The Snow White story was rejected, as I expected. Ugh. I’ve reached the point where rejections have pretty much one effect: they piss me off, but at least they piss me off right back to my desk or computer table. (Some writers occasionally complain that editors don’t give feedback in their rejections; most just use a form letter that says, “Not for us”. I don’t agree. I just want thumbs-up or thumbs-down.)

As for the damned novel, I’m halfway through editing it, and my “words removed” counter stands at just over 9000 — which means that at the halfway point in the book I’ve removed half of the total amount of words I wanted to remove in the first place. So that’s going OK. My basic rule on editing is to ask myself, “If I were the reader and this were someone else’s book, would I skip this part?” If I answer “yes”, out it comes.

Anyway, back to the grind.

Share This Post

Ha! Take that, HTML!! In your face, Flanders!

Since the switchover to Blogger II: The Wrath of Khan, I’ve noticed that when I use the <blockquote> tag, it screws up the formatting of everything that comes after the closing </blockquote> tag. But now I discover that sticking a paragraph (<p>) tag right after the closing </blockquote> tag seems to fix things. Okily-diddily-doo!!

Share This Post

One of my commenters is a bit nonplused after my off-handed admission yesterday of my appreciation of heavy metal music. Jason’s surprised that a level-headed, literate fellow like myself would go for that stuff. (That’s a paraphrase, of course!) So, an explanation is in order, I guess.

I was never that much of a headbanger, really. I didn’t wear t-shirts with my favorite bands’ logos on them. I’ve never owned a denim jacket. I didn’t grow long hair until 1995 or so, the key influences there more being Braveheart than any rock band. And to this day I have never attended a full-fledged rock concert. But I did like the music itself — some of it, anyway. I enjoyed Ratt and Saxon. Def Leppard was OK. I enjoyed Bon Jovi’s early albums, although I didn’t care much for Slippery When Wet, which was their breakout success. I got a kick out of Twisted Sister’s sense of humor. KISS was interesting, as was Ozzy, but I was pretty much “take it or leave it” on all the “demonic Satan child” antics. I remember when I bought a Stryper album without knowing anything about them, and was thus baffled when they started singing about God and stuff. (Come on, that’s really not the type of thing one expects from a metal album!) I never really warmed to Guns-n-Roses, mainly because I’ve always found Axl Rose’s singing voice grating. And to this day, I adore Van Halen — they’re the band I’m likely to name on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as my favorite rock band ever. (On Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays I’ll name Pink Floyd; Sundays I reserve for oldies groups like the Platters.)

What I dug about heavy metal was the size and spectacle of it — not the concert pyrotechnics, but the musical pyrotechnics, when loudness of volume and repetitious harmonic structure often concealed fascinating guitar work, excellent song construction, and interesting lyrics. A lot of metal acts based their songs on mythic tropes — Iron Maiden was really into that — and I was always surprised at the amount of literary allusion to be found in metal songs and albums. (It struck me as odd then, and it does to this day, that the people who partied to that music and scoffed at “literature” were, in fact, partying to music performed by people who didn’t scoff at literature at all.)

And I also enjoyed the occasional classical music allusion that metal artists would employ. Eddie Van Halen was big on this — his guitar solos will often include tiny quotes of Mozart or Debussy — and in any case, I’ve always tried to see all music as being part of one giant continuum. Remember the scene in Mr. Holland’s Opus when Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) realizes that his attempts to teach a music class have failed utterly, so he takes a different approach? He plays a snippet of a popular song of the day, “Lover’s Concerto” — and reveals to his students that it’s actually based on a minuet by J.S. Bach. Then he says, “Try to hear the connecting tissue between this” — he plays a few bars of the Bach minuet — “and this,” whereupon he launches into a bit of raucous, honky-tonk piano of the type that made Jerry Lee Lewis famous.

I’ve always tried to find that “connecting tissue” — if not the direct musical connection, then the connection of spirit between the classical composers of the past and the musicians of today, whether we’re talking about John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Wynton Marsalis, Vangelis, or Van Halen. When I consider the giant proportions of a typical heavy metal concert — the huge sets, the fireworks, the guitar solos lasting ten minutes, the amps set to 11 (because, you know, most amps only go to 10!) — and I then read about the things Hector Berlioz used to do, such as scoring a Requiem mass not just for orchestra and chorus but also four brass bands, placed antiphonally at the ordinal compass points in the cathedral for maximum echoing effect, or perhaps listen to Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (often subtitled “The Symphony of a Thousand”, for the sheer number of musicians required to perform it), or even a full-scale production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger or Lohengrin, how can I not think that in some way these artists all tap into the same spirit?

Share This Post

There’s a scene in the movie Dave, early on, when the President of the United States (played, in a dual role, by Kevin Kline) wants to cut the funding of a fairly popular program, without appearing to be the bad guy. So he gathers his flacks in Congress and basically orders them to cut the funding, saying: “I don’t want to look like a prick. I want you guys to look like pricks.”

The more I learn about President Bush, the more I suspect that this little scene in Dave formed the basis of his political education. Via Matthew Yglesias, I see that while Mr. Bush has publicly praised the AmeriCorps program, his pals in Congress (pals like Tom DeLay, who has no aversion whatsoever to looking like a prick — in fact, he seems to relish it) have cut the program’s funding.

AmeriCorps isn’t a huge program, and some find it tempting to blow it off as just more liberal “feel-good” nonsense that really doesn’t benefit anybody. In fact, one such individual chimes in on Matthew’s comments section, challenging people to name just one substantive thing that AmeriCorps has done. I responded (among others) with my own experience: in West Seneca, NY — the Buffalo suburb in which we lived before moving to Syracuse for six months — AmeriCorps volunteers did much, if not all, of the groundskeeping work on public grounds (parks, the lawns at the town hall and library, etc) as well as garbage cleanup along the town’s busiest sidewalks and thoroughfares. They also do virtually all of the groundskeeping and maintenance work at West Seneca’s nicest attraction, the Charles E. Burchfield Nature and Art Center.

The AmeriCorps budget is so small that cutting it as a deficit-reduction measure makes absolutely no sense. I’d be thrilled if President Bush would stand up for his professed admiration of AmeriCorps by demanding that his band of merry men in Congress restore its funding. But meantime, I think I’ll refrain from holding my breath.

(EDIT: I wrote this post before checking today’s Buffalo News, which has this story. A quote about what the volunteers have done:

Lazzara [Mark Lazzarra, executive director of AmeriCorps West Seneca] said that since its inception in 1993, members of West Seneca AmeriCorps have tutored 20,000 students, cleared 20 miles of waterways, shoveled 250 tons of snow, delivered 16.5 tons of food to 65 pantries and done 90,000 hours of community service and 50,000 hours of violence-prevention mentoring.

Yeah, that’s just the kind of thing we need less of these days.)

Share This Post

Instead of confronting pressing national problems, our president lands airplanes while Rome burns.

Senator Jim Jeffords (Ind., Vermont) recently gave a speech that neatly summarizes why so many of us are, shall we say, less than satisfied with President Bush. And he’s not even a Democrat.

(link via Ruminate This.)

I have a recurrent feeling these days, that I’m living in the wrong trouser-leg of time.

And, going even farther, SF author Charles Stross commented the other day on why he’s less than satisfied with the 21st century.

(crossposted to Collaboratory.)

Share This Post

Stop this sentence before it kills again!!

Last time I was at the library, whilst perusing the New Nonfiction books, my eye fell upon a volume with the seductive title Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, by Ian Christe. Now, as a onetime lover of all things metal (and I still enjoy a good head-banging song every now and then, the louder and faster the better), I figured this would be an entertaining book, and so far it is.

But near the end of the introduction I happened upon what may be the worst single sentence I have ever read:

Emerging like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a contemporaneuous influence, Black Sabbath was as irreducible as the bottomless sea, the everlasting sky, and the mortal soul.

I think I see what Christe is trying to get at here, but my reaction is more like, “Oh man, somebody open a window….”

Share This Post

Well, as of today, Short Fiction Month 2003 is over. It was a lot of fun, and I just may devote an entire month to short fiction again in 2004, even as I plan to not allow my short-fiction reading to completely atrophy like I’ve done in more recent times. Short fiction is the literary equivalent, I think, of dim sum: small morsels, to be sure, but no less artfully crafted than the larger works (and, in some cases, more artfully done), and nourishing both on their own and when taken together.

I read 60 stories in all, by 43 different authors. I was awestruck by a handful of them, enjoyed most of them, was a bit baffled by a small handful, and I actually disliked only one (P.C. Doherty’s “The Serpent’s Tooth”). Fifty-nine for sixty is a pretty good average, especially since I basically selected stories at random. I did not go into Short Fiction Month with any specific stories in mind, with the exceptions of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and Poe’s “The Murders of the Rue Morgue”; I did, however, plan on reading specific authors: Wodehouse, Poe, Thurber, and Roald Dahl are the big ones there.

So, today I’m back to reading novels. I’m going to start Gene Wolfe’s Latro in the Mist (which I’ll be reviewing for GMR), and something else that I’ll pick later. Probably a big-scale space opera, which is rapidly becoming my favorite SF sub-genre. (As if you couldn’t tell, what with all of my Star Wars blathering lately!)

Here, in alphabetical order by author, is a listing of the stories I read during Short Fiction Month.

Asher, Neal: “Snow in the Desert”

Bisson, Terry: “Bears Discover Fire”

Borges, Jorge Luis: “The Rose of Paracelsus”

Bradbury, Ray: “The Million Year Picnic”

Chabon, Michael: “The God of Dark Laughter”, “In the Black Mill”

Clarke, Arthur C.: “Reunion”, “The Secret”

Dahl, Roald: “The Butler”; “A Dip In the Pool”; “Genesis and Catastrophe”; “The Hitchhiker”; “The Landlady”

Davidson, Avram: “The Golem”

De Lint, Charles: “In the House of My Enemy”, “The Stone Drum”

Doherty, P.C.: “The Serpent’s Tooth”

Duncan, Andy: “The Chief Designer”

Engstrom, Elizabeth: “Riding the Black Horse”

Friesner, Esther M.: “Blunderbore”

Gaiman, Neil: “Bay Wolf”; “Nicholas Was…”; “Snow, Glass, Apples”

Goldstein, Lisa: “The Fantasma of Q——-”

Heinlein, Robert A.: “The Farthest Place”

Holland Rogers, Bruce: “Alephestra”

Hopkins, Brian A.: “North”

Kessel, John: “Every Angel Is Terrifying”

King, Stephen: “Everything’s Eventual”, “L.T.’s Theory of Pets”, “1408”

Kress, Nancy: “Patent Infringement”

Lafferty, R.A.: “The Configuration of the North Shore”

Libling, Michael: “Timothy Gobel’s Bug Jar”

Lovecraft, H.P.: “The Call of Cthulu”, “The Outsider”

Masterton, Graham: “Pig’s Dinner”

Matheson, Richard: “The Funeral”; “The Near Departed”

McHugh, Maureen F.: “Interview: On Any Given Day”

Monteleone, Thomas F.: “It’s In the Bag”

Moorcock, Michael: “Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel”

Norton, Andre: “Mousetrap”

Oates, Joyce Carol: “The Sky-Blue Ball”

Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Masque of the Red Death”

Sheckley, Robert: “Shoes”

Sheffield, Charles: “The Diamond Drill”

Smith, Michael Marshall: “A Place to Stay”

Swann, Thomas Burnett: “The Manor of Roses”

Thurber, James: “The Macbeth Murder Mystery”; “You Could Look It Up”

Traviss, Karen: “The Man Who Did Nothing”

Vernon, Steve: “Catcall”

Wellman, Manly Wade: “Walk Like a Mountain”

Wodehouse, P. G.: “The Purity of the Turf”, “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald”

Wolfe, Gene: “A Cabin on the Coast”

Yumiko, Kurahashi: “The House of the Black Cat”

Share This Post

Occasionally, when I sign on to Blogger I will peruse the “Recently Published” list, just to see what gems I’ve missed lately. And one strange thing I’m noticing is that a lot of bloggers are employing random capital letters in their titles — for example, if I changed the title here from Byzantium’s Shores to ByZanTiuM’s SHoRes. Is this some new nugget of “coolness” whose memo I missed, or is there a purpose here?

Share This Post

Looking over the spam in my e-mailbox this morning, I’m suddenly struck by what seems to me a tragedy of medical science and bioengineering. I mean, how terrible is it that we have the ability to expand parts of the human body, and yet our abilities in this regard are limited to male genitalia and the female bosom? Why can’t we have, say, “Make your pancreas BIGGER!” pills for diabetics, for example? Wouldn’t basketball players like to find a little pump-device that enlarges their hands?

It just doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Share This Post

Time for a George Carlin moment:

“In New Hampshire, the license plates read, ‘Live Free, or DIE‘! Well, I’m certainly not gonna move there! I don’t want to live anyplace where they mention death, right on the license plates…Idaho’s license plates read, ‘Famous Potatoes’. I guess those are the extremes in thought. It would seem to me that, somewhere between ‘Live Free or Die’ and ‘Famous Potatoes’, the truth lies. Probably, it’s a little closer to ‘Famous Potatoes’. But, that’s just one fella’s opinion.”

Share This Post