I. Love. My. Job.

So, thanks to truepenny, I now have titles for three books, if my publisher is interested: Pinion, Sanction, and Cleave*. And a title for the whole thing: The House of Dust.

But that's not what's making me laugh and laugh and laugh.

See, I have run out of physical appearances for characters. I used to know what everybody looked like, in my head. Which is why I could never cast actors to play them, because they looked like themselves.

Somewhere around Undertow I ran out. And so in this book, I didn't know what anybody looked like, and actors are usually too pretty. So I started making everybody look like various blues guitarists. And because this is the book where my motto is "That's fucked up! Let's put it in!" I've got both an Elric parody and Benedict of Amber parody*** wandering around.

Which now leads us to the situation I'm in, which is !Benedict, as portrayed by Chris Smither, standing in the hallway in his bunny slippers talking to a couple of teenaged girls through a bedroom door while one of them gets entirely too tipsy on red wine.

My god I love this book. I think I have just grokked the appeal of crackfic, all at once, like a slash of enlightment.**

---

*What do these three words have in common?

**Yes, that was a typo, but it was so good I had to leave it in.

***No. There will not be any !Benedict/!Elric slash. Back away now and PUT THE CRACK PIPE DOWN.

It's probably stupid of me to post this, because god knows I am having a problem lately with the Internets and the taking seriously and the lack of irony and the so on. Apparently, I have lost the ability to wink and nod to people. On the other hand, I am full of thinky, so here is my thinky.

Also, I used to be funny. Or perhaps people laughed because they were scared of me [please see footnote 7].

Okay, so. This is a repost of a post that I posted last night, because I thought it was funny, and it was two AM and I had been poking around on the Internets. Anyway, it got up some people's noses, so I pulled it down before the comment section could lose me any friends. So, yanno, before going any further, [please see footnote 1].

I am now reposting it, because I still think it's funny. I apologize to the three or four people whose comments got lost when I deleted: please feel free to repost.

Also, not so much with the taking myself seriously? Trust me, I am excruciatingly aware that of the something-more-than-six-billion people on Planet Earth, only 25,000 of them actually have or will ever notice I and my life's work exist, and maybe 5,000 of those actually, you know, care. My opinion is worth exactly what you pay for it. And in a million years we'll all be dead anyway. And yeah, I get het up about my Work and my Artistic Integrity sometimes, but that's because [see footnote 1].

However, Version 2.0 comes with Actual Discussion About What I Actually Think About Fanfiction. So be warned, David Pegg.

---

Actual discussion regarding what I think of fanfiction follows:

(But first, allow me to establish my bona fides.) When I talk about fanfiction and fandom, I am not coming to it as a complete outsider. God knows I wrote enough of it between the ages of, oh, 8-16. Although I kind of came to it on my own. There were no Internets in those days, and I had no actual friends. So I didn't actually realize I was writing fanfiction. On the other hand, it means I have a pretty good idea of what the primitive (in the technical artistic sense of primitive) fanfiction writer looks like, what she produces in isolation, and what the motives behind it are. In other words, I did a whole hell of a lot of taking settings that I really liked and adding female characters to them, because in those days there weren't many good women in media. I mean seriously, I liked Scarecrow and Mrs. King because of the strong female lead. I SHIT YOU NOT.

"Some of my best friends write fanfiction." I've certainly done enough defense-of-fanfiction here in the past, and as a result I've even been accused of being a fanfiction writer in disguise. Well, several fanfiction writers in disguise. Most notably, riba_rambles. I assume her husband can tell us apart, though.

I've also written a couple of things that qualify as fanfic with the serial numbers filed off enough to get them past the legal department. I qualify them as fanfiction because they rely *very heavily* on the meta conversation to have any value at all. And to be quite frank, the vast majority of my original fiction, at least at novel length, is reactive. I mean, I jokingly say that Carnival is what you get when you put "When it Changed" and Farnham's Freehold in a box and make them fight... but it's a hah hah only serious kind of thing. A Companion to Wolves is certainly reactive to the whole fuzzy animal companion wish-fulfillment fantasy subgenre. And Undertow is a spiritual descendant of Little Fuzzy and Downbelow Station and "The Word for World is Forest," and I won't pretend for an instant it's not.

Fanfiction [see footnote 4] interests me, frankly, because I think its narrative protocols are useful to any genre writer, anyone engaged in a genre conversation. And they're easy to see and pick out, because so much fanfiction is naive or primitive (much like the fanfiction I once wrote) and thus very easy to parse for narrative patterns. Its conventions are often quite naked. (Much like pre New Wave SF, which is also a quite naive literature. It's very easy to see what artists are doing when they are not quite certain themselves.) (On the other hand, there's some very sophisticated fanfiction, too.) (Please note that naive and sophisticated ARE NOT VALUE JUDGEMENTS. They are descriptions of auctorial understanding of and control over their craft, and the influence of outside/critical/editorial/peer protocols.)

What I'm saying here is that I find great value in understanding how the narrative protocols in fanfiction works, because it doesn't work any differently than any other genre of fiction. Just more transparently.

Also, I hang out on the edges of several fan communities, and while I never quite have the gumption to become active in anything beyond the occasional conversation, I have been a peripheral member of media and SFF fandom since 1989. So if you are moved to make a condescending remark in comments about how maybe I should read some fanfiction before I try to categorize it, [please see footnote 2]. And remember, not categorizing. Examining the narrative protocols behind it [please see footnote 5].

---

And now, the list.

Things I learned this week:

1. Autocannibalism is even more fun than necrophilia. I mean, to type.

Pervert.

2. Fanfiction falls into develops from three [rough] categories[see footnote 3] narrative protocols: porn, subversion, and white-space patching. Of that last grouping, we may say that there is the fanfiction that patches over the unintentional or broken or disregareded holes in the narrative. And then there is the fanfiction that exists because some people have a hard time with any white space--even when it's the kind of negative space that's more interesting than the narrative. This latter is a form of close reading, and is sometimes interesting on those terms, but does tend to defeat nuance, whereas the first form can create nuance where no nuance was there to be found. (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter fandom.) [see footnote 6]

ETA: (below, jonquil and veejane point out that there is in indeed a fourth category, which is to say faux-episodes actually intended to mimic the original material. This? Is truth. On the other hand, I do find that a lot of those do a certain amount of white-space patching or subversion themselves. Things like, oh, examining the curious paternalistic moral and ethical gaps in The Man from UNCLE. *carefully doesn't look at friends list*) /ETA

2a. Also, buttsex. (Which as we all know is still just an anagram for subtext.)

3. Nature adores a vacuum.

4. The universe does not exist to flatter me. Dammit.

5. The only way out is through.

6. You can never go wrong with autocannibalism.

7. Or trebuchets.

8. Especially trebuchets.

9. If you work for twelve hours, and then putter around on the internets for a little while, it gets to be late very quickly.

10. It doesn't get less late if you type top ten lists.

11. The internets take themselves more seriously than I do.

11a. They also take me more seriously than I do.

---

[footnote 1: Monkey, you we are funny.]

[footnote 2: You kids get the hell off my lawn.]

[footnote 3: I see part of my error here. The word "categories" is very ill chosen. Because of course what I'm talking about is an examination of narrative protocols, not the imposition of genre boundaries. I kind of don't care in the slightest about genre boundaries, and have been heard to opine, in SFF, that they're just marketing categories and can we all stop taking it so damned seriously? [see footnote 1]]

[footnote 4: fanfiction doesn't actually exist. Or, more precisely, fanfiction is a modern name for something that never needed a name before the advent of copyright law, because anybody was free to take any story and respond to it, adapt it, switch it around and claim it for their own. However, I think modern fanfiction is particularly interesting because it operates in opposition to and commentary upon a shared body of work--canon and fanon both--in much the same way that SFF operates in opposition to and commentary upon a shared body of work. As does all the Arthuriana, Shakespeariana, Sherlockiana, etc etc etc.]

[footnote 5: I so have no use for categories. I almost always find them unrealistically binary, hard-edged, and divisive. Well, they're meant to be divisive. But the divisiveness is often v. silly. It's easier and more accurate to say, I think, that something contains elements of X and Y and Z than it is to try to decide if it is X or Y or Z]

[footnote 6: This comment was originally meant to be kind of hah hah only serious, but when I first posted it, people took it Very Seriously. For future reference, I am only Very Serious when talking about human rights abuses and what a foolish pack of monkeys we are to be shitting where we eat. And even then, I'm also aware that the cosmos does not care one bit if we wipe ourselves out, even if we take ourselves awfully seriously, and forget to [see footnote 1].

The rest of the time, I'm perfectly aware that most of what I talk about here is wank. [Well, sometimes I get a little hung up on my artistic integrity, but really, I'm as full of shit as the next monkey [see footnote 1].

Anyway, this is where it all gets interesting, because I think most fiction uses these same protocols. The ever-so-blurry dividing line between fanfiction and original fiction (neither of which exist) is more or less, to me, where one stops needing the meta to get the full effect of a story. In other words, you can read Carnival without knowing anything about Farnham's Freehold and still have a book that makes sense and has, I hope, an impact. When the primary impact of a story is metatextual, when it relies heavily on the reader's knowledge of an ur-text, and it's not written by the same guy who wrote the first story, then it's fanfic.]

[footnote 7: NB: I am of Swedish, Celtic, and Ukrainian extraction. If you're not sure if I'm joking, I'm joking. If you're pretty sure nobody would be joking about something that dark and horrible, I'm joking. If you are about to get really het up over something I said that challenges your fundamental assumptions about what's important in the universe... I'm serious. But I still think it's funny, because in a million years we'll all be dead anyway. [see footnote 8]]

[footnote 8: if you were offended, that was a joke. [see footnote 9]]

[footnote 9: if you weren't offended, that was still a joke.]

.

If you read my blog and enjoy it (I suppose there must be people out there who read it and loathe it, given the law of averages, although I can't imagine why, on a giant internet, one would do such a thing), I'd like you all to take a moment and appreciate the fact that you all owe Rick Springfield a tremendous debt of gratitude. You see, it was Mr. Springfield who first acquainted me with the concept of narrative irony and the unreliable narrator.

Like most adolescents I was irony-blind. This is a situation that was probably exacerbated by having been raised, as previously documented, by wild lesbians, in the era when political correctness had not yet crept extensively into the mainstream, but was The Driving Force in the dyke scene. Fortunately, I recovered, probably in part due to early exposure to my matrilineal grandfather's Swedish sense of humor. (I'm a lot funnier than most of you think I am. Just ask mrissa.)

I can still remember the penny dropping. And as I recall it, it was Rick Springfield's "Jessie's Girl" that clued me in that sometimes, things were not what they appeared to be.

And specifically, the lines quoted in the title.

...Dude. The narrative knows the narrator is kind of an asshole. And deeply in denial.

Well, how about that? Next thing I knew, I had figured out that Sting sort of understood that the narrator in "Every Breath You Take" was maybe not right in the head. I've had a weakness for tricky storytelling, in music and elsewhere, ever since.

You'd be amazed the narrative tricks you can learn from pop music and stage performers.

OMG it's 1980 and I'm wearing Keds with a power suit!

(danger: crunchy hook. the management assesses a fairly high earworm risk)
.

You ever wonder if Freddy Mercury got dressed for work thinking, man, there's more to this job than prancing about in assless leather pants and hairspray, but nobody would ever believe it?

Some things never change.

I'm not even done being a hot young thing yet, and I'm already a bogus sellout.

Gimme that microphone stand, man. I gotta do a thing.

He's got Matthew's magic red jacket.
(penultimate and semipenultimate photos on the last complete line.)

(Which of course doesn't show up until Whiskey & Water. So you all won't have noticed it yet. But that is what it looks like.)

Huh.

Guess I know where I got my taste in flamboyant clothing. ;-)

Mysterious Galaxy
Best sellers for July 2006
Trade Paperbacks

    1)THE LINE BETWEEN by Peter Beagle
    2)BLOOD & IRON by Elizabeth Bear
    3) HONORED ENEMY by Feist & Forstchen
    4) ECHELON by Josh Conviser
    5) CHAINS THAT YOU REFUSE by Elizabeth Bear

Thanks, M'e!

---

I had a conversation last night with l'agent last night regarding the commercial potential of Whiskey & Water. Fortunately, we had a bottle of wine handy...

Well, it's a challenging book. It's certainly the densest thing I've ever written. (I also happen to think it's the best. This week, anyway.)

And it does have an *awful* lot of boom, especially at the end.

She also says I should be more positive about my work in public. *g* But hey, I'm a Yankee; I was raised not to brag. On the other hand, I loved each and every one of those books enough to spend months or years of my life on them, so there you go. And I expect the next two or three to be even more polarizing than Blood & Iron seems to be.

And I actually do think I'm pretty okay at this writing thing. Yanno. And getting better every day. (There, arcaedia. Can I go back to complaining about how much I suck now? No? How about posting links to bad reviews? Yanno, this marketing thing is harder than it looks!)

I figure if I don't manage to destroy my career in the next twelve months, what with the fluffy psychic animal companion wish-fulfillment Viking deconstruction wolf smut book, and the book in omniscient with the ensemble cast of something close to fifty characters, and the Big Gay Planet Of The Amazon Women book... then the much more commercial stuff I have coming out in 2008 will be a shoe-in.

(You'll all buy a Big Gay Planet Of The Amazon Women book, won't you?)

Either that, or everybody will decide I've sold out and abandon me. (Start practicing now: "Elizabeth Bear? Well, I respect her early work, but then she started writing trashy Elizabethan romances....")

But I have faith is all of you. (That's code for, "If you bought it for your mom and all the girls at the bridge club, I wouldn't find it in my heart to complain.")

Och, quick, I'd better sell a couple of proposals before the numbers for Carnival come in....

(kidding, kidding. sheesh. Let's just say that I'm prone to risk-taking behavior, and I'm very aware of it. And on that note, I think I'm gonna eat some jellybeans and play Civilization now.)

*

In other news, my brain is trying to conflate Loki and Lucifer.

It works surprisingly well.

You get a complete narrative, as if each story is the missing half of the other one. Or each one explains the holes in the other one. (The Odin-Loki relationship and the Yahweh-Lucifer relationship have some great parallels, but they're different angles on the story, as it were. You still get the saga of a violent breakup and a war in heaven, and neither one really has a good explanation for the motives behind any of it, but somehow, when I jam them together in my head, they click.)

And this, of course, wouldn't fit into any of my working continuities, and I've already got two different Norse things going, and two hard riffs on Judeochristian myth. So really, I need another one.

I am in so much fucking trouble.

...I wonder if I can file the serial numbers off enough to get this into Dust. Since it's already going all Old Testament on me. Which is fun, for an SF novel.

Yup, that one might be starting to gel. Since truepenny gave me this today: 

For behold, the Lord comes forth from His place, and He shall descend and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains shall melt under Him, and the valleys shall split-as wax before fire, as water poured down a steep place. All this is because of the transgression of Jacob, and because of the sins of the house of Israel. Who is the cause of the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And who causes the high places of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?

with any very considerable degree of exactness.

Fortuitously, this morning, I woke up to a Studio 360 entirely on Herman Melville's, Moby Dick: or, The Whale. The quote I used as a title was mentioned in the broadcast. It's in this chapter. There are two more chapters on the whale in art, here and here.

The whole book is here. It's a pretty good book, actually. I especially like the whaling chapters. The Ray Bradbury phone interview on adapting the script is here.

To put that in context:

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

---

That paragraph, of course, could be about just about anything else you wanted it to be about. I'm going to make it be about writing--because of course, writing is still just like everything else.

Specifically, I'm going to make it be about the art of implication.

Writing is a series of compromises. One of the reasons it gets harder as you get better at it is that you become aware of the compromises you're negotiating and the choices you're making, and they become conscious choices (1). When you're learning to write a novel, you are learning to write a novel. Any novel. To find some kind of a path from beginning to end of the book. It's like a war--you go wherever you can find a path. Any port in a storm.

This, after all, isn't easy.

Later on, if you do finish a book (and its a big if) and you revise it, and you learn from it, and you write another one and another one, you start developing skills. You realize that you have choices--in what you show, in what you don't show, in what you imply and state outright, in which way the plot tends, in what technique you use in any given difficult scene. In the POV the book is told in, what papersky usefully calls the mode (which is the conjunction of scope and POV and so forth that are the underpinning of the narrative--the structure the rest of the book hangs off.)

You realize why you get a different book if you tell it in first person instead of in third. You begin to understand that there are strengths and weaknesses in any choice you make. In the process of becoming an educated writer, you become an educated reader.

You lose the ability to read as a reader. First, you read as an inexperienced writer, and you find yourself comparing everything you read to how-you-would-have-done-it. Some of us, at this stage, become incapable of reading anything. Some of us become incapable of writing anything. Some of us become incapable of doing one or the other with pleasure. Every choice this asshole made is wrong! This isn't the book I would have written at all!

Sadly, some people get stuck in this stage. Some of them go on to review books for the New York Times.

For the rest of us, this stage usually passes. (I find that I can often guess whether a reviewer is writing publishable work by one simple quality of her reviews--whether she's trying to figure out what the author meant to do, and whether or not he succeeded, and doing it in some kind of an organized fashion. If they're bitching about the book they would have written instead, well. See above. [I know this stage intimately. From the inside. I have been that asshole who wanted to turn every book into the book I thought it should have been.] )

Eventually, you learn to read like a human being again, but you never get your innocence back.

Ever.

Fair warning: you pay for what you get. If you want to learn to write books, you pay in your ability to uncritically appreciate a story.

Okay, so, you start understanding these trade offs. You learn, oh, that you can have a completely transparent narrative, or one that's layered. (A few people can manage what appears to be a transparent narrative and isn't, a surface that, when you plunge your hand into it to pick up that pretty rock on the bottom, proves to be wet and cold all the way down, and your fingers brush the stone and can't quite reach it. I aspire to be one of them. I am not. Yet. Somebody tell me when I get there.)

You learn that you will not reach the same people with either book. (A book that's mostly linear, fast-paced, narrative fun is wasted on me. I find them boring. Yes, boring. They sell well, though.) You must pick your audience. (You also try to broaden your audience as much as possible in the process, but you still have to write the books you have in your head, and you are the one that has to live with the bastard for two or five or ten years. Write the sort of thing you love to read. Or at least, aspire to write it.)

All of this is prologue. Because what I really want to talk about is implication.

I learned about this in 2003 while I was writing The Stratford Man. I didn't know what I was learning, and I had been doing it by accident occasionally before then, because I'm generally an inductive thinker, and so to me a thought process is not so much, if a then b, if b then c, if c then d--but "if a and q and z and fox and gibraltar then ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM!"

It's the only brain I've got. Make of it what you will.

Anyway, I hate on the nose stories. Specifically, I hate stories that make everything very plain and forward and use what I call "genre characterization," where the motivations of the characters are very obvious, and very plainly marked out and explained, and the characters are extremely consistent in their reactions and follow predictable emotional paths and--

--I've been married. I have a family.

I don't believe in those people for a heartbeat. People are messy, and many of them don't know why they do things any more than the average two year old does. (The writer has to know, of course, or have a general idea, at least. But that's iceberg stuff.) Some characters are internalized enough to guess why they do stuff, and guess why other people do. (Jenny Casey is one of these. She's go a tremendous emotional intelligence. She's savvy about people. She can tell you why Gabe is the way he is, or Elspeth, or any of her friends or coworkers. Well, except Fred. She has a huge blind spot where Fred is concerned, because she hates him.)

Others? Wander through life constantly gobsmacked. (Elaine is one of these.)

So how do you handle the second type?

You imply. (This--the characterization thing?--is only one place where this can happen. Worldbuilding is another one, and even personal movement. Beginning writers, once they figure out that they are supposed to have blocking, enumerate every movement. Later on, you know how to imply. You don't have to write "He spread his hand, reached out, and tugged her braid" because you know you can write "He gave her braid a yank" and the reader will fill in the rest.)

When I was writing All the Windwracked Stars, I tried to imply a bunch of stuff about the worldbuilding without ever stating it outright. I could not write decent exposition at that stage in my career, and I was still learning the implication trick, which is, in all its many variations, the trick of somehow showing the reader that the inconsistency you're illuminated is a clue rather than a mistake. I'm still not sure how you actually learn to do that, other than by practice. (I seem to be getting the hang of it--at least, in Carnival, there's a bunch of this kind of worldbuilding, and it seems (so far) to have gone down smoothly.)

Roger Zelazny is a master of this. There's a scene in The Guns of Avalon I haul up as an example constantly. Corwin is talking to Benedict, and Benedict is talking not about, but around the death of somebody he cared about. And Zelazny has Corwin say, "I glanced away, and when I looked back his face had returned to normal."

He doesn't have to tell us that Benedict is in tremendous pain. Because the alert reader knows. And that moment motivates everything Benedict does for the next three and a half books, and some of it seems pretty tricky from the outside. But if you *get* that moment, as a reader, you get what drives the man.

Now, here's the thing. That--implying motivation--doesn't always work. There are some readers who won't ever pick it up. There are some times when the writer fails. And like every other skill in the set, it's got to be learned.

And of course there's the added problem that readers who need the first kind of on-the-nose characterization are often the type of people who are not good at reading others, and readers who like the second kind of oblique characterization are often the type of people who *are*, and you have another mess. Because of course then you have people who are reading about characters whose personal interaction style is the inverse of their own...

And if you're Zelazny, you fuck with these people. By, for example, having Corwin repeatedly describe Benedict as dour, reserved, passionless. But then, as he's relating the action, Benedict (Corwin says, "He never smiled.") smiles constantly, gestures, loses his temper, gives Corwin hell for his behavior....

And some readers will come away with "Benedict was dour. He never smiled." And some will come away with "Corwin projects a hell of a lot, doesn't he?" Because the narrative is undermining the narrator.

You can't control the reader. Ever. The only thing you can control is the narrative. And know, going in, that no two people will ever, ever read the same book. Or even the book you wrote.

When you think about it, its pretty freaking cool.

---

And two point five comments on Hammered:

http://nicked-metal.livejournal.com/256120.html

http://nicked-metal.livejournal.com/256858.html

http://www.freaknation.com/reviews/books/hammered.php

---

(1)You also, if you're being published, become aware of all the people staring over your shoulder, and the fact that you can't please all of them. A third to half is pretty good, and if you can make one third really love you--well, the thing is, the more people, in general, who really really like a book, the more people, on the flip side, will hate it. This is good. The last thing you want, as an artist, is indifference. Passion. Passion is good. Passion means you're doing something useful.

My friend ashacat loves to quote what she says is an Armenian proverb: "He who tells truth must have one foot in the stirrup."

This is why its good if you piss people off (as long as you also win the love of others), and why writing safe books won't win you an enduring reputation. People do not fall in love with the bland.

You know, Riggs is doing fine when he sticks to the facts. The actual biography here is great. But I think his attempts at interpretations fail because he fails, as well, to realize that Jonson, Marston, and Dekker were funny. And that they won their battles with one another by making people laugh at the other guy, not just spitting vitriol. (Well, okay, Jonson apparently did take Marston out behind the woodshed that one time. But that's Ben for you. Marston, who seems to have been a generally good-natured guy when Ben wasn't getting the hell up his nose, eventually forgave the thrashing. I'm inclined to like Marston anyway; he said nice things about Kit.)

Anyway, there's this whole passage here about Ben Jonson (in The Poetaster, which is also the one where his Dekker parody is forced to vomit up all the seven-dollar words at the end, and then put on a strict diet of Ovid until the illness resolves) comparing himself to Homer (whatever, Ben, shut up and write some more vomit jokes) and Dekker caricaturing Homer in Satiromastix as a jobbing hack scrabbling to make ends meet, after which (we may guess: the publication dates and the period habit of circulating things in manuscript for years mean that one can't be too sure) Jonson commented with the following bill of sale in verse:

To Fine Grand.

What is't, fine Grand, makes thee my Friendship fly,
   Or take an Epigram so fearfully:
As't were a Challenge, or a Borrower's Letter?
   The World must know your greatness is my Debter.
In-primis, Grand, you owe me for a Jest;
   I lent you, on meer acquaintance, at a Feast.
Item, a Tale or two, some Fortnight after;
   That yet maintains you, and your House in Laughter.
Item, the Babylonian Song you Sing;
   Item, a fair Greek Posy for a Ring:
With which a Learned Madam you bely.
   Item, a Charm surrounding fearfully,
Your partie-per-pale Picture, one half drawn
   In solemn Cyphers, the other cob-web Lawn.
Item, a gulling Imprese for you, at Tilt.
   Item, your Mistress Anagram, i'your Hilt.
Item, your own, sew'd in your Mistress Smock.
   Item, an Epitaph on my Lord's Cock,
In most vile Verses, and cost me more pain,
   Than had I made 'em good, to fit your vain.
Forty Things more, dear Grand, which you know true,
   For which, or pay me quickly, or I'll pay you.

Upon which Riggs comments: "Jonson's epigram (1) "To Fine Grand" suggests that Dekker's caricature contained some measure of truth."

...dude. It's funny. It's also a b it of an indictment both of the patronage system (and how Benlike to pick it apart even while making use of it), and lords who take advantage of poor poets (apparently, prompt payment for writers has never been a priority of the system...)

Boy, if Mr. Riggs is ego-googling, am I in for one nasty letter....

---

(1) Ben's poems to his dead children are incredibly touching

There is no such thing as the eco-gothic movement. *g* t's just a handy label Chelsea and I have slapped on certain writerly characteristics that intrigue us.

( eco-what? )

The rest of the conversation, which touches upon Butler, Le Guin, Watts, the future of SFF, and why Robert Charles Wilson's Spin just might be the book of the decade, is here.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

"Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

(thanks to supergee for the reminder)

I've often said that one of the most useful accidents of training for me as a writer has been a thorough grounding in social anthropology, because it alienates the hell out of you. Seriously, a good bit of an undergrad anthropology program is designed to make you look at your own tribal customs as the bizarre set of beliefs they are.

Once you understand acculturation, you're doomed to spend the rest of your life second-guessing your assumptions. This is a really useful tool for a science fiction or fantasy writer.

Unfortunately, it also makes it really difficult to take better-acculturated people seriously. But since it usually takes two or three years of undergrad training to alienate somebody sufficiently to turn them into an anthropologist, there's not much you can do about it under field conditions.

...of course, the crowning irony here is that the process of breaking somebody's acculturation in order to alienate them from their society is a process of acculturation, too. And the person you wind up with when you're done with them is painfully self conscious, more or less not fit for polite society any more, and probably also a little bit creepy.

ETA: There are some spoilers for the Jenny books in the comment thread to this post. Approach with caution.

Final vote of the midnight movie viewing crew on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: eight thumbs up. If anything, it might be a little too faithful, as it maintains the pacing of the book, where the combat sequences are largely passed over or stylized or very brief.

It's not a movie that tells the same story as the book (the way that Peter Jackson's LoTR trilogy is, at its best.) It's the book made into a visual narrative. And I dunno how it would work for anybody who didn't have a stuffed lion named Aslan as a kid (let's get the reviewer bias right out there in public and up front) but man, did I like that.

My quibbles were all, entirely, the kind of quibbles you get when the movie doesn't quite match your head. I wanted Aslan to have a deeper voice, and to be more terrible--though the scene where he snarls at the Witch after she question his word was just right. (I also got to meet a real lion in November, just one thin sheet of Plexiglass away, and a CGI lion can't quite measure up--but he was a damned fine CGI lion.)

Tilda is still love. Mr. Tumnus is perfect. Lucy is wonderful--charming and delighful and fierce--and Edmund is a prat.

All in all, I give it a rousing just so. I cried like a little girl at all the appropriate bits, and there were plenty of other muffled sobs and sniffles and muted ooohs and even some cheering. And let's not talk about the lump in my throat during the lead up to the clash of the armies at the end. (Griffins! There was cheering for the griffins, and a really nice visual parallel to the Blitz at the beginning, and that's the most spoilery thing I have to say). It delivers; it's just exactly right; and if it's not a daring re-envisioning of the narrative I'm just fine with that, in this case. There's a place in the world for faithful adaptations too.

Also, Tilda Swinton. Yum. Giving Jadis all the complexity and nuance and emotional resonance she lacks in the books. Heck yeah; she's still--if she were just a tad more butch--the EBear Lucifer.

She and James MacAvoy and Georgie Hensley gave serious standout performances in this, layered and delightful.

I am a happy bear.

It was also a bit creepy to realize just how thoroughly that book is engraved on my DNA... and to spot some of the influences it's in my own work. Yeah, you'll know the scene in Blood & Iron when you get to it.

I swear it was totally the back of my brain handling that one.

And I definitely need more stone lions. *g* And centaurs. You can never have too many centaurs.

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Courtesy of herbmcsidhe, a brief article on Jenny Casey, the challenges of a speedy publication schedule, and my lack of a recognizable sense of humor is up on ScifFi Wire. (That's meant to be funny, the bit about the sense of humor) (Maybe I need a laugh track....) )

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And now, back to the CEM. Probably too early for the rest of that Chardonnay, huh?

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ETA

I knew I liked Willie Nelson.

docdad on on warriors and farmers, and dialogue, and crossing valleys.