Month: September 2002

A brief political reason: I finally figured out, after this post of his, just what bothers me so much about Stephen Den Beste’s insistence on the moral imperative that the United States has to act unilaterally against Iraq. What bothers me is that SDB seems to genuinely believe the US-Iraqi dispute to be a dispute between two nations and two nations only: the US and Iraq, and that no other nations need concern themselves with out little war. It seems to me that one lesson of history is that “private little wars” like this tend to have effects, for good or ill and foreseen and unforeseen, on far more nations than just the two combatants.

I still waver on the issue of whether or not we should invade Iraq, and I’m not going to delve into it here; I’ve broken my “no politics” pledge enough already. But I will note that I find the current meme in the pro-war community, “It’s between the US and Iraq and everyone else can butt the hell out”, to be a dangerous and possibly short-sighted attitude.

And as Mr. Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

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I’m one of those people who still watches ER religiously, so I greeted this news item thusly:

AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

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I have now seen the funniest movie trailer in history. I have played this thing ten times or so since I discovered it (via Roger Ebert’s Movie Answer Man column). Check it out. If you’ve ever tired of those ponderous film trailers with that deep, gravelly voiced guy starting off “In a world where….”, you’ll love this.

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I’ve been on a roll lately with the novel-in-progress. As it stands, I’ve got four more chapters to do before it’s done and ready to be spit upon and laughed at accepted warmly by an agent and, then, a publisher. This is something of a milestone for me, as I have been working on this particular item for nearly six years now. (And it will actually be longer than that, as this is only Book One of a duology.)

Of course, that six years is not one unbroken stream of work. Like most proto-writers, I used to go through periods during which I would consider that “I really ought to get some work done on the book” and yet, never actually do any writing. Never a day without lines is a tougher commandment than it sounds.

I’m a bit worried right now about the length of the thing. Currently, the word count stands at a little more than 135,000 words. Allowing for my average chapter length, I expect the novel to weigh in at 170,000 to 180,000 words. If one assumes roughly 400 words to a page in a mass-market paperback, that puts my book at around 400 to 450 pages or so. Somewhere I seem to recall encountering advice that first-timers should err on the side of brevity, but I may be wrong. And assuming that the book actually comes before an actual editor whose reaction isn’t “Send the form letter and bring me the next manuscript!!”, there will be a lot of editing to be done in the future.

Anyway, it’s still pretty exciting to actually be nearing a conclusion of sorts. And then it’s on to the second volume….

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I haven’t tried to write one yet, so I can’t be sure, but it seems to me that haunted house stories must be fairly hard to pull off successfully. The tropes are by now very familiar: the brooding mansion sitting on a large estate out in the country; the history of eccentric owners who met dolorous ends in the house; the fact that people who have attempted to stay in the house have failed miserably; the odd, almost robotic housekeeper who still stays on at the house; decriptions of the house itself as “evil”, “malevolent”, et cetera.

All of these tropes are present in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Maybe it’s the familiarity of the haunted house story that made the book suffer a bit for me, as I found the story rather hard to really get involved in. The feeling of malice in the book never really came alive, at least not until near the end. The book does not so much “build” as “meander”, and then it suddenly arrives. The only real indicator of an impending climax in the book is the dwindling page-count as one reads it, which I found disappointing. I’ve admired Jackson’s short fiction, and I have also read a great deal of praise for her novels (and this novel in particular), so I am quite surprised by my reaction.

The story is fairly simple: four people go to live for a time in Hill House, as an experiment at the behest of a researcher into the paranormal. Living in the house tends to bring out the worst in all of the characters, for some reason, and it is to Jackson’s credit as a writer that each character becomes unpalatable in his or her own way. Unfortunately, though, the characters are not balanced, as the tortures and self-loathing of Eleanor overtake everyone else. (Yes, I know that in the end there is a reason for that, but it still doesn’t help the two-hundred plus pages leading up to it.) There are the standard “things that go bump in the night”, but some plausible explanations for this are provided along the way. In fact, nearly everything that happens in the book seems to have a plausible explanation, so we are never particularly certain if Hill House really is haunted or not. That’s an interesting angle, but it never really takes flight.

I wanted to like The Haunting of Hill House much more than I did. My attention was simply never grabbed as a good horror story should (or any good story, for that matter). For a very similar story executed in more involving fashion, check out Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

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Sometimes in sports when a bad team rebuilds, a specific progression can be traced. First, they are the bad team that everyone wants to play because they’re an easy target; that was the Buffalo Bills last year. Then, they become the bad team that nobody wants to play: they still lose most of the time, but they scrap and claw and fight and always keep the game close. That could very well be the Buffalo Bills this year, especially after the opener yesterday, which they lost, 37-31 in overtime, to the New York Jets.

Most of the Bills’ “question marks” going into the game actually did well. The offensive line was able to run-block effectively, allowing Bills RB Travis Henry to put up over 140 yards rushing. Their pass-blocking wasn’t as good — Drew Bledsoe faced an awful lot of pressure — but that will most definitely get better. The defense also did a good job of keeping the Jets offense from ever really developing a rhythm for more than a series or two. So how did the Bills end up losing? Because their special teams, which for more than three years now have been substantially less than “special”, blew the game by giving up a blocked punt and two kickoff returns for touchdowns — including the opening kickoff in overtime, so the game ended in OT before there was ever a play from scrimmage. Special teams play has been a train-wreck for the Bills ever since that playoff game in Tennessee that they lost (also on a kickoff return, this one with twenty seconds or so left in the game). Oh, where is Steve Tasker when you need him?

How was Drew Bledsoe’s performance? Well, it’s wonderful to be able to watch the Bills and have some confidence in the quarterback again, something which has not really been the case since Jim Kelly’s retirement. He did throw two interceptions, although I only consider one of them to be a true interception because the other was one of those deals where the receiver gets a hand on the ball, but then the defender pops him, knocking the ball into the air where another defender, who happens to be in the right place at the right time, plucks it from the air. Calling those against a QB’s stats has always struck me as a bit unfair. Maybe they should be called “deflections” instead of “interceptions”. Bledsoe also engineered a last-minute drive to tie the game, which was utterly thrilling. Welcome to Buffalo, Drew.

(An interesting side note: Drew Bledsoe’s first play from scrimmage in his NFL career, back in 1994 with the Patriots, was a pass play on which he was sacked by Bruce Smith of the Bills. His first play from scrimmage as a Bill was a pass play on which he was sacked. Weird.)

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A quick maintenance note: I have removed the permanent link to James Lileks’s site, not because I don’t care for his viewpoints — although I don’t — but because his writing style has become grating to me. I was originally interested in his writing because I found a certain kind of warm humor in it, but that element appears to have vanished completely.

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I expect that every writer has a shelf full of reference books to which they turn on a regular basis. Even a writer who works in fantasy, making up his or her setting and details as the work goes along, has to rely on a number of references for things like environmental information, literary techniques, poetic allusions, and the like. Some of my more frequently used reference works include the following.

:: The Rand McNally Atlas of the World: Masterpiece Edition. This is one of those gigantic atlases with close-up, topographical maps of just about every place on the earth. Immensely useful.

:: The Oxford Essential World Atlas. Why have two atlases? Because the Oxford one is smaller, being a large trade paperback as opposed to an eighteen-inch high, two-inch thick tome like the Rand-McNally. Sometimes I don’t need the close-up view, so the Oxford suits me fine.

:: Historical Atlas, by William R. Shepherd. And then there are times when I need to know what the borders of the Ottoman Empire were, or perhaps the ecclesiastical districts of Plantagenet-era England, or the route of Marco Polo’s journey to China, or the limits of Mongol encroachment into the West. This book has all that and more. I’ve meant to update this book over the years — the one I own dates from 1956 — but the old one hasn’t lost its usefulness one whit.

:: Scientific American’s How Things Work Today. I haven’t had a whole lot of use for this book in my own writing yet, but it’s full of information on the current state of technology for laypersons.

:: The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference. This is a big catch-all book about the current state of the sciences. If I ever turn to writing SF, I suppose I will use it more than I do now, although it’s a fascinating book to dip into.

:: The Oxford Book of English Verse. Here’s another one that I should probably update, as my copy is seventy years old. Every writer needs an all-purpose collection of poetry….

:: Immortal Poems, edited by Oscar Williams. ….or two. This one’s more compact, being a mass-market paperback. It also contains a lot that the Oxford doesn’t.

:: World Poetry, edited by Washburn, Major and Fadiman. This is just what the title says, and it’s as wonderful as useful.

:: Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Also just what the title says. This book has capsule bios of authors, capsule entries on their major works, entries on literary techniques and movements, and a lot more.

:: The Bible, King James Version. I’m not much concerned with the theological aspects of the Bible, so I keep the KJV, which is a towering achievement of the language.

:: Almanacs. I’m not loyal to any particular almanac. I buy a new one every three years or so; currently I have the TIME Magazine almanac. I bought this one, as opposed to the World Almanac, simply because it was cheaper at the bookstore I was in on the day that I decided to update my almanac. You never know when you’re going to need some tiny little fact like who won the 1949 World Series or when the Chrysler Building was erected or the dates of King Henry VII’s reign in England.

:: The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. This book is absolutely essential.

:: Dictionaries. Currently I own two: The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition and The Oxford Pocket Dictionary and Thesaurus, American Edition. (I’m not sure how the Oxford can be remotely considered a “pocket” dictionary. The thing won’t fit in any pocket I’ve ever seen.) My AHD has more entries than the Oxford, but the Oxford has the thesaurus in the same volume. I am also a member of a book club that includes access to the full Oxford English Dictionary online, although I don’t use that perk as often as I originally thought I might.

Of course, there are a large number of other books that I use as reference materials, but the ones listed here are my main workhorses.

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This weekend was a sad one in my family: our oldest cat, the nine-year-old Persian named Jasmine, passed away. It was very sudden and very quick, which is bad because of the shock but is also good because of the quickness of the whole thing. We are one of those families for whom pets are pretty much full family members, so her loss was hard. Also hard is explaining what has happened to our three-year-old daughter. She understood that something happened that made Mommy and Daddy very sad, and she understood that Jasmine became very sick…but she evidently hasn’t put the emotions and the reality of the event all together yet. This is the first death in the family that she has experienced.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Multnomah Falls, Oregon.

I’ve lived near one of the world’s greatest and most famous cataracts, Niagara Falls, for more than twenty years now; but before that I lived near another of the most beautiful of the world’s waterfalls, the spectacular Multnomah Falls. This cataract is located in the Columbia River Gorge, an hour or so from Portland. The water volume is certainly nowhere near Niagara, but Niagara can’t begin to boast Multnomah’s amazing height. The falls are created when a lovely but unremarkable stream plunges more than six hundred feet over an escarpment. The hiking trails in the park devoted to the Falls yield a number of amazing views, from the pool where the Falls land to the bridge at the Falls’ midheight to the observation deck located at the very brink of the Falls. It’s been more than two decades since I saw Multnomah last, and I would dearly love to go back.

The image links to an official National Parks Service website devoted to Multnomah Falls.

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