Hey guys,

Music to Write By: “Superman’s Dead” by Our Lady Peace.

Still in moving mode, so this will be another brief one.

Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has just won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I talked about this novel in a previous post. Basically, I said the book was really good, but I objected to McCarthy abusing the English language and grammar in general to appear more literary.

So the most prestigious award in the world (barring, perhaps the Man Booker Prize) has honoured McCarthy. Having read a few Pulitzer Award winning novels like House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, I can tell you that often books are picked, not for merit, but because they add something to the tapestry of English Literature. If you follow the link, you’ll see that House Made of Dawn was honoured because it was written by a Native American author about the plight of Native Americans. The book is experiemental, switching from 1st to 3rd to 2nd person POV. Is it well written? Well, it’s competent, but not on the order of “Regeneration” by Pat Barker or The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, both Booker Prize winners.

Is this the case with The Road? Was it honoured for successful experimentation rather than a beautiful story? I don’t think so. McCarthy has mastered the sympathetic character in his protagonist “the man” (never named). The book is stunning in the depth of emotion you feel for its characters. The guy is a talented author.

Still, the Pulitzer commitee doesn’t honour authors simply for writing a great story. They obviously thought McCarthy’s book added something to English Literature and I agree. Though I despise the grammatical trickery McCarthy chose to use, he got the literary community to notice a sci-fi novel. The book has done a lot for the genre. He should be congratulated.

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Renegades of Funk“ by Rage Against the Machine

There has been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere recently about Copyright, so I thought I’d throw a few of my own ideas into the mix.

Cory Doctorow recently issued a call for writers to write a reply to SF novelist Mark Helprin’s call in the NYT for copyright to be extended eternally. I think it’s obvious to most writers that this is a Bad Idea. For an illustration of why this is so, crafted better than I ever could, read Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson.

Personally I cannot imagine a world of eternal copyright (although it would drastically cut down on the number of Bad News Bears rip offs that come out year after year). Imagine if you could no longer write about feuding families and star-crossed lovers because Shakespeare already did that? Or shipwrecks? Or gunfights at high noon? This is extreme, but you see what I mean.

On another note, due to the advent of POD technologies, Simon & Schuster has modified their boilerplate contract so that the rights to a book they purchase never revert back to the author (even if the book goes off market, or doesn’t sell any copies). They’ll own your book. Think of it. They could take your book off the market, not sell it ANYWHERE (even Amazon), and you could NEVER get it back. Ridiculous. Read SFWA’s response to this policy here.

Lastly, I just thought I’d throw this out there because it’s interesting. Landi Guidetti was recently sued for copyright violation for downloading 4 songs over the USC network. One of Cory’s students interviewed him. It’s damn interesting. Have a look.

What are your thoughts on Copyright? As authors, this is near and dear to our hearts. We make our livings on it. But technology is gradually rendering it obsolete. Or is it? How do you think technology will affect us?

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Love in an Elevator“ by Aerosmith

So I finished The Neverending Story by Michael Ende*in record time on my vacation and found myself in O’Hare airport with nothing to read. The only thing even faintly sci-fi in the pitiful bookstore I visited was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I picked it up because it’s the story of a man and a boy walking across a post-apocalyptic America in search of the world’s last canned food. Two things about this appealed to me. Another member of my writing group, Andrew LeBlanc, is writing a screenplay called “High Nuclear Noon on the Radiation Range” which is a similar and yet disturbingly different idea, and Oprah actually picked it for her book club. Which, in theory, should give the rest of us genre writers hope.

It doesn’t.

Judging from the writing, McCarthy is one of those pretentious literary authors who believe that the english language is their bitch. Commas have been deemed irrevalent. Contractions like can’t and don’t have had their apostrophes amputated (but, interestingly enough, “it’s” still has its punctuation (I’ll riff on this in the comments if anyone prompts me)). Mercifully, dialogue is given its own line (but no quotes). Even the lowly sentence isn’t spared. Check out some of these gems…

Deep stone flutes where the water dripped and sang.

Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake.

Its bowels, its beating heart. (okay, I lied, there are SOME commas but they’re as rare as a virgin on Hollywood Boulevard.)

Now, I’m an English minor, and thus, I was forced to read such literary excrement as James Joyce’s Potrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Normal humans don’t like these books. In fact, both were self-published. Even my lit prof, whose job it is to like Joyce, claimed that Joyce’s third book, Finnegan’s Wake was basically unreadable. You need to reach a certain level of pretentiousness before you can get into these books, and thankfully I haven’t hit that point yet.

Now, I’m not saying that McCarthy’s book is horrible. It’s a pain to read because of the above issues, but it’s actually quite well written. My objection is that he’s trying to artificially make his book literary by using these parlour tricks. He’s saying, “Look at me, I’m so good that you can like the book even though it’s a pain to read.” There’s a certain segment of the literary community that will like the book simply because of these parlour tricks. In my opinion, the book gained absolutely nothing from these stylistic indulgences.

I’ve said this before about Joyce’s work, and I’ll say it again about McCarthy’s. A great writer should be able to write masterpieces without resorting to Stupid Pet Tricks. Sure, break the rules if it adds to the work. In The Road, they don’t. McCarthy’s tactic is a cheap trick to get attention from the literary community. Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.

*The Neverending Story, the novel, is much, much better than the movie. The movie only covered the first third of the book, and the rest of the book is truly awesome. For instance, Bastain ends up raising an army and attacking Atreyu. The Ivory Tower is burnt to the ground. Many of the books true life lessons are contained in the last part of the book. It’s for kids for sure, but adults will love it. Highly suggested reading.

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Under Pressure“ by Queen

I’m not going to cover more ground here on how to avoid getting scammed. There’s TONS of material about that on the web already. But, as you know, part of the mission statement of this blog is to bring those resource to you. So, on that note, I’ll mention three very importants bookmarks no writer should be without.

The first one, of course, is SFWA’s very own Writer Beware. The page is maintained by the folks over at SFWA and contains warnings about larcenous literary agents, predatory publishers, and um evil(?) editors (no relation to the Evil Editor who, aside from some snarkiness, is generally a good guy).

The site is highly recommended. Some must read sections are the Thumbs Down Agency List and the Thumbs Down Publisher List.

And that brings us to our second spot. It’s A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ Writer Beware blog. The blog was definitely the right format for Writer Beware. Many dubious agencies change their names frequently to avoid bad publicity. These two writers have actually succeeded in putting fraudulent publishers in jail, so you know they’re serious. The site should be called “Con Men Beware”.

I’ll just mention the final resource briefly as I’m nearly late for dinner with dad. Preditors & Editors has numerous services available to writers, from agency listings that contain a “recommend” and “not recommended” tag, to lists of attorneys, awards, and publishers. The site also holds an annual “best of” e-awards contest for best zine, best story, best editor–you know, the usual categories. If the awards mean anything other than that the recipient has a strong web presence is up for debate, but any exposure is good exposure, right?

Anyways, that’s it for now. Upcoming posts will deal will tackle Amazon head on… so stay tuned for the carnage!

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “Big Bang Baby“ by The Stone Temple Pilots

First of all, I went back to the old theme temporarily. There were some technical difficulties with “Simply Green”.

There’s been a lot of excitement in astronomy recently. A new planet has been located around the red dwarf star “Gliese 581″. There is much awesomeness in the Gliese system. The star is a mere 20 light years away which means it’s conceivable that an astronaut could reach the planet and return within a human lifetime. Further, it’s not a gas giant like nearly all previously discovered planets. It’s a rocky planet, like Earth, and its orbit is within the “Goldilocks” zone where it’s not too hot or too cold for life as we know it to exist.

Nothing fires the imagination like the discovery of a planet that could support life, so I thought I might toss this out there. What do you think life would look like on this planet?

The planet is twice as large as the Earth, and five times as massive, so that means a large iron (or possbily uranium) core. Think intense magnetic field. Because the planet is far larger than the Earth, gravity would be five times as intense, which means no tall creatures like giraffe, elephants, or even us humans. Think snakes or iguanas. Blood is a problem. Your heart would have to be incredibly strong to pump blood to the head, even in a relatively flat creature like a snake. Spongy flesh like our brain is probably impossible, so maybe a flat brain spread over much of their bodies would have to be the norm. Algae would flourish in this kind of environment.

The system is also home to a “super Jupiter” that orbits so close to the sun that the planet loses tens of millions of tons of gas a year to its hungry parent. This would periodically bake our rocky planet in vast doses of reflected radiation. The only way for life to survive this would be if our planet had a “super-ozone”, or, more likely, is covered in a vast ocean. So think underwater life. This might explain the lack of radio waves (SETI has checked the system twice).

Since the sun is a red dwarf it is much smaller than our own Sun. Our newfound planet is therefore able to orbit much closer in without getting cooked. Its “year” is only 13 days, and we’re not sure if it “wobbles”, which is the source of our seasons. But they’d probably have weather. In fact, it would be intense. Remeber that “Super-Jupiter” we mentioned earlier? Well, it might generate massive tides on our ocean world. It might even set up a kind of “standing wave” that passes with regularity over the surface of the planet. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Well, those are a few thoughts about life would look like on Gliese’s planet. What do you think life would look like? Got a picture in your head? GOOD! Now go out and write a story about it!