Jay Lake: Writer

[writing] What I spent my day doing

I spent about five hours writing today. Some of it was wrapping the next stage of revisions on “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future”, as well as a couple of other bits of fiction revision and WRPA. Then I spent a bit more than three hours concepting the actual plotting elements of the Sunspin outline.

This is what I’ve got so far, conceptually:

Amazing how much work can go into such a few words and lines on a board.

© 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Books, Photos, Process, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 7:38 pm Thu December 23 2010 | Comments(2) |

[process] The novella, such as she is, through the lens of my own work

Yesterday while revising “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future” (the Sunspin novella I recently drafted), scarlettina got back to me with critique on my revisions to “The Stars Do Not Lie” (the lost colony religious steampunk novella I drafted last spring). We wound up talking on the phone for a while about “Stars”.

In the course of that conversation, I made the observation that I’m coming to believe the novella is my natural length. I seem to do what I consider my very best writing in that 18,000-30,000 word range. And given that it’s an awkward category to market, that’s somewhat unfortunate. Though in truth, I’ve done okay with getting novellas out into the world.

I made a crack about novella editing on Twitter and Facebook, to which Greg Feeley responded with a link to a terrific article by him in the New Haven Review about the challenges of working in this form.

Two of my favorite pieces of my own work are novellas, “America, Such As She Is” (first published in Alembical, ed. Lawrence M. Schoen and Arthur Dorrance [ Powell's ]) and The Baby Killers (single title work [ PS Publishing ]). I’ve been trying to articulate why this is, even to myself.

The novella is short enough for the writer to experiment with literary forms, tropes and techniques without overwhelming the reader. I don’t believe an entire novel could be written, not by me, in the style I used for either of the abovementioned pieces. At the same time, the novella is long enough to really put some meat on the story, play with the implications of whatever is going on, and follow the plot at a pace both sensible and leisurely.

But that’s why I like writing novellas in general, not specifically why I like “America, Such As She Is” and “The Baby Killers”. For my own part, my besetting literary sin is cleverness. I really enjoy both reading and writing unusual forms. Challenging vocabulary, elusive point-of-view, unsettling plots, Escherian story structure. These are meat to my literary bone. And frankly, they make stories into a lot of work. Good, fun, work, but work. Work I personally find entertaining, but hardly the stuff of the light distraction or heart’s ease that so many people read for.

As someone said on a Con panel years ago (I believe it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, but I’m not sure), “Reading should not be prophylactic.”

So what I love most about the novella is likely not what most people who love them love most about the novella. Perhaps even the opposite.

Which brings me back to “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future” and “The Stars Do Not Lie”. Neither of those stories is tricksy, what author Elizabeth Bear calls “stunt writing”. Both use a fairly straightforward narrative voice (as straightforward as I get, at any rate) and eschew cleverness in favor of a more clear-eyed storytelling that drives deeper into character and plot. Readers’ stories instead of writers’ stories, if you will.

Is this me maturing as a writer? Is this me abandoning my cherished cleverness? Maybe. More likely, it’s just me learning from my work. Becoming a better novellaist — I hope — and hopefully a better writer in general.

I often tout the flash fiction form as an excellent vehicle for the professional development of authors. But lately, I think the novella has become my laboratory.

What’s your experience with novellas, either as a reader or as a writer? Do you make a distinction?

Tags: Books, Process, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:47 am Thu December 23 2010 | Comments(6) |

[photos] Your Thursday moment of zen

Your Thursday moment of zen.

Farm implementia, rural Oregon. © 2007, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Oregon, Photos, zen

Posted: 6:18 am Thu December 23 2010 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad winters over in Oregon

Review: Cthulhu’s Reign ed. Darrell Schweitzer — Including a somewhat mixed reaction to my story, “Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names”.

Five steampunk books you should read — Mainspring made the honorable mentions in this article.

Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Write Novellas — An article on that most heterodox literary form, the novella. Link is to a .pdf file, FYI. (Via Greg Feeley.)

Some observations about e-books and illegal downloading — Paul Cornell speaks wisely and in great detail.

Scrivener’s Error on e-books — Plus other divers alarums and entertainments.

Grace Jones singing “The Little Drummer Boy” to Peewee Herman — Because, you know, it’s Newtonmass, when weird never goes out of style. (Via willyumtx.)

English Banned in Chinese Writing — The spirit of L’Académie française lives on.

Transits Near and Far — Analyzing exoplanetary atmospheres.

?otD: Snow tires or all-season radials?

12/23/2010
Writing time yesterday: 3.0 hours (revisions, WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 249.6
Currently reading: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Tags: Books, ebooks, Language, Links, Mainspring, music, Personal, Process, Publishing, reviews, Science, steampunk, stories, Videos, weird, Writing

Posted: 6:16 am Thu December 23 2010 | Comments(1) |

[personal] Updatery of various sorts

First of all, I want to give a big shout out to whatever idiot with the Arizona area code called me at 2 am. I never did get back to sleep. This is going to make for a long day today.

I managed a prodigious amount of writing time yesterday at the Fireside Writers. (Plus we enjoyed a nice Mexican dinner after. Mmm.) It was mostly revisions on various short fiction manuscripts, along with writing related program activities. One piece of WRPA was a draft of a 2010 year in review requested by a ‘zine. Which is to say, my personal year.

Great Ghu was that sobering to write. I revisited all that has gone on in my medical and personal life, and I tracked through my writing accomplishments. Which would have been worthy in a normal year, and are jarring in the context of the year I’ve had. It’s been a damned intense twelve months.

I’ll be making a year-in-review blog post here around New Year’s, which will recap much of what I just pulled out, but, yeah. I’m more than a little astonished at myself.

Next up is revisions to “The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future”, the recent Sunspin novella. Then I’ll get cracking on a full (but not final) version of the endless outline for the books themselves.

What are you working on? Or are you taking a holiday break?

Tags: Books, Cancer, health, Personal, stories, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 5:35 am Wed December 22 2010 | Comments(8) |

[process] The best writing advice I ever got

This past Monday, I posted on the worst writing advice I ever received: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. A lot of folks had something to say about it.

The most consistent critique of my remarks arose from a rejection of the framing I’d placed. I made some broad statements about what does and does not constitute good fiction.

Now, as it happens, my recent rhetoric notwithstanding I am pretty firmly in the camp that says there is virtually no canonical writing advice. The only universal I can in good conscience determine is “Write more.” Meaning, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, and maybe do a bit more.

Everything else falls into the trap of individualized process, divergent experience and changing expectations. What one writer (perhaps me) passionately believes about the role of auctorial emotion in the story on the page could be nonsensical or even destructive to another writer.

Yet at the same time, even in that context there are a number of pieces advice that have a fairly wide applicability. “Finish everything you start.” “Don’t self-edit while drafting.” “Keep stories in the mail.” Surely there are exceptions to each of those examples, but for most writers, most of the time, they are at least useful if not canonical.

In that spirit, I offer the best writing advice I ever received. It was from Ray Vukcevich, a brilliant writer whose genre could perhaps be characterized as magic realism, or perhaps not. He once told me, “Cut out all the parts that aren’t interesting.”

That was such a gnomic utterance that I’m still not sure I understand it, but it’s also a damned fine piece of advice. I even wrote an entire article about it a few years ago. Like most profound advice, the trick is in sorting out how to apply it. Ray’s comment has been a mantra to me for many years.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you ever got?

Tags: Process, Writing

Posted: 5:28 am Wed December 22 2010 | Comments(9) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Chicks in a cage. © 2007, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: nature, Photos, zen

Posted: 5:25 am Wed December 22 2010 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad walks like a woman and talks like a man

Stalled — Leah Cutter on the difference between being blocked and being stalled. A very useful distinction.

2010 Best Writers I Discovered In 2010 — Brian Thomas Schmidt reviews writers, including me.

Terry Gilliam presents ’1884 Yesterdays Future’… Animation test.. — Mmm. Steampunky goodness. (Via scarlettina.)

Pemberton’s French Wine of Coca — A little culinary history. C-O-L-A cola… (Thanks to goulo.)

Visualizing blood tests — Information Is Beautiful shows how much difference the presentation layer makes. (Not that we didn’t already know that…)

The Right Stuff to Wear — The Smithsonian Institution’s spacesuit collection. (Via a mailing list I’m on.)

Science: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade — (Thanks to lt260.)

40 Percent Of Americans Still Believe In Creationism — Shockingly, there is a strong correlation between belief in arrant counterfactual nonsense and low education levels. Likewise conservative political affiliation.

Barbour: Segregationist Citizens Councils That I Praised Were ‘Totally Indefensible’ — In other words, he’s sorry the rest of us decoded his racist dog whistle politics. Ah, more of those justly famed conservative principles and intellectual consistency. In this same context, Ta-Nehisi Coates with more on the conservative revisionism about the Confederacy so sick that it borders on mental illness.

?otD: Does your champagne taste just like cherry cola?

12/22/2010
Writing time yesterday: 4.0 hours (revisions, WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 4.5 hours (interrupted buy 2 am wrong number call, couldn’t go back to sleep)
Weight: 250.6
Currently reading: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Tags: Cool, Food, Funny, healthcare, Links, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, Science, steampunk, Tech, Videos, Writing

Posted: 5:22 am Wed December 22 2010 | Comments(1) |

[help] Need some Latin help

I have a short fiction manuscript with section headers in my terrible dog Latin. Anyone here with enough real Latin willing to have a look and correct my manglings?

I’d be much obliged.

Help has arrived. Thank you!

Tags: Help, Language, Writing

Posted: 6:41 pm Tue December 21 2010 | Comments(2) |

[fiction] “Elf Shit” – Christmas fiction for your reading pleasure

In the spirit of the season, I bring you fictive tidings of, well, if not comfort and joy, at least Santa and his elves.

“I love the smell of elf shit in the morning!”

Big Red’s voice roared like an ice sheet giving way. The fat man was unnaturally cheerful. But then, damned near everything about him was unnatural. I’d known him since our boarding school days, when he’d been a fat boy of strange appetites and stranger passions. None of us from the old days were surprised at the man he had become.

The elves keened in their cages, enclosures too small for them to stand upright or turn around. Their broken voices wailed in a minor key harmonic that in another time and place might have heralded the rising of an omen-drenched comet, or the bloody harvest moon towering over the Wild Hunt. Their elegant, predatory beauty had been whittled away under Big Red’s none-too-gentle care until they had become cankered horrors with only a stray goose feather or amethyst to recall the beauty they had once been part of Under the Hill.

“It’ll never work,” I told him. PR was my job in this whole deal, making sure the folks at home bought into the Santa trip.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Fiction, stories

Posted: 6:31 am Tue December 21 2010 | Comments(3) |