sinew is considered outmoded these days, as though civilization has moved beyond this "boyish" interests. We sit back on  leather sofas and watch news stories on our giant flat-screen TVs about the brutality that grips other countries and shake our heads at how far "behind" they are at becoming more like us, little realizing that our way of life isn't some end point on a cosmic sliding scale of national improvement. I know, given enough time, all civilizations will collapse back into this "outdated" norm. Barbarism isn't a fantasy but an inevitability. I can picture Roman citizens on their couches laughing about the backwardness of those unwashed simpletons on the frontier.

Maybe that's something Howard has to offer us. Every day, I feel like we're slipping closer to his descriptions of decadent, hedonistic, lazy societies too wrapped up in our petty interests and wars to notice our own slide towards downfall. If we look honestly, we have to admit we're there already.

Tell Microsoft I'm Not Speaking To It

For the last few months, I've been using Microsoft's brilliantly useful Windows Live Workspace. It allows me to open my Microsoft Word documents anywhere and edit them easily within the Word application. This has allowed me to write and edit my fiction from several different places, such as my home computer and the computers at work. So far, so good. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided they're going to cancel Live Workspace and transfer everything to SkyDrive.

Any my version of Word doesn't support SkyDrive.

That leaves me with three equally unpalatable choices. One, go back to much less convenient work-arounds, such as emailing myself documents or using another, less integrated service. Two, use the crappy in-browser editor Microsoft gives you with SkyDrive, which is about equal to this cheapo text editor I'm using to write this blog. Three, buy a new version of Microsoft Office for around a hundred fifty bucks just so I can keep going with the service I've gotten used to.

I can shrug off most inconveniences, but I'm furious about people messing with my writing. You can't dangle this great service in front of me and then take it away from me if I don't pay you more money, Microsoft. That's just not right.

I can't help but think it wouldn't be difficult to continue to support Workspace. It gives me less storage space than SkyDrive, which is fine by me, since I'm only using it for text documents. If I chose to voluntarily keep using Workspace, I could save Microsoft some storage space. Yeah, storage is currently ridiculously cheap, and I'm sure it's assigning employees to keep the system running that's the issue, but that doesn't make me any happier. This just stinks of Microsoft wanting me to buy a new product just so I can keep doing something they offered me before with my old product.

I'm genuinely upset. I don't know what I'm going to do. I genuinely want to keep using this service, but I don't have that kind of money. To add insult to injury, Workspace still assures me it's in Beta. Does this mean there will never be a release version? Have I been teased this whole time? I'm so mad I can hardly even type. I'm so mad my skin's turning... kinda... green. I... can't... think straight. No... not again...! I........


RAAAAAAAAAAAAR! HULK SMASH!

Random Writing Thought

I'm currently writing a story with the working title "The Month of Two Suns." I can't help but think that "The Day of Two Suns" sounds much more dramatic, not to mention much more like a good fantasy story. A month is just too much time. It's hard to remain excited/scared about anything for a whole month, even if you're living in a fantasy world that has no TVs or Internet. The first few days you might run around and bump into things, but sooner or later, you have to eat something.

"Month" is, naturally, the amount of time the two suns appear in the story (which is to say, the sun and a comet), but I can't help but want to change it to "Day". If I see anything titled "Month" in a journal, I might just skip it, thinking it's just too long to bother with. I don't have the imagination at the moment to follow a whole month's itinerary, even if it's stuffed full of swashbuckling action and rip-roaring adventure (what exactly is the origin of that expression?). And the story isn't about the whole month anyway, just the end of it.

Do you think this hard about the titles for things? I know it really doesn't matter, since it's just a working title anyway. So, what did YOU spend your free time today doing?

HAPPY ROBERT E. HOWARD DAY

TODAY I WILL WRITE MY BLOG IN ALL CAPS TO SIMULATE ME YELLING THE WAY ROBERT E. HOWARD USED TO YELL WHEN HE WAS WRITING HIS STORIES ON HIS TYPEWRITER. ROBERT E. HOWARD WAS BORN ON JANUARY 22 (OR 24, DEPENDING ON THE DOCUMENTATION YOU LOOK AT). AT ANY RATE, AS YOU HAVE PROBABLY NOTICED IF YOU READ THIS BLOG, BOB HOWARD IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE WRITERS. HE DIDN'T HAVE THE TECHNICAL SKILL OF YOUR TOLSTOYS OR YOUR DICKENSES, AND HE CERTAINLY DOESN'T ENJOY THE POPULARITY OF TOLKIEN (WHO I WOULD ON ANY OTHER DAY NOT DARE TO CALL INFERIOR TO HOWARD FOR FEAR OF UPSETTING THE FANBOYS, BUT BY CROM, ON HIS BIRTHDAY I MIGHT AS WELL COME OUT AND SAY IT: HOWARD WAS THE BETTER WRITER), BUT HIS STORIES ARE FILLED WITH ADVENTURE, EXOTIC LOCATIONS, AND LARGER THAN LIFE CHARACTERS WHO NOT ONLY LEAP BUT FLYING AXE-CHOP OFF THE PAGE. MANY OF THE TROPES HE ORIGINATED BECAME FANTASY CLICHES. CONAN THE CIMMERIAN IS OBVIOUSLY THE MOST WELL KNOWN OF HIS CREATIONS, BUT MANY OF HIS WORKS STILL INFLUENCE WRITERS INDIRECTLY TODAY--THE IMAGE OF THE PURITAN-DRESSED HERO FIGHTING EVIL WHICH WE SEE IN EVERYTHING FROM WARHAMMER TO VAN HELSING STARTED WITH HOWARD'S SOLOMON KANE.

phew okay gotta get a cup of water

ROBERT E. HOWARD AND I DO NOT SEEM TO HAVE MUCH IN COMMON. HE LIVED HIS WHOLE LIFE IN TEXAS, AND I HAVE NEVER HAD MUCH AFFINITY FOR THE SOUTH. HE WAS AN AVID SPORTSMAN AND AN ACCOMPLISHED AMATEUR BOXER, AND I SOMETIMES HAVE TROUBLE OPENING TRICKY PACKAGING. HE BELIEVED IN THE NOBILITY OF SAVAGES AND HATED CIVILIZATION, WHILE I BELIEVE TRUE CIVILIZATION IS THE PEAK OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. ON THE OTHER HAND, WE BOTH LOVE HISTORY, THE IMAGINATION, AND ADVENTURE. WE BOTH LOVED BOOKS FROM AN EARLY AGE (LEGENDS SAY HOWARD SNEAKED INTO LIBRARIES AFTER DARK AS A BOY, TOOK OUT BOOKS TO READ AND MAKE NOTES FROM, AND RETURNED THEM THE SAME WAY DAYS LATER). PERHAPS MOST OF ALL, WE BOTH FELT WE WERE BORN IN THE WRONG TIME, AND FOUND A WAY OF EXPRESSING OURSELVES IN BOOKS AND WRITING THAT THE REAL WORLD DOES NOT PROVIDE.

HOWARD IS TRULY A LEGEND, A MAN WHO CREATED SOME DAMN BRILLIANT FICTION AND CHARACTERS THAT HAVE STOOD THE TEST OF TIME. PERHAPS I WILL 'OUTGROW' MY FASCINATION WITH HIM AND HIS CHARACTERS, BUT ALL THE GODS, I HOPE NOT!

REST IN PEACE, BOB HOWARD. YOUR LEGACY LIVES ON.

Edit: of all the tributes to Howard I've read today, this is so far my favorite

It's NaNoWriMo again!

National Novel Writing Month is almost here again! In less than a week, thousands, perhaps even millions, of people across the world will be tapping furiously at their keyboards for a solid month, struggling to reach that golden mark of 50,000 words. For everyone who has been putting off writing that great novel because there just isn't enough time in the day, NaNoWriMo takes away the excuses. If so many other people are doing it, so can you! I've participated twice in the past. I actually finished a 52,000 word novel in 2007, and I participated but only made it to 30,000 words in 2008, mostly because I'm lazy. I was also writing my Master's thesis at the time, but that's just an excuse! Just like with all things in life, if you really want to do something, you do it. You don't complain about how much else you have to do.

This year, I fully intend to participate, and to win! I think the real joy and success of the project comes from the communality of it. Novel writing is a generally lonely business, full of self-doubt and misery, asking myself why I'm pretending to be a writer when everyone else is out having fun or being productive. NaNo is the time everyone else is engaged in the same struggle, and with that comes strength and a sense of real purpose. The website lets you keep track of what your friends are writing and how they're doing. There are also forums to let you talk to both local and other writers about your trials and your triumphs. Really, the overall feeling is that we're all in it together, and that, for one month, whether you're writing about sweeping tragedy or ninjas, all that matters if that you keep going. Everything is positive, encouraging, and optimistic. We can do this! We can write a novel in a month!

Now I just have to buckle down and do it.

If you're like to do it, please do! ^_^ And we can be friends on the site and share encouragement and all that stuff!

Truth in Writing

The students in English 1010 are working on their personal essays, which means personal essays are also constantly on my mind. I just had a conversation today in which I confessed that I believe that, in general, people are cruel, selfish, and petty. I wish it wasn't the case, but I have an unfortunate (and undoubtedly prideful) view that the average person is mediocre, and mediocrity breeds pettiness. People do not aspire to be great, to transcend this mortal coil, to create beauty and wisdom and fantastic thought, they....

But then something catches me off guard. It's a thought I hadn't expected, although I've heard it before. The thought is this: of all the essays I read, I can't help but feel for every single writer. I feel a connection, some slight touch, like the spark of electricity jumping between two wires. Even for the briefest moment, we touch, like strangers in a crowd who brush together and then feel our eyes meet. And for everyone, even for the kids who only want to write about how cool that game was, or for the ones who have to be there and can't be bothered to treat me like a person, I can't help but feel a little sympathy. A little compassion.

Writing is beautiful in that. More than any other medium, it transmits pure thought. It places me into the mind, the experience of the writer. Rather than capturing the objective truth, it captures one person's truth, one particular person's imperfect memory rather than a completely factual recollection of the past. And in that imperfect memory are housed all the fears, all the hopes of a real person. If a person misrepresents a situation, leaves out the things they fear or mourn, their own actions they wish they could forget, that is beautiful, because I can feel even in the absence that shame, that guilt, that grief. If the writer admits it, embraces it, presents it to me like a gift upon a cushion, it is beautiful, because, no matter what it is, it is so wrapped up in heartbreak and truth that I can't help but pity them. Even the ones who don't see how thoughtless, absurd, or even cruel they were implicitly admit their childishness, their lack of understanding, and I can't blame that, because they don't know what they did.

If we could all write and all read, all come to understand our own thoughts and the thoughts of all others, to live not in their shoes but in their minds and memories for the space of even a few brief pages, how could we ever have war? How could we allow poverty, misery, suffering?

(And then there are those who walk in and say, "I hate writing. It's so pointless." Bastards.)

American Writer

We need a reality TV show about writing, to make writing edgy and cool. It should be a reality-based contest to try to find the best writer among a gang of colorful characters. There could be the rebel who never wants to accept criticism (I'll use to be verbs if I want to, that's just my style!), the lovable one who can never get it quite right (oh, I thought haiku was 7-5-7!), and the misfit who struggles to fit in with everyone else (no one appreciates my sonnets about death!). Just imagine the hilarity when people from the street cue up to come write for the celebrity judges, who tear apart their cliche-riddled personal essays! The tears when we're getting close to the finish but one of the characters is still trying to wrap up the climax of a short story! The thrill of listening to the final product each week and calling in for our favorite piece!

I'd be happy to help produce the show, TV people. Just drop me a line.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went into one of the local used bookstores, Books of Yesterday, and delved into their dungeonlike basement, where half the books are just lying around in towerlike stacks or unsorted on big shelves behind the desk I never see anyone at. In the back corner, they keep their fantasy books. I saw a copy of R.E. Howard's King Kull stories, but the book had mold in several places, and I'm not about to pay five bucks for a moldy book. I also found an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry. Wikipedia says Fafhrd amd Gray Mouser is one of the seminal swords and sorcery series. The only other time I remember reading about Gray Mouser is when he dueled Zorro way way back as a joke in InQuest magazine. The store had two copies of the book. One had a laminated cover, and they wanted more than ten bucks for it. The book cost 1.25 in 1973. The other, the one I bought, was five bucks. It has a page loose and several pages torn, so I was going to try to talk them down, but my nemesis at the register beat me to the punch.

When they say Neanderthals would fit in with modern men, I wouldn't be too sure. This guy had a brow ridge that would do a silverback proud. He barely spoke three words to me, didn't say hello when I did, and literally threw my credit card onto the counter when he was done swiping it. Since I was worrying about whether I was going to get brained by a stone-headed club, I didn't have the audacity to question him about the quality of his product. And so I walked out, five bucks plus tax poorer, but with a book that, according to the back cover, promises "the greatest heroes in the annals of fantasy." Can't go wrong there, now can ya?

Developments

You might notice that I've removed the bit about where I live and it not being very cyberpunk. The reason for this, as I alluded to briefly in my last post, is that I'm really not very cyberpunk these days. The reason for the original theme of this blog was that I was writing a cyberpunk novel, and it was to be things that I came across tangentially or just material related to that genre, in which my mind was revolving at the time. Things have changed, however, and by no choice of mine that novel is on hiatus. For the time being, my writing is more along the lines of burly men swinging swords at snickering sorcerers, not to mention whatever else I come up with on ficly. I am also ghostwriting a fantasy novel, which comes with its own thick share of challenges, so I do my own writing in my 'free time.'

So be warned that, aside from a general writing theme, this blog will be about just whatever's on my mind. Well, I suppose it will continue to be. Excelsior!

Today's Moment of Horror

You know those moments where you question everything you thought was good and true as the world comes crashing down like a buzzbomb on your coastal British city? I just had that moment. And that moment is this: http://ficly.com/stories/4809

It's nonspecific--the solitary detail is the line near the end about holding her pillow and screaming 'why!', something I doubt anyone outside a Disney teen movie has ever done. It's full of cliches--"heart and soul" being among the worst. It's written in intrusive second person, constantly reminding me that it's not really talking about me. It starts off with quite possibly one of the worst rhymed couplets short of 'life' and 'strife.' It uses 'your' for 'you're.' It uses the word 'heart' four times in twelve lines.

It's from that website I've been touting, and the betrayal of something I championed only makes the pain that much worse.

Because it's covered in praise. Dripping in bleating, sparkling, slack-jawed fawning. While it violates everything I hold sacred about the theory of good writing, it gets a featured slot on the main website. It's like seeing someone beat my best friend to death with a rusty meat tenderizer and then get handed the key to the city by the mayor.

While rocking back and forth clutching my knees in the darkest corner I could find (which in this case was among the spider family living behind my boiler), I've tried to convince myself that it's a satire and everyone is in on the joke. But I just can't believe it. I can't bring myself to.

And if your response is, "Oh, but it's so heartfelt," so is putting your head in a toilet.

The problem here is that this situation raises an inescapable point: when a small percentage of the population thinks clear, detailed, poetic writing is excellent, and a much larger percentage thinks wordy, nonspecific, melodramatic nonsense is excellent, who is right?

Have I just spent the last seven years of my life learning to write the wrong way?

I need to go cry myself to sleep.

(To those who think this is all tongue-in-cheek poking fun at this poem, it's not. Despite the jokes, I'm genuinely distressed about this. My stomach hurts.)

My Newest Fascination

So my good friend has gotten me involved with ficly.com, which is all about writing short stories--VERY short stories. Because they're limited to only 1024 characters (that's like letters, but includes any keystroke), it takes the old excuse of "I don't have time to write a story" and slaps it in the face with a dumptruck. Anyone has time to write 1024 characters. If you have ten minutes, you have time to write a story on ficly.com. It also teaches economy of language, because the writer has to create a character, setting, and plot all in a very limited space. Another interesting dimension of ficly is that anyone can write a 'prequel' or a 'sequel' to any story, so stories become chained together.

I recommend any of you who have an interest in creative writing to check it out. And don't tell me you don't have the time.

Simple Gifts

I remember learning that song in perhaps third grade and thinking it was remarkably dull. "To turn, turn will be our delight?" Sounds like a bunch of hippies. And hippies are just a step above Wiccans.

Setting aside my burning torch for a while, let's talk shop. People say it's the little things in life that matter. That's not true. It's just that the 'little' things many people overlook are the things that are really the big things. Ever since I was a wee lad, I've had a fanatical devotion to creative writing. Some novels are dearer to me than most people are.

I value reading things written by my friends. Like a child who is given a blank piece of paper by a psychiatrist and some crayons, the blank page shows the soul of the creative writer with clarity not found in anything else. In a piece of creative writing, be it nonfiction, poetry, or fiction, we reveal our inner selves, our longings and our doubts and our terrors. When we create from the heart, our veils are penetrated, and readers nestle into a private nook of our soul. Even more so than in a painting or a sculpture, which is only a snapshot, a piece of creative writing is a world in itself, with its own rules and values. It reveals if the writer is calloused or romantic, cruel or kind, petty or generous.

Flannery O'Connor believed in a just world, one where truly good people are rewarded and the sinful are punished. She then went on to demonstrate how all of her characters were flawed.

Charles Dickens wanted to believe in a happy world that is safe and good, but they always came out flawed.

Courage and loyalty were paramount to Rudyard Kipling.

Of course, you can argue any of those sweeping generalizations, but my point remains: creative writers don't write about the absolute real world, but rather the world as filtered through their hearts. It's the world as they see it, as they hope it is, as they fear it is, as they wish it was, as they are terrified of it becoming.

This is why I value the writing of my friends above almost anything else. In it, I feel like I really get to know the person. It's not just when you hold a person over a volcano (what, you haven't seen Firefly?) that you meet him, but when you read his poetry.

Perhaps a year ago, a good friend of mine gave me a chapbook of his poetry to read and critique. I never did get to critique it, but I read it every now and then, and I am amazed by both the depth of the writing and I feel like I truly meet again a person I only glimpse in 'real life.' Frankly, I feel a little guilty to hold onto this poetry and read it, but that's a part of someone's soul. It's not the kind of thing I can throw away.

Moments like those, like a sunrise over a treasured landscape I'll never see again, are as unforgettable as they are sacred.

(PS Probably fortunately for my digestive system, the bacon did stay green after it sat on the frying pan for a minute, which dissuaded me from chancing it.)

The Reason I Crunch Numbers

Although my crunching of the numbers for Star Wars might be excessive, I enjoy it, and I find it to be a useful activity, both as a fan and a writer. It's important to try to understand the way a world works, its nuances and behaviors. To be able to understand and write about a world, it's important to understand how it works. And that's where something like crunching the numbers comes in. A few years ago, I wrote an entry in another blog somewhere about why Sauron could never bring the amount of forces shown to bear on Gondor--there is no way that, with medieval technology and supply routes, he would have been able to provide food, shelter, equipment, stables, etc. for such a vast force. I brought in some modern arguments about things like the supposed million-strong army of the Persians: it's just not possible to have a force that vast all in one place. It's very rare to see an army over 200,000 strong in the ancient world for that reason, and even that army needs massive numbers of followers and support personnel. Historically, I've heard it said that an army would have followers on a 1/1 ratio. Even assuming orcs don't bring their families along... but now I'm getting carried away again.

These are the considerations every fan needs to take into account when thinking about a world. It's the little things that turn a book or movie from just a story into a living, breathing world in which the audience's imagination can run wild. Whenever I'm watching or reading something that moves me, I imagine myself into that world, creating new stories and characters on a whim. That is the deepest level of immersion in a world, and it's necessary to understand the mechanics of that world in order to do that. It's also the reason I read slowly: I can go through text very quickly if I'm just reading for comprehension, but I prefer to read slowly, to stop to picture scenes, to think about what if and to fill in the gaps in the story with my imagination.

That's my reasoning behind spending all that time on crunching the numbers for my favorite stories. It's fun, and it's useful. Maybe you should try it, too. Keep your favorite writers honest: what's possible and what isn't?

By the way, I notice now that I didn't take the modern navy numbers by a third, as I was doing for the others to simulate the lack of extreme poverty in Star Wars. In that case, there would have been 800 Star Destroyers rather than 2,400. Fewer, but that's still a lot. Then again, I doubt the extreme poor contribute all that much to military economies, so perhaps my initial figure was reasonable.

The writer Brandon Schrand

... is much shorter than I expected. He came to the school to meet with students and read from his work. The selections he read from his work were excellent; he read a few chapters from Ender's Hotel, his memoir about growing up in the hotel his family owned and managed. He also read from a new book he's writing, which is a memoir in the form of an extended annotated bibliography. Apparently, he was really into pot and Morrison when he was younger, which he humorously insisted was fictional, since his mother-in-law was in the audience. He also seemed to like my question; I asked what he would say to young people who don't feel they've had much life experience who are looking to write nonfiction. He replied that everyone can tie their work in with the greater human experience and thereby make it meaningful. He also encouraged us to find the meaning in everyday life; just because we haven't experienced weird stuff or had great tragedy befall us doesn't mean we can't write something that speaks to the human condition.

Good on you, Brandon Schrand. Good on you.

Back to working on my essay about William Gibson. The more I write, the more I'm convinced I'm just full of it. Sigh. Excelsior!