A Personal Apocalypse

I used to think that if I had to classify my fiction in one specific genre, I would call it a literature of personal apocalypse. I’ve always been attracted to stories of peak moments. The climax is the point of the tale, and the rest is mere denouement, required (by most people) but fundamentally inconsequential. I don’t care about the “ever after”. I only care about “the” moment. Everything leads up to it, and I always prefer a story to stop right then and there, without the trickling bullshit that typically follows. I’m told that normal people don’t work that way, but all of us are somewhere “on the spectrum”. It’s a continuum, as my wife likes to say.

I came up with this heady notion while still a youngster, of course. In my early twenties, when I was writing my fingers down to the bone (literally, with pen and paper. I had a callous the size of a peanut on my right middle finger), I wrote a novel in “subway-surface” style that was subtitled “A Personal Apocalypse”. I later completely rewrote that novel, “Phantom of the Mall” and converted it into a personal/robot apocalypse, perhaps the only story I know of where the happy ending consists of androids becoming alcoholics.

I bring this up because I am currently reading an absolute masterpiece of the genre of personal apocalypse, “The Passion According to G.H” by the astounding Clarice Lispector. This is a story of a rich, bored woman who goes into her former maid’s room to clean it up and finds in there, in the wardrobe, a rather large cockroach. Lispector takes this germ of a notion and presents a vision of a person transformed unlike anything else you’re ever likely to come across. There is tremendous depth in the telling but also just some brilliant writing. Lispector says things that stop you in your tracks and make you wonder. I love it.

Turned in upon myself, like a blind man listening to his own listening

I ask myself: if I look into the darkness with a magnifying glass, will I see more than darkness?

I was for the first time becoming drunk with a hatred as clean as water from a spring

I was all acid, like a piece of metal sitting on your tongue, like a crushed green plant

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A White Space in the Book Market

At a company meeting I heard an executive talking about the need to “got after every white space in the market”. After mocking this turn of phrase, I later thought of one such white space – in the book market. There has been a wave of independent authors, buoyed by the technological trends in smartphones and e-readers. At the same time there has been a decline in the business of supersized bookstores. The chains are not doing well, and smaller independent bookstores have an opportunity to stake out new territories, and may find some success if they are well-situated and innovative enough. One such junction might be the marketing of independently published books. Many of these are breaking through the e-bestseller lists, so they are proven to be desirable commodities. How to get these books into bookstores is a different matter.

On the one hand, there have been independent distributors in the past, companies that aggregated small press books and had some salesforce and warehousing to funnel these through to independent bookstores. Such distributors found it difficult enough to survive, especially during the rise of the superstores, but right now there may be an opportunity to build on that model with independently published books as well as small presses. It may be only viable, in the beginning, for very localized success, in such markets as New , the Boston Area, Northern California, etc … but some enterprising entrepeneur could take it on. They could work with Smashwords, perhaps, to identify and contact those bestselling – and other worthy – independent writers, and with Lulu, even with Amazon’s CreateSpace to find their way in (bookstores apparently loathe CreateSpace so this part might not fly). It would take some legwork and effort, but they could possibly convince the independent bookstores to set aside a special section for local, independent authors. The problem here is profitability (and tangled issues like returns and many individual relationships)

Another idea combines the advantages of bookstores and web publishing. One of the great things about bookstores is browsing. One of the great things about online offerings is free excerpts. Why not put them together? Print-on-demand machines could produce pamphlet-like versions of books – front and back covers and the first 5-10 pages. Bookstores could display this in racks the way that maps are displayed, or like travel brochures in hotels and rental agencies. The cost up front is low (indie authors may need to contribute a small amount to that, to help defray the cost and also perhaps serve a barrier to entry that would serve to thin the herd, so to speak).

This is the kind of thing that independent bookstores can excel at, and it could work to bridge the gulf between e-publishing and p-publishing, There is no inherent contradiction. Many people prefer paperbacks to e-readers. The same books can find their way to everyone. It would take a group effort – on both sides. Independent bookseller organizations could be working together with independent self-publishers for mutual benefit

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Recommended: Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Maltas

Bartleby & Co, a book of short essays about writers who stopped writing, and why, has given me the longest “must read” list of other books I’ve ever gleaned from a single source. It helps that so many of his favorite writers are also mine. From Walser to Musil to Melville to Kafka to Calvino to Felipe Alfau and Henry Roth and so many others, Vila-Maltas tells the stories of writers faced with the immpossibility of writing, the insufficiency of words to properly express what they wanted so much that they simply had to stop, sometimes for decades on end. He begins with the great character Bartleby the Scrivener from Melville’s wonderful story (perhaps my favorite short story of all time), the office clerk who “prefers not to” do anything whatsoever. Vila-Maltas scours the annals of literature to find all sorts of variants and variations of this attitude and theme with an abundance of charm and wit and humor. This is not about ordinary writer’s block but rather the tales of those who continue to produce, though perhaps only in their minds! The dreams and fantasies and imaginations live on, but deliberately and consciously uncommitted to paper. There are so many interesting bits in this book. I’m glad the author himself did not suffer from Bartleby syndrome, or at least not yet!

Unfortunately it’s not available as an ebook, but the public library came to my rescue once again.

A Self-Publishing Book Review Sob Story

This article in Salon.com, while mainly a whiny and self-pitying lament, does shed some light on one aspect of the recent changes in book publishing. Publishing is not what it used to be, and neither is book reviewing. It used to be that a published author stood a decent chance of getting a professional review from a newspaper or magazine book reviewer. Apparently, there ain’t no days like those anymore. The article’s writer – a previously published author with in-crowd connections who was once able to garner such blessed reviews – couldn’t even get responses to his emails once he decided to self-publish his latest awesome novel (which he only resorted to after it failed to get traditionally published). The kicker is when he moans that If this can happen to him, imagine how horrible it must be for the 99 percenters of self-published writers, those of us without his hoary ties to people-in-the-know and his track record of proven, if admittedly minor, success.

What we 99 percenters know, of course, is that when it comes to getting (legitimate) reviews of our self-published fiction, we have always relied on the kindness of strangers.  We quickly exhaust our social network supply of potential reviewers (we exhaust them in every sense) and after that it’s all “word of mouth, baby”. Recently a publicist for free-ebooks.net (one of the many ebook sites with an experimental business model, this one a subscription service) asked me if I knew how to convert downloads into reviews. The only answer I could give was “maybe give them stuff” – not money, but rewards of some kind, benefits in kind, more free books perhaps. Goodreads Giveaways are supposed to work like that. The winners are supposed to submit reviews after they receive and read your books. I have no way of knowing if they actually do that. I’ve done four giveaways so far and am beginning another one this week for “Prisoners of Perfection” but there seems to be no tracking mechanism for the reviews or ratings.

Yes, it’s difficult. For every thousand downloads-to-strangers you might get one written review. That’s just a guess, nothing scientific, but it seems to correlate with my own experience. Star ratings are somewhat easier to come by, but are not the same thing at all. People who take the time to write and post reviews of self-published books are practically mini-gods to self-published authors. We can’t thank them enough, even if they trash our work. At least somebody said something! Otherwise, how can we even know that we exist? Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing, but all publishing involves a degree of vanity. The Salon article shines a bright light on that little secret as well.

The article’s conclusion is “I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.” I didn’t feel too sorry for him. If what the author reallt wants is reviews, only that, his best chance is to give away his book for free and to give it away for free in as many places as he can. He probably still wouldn’t get a boatload of reviews, but then the question is, how many are enough? How many reviews would it take to make it all fun for him? How many readers would it take? How is 1000 strangers reading your book better than 999? What difference does the one thousand and first make, in your everyday life? Where do you draw the line between fun and not fun?

A friend of mine once told me her philosophy of gardening, and it’s stuck with me ever since, especially in regards to self-publishing. One tomato is great, she said. Anything more is “abundance”.

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Adopted Books

My thanks to the commenters on my previous post, wherein I said mean things about a beloved classic of science fiction, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. That book had been recommended to my son by his sixth-grade teacher, a friend of mine whose taste in books has been generally very good, at least as far as sixth graders are concerned, and my son has been enjoying our reading of Ender’s Game to some extent, though he does chafe a bit at the cliche of cockroach-like aliens and perpetual intergalactic war. He likes the hero/genius/child, of course, and how he outwits, outplays and outlasts ™ the mean stupid bully child. But enough of that.

What I meant to jot down some thoughts about is how we, and by “we” I mean readers, all tend to have a set of books that we adopted, often at an early age. These books are almost pets, almost friends, and stay with us for life. Ender’s Game is one of these books for many people. I’ve had a number of such companions in my life, and regardless of their perceived “quality” or stature or fame they all have incalculable value to their “owners”.

Then there are the ones that got away. My mother was a librarian, so I spent a great deal of time in my youth in libraries, and at one point I was enamored with any kind of fictional sea-faring adventure. I still read Joseph Conrad and Jack London and Richard Dana and Herman Melville but back then the books I read were for kids or young adults, and I couldn’t find enough of them. They were full of terms like fo’c'sle and aft and bilge and jib, none of which meant anything at all to me, but the seas were rough and you could get washed overboard at any moment. There were no monsters in these books, no aliens, nothing inhuman but the ocean itself and the first mate, who was always dreadful.

I cannot remember the authors or titles of any of those long-ago library books. When I look into it I recognize nothing of what I find. The names and words are long since gone. I’m pretty certain, though, that if I found them again, I would be stunned at how simple and probably silly they were.

I went through a fairly long period of reading science fiction (never had much use for fantasy or magic except in fairy tales) but then it stopped appealing to me, almost all at once, in my mid-twenties, which is now some decades ago. I still enjoy some science-fictiony elements in more speculative fiction, but flat-out world-building with fake languages, too many limbs and unpronounceable names is beyond my scope for now. I’d rather make fun of such stuff, which I’m doing a little of in my current story (The Lemon Thief’s Ex-Wife’s Third Cousin) wherein one of the characters works for a newspaper, translating headlines into non-existent languages because you  never know. Sometimes we adopt genres as well as books and authors. I guess I think of science fiction as a sort of pet rock, pretty to look at, and sometimes even amazing. Sea-faring adventures, now there’s a genre that’s pretty much come and gone.

(somehow I’m reminded here of one of the tidbits from Bookstore Lore: The Stupidest Questions Ever Asked in a Bookstore. A person comes into the bookstore and asks “where are your non-fiction books?” The snotty clerk (ahem) says, “well, you see that sign over there that says ‘fiction’? “Yes,” the unwitting customer replies. “Everywhere else,” says the rude clerk, “is non-fiction.” – Naturally, the customer was looking for a book on serial killers. In America, “non-fiction” translates almost always into “Serial Killers”.

Varieties of Difficulty in Reading

I’m experiencing trouble reading two very different books in very different ways. On the one hand, 2666 by Roberto Bolano is intentionally difficult, as he clinically relates the individual stories of the hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez in the 1990′s, one after another, the unsolved crimes getting their day in public court, in a sense. The way he tells their stories leaves out so much, but then again, their lives were also cut short and the narration reinforces that fact. It’s a brooding and depressing book in general. Hard to keep going at some points, but tremendously compelling at others.

The second book is the one I’m reading aloud to my son, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. This book is beloved by so many people that I’ve been surprised both at how poorly it’s written and how very boring it is (to me). It’s essentially Starship Troopers with a precocious six-year old. Ender is six in the same way that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes is six – not really. But he’s a genius and isolated and misunderstood and manipulated by the adults around him, so it makes sense this book would appeal to nerdy teens and tweens. I’m just not the audience.

Lousy Book Covers

http://lousybookcovers.tumblr.com/post/38479747491/lumberjack-in-love-i-i-cant-even-edit Naturally we all want to see if we’re on there, holding our breath as we scroll, but have no fear. At least you’re not a lumberjack in love

Review: Catskinner’s Book by Misha Burnett

Reviews say as much about the reviewer as about their subject. Reviewers bring to bear all of their previous experiences and attitudes, their perspectives depending on their personal history and current state, the tastes and preferences of their friends, their families, their generation, their social background, time and place, and so on. All of which is merely an introduction to this particular review, which is as much about my response to the book as about the book itself.

On reflection, it occurred to me that my experience of “Catskinner’s Book” by Misha Burnett, is similar to my experience of the movie “The Matrix”. The main similarities in the works themselves is that they deal with the theme of ‘aliens among us’, and there is a unique protagonist, a chosen one of sorts. The way the hero of Catskinner’s Book was “chosen” is closer to the way the infant of “Rosemary’s Baby” was “chosen”. Catskinner, like The Matrix, features a number of striking concepts such as distinctive representations of a ‘hive mind’ in humans. Catskinner also has a main female character of considerable surprises. The book is as much horror as science-fiction.

The writing in Catskinner is bold and deft and hooks you right in from the start. That was enough to carry me along for quite a while, but … and I’m sorry to include a ‘but’ at this point … like The Matrix, there was one element that drove me out of the story and left me on the sidelines, letting the rest go by. This has everything to do with me, in my current state, and the tidal wave of excessive violence that’s currently pervading our culture (and has been for some time, witness The Matrix!). I’m talking about long, extended scenes of carnage and mayhem, all of them both unlikely and ‘fantastic’ in the imaginary sense (Neo with machine guns in the marble corridor forever) (Batman and the Joker in the tunnel) (The goblin massacre in The Hobbit) (I could go on and on with such examples). I’m not sure what the attraction is, but surely there is one, and we are seeing more and more of them acted out in our theaters and schools and shopping malls – not just random killings, but sprees all dressed up in appropriate costumes and dramatically ready for the cameras. Perhaps it’s because I started to read this book shortly after the Newttown tragedies, or maybe I’ve just had enough of it for one lifetime, but it leaves me colder all the time. I can’t follow the stories anymore after encountering these prolonged bloodbaths.

All of which does not indicate that you, the reader of this review, may not be able to look past that, or may even enjoy these passages. It’s curious. I didn’t mind the main character being a paid assassin. It’s what he was created for, in a sense, and it matches the overall plot, which is a sort of gangland-rivalry-from-outer-space. It just seems to me that this kind of thing can be done, and used to be done, with a lot less shattered glass, a lot fewer explosions, and somewhat less incredible stunts and feats of physical prowess. I recently watched the old Sergio Leone – Clint Eastwood classic, “For a Few Dollars More”, and there is a scene where Clint has to climb over  a wall to sneak into the bad guy’s compound. The stunt man actually climbs over the wall, slowly, with difficulty, like a human being actually would, and comes down on the other side landing hard, a bit scratched and bruised as well. Nowadays a single leap and it’s up and over and down, no worries, as if we were all composed of computer-generated graphics these days. All of which is to say that I’d like a bit more realism in my fantasy fiction! Crazy, I know.

The “Amazon Breast Curve”

Interesting article on Salon today about the overall shape of Amazon reviews suggests that the more the horizontal star-rating graph looks like boobs, the more reliable the ratings are – with more five and one stars and fewer threes. That kind of goes along with my intuition that the more a book that reaches a broader audience the more likely it is to have a wider range of reactions.

I guess that’s common sense, but on the other hand, if you’re looking at a straight genre book this doesn’t hold up. Romance readers know a good romance book and only romance readers are likely to review romance books. In cases like that, you want to see a lot of fours and fives, no curves.

To Be Continued – Notes for a story I may not write

The idea stemmed from my old video of the tedious time traveler, and then turned a corner when I realized that all time travel stories involve an individual or a small team of actors – but what if time travel became cheap and easy and popular, like Facebook, and suddenly everyone was doing it! And then, what if there was a kind of loop, a limited span of time in which all this could occur. For example, the time travel ‘fad’ begins in 2012 and ends in 2018, and these are the only time periods within which anyone can travel around. You could meet your future selves (me+2, me+4, me+6) and hang out with them, merging into them when their time came around, but … and this is the big but (pun intended), it turns out that there is no such thing as free will (the Catholics were right!) and nobody can change anything whatsoever!

Everyone knows who’s going to win the next World Series. Everyone knows, in fact, what the box score of the next game is going to be. The guy up to bat knows he’s going to strike out or hit a triple. Everybody knows! You know if you’re going to sleep with that guy you just met at the bar. It’s happened and your future self already told you. These future selves are everywhere, gossiping and spilling their guts. They won’t shut up and you don’t want them to. You want to know the future. Who doesn’t?

Well, by 2018, nobody wants to know anything about the future anymore. In fact, we all become sick and tired of the future by then. Especially our own futures. Those of us who are destined to die in that span will die, just as planned. Not a damned thing you can do about it.

For a while, no one knows that this nightmare will end in 2018. It gradually becomes apparent and eventually the man who was responsible for the entire fiasco, an inventor named Cedric Von Barkingham, is hunted down and killed in 2018, putting an end to it all.

Well, those are just some of the ideas percolating around the old brain. It could be fun, but I really don’t feel like writing any stories with a society-wide component. I would have to find a way to turn all that into merely a backdrop (as I tried to do with Humanoid Central and The New Guy in Moon Base Twelve) and focus mainly on a few characters, possibly including Von Barkingham. But chances are, I will leave the rest to your imaginations.