Inkblot Panorama 5, Plus Some Writing Thoughts

Selections made and a bit of initial color.

Well, last night's writer's group meeting was really good for me. The solutions to two big problems have possibly come to light.

The first had to do with my story God's Tourists. It's already been published in the small press magazine Monday Night but I've been reworking it for reasons explained here. The story is more or less about my relationship with my grandma Jean Bishop. I used a bunch of aliens to help turns my memories into a story -- briefly, they're a bunch of New Age types who wind up making knockoff versions of my Christian Scientist grandma for sale. The end scene is the strongest emotional moment in the story but it has none of the SF components that drive the narrative.

Rob suggested that I might have the statements made by my grandma in the last scene made by one of the knockoff versions of her instead and the idea clicked. I'm going to have to give up some of my favorite moments in the story to make it work -- stuff Allison told me to keep -- but it's the old story. We call it killing your darlings...

Speaking of Allison, reading her work has really lit a fire under my ass. I mentioned in a previous post that I was disappointed by my novel.

It's lacking the guts I intended it to have. The most common and most frustrating criticism I've received about the novel has been that the protagonist's motivation/problems have been unclear.

"Why is he so down on himself?" "Why doesn't he just get laid?" "Why does he do that for those people -- it's not like they did anything for him."

Well, as I've mentioned before the protagonist is a stand-in for me in my twenties. When I was really, really nuts. I tried to address this in the novel by showing my thoughts and emotional stated honestly. It hasn't worked out.

But Allison's work has finally made me realize that the problem is that I need to just lay some of this right out. Her stuff has the kind of emotional intensity that I've been aiming for and missing. And she does it by just saying exactly what she means to say. By unapologetically airing what some might see as dirty laundry.

I've realized that for all my attempts to be honest I've been holding back. I need to spill my guts here if I'm going to write the book I intend to write. It's not going to take all that much in the way of actual words -- it'll probably come out to five or ten pages of manuscript -- but it will make that crucial difference, I hope.

I can't get away with just saying things like, "There were already too many people for me to handle so when the doorbell rang again I went to my room. I was mulling over the fact that no one cared enough to check on poor me when there was a knock on the door."

Plain and simple, that fails to give the emotional impact of deep-rooted social anxiety, the whole tangled knot of misery that lies behind that kind of alienation. It's weak sauce. I need to bring the real thing.

I hope I can pull it off.

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: The Mask of Gold -- A Complete Short Story Posted In The Comments

After the great wave swept away the atolls of his kingdom, Kanatanka fled into what he thought was
an endless ocean --

Only to find himself in a strange land --

Filled with strange creatures.

In the distance he sees it...

The Black Tower

And of course there's something else that goes along with this kind of nonsense -- something possibly NSFW.

About a year or so ago I started working on what was intended to be an online adventure comic strip. In order to make life easy on myself I decided to do something simple and familiar. (Note to self -- this never works.) There are certain tastes of mine that are like malaria -- I can go for years without thinking to indulge them and then they resurface and I'm swept away on a feverish tide.

In this case it was Sword & Sorcery. When I was a kid back in the seventies there was a revival of this form of fantasy, spearheaded by the work that Lin Carter and L. Sprague deCamp put in on Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. Ballantine Books has recently republished all of Howard's Conan stories (among others -- the Soloman Kane series being a particular favorite) and going over those rekindled my interest in this very minor sub-genre.

(As an aside, in a lot of ways this revival was fueled by the population of the Lord of the Rings -- even though the Weird Tales crew was active long before the Inklings. Conan predates Frodo.)

Here are two different ways of looking at S & S. First is that it's the fantasy equivalent of hard boiled fiction, that it was Howard taking the more mannered tradition established by William Morris (yeah, that William Morris) and Lord Dunsany and giving it a gritty, here-and-now perspective. The characters are going to be gutter-dwelling underdogs before they achieve greatness, and they're more likely to be motivated by a need for drinking money as by destiny. Magic isn't so much the organizing principal of the cosmos -- it's more like a Saturday night special. And so on.

From another point of view S & S came about as the result of Howard combining two genres -- historical adventure and horror. Howard's setting for the Conan stories was a thinly-veiled Europe, Africa, and Near East and his historical precedents were taken from any time that struck his fancy -- everything from the Neolithic to the Edwardian period.

I've always wanted to try my hand at that stuff. But I wanted a non-Eurocentric background -- a big part of my pleasure in fantastic literature derives from a sense of exoticism and other people have been playing in Howard's sandbox for so long that most work modeled on his stuff is dull, dull, dull. I wanted something different.

Hmmm. A vague pre-historic setting with a wild mix of creatures and cultures... Hey, you know where and when they had a great mix of critters just begging to be used in this kind of story? Miocene Central America. This would predate the evolution of man -- but this is a freaking fantasy, man. And there are rumors of everyone from the Polynesians to the Chinese having left their mark on prehistoric Central America. So I decided to go the Howard route and include anything that felt like fun rather than construct something that was intended as serious speculation.

Thus was born Kanatanka -- AKA Conan the Samoan. As a young king, his forbidden love led to the destruction of his island home. Fleeing the destruction, he finds himself in a strange new land...

The initial story, Tribes of the Black Tower, was partially inspired by my brother-in-law, Aubrey Ankrum. He was telling me about a show he'd seen about cairn builders and their practices of worshipping their ancestors. As he described how they'd creep through the narrow passages into the chamber where the bodies lay I found myself vividly imagining the experience and when we got to the part where they reached the chamber...

Well, the idea of what would happen to people breathing the gasses of decomposition came to me in a fashion that was not subtle.

"Dude," I said, "they were totally huffing corpses. They were getting high off that shit!"

And there was borne the degenerate cult of the Black Tower.

I wound up having to ditch Kanatanka as the novel proved too demanding. But as part of the experiment I tried writing a story using the character and setting. Aubrey thought it was the best thing I'd ever written; Rob thought it was the worst -- that it lacked the anger and fear that grounds the majority of my work. I can't figure out where to send the damned thing so here it is, in the first comment section. Hey, everyone, free story!

I will say that it was about as much fun as I've had with fiction. I didn't write it so much as sit back and transcribe the movie I was watching and when I was done it needed almost no edits to get it into its current state. So put yourself into a seventies state of mind -- picture Kanatanka airbrushed on the side of a van -- and read The Mask of Gold.

I think I may have to go back to Tribes of the Black Tower when I'm done with the rest of the novel...

From The Valley of Lost Projects: Kanatanka

Kanatanka lay dying.

The echoes of the wardrums had long since died, and the stink of blood and shit on the battlefield had been overtaken by the scent of rotting flesh. Buzzards and condors, knife-tooth possums bigger than a man and long-legged forest caiman fought for carrion with the scattered survivors of the northern invasion.

Now they have come to his deathbed, friends and allies, old loves, all those whose lives had been changed for better or worse by the man who stood at the front of the fight against the monsters of the north. They have come to hear and record his tale, the saga of the outlander, the fugitive king, rebel, man-at-arms...

KANATANKA

Thoughts On Writer's Groups -- Two Different Ones

This comes from my short-lived attempt to train myself as a scientific illustrator, a goal to which I still aspire. When the novel's done I may well take science courses for a while in order to further that end, said the perpetual student.

So on Saturday I attended a writer's group led by the poet and short-fiction writer Carla Kandinsky. We've had a couple of creative writing classes together and as I previously mentioned she invited me to attend the writer's group she runs.

When I first decided to take my fiction writing seriously one thing that influenced me strongly was associated with my former editor (I wrote cartoon scripts for Mondo Media for a while around the turn of the century) Megan MacDonald. She'd recently won an award for her scriptwriting and mentioned in the linked article that the best things a wannabe writer could do were reading a lot and joining a creative community. I was a compulsive reader already -- but the latter was news to me. "You could've told me that," I thought to myself, and then hit Craigslist.

Due to an odd series of circumstances a good writer in a good writer's group found me and suggested that I should meet her group, give them some sample work, see how things fit...

Worked out well for me. I've been in the group for maybe five years now and have seen a lot of growth in my abilities. I've also seen a lot of crazy politics, made a lot of friends. Everyone who's left the group has worked or spent time with me afterward. I can't overestimate how rewarding its been.

Currently, there are three other people in the group. I don't mention the names of people who may not want to have themselves put into the public sphere but since these folks are writers I'm gonna risk it.

The first of the current crop to join was Al. He's an unpublished mystery novelist working on a series about a police homicide detective who had trained as a rabbi. Good stuff hovering on the cusp between literary fiction and police procedurals. Al's a serious, disciplined writer who is my bet for the first one of us to make the leap to a professional career. A responsible family man with a strong spiritual streak. My dad once said, "Usually I can't stand religious people but with Al I don't mind it." Which sounds a little patronizing in print -- when spoken it had a note of admiration with which I concurred.

The next to appear was Debora Kuchar. When we were looking for some fresh blood she responded and sent in a piece of surrealist science fiction that got good responses from the group.

She never showed up for a meeting -- this is not unknown.

But a while later I was exchanging critiques from noted poet Maria Chavez at Jupiter, a downtown Berkeley beer bar. While we were wrapping things up a friend of hers made an appearance. He had Deborah in tow and in the ensuing conversation we found out about our previous contact. She showed up and got hooked. She's done a lot of extremely individualistic material with a strongly surrealistic edge to it (I wish she'd figure out a venue to show some of it off) and now she's focused on her blog -- go ahead and click on her name for a taste. She's a skilled and gifted (the two are different) landscape architect and gardener and this has influenced her writing in some fascinating ways.

The group got to the point where it was just Debora and Al and myself. Then Linda came back into the picture and has been meeting with us since last July. She'd been in the group for a while before having to bow out but now she's back with both a vengeance and a novel, a thriller partially set in the LA riots set off by the Rodney King verdict.

I met Linda in Lee Marrs's scriptwriting and storyboarding class and it was one of those things where you just lay eyes on someone and you know there's something between you. Sometimes love, sometimes hate, in this case friendship. We differ in so many obvious ways it's ridiculous; at the same time we are basically two versions of the same thing.

You ever have someone whose boyfriend or girlfriend changes periodically and at the same time it seems like the same person every time? Kinda like that.

So each week we send out our submissions via email as .doc documents. Then we each print up everything the other people have sent and edit it. On Monday night we get together and go over the edits, ask for thoughts and suggestions, and in general engage in very practical and specific critiques. Since we've got three novels going it's a lot of material -- Al is the most productive and the pace he sets is a great example. He also has a fascination with the mechanical details of narrative structure that has been a real prod to my own exploration of that area of fiction writing. I'm probably the most intrusive and heavy-handed editor due to my fixation on prose style. Deborah and Linda are both great for their ability to think about physical continuity and clarity of expression -- I spend a lot of time listening to them and whacking my forehead at the things I didn't get.

Now the writer's group I attended on Saturday is the antithesis of what I'm used to. I don't have a lot to say about the membership since I'm not familiar with them -- but as group they give the impression of a certain type that's very visible here in Berkeley.

At forty-four I was the youngest person in the room, and to be honest I felt very out of place. Everyone else seemed quiet, gentle, aesthetically oriented, spiritual -- they struck me as hippy-types, to be crass about it. Nothing against the hippy, and of course it's inappropriate to label people like that without knowing them well. But I felt too big and loud and... vigorous isn't the right word but if vigorous were a pejorative term that's what I'd mean. They wrote in pens in notebooks; I wrote on a laptop. Maybe that's the best way of putting it.

Not that I didn't like them; I just felt like a pit bull in a goldfish bowl.

The way this group works is to do short writing exercises and then read them out loud. The emphasis is on expression rather than narrative. There were some lovely bits of writing produced; it was fascinating to see myself picking up on the vibe and running with it. What I did was atypical and on the precious side; I kinda dug it. I'll put it up tomorrow.

I'm going to try a few more sessions before I make up my mind. Yeah, I felt ill at ease, I'm not entirely thrilled with what I did. But it's not good to stay entirely in my comfort zone and I don't think I was grossly offensive. Fuckin' killed my back, which gives me a legitimate out if the social discomfort (please note this is my pathology, not their persons or behaviors) proves intolerable. This new kind of writing might be good for me; I've at least got a seed for a short story out of it.

Listen, if you want to write you'd probably do well to find or form a group. They get a bad rap in some circles but for me they're a necessity, plain and simple.

A Quick Progress Report

Just to start off, tomorrow night I'm going to the reception for the latest issue of the award-winning Milvia Street magazine. They used four or five pieces of mine, depending on whether they published one or both of the hyeanodon drawings. Here they are! I'm pretty sure they gave Bluehive a color page but we shall see.

This one actually turned out to be my first print sale. The missus's dad was staying with us and when he saw the large print of this he wanted to buy it. I'm letting her handle the financial side of things...

This is one of a series of drawings I did for my sister's aborted website. She wanted a retro look so I obliged.

So I decided that since the novel was going awry and it was getting harder and harder for me to do anything but visual art stuff it was high time for a little tough lovin'. The rule is now a thousand pages-I-mean-words a day. Every day. Creatively I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner, so this kind of rule is hard for me to stick to.

But I've been doing okay so far. I topped 70,000 words this morning -- for you non-writers, that's a respectable length for a novel, one of those big fat bestselling rat-smashers runs about 100,000 words -- and I can see the end from here. I can imagine being done with this draft inside of a month. We'll see, but it's possible.

As for short fiction. My tough guy dinosaur story for David Byron isn't talking to me -- I should have finished the damned thing in one go. Note to self -- knock out the rough draft to a short story in one sitting if at all possible.

But the story I'd planned to give to Milvia Street was three times longer than they'd publish. So I sent it off to Rob and it's going to be in Swill. This suits me fine -- it's one of the best things I've written and I really, really like the idea that Ellen Datlow, editor of horror half of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror will get a chance to read it. It's called Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! and it wasn't until I'd finished the second or third draft that I realized it was a deal with the Devil story. Instead of the usual approach where the point is to come up with a twist on the fulfilled wish (there is one of those but it's not the center of the story) I show how the devil-character, the Tribulator, is destroyed by culture shock. It also features very, very jaundiced views of both of my romantic relationships -- something I didn't know I was doing while I was writing it.

Oh, it is a mean little unit.

Which means the creepy/funny SF bar story I'd written for Swill is now free. I'll do a rewrite this weekend and get it of to Mr. Byron to compensate for the loss of the story I'd promised him before.

So I need to come up with something for Milvia Street and something for Monday Night. One piece is going to be about my first three clear memories -- bedwetting, agnosticism, and a doberman attack. The other? I'm hunting for inspiration.

I'm putting off scheduling a print day for my art until I'm done with the Anomalocaris canadensis piece. Yesterday I spent some time studying Illustrator techniques for handling color rendering. One that looks interesting is to use the gradient tool to lay in rough tones, then convert it to a gradient mesh and refine it. So that's the tack I'm taking. Soon as I get this posted it's gonna be time to pick some colors and start laying down gradients...

Attention! Any Writers Out there? Here's Your Big Chance!

Here's an early version of the cover for Issue Two. You've seen quite a bit of my work from Swill if you've been following the site -- having to illustrate the son of a bitch is the main reason I'm back in the visual arts.

Swill magazine is now eagerly awaiting your submissions. If you write fiction please give us your consideration. Swill is a feisty literary magazine and while it is small of press it is large of publication -- it's printed at magazine size and carries as much wordage as a decent-sized book.

There is no payment. I've been working on this thing for three years now and I haven't seen dime one and probably never will. That's not what the magazine's for...

Swill has received praise from both the literary and the genre fiction communities and is part of the permanent collection at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

We did get a bad review once but they complained about things like gratuitous violence (if someone could explain to me how something as inherently rewarding as violence could ever be gratuitous I'd be interested in hearing your position) and plot while another review said that while we published some genre fiction we were a "necessary corrective" to the current literary scene.

Here's what we're looking for. First and foremost we like stories. Stories with characters, plots, settings, themes, beginnings, middles, and ends. This is why we've been accused of genre-ism -- genre is the last true bastion of conventional fiction.

Look, the moment of quiet epiphany has its place. No doubt. But to see it dominate literary fiction to the degree that it has reminds me strongly of the stranglehold superheroes have in the comic book world -- and a lot of the time people invested in literary or academic fiction respond to a story driven by plot and character the way a lot of comic book fans respond to a work that doesn't feature steroid freaks and boob jobs wearing leotards.

And it's not as if that's all we publish. If we like your piece we'll publish it -- we've published experimental fiction and poetry quite cheerfully.

What do we like? Action isn't a bad thing. Make us laugh and you've won our hearts. Mean what you write. Transgression is always popular with me and Rob -- the best story in our first issue got in partially because it offended both of us, which is quite a trick.

If you're interested go to the site and check out the submission guidelines. (For some reason -- probably having to do with frames -- I can't link directly.) You might want to take a peek at the section labeled "Sean Speaks" as well. If you're a fiction writer it should confirm all your worst fears about what happens to your story once you put it in the mail...

And if you're a reader go wander around. I swear, Swill ain't half bad. I recently wrote to Rob and asked him why doing Swill has turned out to be one of the smartest things we've ever done.

He sent an internet sigh. "It's not like it has much competition."

Fair enough.

A Lazy Day, Then Back To Fiction

I have a distinct suspicion that I'm not gonna get much done today. I am burnt out from my recent bout of productivity and it's Saturday and I've been in this mood lately.

The missus is going away this afternoon and there's no band practice tonight. But my music buddy is going to a pinball expo with a mutual pal and I may tag along. I have the iPod that was left here on Thursday so I will be seeing him.

I'm anxious to get back to the fiction. I've got the start of one story for New Voices in Fiction. That one may or may not fly -- I'm conducting an experiment in writing something based on the virtues of olde school cyberpunk -- how dense? how fast? I'm getting a kick out of taking the exposition that I normally try and avoid and making it the core of the work. And in a weird way it's a Hunter S. Thompson tribute -- honestly, I read his stuff as heroic fantasy or adventure fiction anyway.

It may well wind up unreadable, though. In which case I've got other options, like the short story I need to edit.

The main job I've got ahead of me is restarting the novel. The last submission I made to the writer's group was received with great sorrow. The consensus was that the narrative flow which had been running from the start evaporated.

Of course I hadn't been in prime fettle when I wrote that material but it still bums me out to hit this bump. In previous drafts I had this happen all the time but this one was moving along just fine until now.

I have realized that the section in front of me needs a different kind of treatment than I'd given it. It's actually going to be a story inside the bigger story and it is more along the lines of traditional adventure stuff than I've had so far in the book. It's Western-flavored with a taste of post-apocolyptic mutant future novels like Heiro's Journey by Sterling Lanier. I need to take a breath and think it through before I start.

Also, there's a speculative component to it that I'm thinking of posting about. It's a fantasy but it's influenced by science fiction and because of that the element of speculative evolution has come into play...

Anyway. It's seven-thirty so the missus ought to be up. Y'all have as nice a day as possible under the circumstances.

I'm Gonna Be In A Book!

The teacher asked for a subtle use of gradient. It works but it seems a little... lacking.

Ahhh, that's better.

A little while ago I stopped sending stories out to professional markets. There were a number of reasons for this. First, I've been putting my writing energy into the novel. And right now I work with an editor who likes my fiction well enough to place it in the two small-press magazines he edits.

Of course, I also stopped because when I started sending stories out I got personal rejection slips -- here's what didn't work, came close, strong writing here -- but as I improved I started getting form slips and that hurt my little feelings.

So a little while ago I said the hell with it, worry about selling short fiction once the novel's finished.

So of course that's when a small-press editory, Dave Byron, contacts me and asks me to write a story for an upcoming anthology. (I'm putting his site up in my links section -- it's New Voices in Fiction.)

The book is to be titled Grand Guignoir and it's intended to combine Grand Guignol theater with noir fiction. In other words, over-the-top crime stories. "Doc" Byron ran across a sample of my writing on the Swill site and figured I was good at bad so he signed me up.

Bucky Sinister is going to be there -- he was in the first issue of Swill. (Tragically, both he and I submitted clown-oriented horror. Very different stories but it was enough to give the issue its theme.) Cool!

But the big news? Joe R. Lansdale has a story in there. I'm gonna be in an anthology with Joe R. Lansdale! The man is one of my minor heroes and has been a bit of an influence -- more than anyone else he taught me not to look away from what you're writing. He's also an example of someone who started off writing what was more-or-less pulp fiction and who has grown over the years into a very respectable author, one with real depth and strength who uses the tropes of popular fiction to address personal and political concerns.

Like I said, a minor hero of mine.

How about a little fake Mondrian while we're at it?

And the story? I first submitted a piece I'd had trouble placing elsewhere, and in an email to my writer's group I admitted that it was a story that didn't quite work for me and that I'd submitted it as an act of unconscious self-sabotage. (The world's most popular indoor sport, at least in my world.) I've since realized that it's really a spoken word piece and that's why it doesn't work on the page...

So then I went through my notes to see if any concepts seemed as though they'd work for an ultraviolent crime story. That was when I remembered a character I'd created for a novel, a costumed vigilante. He was based on my readings concerning organized pattern killers -- whose behavior was very strongly reminiscent of some superheroes.

Right now there's a celebration in the culture of the good guy who acts like a bad guy, of the man who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty when the time comes. Who isn't afraid to kill and torture as long as he does it to people who deserve it.

To say the least I disapprove. I see this as a corrosive concept, one that leads into a downhill spiral. Yes, I'm thinking Guantanamo among other things. And there was the question I had to answer.

If the bad guy is really bad -- really, really bad -- how can you show the agent of justice confronting him as being repellent in his own right? How do you show a strong man acting in opposition to evil in a way that doesn't engage the sympathies of the audience?

I think I pulled it off.

Oaf Fiction Now Available.

Here's the front cover to the current issue of Swill...

Right now I have two short stories up on the net. One is a straightforward piece of reminiscence called Montana Seafood. You can find it at...

http://www.mondaynightlit.com/read-craven3.html

The other is the closest thing to straight-up old-school science fiction that I've done. It's partially a tribute to the tradition of bar stories -- specifically, Lord Dunsany's Jorkens stories, the Gavagan's Bar series by L. Sprague deCamp and Fletcher Pratt, and Tales of the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke.

It's also a salute to my favorite SF microscopic worlds, ranging from Fitz-James O'Brian's The Diamond Lens to Theodore Sturgeon's Microcosmic God to George R.R. Martin's Sandkings.

Go to It's The Little Things by Sean Craven at

http://www.swillmagazine.com/

I've got to admit I'd like to give both of these another run through the mill. As the Ramones would say, why is it always this way?