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The other day while setting off for a walk early morning, I came across something unexplained – though not unexplainable. On the sidewalk, near an apartment building, were a jacket and a tie.

Now, this might be understandable, since we live in one of those urban neighborhoods that’s fine during the day but you really wouldn’t want to go traipsing around at night unaccompanied. Probably still safe at night, but a bit seedy. (Think Tom and Kyrie’s neighborhood in the Shifter series.)

It would make perfect sense if the jacket looked dirty and worn and the tie were in a position where someone might have discarded it in, say, an ardent fit of sidewalk love.

BUT the jacket was new and good quality and it lay exactly as if someone had shrugged it off while facing the building. Only there was nowhere for anyone to stand while doing so, much less to walk away from after shrugging it off. It lay maybe three inches from a low brick wall with an iron fence embedded on top. The tie was even odder, because it was on a hanger – not as if it had just come from the cleaners, but as my younger son keeps his. He’s not very good at tying ties, yet, and so he keeps one or two loosened and wrapped around the stem of the hanger. The hanger in turn was hooked into the top of the cast iron fence at about my knee level. And it too was good quality, silk, and I suspect expensive.

Now, is it possible someone was carrying a basket of laundry and these things slipped off the top? Of course it is. Only, they’d have to be walking on top of the brick wall, with feet on either side of the iron fence. Possible. There are a lot of college students around here… just not likely.

Being who I am, I tried to take a picture of it, but my phone is new and I didn’t manage to. When I came back the jacket and tie were gone, either reclaimed by their owner or possibly picked up by some transient whose sartorial stock just went up markedly.

Oh the other hand, I can’t rid my mind of the image and the idea that what those clothes looked like was someone not particularly neat – say a young man – undressed in his own bedroom, and sort of threw the jacket over and hung the tie on his bedroom door.

Needless to say scenarios for that sort of thing range from the one in Simak’s Out of Their Minds where the character, under the illusion of being in a house, undresses and lies down in a rattler-infested cave; to some sort of very small time/space portal in someone’s bedroom, in another universe. (In which case the owner had one of those mornings that happen to all of us sometimes “but where could it have gone?”) Either of these would also serve as explanation for the strangely high incidence of shoes by the side of the railroad tracks in Portugal or the highway in the US. (The alternative is sudden footwear phobia syndrome so widespread and prevalent it appears in every culture. Or that shoes choose to commit suicide when faced with more efficient modes of transport than feet – that latter might explain why often it’s only left or right shoes. If you posit shoes as a dual entity perhaps it’s not so much bipolar as bilateral and one shoe is always more depressed than the other. [Oh, all right, I’ll behave].)

Is the mundane explanation likely right? Well, yes, I’m not completely insane yet. On the other hand there are events (some much crazier than this) where the mundane explanation is likely right, but it’s not the EASIEST one. And anyway, I imagine this little shard of weird will surface sometime in a story.

I wonder if everyone else is afflicted with this type of mind and only writers give vent to it, or if other people don’t even wonder about the surreal intrusions in their lives.

Mine is the mind that will now go through life thinking “It’s seven am. Do you know where your clothes are?”

All of us want to write something that matters.

I don’t know a single person who wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to write an urban fantasy, just like all the other urban fantasies.”

Over the years of knowing a lot of writers, I’ve heard them talk about “this cool idea” more than once. I’ve never – okay, once, but that writer still isn’t published – heard the “cool idea” being something like “It will illuminate the injustice inherent in the human condition.”

In fact, when writers get together, either online, at cons, or in the case of my family at the dinner table, what we get is something like this “I was thinking of writing a story in this parallel world where street lights are sentient” then come details of characters, the beginning and usually something like “And then they find out they’re aliens.”

Does the street light world reflect the alien illumination cast by an invasive culture? Search me. (Use gloves.) That’s not how writers work. It simply isn’t.

Or rather, it’s not how genre writers work. For all I know there are people who DO sit around (probably in trendy coffee shops) saying something like “Zenith, my friend, I just ache to write a book about the heartbreak of psoriasis. ACHE I tell you!” However, those aren’t the sort of people I’d talk to, and I suspect they’re not the sort of people who write books, you know, with words in them. They just drink coffee and cry into their berets.

So, what point am I trying to make here?

My friend Mike Kabongo, who for his sins is a literary agent, did a post on this subject. I suspect – though he doesn’t say it – he did a post on this subject, because editors want to publish “significant” books and so he has to sell them to publishers as such.

I don’t envy him his job. In the past I’ve had to sell books to agents (who refused to send them out otherwise) as mind-changing, different, paradigm exploding. For science fiction that’s even more interesting because you can’t say “it’s a space opera and the twist is really in the plot, where it’s revealed that…” For fifteen years no agents would send out my science fiction because “you don’t have any brilliant new scientific idea.”

Okay – deep breath – it’s not that we want to write forgettable books, but most of us don’t get books in a form that we know what the “message” is. I’d argue when books come in that form they tend to end up as screeds and very boring. Beyond that, Mike makes a cogent argument that very few books, ever, change a person’s mind, and that they’re more likely to do so when the person is very young.

Heck, even Heinlein didn’t change my mind on anything with one book. He had a profound influence on my beliefs over time, but each of his books I read just for fun. Yes, they had a central idea. Yes, sometimes I even saw it. But while reading I didn’t care, I just knew it was a rip-roaring adventure I enjoyed. In re-reading I might pick up on the other ideas. And I reread him a lot, because it was a rip roaring adventure I enjoyed. (And my favorite Heinleins don’t have a “breakthrough science idea.” I’m sure other people had done alien mind-controlling invaders and sentient computers before he did.)

The second and more important thing is what I call “publishers thinking they’re Universities.” I.e. they think they can claim critical respectability and significance for genre by claiming the high ground of “message.” But that’s not how it works. Oh, a few of our number will make it over the hill – Umberto Ecco, who not coincidentally, is a philology professor and a few others – but most of the time the moment someone gets to that summit they’re not considered genre. Genre can’t be made respectable, because if it’s respectable it ceases being genre.

So, what to do? I don’t know. It’s one of those cases where it seems to me the publishers want something completely different from what the public wants. And the public doesn’t like the slow-message-laden, “serious” works that get the most push (hence the fall in circulation across the board.)

What do you guys think? Do you want each book you read to “blow your mind”? And do you want it to be in a life altering sort of way or just “Oh, I liked that” and “I never thought of magical jelly fish before”?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club.*

(I write this fully conscious of the fact that it will bring a lot of very interesting spam to this post, but it has to be said.)

I became conscious of this when reading comments on a blog yesterday, where people seemed to be under the impression that fifty years ago most kids didn’t know sex EXISTED or what it consisted of. This is something I run into over and over again. For instance, in A Touch Of Night people were shocked, shocked that Lizzie would believe Bingley and Darcy were having an affair, because “how would she know about such things?”

This is very silly. Heinlein said that each generation thought they’d invented sex. He’s probably right, just like every generation thinks the next one is going to h*ll in a handbasket ever since the old testament was written and possibly before. (At some point we’ll decipher the scrawls in caves and come up with “things aren’t as they used to be. New generation can’t hunt, can barely gather. This newfangled agri thing will be the death of us. By next winter, no humans.)

It is however fostered by rule two of sex “everyone lies about sex.”

This is perfectly understandable, heck, acceptable to us today when we can look at surveys that say most boys are active and most girls aren’t and roll our eyes and go “and all of them lie.” BUT we tend to go misty eyed and think the past is another country where everyone tells the truth. And since what tends to survive puts their best foot forward, we assume we invented sex. We are the wicked generation and now our kids will pay…

Some reality checks: first, until our current generation where we are isolated from the animal kingdom and nature in general (but have the internet as a compensation.) Someone in that same blog yesterday was outraged that we thought “children in the past stood around watching animals have sex.” Look, even if they weren’t in farms, they had pets. They didn’t castrate their pets. It was inevitable they’d see something. And no, they’re not stupid enough not to know what it was. Plus, kids listen to adults talk and who knows? Perhaps there is such a thing as instinct.

The chances of a girl of Lizzy’s intelligence not knowing about sex and its “usual” variations are zilch. (And before you tell me that household pets aren’t homosexual, yes they are. Okay, not exclusively, and usually it’s a dominance thing, but she’d have seen it or heard of it.) Oh, she might have no idea of the exact mechanics between humans, but the concept would be there.

Okay, there are always unreally innocent people. Perhaps it’s a gift or a grace or they just lack instincts. However, growing up in a very traditional society and not paying much attention to what animals do, I’d worked out the basics of sex by the time I was eight. Not in practice of course, and I’d gotten some things laughably wrong (one or two of them didn’t get corrected until I got married and I think my husband still chuckles about them) but they weren’t in the essentials. Mostly they had to do with details of male anatomy and such. Still, I did have a friend who in the last year of highschool was COMPLETELY puzzled as to why a neighbor wanted to borrow her parents’ siamese cat “so that their cat could have kittens.” It wasn’t a put on, she really was flabbergasted and no, I don’t understand HOW, since she wasn’t stupid. Not the brightest bulb, perhaps, but she’s now an MD, so she couldn’t be completely dim. I suspect her mom, a very pious woman, just blocked off her intent to even enquire.

But this is not normal. This is not sane. Most sane kids, no matter what class and era, work out what happens by adolescence. It’s impossible to be that oblivious to one of the central preoccupations of mankind. And if you care to dig into Victorian biographies (or earlier. The regency was far more daring) you’ll find out that the lives of people were often as complex as they’re now, they just kept a better facade.

So, why does it matter? Well it matters for two reasons: one is that if we think we (or in the case of our generation the boomers, because it’s impossible to ignore the fact that they claim to have invented it. They’re so intent on telling everyone) invented sex we tend to give the discovery way more importance than it deserves.

The boomers fell into this trap. All the ills of the past were due to that evil thing “repression.” If only one destroyed traditional marriage and screwed around everything would be fine, great, hunky dory. Even more interesting, most neurosis and problems were because one didn’t screw around enough and if one JUST did it, everything would be fine.

Since most of civilization consists of putting the appetites we share with dogs to a useful social purpose, or at least put a good face on them, this view leads to dismantling civilization at its base. (Note here that I’m not advocating pushing gays back into the closet. Our treatment of homosexuality is as insane as anything else since the beginning of time, but as homosexuality has persisted and existed from the beginning of man, and as it exists in all the great primates, I don’t think just shoving our fingers in our ears and saying “lalalalalala” will take us back to where it didn’t. That too is part of believing that homosexuality was invented – with sex – yesterday. I do believe in gay marriage. No, I’m not going to debate it here. If you feel up to my opinions – and they’re profoundly traditional, not to say moralistic in base, even if I arrive at a very unique conclusion – look here. I don’t see any reason why all the appetites we share with dogs shouldn’t be socialized and made civilized.)

It also leads to thinking of sex as a cure all. If I had a dime for every time an adult informed me during my messed up teen years that if I just had sex I’d be fine, I’d be a very rich woman. You know what? They were wrong. I needed self-confidence. I needed knowledge of the world. More importantly, perhaps, I needed to know that I was normal (in ways other than sex.) Introducing sex to that equation would just have screwed me up more because sex brings instinctive feelings of attachment with it, and no man needed the ball of instability I was at the time. And no boy would be able to deal with it. Splendor in The Grass is not only a fairy tale, but one that deals with humans as they never existed.

Next, it causes us to give up hope in our time, and to view the generation after us as even more wicked. I mean, lookit, sex was invented yesterday, and look what they’re ALREADY up to.

So, let’s admit sex was not invented yesterday. It is not a cure all. We don’t need to evangelize the older generations with it. It won’t solve all our ills. It should never be the center and fulcrum of anyone’s life, unless their life is very poor of other interests.

It is also not the end of the world that young people are fumbling around and having sex too early. Some percentage always did. We can guide them. We SHOULD tell them that it is not a cure all or the solution to all their problems. Most of them will figure it out, mind you, anyway. We can stop pushing the weirder stuff at them.

But in the end sex is part of the human condition. It’s one of those friction points between man and beast. One of the bits that is not like onto the angels. Shoulder it as one more of the burdens of all too mortal flesh, make it sublime with love, repress it and turn the drive to something else, or indulge in it to clear the mind BUT don’t think you’re the first to do any of it. Or that you’ll be the last.

Oh, yeah and GRUMBLE let’s stop writing books where everything turns on sex and where the climax (eh eh eh eh eh – what, I never said I wasn’t juvenile) is when someone realizes someone else is really good in bed and therefore the plot is resolved. Unless you’re writing a porno (if you are, how does it pay?) this is just stupid and boring. Sex is just one of the primary colors, and not even a very good one. All you’re doing when you’re only writing with it is imitating pre-schoolers who finger paint an entire sheet in black because it’s the most visible color. Stop that, wash your hands (eh eh eh eh eh eh eh) and bring out the other paint pots. Love, charity, tenderness, hope, or even intellectual curiosity are far more satisfying as plot motors.

I don’t know exactly when I learned to read, but it was sometime around four, and mostly I seem to have learned by

following the action in Disney comic books and relating it to the words. If I could con an older relative (my brother, ten years older and my cousin Natalia, fourteen years older were the prime targets) into reading the books allowed to me, I’d memorize the sounds of the words, then compare those to other words with same letters… anyway, you get the point.

Years later, when my younger son was having trouble learning to read (he was six, ferheaven’s sake) and didn’t seem inclined to – as his brother did – just plunge right into Roman History texts, I thought “I wonder if he’d learn from comic books.”

Of course, the problem at that point was that most comic books nowadays have material not suitable for elementary schoolers… or middle schoolers… and you should be careful about the high schoolers.

Unlike Europe, where Disney comics are ubiquitous and can be found everywhere on newsstands, and read by everyone including adults (several characters and series exist that don’t here, and anthologies come out all the time that contain, you know “all Junior Woodchuck” stories), I’d never seen Disney comics in the states. This was before the full hit of the new comic craze, too, so I didn’t even know where the next comic bookstore was. So I searched online.

After some brief and bizarre encounters – do you guys know there’s Uncle Scrooge/Donald slash? I mean, let alone the sheer wrongness (they’re DUCKS) there’s the incest. Never mind – I found the company currently publishing Disney comics… Or rather, just about to quit publishing them.

They were trying to get rid of stock and for $500 you could purchase something like 1000 comics of the Donald and Mickey lines. I had $500 and did – though in retrospect, I regret not having spent the $2000 and got everything they’d ever printed – and got this HUGE box of comics.

On the one hand they worked for the kid. On the other hand, I found that a lot of what they had were reprints of comics dating back to the depression era, stuff I’d never seen. In comics as in most other such stuff, Europe JUST does not reprint and therefore has a much “shallower” memory than the US in many ways (which sounds counterintuitive.)

I found out that I could learn a lot more about the texture of daily life from comics of the thirties and forties than from books about those time periods. For instance, I’d never heard of Victory gardens before, in all my copious reading. I also didn’t fully understand how people felt… Like, there is a contest where the prize is a job as a hotel bell hop. Think about it. The prize is a … job. (Yeah, we’re getting there.) But there were also a lot more revelations – like the fact that Mickey used to go around with a gun almost his size. Which makes sense, I guess. If you’re a small mouse in a man’s world you’d best be armed. Or what was considered a really good meal. Or the fact that when Donald needs to track his nephews, he puts radioactive buttons on their hats.

But possibly the most important revelations were those that are hard to state explicitly. The way courting couples treat each other, for instance (it’s not as chauvinistic as we’ve been led to believe, but it IS different.) Or the way kids were expected to act – in comparison to even bratty kids today, Donald’s nephews could only be qualified as demonic. (How did they go all goody two shoes these days? There’s an entire sociology and education thesis on that alone.) Mickey’s nephews are not much better. And it’s clear that this was not considered out of the ordinary.

Some of it I had reason to suspect, like that animals were a lot more “disposable” than today. Try doing a comic today with a hero just kicking an animal out permanently for misbehaving.

Anyway, there’s an education in them there comics. Even accounting for the exaggeration of the medium (and of course there is some. Distortion, too) it shows an almost completely alien way of life, one that’s foreign to us and that is hard to intuit from scholarly works.

By the way, you can get sort of the same sort of feel from mysteries written and published in the first half of the 20^th century. A feel for a life that was completely different in ways that more serious studies won’t allow you to see and that movies often don’t show. For that matter, mysteries are better than main stream novels simply because in mysteries, clues and circumstances are built of the quotidian. So, “normal life” holds center stage.

The past is another country, but comics – and sometimes mysteries – give you a visa to visit

Unfortuantely I spent the entire morning following the pukeomatic — Havey — and mopping up after him.

Meanwhile, I said posting would be weird for a while, and it will be as I absolutely have to finish this novel before the end of the month.

Yesterday I transferred my stuff to the new kindle, so I can actually access the web while in Portugal without having to go to my brother’s.  I’m now organizing it all into collections — you’d think they’d have an easy way to do that on the web, but no, you have to do it step by step like Juan Valdez.  So, it’s happening a little at a time.

So, now I go to get more coffee and then I write.  Send working thoughts my way.

I and my friends at Mad Genius Club are dealing with the move from blogspot to WordPress, which I think we left a day too late, as bloger is still down and has now lost posts :/ 

The cats went on a rampage last night, pulling pictures off the wall.

I have a doctor’s appointment in ten minutes.

I’ve been trying to think of something to blog about, but can’t form any coherent ideas, so you’ll just have to take the above as my note to teacher as to why dog ate my homework.  I’ll post more later, if I’m up to it.

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ~Logan Pearsall Smith, “All Trivia,” Afterthoughts, 1931

I’ll confess that much as I would like to sound incredibly erudite, I’d never heard of Logan Pearsall Smith until I read this quote. Having read it, I’m of two minds about it.

The reason I’m of two minds about it is that I have a tendency to “whisper” in writing, something that I’m sure will surprise a lot of people who have met me in person (i.e. who’ve been exposed to the woman who needs not microphones) as well as a lot of people who have read me – in person or not. But what you see in my books is not always what comes naturally. Naturally, I have a tendency to elide a lot of the emotion and what I would call “the embarrassing stuff.” My style of narrating is to assume the reader already knows a lot of this and it doesn’t need to be emphasized. That, as I’ve learned, is wrong. There is such a thing, yes, as keeping a stiff upper lip, and it is very important in a human, but not always in a writer. Since readers read for the emotion, the stiff upper lip undercuts the power of the writing.

On the other hand, there is a way of whispering in writing – there are the things not said, but which come across just fine. This is a higher type of writing, and one that I frankly don’t know if I can do. I try, but it’s hard to judge, with your own work, whether you landed perfectly or fell on your face. Only the reader can tell.

This type of whispering is subtle and haunting. It’s the little things about the character and the world that remain in your mind, sometimes years later, the little things that aren’t always stated, but that you return to, are sure of, wish were written about.

Entire websites full of stories echo with Jane Austen’s whisperings, particularly in Pride and Prejudice. “Did other people know what they were feeling better than they did? When did he realize he loved her?” Etc. The same goes for Georgette Heyer. Most of the sexual tension in her romances is never even mentioned. Take Venitia, one of my very favorites – they joke, they recite poetry, they make repartee sometimes on risque subjects, but there’s no kissing, no fondling, nothing beyond an embrace and that at the end. However, the sexual tension is scorching. How much more powerful does it make the book than the modern romances which tell me what went where and how many times, sometimes with shocking anatomical improbability? Then there is Heinlein. Take The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Nowhere does the main character tell us he’s fallen in love with Wyoming Knott. Except it’s in everything he says about her, and how he says it, so when she marries into the family and ends up in his bed before the trip to Earth, it’s expected. It’s been whispered throughout the book, even though explicitly they’ve done nothing more than flirt. And there’s Pratchett. Most of the romances, like in Making Money and the relationship between Sam Vimes and his wife. But more than that, there are hints about Nobby Nobs that you honestly don’t want to think too deeply about.

But it is those whispers, those less-brightly-illuminated scenes that give the book the feel of roundness, of completeness. Look, if you walk down a well lighted street, you expect to pass boarded up stores, and others that are dark and alleys that you only see the opening to. If those are truncated, not there, you know the street is a fake, a Hollywood scene made of painted boards with nothing behind it. At the same time, if al those side avenues are brightly illuminated, you get dazzled, stop paying attention to where you’re going, and get lost in a side street. Or, to make the metaphor more consistent – if you hear only one loud, clear voice, you feel like there is no one there, just perhaps an electronic simulation of a human voice. As – in TMIAHM – Heinlein noted, behind a real human voice there are other sounds. Breathing. Adjusting yourself in the chair. A door slamming somewhere.

We don’t consciously hear them, but they are there, and they convince us this person is real. Of course, in the same way, you don’t want them to be so loud they drown out the voice.

You see the point and the dilemma? It’s something I’m trying to learn, as I said, but I’m not sure if I can, except by studying those who’ve done it well and learning to imitate. And you? Do you know who does it well? Do I even explain what I mean clearly enough for you to understand?

I hope I do. I want to catch your attention, and I hope I’m learning to whisper.

　*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

I was reading quotes on writing, seeking inspiration to blog here and at Mad Genius Club, and I found I just had to share a few with you guys:

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.  — Moliere

  For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.  Ernest Hemingway

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind. — Anonymous

If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it … it would have been much better.  Anonymous

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth… But amusing? Never.  Anonymous

Hard writing makes easy reading.   Anonymous

I particularly love the top one.  And it is SO true…  Though the one before last, well…

Guys, I’m trying to get caught up on a bunch of projects before going to Portugal at the end of the month.  Fortunately my friend Mike Kabongo has written the post I would have written, if I had time today.

There is nothing more frustrating to me than finding a great book, reading one or two more by the author and then finding out they are no longer being published. Sometimes its just because I have found a writer who has passed away, decided they don’t wish to go through all that is need to get published, or maybe the publisher folds. But if its a sales issue, I and other readers who like that writer are at least partly responsible. Thanks to the fabulous suricattus  I ran across a great blog post on what you can do to help authors you like.

That blog post by Jody Hedlund is a great start and filled with pretty easy things readers can do to help writers they like succeed. One important way to help that I mentioned at Ravencon, but don’t see talked about enough is pretty simple but may take as much as three minutes of time is probably the most important thing we fans can do to help our fellow readers find books we like, and help publishers and writers get books to shelves. It is fortunately pretty simple: preorder.

So, without further ado “go here and read“