Recommended: The Pick Up by Paul Samael

As any contemporary father can tell you, there is a certain caution he has to take around young children these days, much more so than a contemporary mother must. A father, watching his children at the playground, is likely to be among more mothers than other fathers, and those mothers aren’t always so club-welcoming. A man is a suspect around young children, any man, including male elementary school teachers, any male youth sports coach, any man, anywhere, due to the confluent factors of rational probability and media hype. On the one hand, when there are crimes against children committed, a man is more frequently at fault. On the other hand, the percentage of crimes against children versus men interacting with children is not very high, but most of us have been conditioned to think otherwise,. Whether we like it or not, the stories bombard us daily and we cannot help but absorb them all out of proportion to their actual occurrence.

All of this is by way of preamble to the story told in Paul Samael’s new story, The Pick Up, (a free ebook available from Smashwords) which focuses on this issue. A father watching his child and his child’s friend in a playground has a brief and utterly innocent interaction with someone else’s child, but soon finds himself embroiled in suspicion. accusation and scandal. As a father who has spent the last several years around young children, I was easily able to identify with the protagonist and the themes in this story, so it had emotional resonance with me. Also, I think Paul is an excellent writer and every new story of his is an event for me, so I grabbed it from Smashwords and read it as soon as I heard about it, and I’m very happy to recommend it to anyone who appreciates a good story, well told.

First Draft Day

No day of writing is as satisfying to me as the day of completing the first draft of a story. I always feel like I’ve taken a load off my back. The whole time I’m writing the darn thing, I have a terrible sense of incompletion, that I haven’t yet said all the things I wanted to say, and maybe never will, but when that first draft is done, I feel that at least the basics are all there, finally set down and committed to paper.

Only later do I remember some of the things I meant to include but somehow forgot in the general sweep of things. This latest one, The Lemon Thief”s Ex-Wife’s Third Cousin, the first draft of which I just finished this evening, had a number of elements I wanted to explore at least a little bit. Part of it was my recent experience living amidst the constant upheaval which is Christchurch, New Zealand at this time in its history, and the sense of perpetual but slow-motion apocalypse pervading the populace there, the constant anxiety that is also business as usual. Then there was the vague concept of parallel lives, of the little choices we make every day that could, at any moment, set us on a different course in life altogether, and often do exactly that. There is also the influence of friends on our fates. Also the confusing notion of second versus third cousins (something I forgot to get into in the first draft altogether). I also wanted a narrator who could only tell what he saw for himself, so the story will be missing some crucial scenes because the narrator had no direct access to them. Also when the narrator is close to, but not really part of, the story itself. I wanted to expose a little of the commonplace, ordinary every day patriarchy that pervades our lives without even a notice (the names of places and streets, for example, are to a very large extent men’s names, or named after men). I wanted to hint at some things and see if anybody bites at the bait (knowing full well this almost never happens). 

In short, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to touch on, and at the same time I thought I had enough of an interesting plot to hold a reader’s attention and still let me address most if not all of those ideas. Now the time is come to ‘let it bake’, something I’m never very good at. I want to continue thinking about the book for a while, see what I missed, or left out, or should remove, and so on. Read it few a couple more times. Maybe type it out all over again. I used to have to do this back in the days of pens and paper and typewriters and it usually resulted in improvements overall. Computers have made me more lazy about doing that.

For today, it’s enough to go through the Smashwords formatting procedures and run spell-checker and take care of basics like that, the technical basics. The next creative sweep through it all will come after I’ve let it sit and seen what rises.

One answer to that question

The question being why do you write fiction? One answer, loneliness. Sometimes my stories are my friends, the ones I can talk to, the ones who aren’t bored to death of me, the ones who listen. They tell me things too. Tonight I started, finally, the lemon thief story. Last night, when insomnia was worse than usual, I found a way into the story. Tonight I took it, and then the story started telling me things about itself that I hadn’t known before and couldn’t have anticipated. We’ll soon see if it’s enough. I’ve been reading a lot of first rate writers lately, so I’m not terribly confident that I can pull off this idea I have. Saramago could have. Bolano could have. Me, not so much I’m afraid, but I’ll give it a go.

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.

Freedom from Fantasy

Entry into the mysterious heart of Snapdragon Alley is by invitation only. Some few are allowed inside while most, including the reader, are not. Only one individual who has received the offer has refused to accept it, and he is the key to the entire series. No one that I know of has yet seen that this riddle is even there.

Argus’ refusal is a rejection of escapism. As a child, he cannot and would not make this choice for himself. As a young man in Freak City he is most vulnerable but is again saved by friendship, by love, that which has the most value in the real world. As a grown man in Dragon Town his refusal is conscious and rational. He prefers reality, his family and his life. In middle age, in Happy Slumbers, he is again tempted but chooses reality over fantasy.

Some reviewers, sensing that Argus is the main character throughout, have complained about his lack of action, his passivity. He is not the hero that is expected of a protagonist in these times. He is much more of a Hamlet figure in an age of Harry Potters and Spidermen and Dark Knights.

I have not been sure whether I should be offering more clues such as these in the various synopses of the books on the websites. I am pretty sure that interpretation is not the author’s task or proper role. Maybe I’ll just offer such notes here for random discovery.

Life as journey

The Insufferable Gaucho, by Roberto Bolano, does an excellent job of illuminating this idea, that life is a journey, that one choice leads to another, and one path becomes many paths, and we end up far from home, and far from who we were, or wanted to be, or thought we would become. The story accomplishes this insight without ever revealing that intention. By the end you feel you have gone a long way with the character.

There’s a Story in Here Somewhere

In today’s local news, a secret underground room was uncovered at one of the many demolition sites in Christchurch (my “Goldilocks” city), a room that had belonged to an old house  long ago torn down and had an office building put over it. If they hadn’t had to tear down the office building, the room would never have been found. As it is, they uncovered hundreds of artifacts from the nineteenth century that had been buried under there all this time.

Underground Overground Archaeology director Katharine Watson said the find was “amazing and surprising”.

“It was under a multi-storey office building so we didn’t expect to find a thing. You don’t expect much to survive construction of those buildings,” she said.

A story could be built on top of this, an unexpected story lying buried beneath a completely different story, one that would have to fall apart completely before it revealed this other, hidden tale. A fictional structure modeling the physical architecture.

One idea that occurred to me was that everything in the room would be old except for maybe one single item, something which have to be quite recent, yet there was no possible way for it to be there. A mystery, possibly with some elements of the supernatural, ensues.

Another idea is that the room contains some information that completely changes a perspective on something – whether it’s a family memoir, a photo, some historical document. A more traditional novel ensues.

Many other stories,and kinds of stories, could be built on top of this layer.

How to Become a Writer

When I was a youngster, in my late teens and early twenties, I decided I wanted to “be a writer”. At that time it seemed like a logical conclusion that in order to achieve this goal, I would first have to “become” a writer, as if there were a sort of standardized cocooning process by which this transformation could occur. I looked around for words of advice from the masters, and the best I came up with was from Henry Miller, who said something like this:

“Write two million words and throw them away. Then you can begin.”

I did not find this disheartening, but rather encouraging in a way. I had already written a short novel of sorts, a dreadful thing called ‘The Gospel According to Nobody”, so I added up the words and tossed them all into The Pile of Two Million. I was “on my way”, or so I thought.

From that point on I wrote a lot, mostly with the idea in mind that it was all for The Pile so I needn’t worry about whether any of it was any good or not. It was all to be trashed no matter what. In this way I wrote my first two million words, and with the honor of a samurai-in-training, I did my duty by them. These were all written by hand, in pen, in spiral-bound notebooks. While I never typed them up (this was all before personal computers even existed), I did carry some of their germs with me – germs of the stories – and at some point later on managed to revise and rework some of them, but not until I had accomplished that transformation and had “become” a writer. Or at least I should have, according to the rules and Henry’s instructions.

Along the way I had changed my mind about all that. I came to the conclusion that one is only a writer when one is actually writing, in the same way that one is a bicycle rider only while riding a bicycle, or a reader when reading, or a teacher when teaching, a worker when working, a smoker when smoking, and so on. A person is never some one thing, a definition, an object perpetually trapped in verbal amber. To the extent a person does define themselves in such a manner, they are subjugating all the other facets of their nature to the glory of one meager, transient aspect.

What I had become was someone who writes, sometimes, along with having become a lot of other things besides. Nevertheless, I still think it was good advice. Those first two million words were indeed truly awful and deserved their fate, not that every word since has been golden, not by any means, but I did learn to listen to the voice in my head, to the rhythms and the sounds of the thoughts in my mind, to feel the patterns that my brain naturally follows, to recognize its strengths and especially its weaknesses. It was Harry Callahan who said “a man’s got to know his limitations.” If my journey from Henry to Harry taught me anything, it was this. Sometimes it takes many millions of words to find the right few.

ASAP’s Fables #1: The Dog and the Crow

One fine summer morning a dog was chasing a crow. The crow got away ASAP.

Art, Fame, Soul

The Literary Man discusses this diagram under the heading “why do we write”?

but the topics were far too lofty for my feeble, cynical mind. In trying to figure it out, I came up with my own categories.

Instead of “Art” I use “Method”

Instead of “Soul” I use “Meaning”

Instead of “Fame” I use “Motive”

 

The intersections of two categories add up to:

Method + Motive = Hack  (you’ve got the craft and purpose, but nothing to say)

Motive + Meaning = Flake (you’ve got inspiration and purpose, but no technique)

Method + Meaning = Freak (you’ve got talent and inspiration but not purpose) (I think I fall into this one)

 

The intersections of all three I will simply call The Sweet Spot – no need to glorify it. Luck’s got a lot to do with it, too.