Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Silly but fun, as long as you don’t think about the plot too much.
Criminal overlord plan: If you’re worried about an excellent team of investigators showing up to investigate a murder you’ve committed, and you want to lure them in on your own terms, wait until after you complete your $65 million deal with terrorists.
On the list of things I was not expecting, here’s something new: a note from iTunes/iBooks saying that my short fiction collection, which I published in July of last year, was now for sale in their store.
Me, I was a little surprised. I thought it had been for sale fourteen months ago. Shows what I know.
Anyway, short fiction collection! It’s ebook-only, but there’s a new Twenty Palaces novelette in there. Here’s the cover, done by my movie special effects buddy Jim Myers.
Thanks, Jim
As I said yesterday, I’m on a bit of a social media break, mainly to steal back some time for writing and family. So far it’s going well.
The anthology I’m going to be appearing in–with Jim Butcher, Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Joe Abercrombie, and Terry Brooks–is available for preorder. Check out the cover art and the table of contents.
My contribution is set during the events of The Way into Chaos. (Spoilers!)
In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Matt Scudder is a former cop and an unlicensed private investigator. Sometimes he does favors for people, and they give him money as a favor in return. This time he’s hired by a cop who’s accused of extortion; can Scudder convince the accuser to retract?
Of course things get complicated and there’s a murder. The cop claims he’s been framed by other cops, and Scudder is the only one who can help.
This is early in the series, when Scudder was still drinking heavily. It was much later that he joined a 12 step program and struggled to keep his life together. I’m not sure which version I prefer.
The weird thing is that, while I enjoyed the book–the tone, the characters, the plot–I’d completely forgotten I’d read it before. Read it and didn’t remember it at all, except for one sentence. I rarely reread deliberately, and this isn’t a book I would have tackled again if I’d recognized that utterly generic title.
61 Hours by Lee Child
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Jack Reacher novels are interesting, in that they’re enjoyable but not particularly involving. Reacher is the basic competence-porn thriller hero, who can work out where a fugitive has run off to after nothing more than a brief phone call, but doesn’t recognize the killer when the plot needs him to assume something else.
The heroic levels of research that books like this are built on is often the best part, like reading an oddball magazine article on, say, congressional boondoggles during the Cold War. Unfortunately, “Show the research” can be intrusive, too. When Reacher is handed a gun, do we need a rundown of the manufacturer’s founding like some Wikipedia copy pasta? Nope. We get it anyway.
The climax was so absurd that I threw credulity aside and enjoyed it as camp. I prefer thrillers that strain credulity, and know it. It’s fun.
On Thursday afternoon, I was working with my son on his homeschool reading. He’d just finished Fahrenheit 451, and he explained that he liked the chase scenes at the end more than the setup at the beginning and middle.
“It seems to me,” he explained, “that in books that are considered classics, they’re more concerned with the… psychology of the characters than in the chase stuff.”
I agreed with him.
That night was family movie night. we picked MARATHON MAN, which was on Netflix Streaming. Spy thrillers are a big hit with the kid, because he’s a big fan of, as he puts it, “smart people being smart.” That’s why he prefers Mission Impossible to James Bond, and why he had an allergic reaction to Dumb and Dumber.
Anyway, Marathon Man’s dental stuff went by without much comment, but the movie was slow (compared to the stuff we make the time to see in the theater) and it was low-key, and it was concerned with the relationship between the characters. When it was over, I asked him what he thought.
“I liked some parts.”
That’s his answer when he finds long stretches of a film kinda dull.
“It’s a classic seventies thriller. Remember what we said earlier about classics? The long shots of people’s faces, or the awkward conversations they have, are their to show the psychology, like you said. Maybe the greatest story ever would combine the character and the exciting event, but we can’t all be Shakespeare.”
Then he nodded and pointed at me, and retreated to his bedroom to draw or read his latest light novel. Anything to avoid a longer conversation about a movie or book.
My wife squeezed my hand and said “Very good. Very good.” She’s happy when we can explicitly tie movie night into his schooling. “But it was pretty slow.”
A while ago, I tweeted this:
PRO WRITING TIP: A great way to motivate yourself to write pages is to imagine yourself on your deathbed, regretting your unwritten books.
— writer of some sort (@byharryconnolly) September 9, 2015
I joke a lot on Twitter, but that’s an actual thing I do to motivate me to get out of bed: I imagine the burning regret I will feel for every minute of my wasted life, because there have been a lot of them.
For me, a lot of the work I’ve done to make myself a better writer has been about increasing my productivity. When I first started out, I could barely get through a few hundred words a day. Finishing anything took forever, and everything I finished was mostly bullshit, and it was all so incredibly hard.
It took me a while to realize why I couldn’t get anything done: I’m easily distracted. Looking out the window, checking the internet, oooh that book looks interesting… all of it stole my time and attention away.
Then there’s the daydreaming, and I don’t mean about my characters or what they’re feeling. I’m talking about stupid shit like wondering if I could hit one of the rats running through the tree outside with an arrow, or what I would say to encourage JRR Tolkien if I could time travel back to the time he was struggling with Fellowship…. Really useless, stupid shit.
But I learned that working slowly was hurting me. Too many word echoes. Too many continuity errors. Poor pacing. I became a much better writer when I taught myself to speed up. I’m still not all that fast, but I’m better than I was.
The thing is, I suspect I’ve hit my personal upper limit.
Recently, I challenged myself to accomplish 10k words a week, with the added incentive that I could take days off, guilt-free, if I hit goal early. Why not? I’d certainly managed 2k or 2.5K on dedicated writing days. If I could manage five days of two thousand words each, I could take two whole days off and feel fine about it.
And it worked. For one week. Then I had to stop because I realized I was just typing out weirdly detailed extraneous bullshit about every minute detail of whatever behavior was happening in my mind’s eye. Everything was draggy and dull and bloated. So I stopped, tossed aside my dumb new plan, and took a couple of days to do nothing.
Check out Chuck Wendig’s post here about his productivity. Chuck writes quickly, finishing a few books a year. His stuff is popular (unless you love Mandalorians more than you probably should) and he gets critical raves, too. But, as he says in his post, this is what works for him. As much as I would like to be that prolific, it just ain’t gonna happen. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
(One place I would disagree with Chuck is this statement: “Fourth and finally, and I’m mighty sorry to report this, but a full-time writing career is not easily maintained by writing slowly.” I’d suggest a writing career isn’t easily maintained in general, and there are plenty of authors doing very well releasing books slowly. GRRM, Susanna Clarke, Pat Rothfuss, and Scott Lynch each have probably sold more copies of their latest than I will sell in a lifetime, but it has nothing to do with writing books quickly)
And this is why (to finally get around to the point of this post) I would warn people against gamifying your writing output. Yeah, I just spent a couple hundred words talking about increasing productivity and finding what works for you, but turning your process into a game, with points and levels, strikes me as leaning way too hard on productivity.
Because increasing productivity can be harmful to our work and our legacy, if we’re lucky enough to have one. It might be pleasant to award ourselves points for submitting stories, but if the stories don’t sell, then what good is it? Better to award points for actually selling work to a publisher, which supposedly writers can’t control, but if the work is solid and we’re putting them into the hands of buyers, we’ll eventually hit the mark.
And that’s why I cut off a productivity experiment. It was turning my fast-paced thriller into yet another bloated fantasy, and that sucks. Yeah, it would be great to write four books a year that were critical and popular darlings. It would be great to write a book every four years that readers turned into instant best-sellers. It would, in fact, be great to revive my moribund writing career so that I could maybe hit the midlist someday.
But then I read something like this and I’m reminded that I simply need to keep doing what I do, for the reasons I do it. I need to keep pushing myself toward better, more personal, more original stories, and productivity is secondary.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Book 15 in #15in2015
In an era when so much fantasy–especially the really popular sellers–read like novelizations of movies that have never been made, this book (I read it in a single volume edition) was wonderful.
This isn’t my first time through. I read Lord of the Rings in high school and then again in the nineties when a pre-production interview with Peter Jackson got me all excited for the stories again. This time, though, for my third read, I promised myself that I wouldn’t skim.
Because, frankly, LOTR is pretty skimmable. Especially at the start, where Tolkien was obviously feeling his way through the story, trying to get a handle on what was happening.
But by the end of the story, the cumulative weight of what had gone before has a powerful effect. I’m not even sure when the change happened, but somewhere in The Two Towers I was hooked.
I’m not going to talk about these books too much, since so many others have done it before and better. However, I was really touched by the scenes in The Scouring of The Shire, in which Frodo, who’s been touched so deeply by evil, pleads with the others not to do violence of any kind.
Anyway, flawed, but its flaws are part of what makes it so wonderful.
Okay. I am. A little bit, but only to float an idea.
Eric Flint (possibly aiming for a fan writing Hugo himself) wrote a long post called The Divergence between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he argues that the award-winners of Ye Dayes of Olde (before the mid 80’s, I guess) were also the best sellers in the genre, but for the last 25+ years, that hasn’t been true.
He comes at this argument through an odd, winding route, attempting to magically divine the top sellers by seeing how many feet of books are modeled[1] on the shelves, using pre-Amazon measurements he took at B&N and Borders. (Kids, Borders was once a big chain bookstore.)
Which… fine. Let’s just pretend that this is a good measure of sales. Assuming that the big sellers of today are no longer necessarily getting the awards, why not?
Let’s put aside the idea that there’s some sort of left-wing cabal handing them out to their friends, because that idea is dumb. Let’s also put aside the idea that the standards for the awards are especially literary. To quote Abigail Nussbaum:
The truth is—and this is something that we’ve all lost sight of this year—no matter how much the puppies like to pretend otherwise, the Hugo is not a progressive, literary, elitist award. It’s a sentimental, middle-of-the-road, populist one.[2]
I basically agree with her, although I don’t feel the urge to “walk away in disgust” and am in no way disappointed. The Hugos are what they are, and I think that’s fine for the people voting for them.
But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?
Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.
Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.
Obviously, some Hugo voters enjoy that sort of thing, too. If they didn’t, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY wouldn’t have won this year. They may not think R.A. Salvatore’s work deserves an award, but they’ll read it and enjoy it. But the few thousand people involved in the Hugos are not enough to fill out the readership of someone like Jim Butcher or Robin Hobb. That’s a whole other group.
Flint’s post seems to suggest that the awards seem to have moved away from the influential big sellers, and he’s not sure why[3]. I would say that science fiction and fantasy have become large markets with a readership that’s less insular. It has more “casuals” to steal a gaming term. Those are the people who are blowing up the sales of the books at the “basic entertainment” end of the spectrum.
That’s a good thing.
It might seem funny at this point for me to say, once again, that I’m not all that interested in the Hugo Awards. I’m really not, although I’m very interested in selling large numbers of books [4]. The divergence between what sells in large numbers and what wins popular awards is an interesting data point.
[1] Modeling: When bookstores make a special effort to always have an author’s books on the shelf. A copy of The Two Towers sells, and a new one is ordered instantly. That’s a good place for an author to be.
[2] I found her writeup in this io9 summary of Hugo articles.
[3] Do the people who give out the Edgars worry that the books winning awards aren’t on the bestseller lists?
[4] Check out my books. I’ve got sample chapters for you and everything.
Ideas are cheap.
Everyone knows that. They’re optional, since you can have a great story without an unoriginal idea behind it. They’re common as dirt–so common, in fact, that most writers have more than they could ever find time to write–and they’re only one very small component of a finished piece of fiction. Without solid execution, even the greatest ideas are useless.
But a cool story idea is valuable in one way: it can make people excited about a story.
That’s why I give my story ideas away right here on the blog. Sometimes I have an idea that’ll tickle my brain, but I don’t have the time (or, frankly, the inclination) to write it. Sometimes it’s just a title or an interesting mashup. Maybe it’s in a medium I don’t write in. Maybe it’s a genre that’s wrong for me. Maybe there’s something else about that, while it sounds interesting, makes me want to put it aside.
The best way I’ve found to put them out of my mind is to add them to my Story Seeds posts, then give them away to the world.
Last night, for the first time ever, I received an email from a writer who’d taken one of those seeds, written a story, and sold it. Obviously, my role in that sale was incredibly small–it was the writer who did the bulk of the work. Still, it feels good.