Surreality CheckA Savage Writer's Journal
Bad Jingles, Part II As I remarked in the last entry, marketing dorks seem not to care much about the context of the songs they use for jingles. Dorothy Rothschild, another NAWer, pointed out the irony of Microsoft using material from Mozart's Requiem to talk about one of their, well, hell-bound and unmissed operating systems. Then, for those of us who are old enough to remember it, there's the use of "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (The Police) in a deodorant commercial. Yup. I've always wanted my products to be associated with pedophilia. All of which leads to the following marketing campaigns:
Maybe I should try to get a job doing advertising schtuff and do this on purpose to clients I don't like. Comments forthcoming on the disgraceful Nonfiction Top 100 list from the Modern Library (an imprint of Knopf). I'd almost call the list antiintellectual, but that's slightly too harsh. Not much, though. 02 May Some initial comments on the Nebula awards: Bad T! Bad, bad T! Naughty girl. Attends Nebulas. Lives in Pittsburgh. Could give us an update. Could give us juicy gossip. But noooooooooooooooo! I'd put her over my knee and spank her, but Ray might have something to say about that, and everyone would assume I was just a dirty old man being fresh with the pretty young ladies again. (Just kidding. Not about Ray, though.) The winners were:
06 May A few notes that will disclose my lack of creativity:
07 May Del City. Boy, Nikki's entry on Del City, Oklahoma brings back memories. Mostly bad ones. But I do have one good tornado memory. During the mid-1980s, I was nominally stationed at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City, and lived in Del City. Now Oklahoma City had quite possibly the most useless local media in the country. Any time the wind rose even slightly, the cable TV system and broadcast channels were all knocked off the air. (That's a great way to ensure that people get weather warnings.) In any event, the Oklahoma City media was also obnoxious in another way: it was a few steps to the right of Rush Limbaugh, and proud of it. All three "network" TV stations, the public TV station, and the "independent" TV station showed nothing but church services from various evangelical churches on Sunday mornings. Liberal TV programs like CBS's Sunday Morning need not apply. 60 Minutes was preempted for evening services more often than not. One particularly vile preacher, whose congregation (I hesitate to call it a "church") met a quarter mile up the road, spent his time preaching against this, that, and the other Group Responsible for All Evil. One week, it might be liberal college professors. Another week, meddling Yankees who demanded integration in the local schools. The week before Easter that I'm thinking about, it was the Jews, for killing Christ. OK, get to the tornado. Two days after the Christ-killer sermon—and I've run into that language elsewhere in the Deep South—the TV stations all went off the air at about 8:30 pm. The next morning, everyone in my unit who knew where I lived wanted to be sure I was ok after a tornado hit so close. The tornado had skipped across a gasoline depot and power substation, made matchsticks out of said preacher's meeting house, then skipped over a 50-unit apartment building and into a vacant field. Virtually the only damage produced by that tornado touchdown was the destruction of that church building and damage to cars in the adjacent parking lot from the debris. That, my friends, was the Finger of God warning a sinner. That one incident is what convinces me that God, whoever he/she is, has a sense of justice—and my kind of sick sense of humor. (Of course, the congregation then proceeded to raise a couple of million to build a temple unto themselves, in which they could hold even grander Las Vegas-style floor shows masquerading as worship services. Fortunately, I was transferred to civilization.) 09 May Unfortunately, my health really sucks right now. I had been planning on WFC this fall, but that's now a no-go. The last convention I went to was GenCon III (that is not a typo). Doncha love it when the medication that is supposed to help [insert ailment] makes it worse? At my current rate of fiction production, I'll finish another short story sometime in 2000. That's not very encouraging. Neither was the rejection I got from Pulp Eternity yesterday (although that's not Steve's fault!). The words of the rejection were encouraging (and I'm quoting without permission—Steve is one of the "nice guy" editors who always comments): As the stories creep up to 5k and beyond, the competition gets tougher and the slots more scarce. The major negative deals with the Bletchly scene. It does not advance the plot and ultimately has nothing to do with the ending. . . . I also could have stood more internalized commentary by Rianne. I understood her, but not the relationship with her mother.Sigh. I apparently achieved the initial effect I was looking for, but not the ultimate response. That's a "shame on me," for failing to communicate clearly enough. The point of that scene is that it neither advances the plot nor determines the ending; it's not a red herring, but a closing off of the most obvious, stereotypical possibility for the ending. The point of the sparse (actually, completely absent) internal commentary by Rianne is to make the reader draw his or her own conclusions; the story is purposely "showing" with no "telling." But I'm obviously missing a step somewhere here. Although the story's ultimate theme—that the "big action scenes" so common in short fantasy are irrelevant—seemed to get through, my method failed me. Time for a rewrite; I'm not sending this one back out without some more thought. And it will probably only get longer, which further limits potential markets. At the same time, though, I don't want the reader's forehead to have an imprint from a cast-iron frying pan. This is actually a much finer line to walk in the supposedly inferior world of commercial fiction than in the mainstream small press. My placement record (under yet another pseudonym, so don't bother looking) is a hell of a lot better in the mainstream small press, yet the stories aren't as good. At least the nonfiction is rolling along. Over the last three days, I've outlined a 55-60,000-word book on one aspect of consumer affairs that receives short shrift in the market. I not only found a market niche, I have almost unique qualifications for filling it! Another week or two and it's query time. 10 May Not much today. May 10th is always a bad day for me. It's an "anniversary" that I don't like very much. However many times one tells oneself that "everyone, including the experts who should know if anyone does, agrees that was the only way to handle it," there's still a sense of personal responsibility (presuming, of course, that one has any sense of personal responsibility to start with). I always understand Vietnam vets better for a few days in May. I'm looking for a particular piece of information for a story. Maybe a NAWer knows; I've been unable to find it on the 'net. Specifically, was the brass casing for ammunition fitting the Lee-Enfield rifle, as used in late 1917, the color of the American "brass" (a very yellowish tint) or the Spanish "brass" (which has a great deal more tin, and is thus almost silver)? I know it seems a silly detail, but I need to know whether the round could be mistaken for a first lieutenant's bar (silver) or a second lieutenant's bar (gold). (All the reference librarians, and even gun collectors, that I've asked have said "huh?".) Actually, this is important to the story. An American 1Lt could have been a company commander; a 2Lt would have been a platoon leader. Because of some features of the background, I need to get this right. Diana's having an interesting time. I never was a very good shot with either the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson "Combat Masterpiece" (a more misleading name I've never seen) or the 9mm Beretta semiautomatic. I was, however, rated as "expert" with the M79A1 40mm semiautomatic grenade launcher. Of course, it's a little hard to find a civilian firing range for one of those . . . A belated Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers in NAW. 11 May Time to get in trouble with a NAW significant other again. Please forgive me, Sunish; I'm going to flatter your wife to make a point. (I'd probably flatter her anyway. Of course flattery works [Reversal of Fortune].) On May 7, Chiara Shah said: Oh, I'm sure I'll have more moments, like when I watch my first movie in a theater—Star Wars, perhaps?—or when I attend my first "dress-up" function without the agony of itchy contacts in my eyes or the nerdiness of glasses on my nose. 
I'll grant the itchiness of contacts. But I ask you: Does this look like a "nerd"?
This gets into self-images. I'll freely admit to thinking that I look like a nerd. (What did you expect? Mr. Universe? Well, at least I'm not Sylvester Stallone.) As a professional certified Dirty Old Man, I hereby proclaim that Chiara doesn't look like a nerd wearing glasses—she looks very pretty. But does that really matter? Isn't it her image of herself that matters? How does one build a self-image? I can't speak for anyone else. I got my self-image as "ugly" from hearing it so many times growing up. (It has more than a grain of truth in it, to be sure.) It seems to me, though, that this should be an important aspect of how we portray character self-images. Take Helen of Troy and transport her to, say, the Pacific Northwest at around 1450. I seriously doubt that a "baby Helen" would be able to build the exaggerated self-image (and external image) seen in the Iliad in a society that did not have similar "beauty-values." To choose an obvious difference, the near-skeletal slimness that most Americans have been conditioned to hold as "beautiful" isn't "beautiful" in many other cultures. The irony here is that the whole purpose of glasses is to overcome a disability. That, in the end, is why glasses are probably thought of as "nerdy," or "ugly," or whatever. We don't like visible signs of disability. Gedankenexperiment: If Michelle Pfeiffer was wheelchair-bound, would we consider her as "beautiful" as People currently does? Glasses are, in a sense, a constant, visible reminder that someone is less than "whole." In a culture that has advanced far beyond hunter-gatherer, general visual acuity is not a survival characteristic. Using what those eyes see is the survival characteristic (some prominent anthropologists have argued that's true even for hunter-gatherers, but I digress—as usual). Remember the old chestnut "stage a crime for the audience, then have them write down what they saw"? I've seen this conducted with an audience of trained observers—detectives, counterintelligence officers, medical examiners, and so on—and it doesn't make a difference. The success rate remains under 10%. Now, how many story ideas can I build out of that? (For one, if you haven't read it already, read The Sparrow.) Yes, I wear glasses. Very thick bifocals. You've seen Revenge of the Nerds, haven't you? The original TV Superman? Some of my colleagues used to joke that if I broke my glasses "over there," I could knock the bottoms out of a couple of Coke bottles. Then they tried it. They stopped joking about it when they discovered that my prescription was substantially stronger. European Coke bottles correct about 20/400 or so. Somewhere, I have a picture of me, wearing the bloody things while dressed in "captured spy" clothes, while somebody dressed up as "Ivan the Incompetent" tries to "interrogate" me with the Soft Cushions. I've never had any success writing about perfect people. So I may just give more of my characters glasses from now on. And they won't be rose-colored. 12 May Sat down in The Comfy Chair and edited for a couple hours this morning. Then I couldn't stand up. My bad knee had decided that it's finally time for that 50,000 mile tuneup. After a couple of minutes of swearing (I was in the military, and I am adept at blasphemy in seven languages), I got it to unlock. It seems pretty normal now, but it scared the hell out of the dog to see Daddy unable to move (especially since she really needed a potty break). So, I went down to Midas . . . oops, that was for the car. So I went down to the doctor's office. Fortunately, my insurance is a PPO, not an HMO, so the first person I saw was a medical professional, not an accounts clerk. It's kind of embarrassing when you can't get your pants down far enough for the PA to take a look at the joint! Fortunately, the orthopedist had just had a cancellation, trundled over, and told the PA not to bother with the exam. A few cc's of cortisone later, the swelling went down. Unfortunately, it only went down enough for the orthopedist to show me off to his med students. I suppose that's the price I pay. An hour later, my knee was back to near normal size. While the doc was stretching the leg so he could check the backside of the joint, something popped—and the pain went away. We both think that something had gotten caught in the joint itself—kind of pinching a finger in a door. So, the solution is not to stay propped with both feet level for more than an hour or so, unless I keep shifting position. I've known this for a few years; maybe this will be enough reinforcement. At least I'm getting more out of my insurance than I'm paying in. While I was in the waiting room, I finished up the first shelf of The Basic Bookcase and read about a quarter of a book. I won't be reviewing the book on the reviews page, but I'll say something here. What has Bantam done to Robin Hobb? They should have called the most-recent entry in the ongoing trilogy Ship of Fools. The characters all remind me of the dragon in the old radio comedy routine "Dragonnet." SGT TUESDAY: (deadpan) Your time's up, dragon. I'm taking you in on a 1019.Shame on you, Bantam. You didn't let an editor near this before publication, did you? 15 May Ron Collins had a rather interesting comparison between John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen in a recent journal issue. I hate both of them, but I hate Mellencamp more than I hate Springsteen. Then again, on the other hand, I like The Who, too, so I'm not very consistent. (I am not a Mod, a Rocker, or a Bell Boy.) Neither Mellencamp nor Springsteen is really much of a musician. I have nothing whatsoever against rock—Mr. J. Marshall Hendrix was a fabulous musician. But both of the idols under consideration (gawd, that was a pretentious phrase) implicitly and explicitly express disdain for thinking and intellectuals in their three-to-five-chord music and (particularly Mellencamp) their lyrics. No thanks. I grew up with enough hostility. I don't need more "you're sh*t unless you get hot and sweaty every day at work, earn your living with your muscles, and prefer your beer stale" nonsense. I suppose I could start a long diatribe about the rise of the minstrel over the bardic tradition, the loss of "high music," and so on. But, in reality, what we think of as "high music" has the same proportion of rubbish as what we've been able to reclaim from popular music of its time, and the same holds true today. For every Beethoven piano sonata, J.S. Bach fugue, or Rachmaninov concerto, there were hundreds of popular pieces floating around, many of which simply cannot be endured while sober. We know more about the "classical" composers as much due to differences in literacy as anything else. That's why the "Tin Pan Alley" and later eras seem so drab—before the 1920s, the only music generally recorded on paper was either in the "high" tradition (everyone in the target audience could read) or a "megahit." Of course, the "high" tradition, and even individual composers, has problems, too. Much of Mozart's work is barely heard today, and deservedly so. Gluck? Who's that? But where does that leave us? There's always the "hard folk/suburban blues" movement, which even at its most "electrified" has been both more "connected" to people and more thoughtful than chartbusting pop (any category). Paul Simon, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Randy Newman, Pink Floyd, early Peter Gabriel and early Genesis, early Alan Parsons, Procol Harum, Dire Straits, Pentangle, and particularly pre-1982 Renaissance, to name a few, all added musicianship to the brew. To turn this back to Springsteen and Mellencamp: What offends me the most about both of them is the constant subtext that "It's really somebody else's fault that I'm so screwed up." Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" is perhaps the epitome of a certain kind of antieducational claptrap. Unfortunately, the counterpart is often pseudointellectual claptrap, such as King Crimson. And just what the hell does this have to do with speculative fiction? I'm not sure yet. But the arts seem so separated from the narrative in speculative fiction that a story or novel that really makes an attempt at integrating the arts into the fiction really stands out. Recent examples include de Lint's Memory and Dream and Waitman's The Merro Tree. But most of the time, the arts are notable for their absence. Really. Why didn't Han Solo have any pinups on the Millenium Albatross? Didn't Chewbacca need a Walkman®? Did Yoda ever stand in line to get movie tickets? (Can Yoda even read?) And, on the whole, written speculative fiction is no better. Last thought: Every writer's theme song is Randy Newman's "It's Money That Matters." 20 May Not a good week, productivity-wise.
21 May Ron Collins had some interesting thoughts on gun control, school massacres, and the like. Being somewhat of a contemporary of Ron's—just after I graduated from high school, one of the local Big Controversies was whether there was any "evil musical influence" when two ultra-privileged teenagers (from another high school) drove a car into Lake Washington while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird"—I remember that nonsense all too well. The high school I went to was a tad more violent than what Ron describes. There was at least one death due to student-on-student violence that everybody admitted to, and there were several other "car accidents" that probably weren't "accidents" (although the police turned a blind eye to such things). Even so, there were very few guns around school. Lots of knives, etc. But not much firepower.* Sadly, though, Ron is all too correct. Littleton was not a random act of violence by kids who found Mom's "personal protection" in the bedside drawer. Those kids would have found some way to wreak havoc. (TNT isn't that hard to make, although the directions in The Anarchist's Cookbook will only get you blown up.) Maybe there is another explanation. Just where the hell was the parental supervision? Maybe it's too much to blame the parents. Maybe there were other factors, or lack of prior warning. But that's the first place to look. And it's a hard place to look, since their children are now senselessly dead, too. As a society, we do a very poor job of examining "mishaps" to prevent future "mishaps" without being judgmental. Battlefield medicine has a particularly grim routine called "triage." One physician—usually the big loser in last night's poker game—does nothing but evaluate the wounded as they come in. The goal is to save as many as possible. That means that two kinds of patients get pushed to the end of the line: those with only "minor" or "superficial" wounds, and the "hopeless cases" who have such a low probability of survival that allocating medical resources to them will doom other, "more saveable" patients.
I sincerely hope that we're not to the point of making triage judgments about our children's
education and future.
* Whether one agrees with gun control or not, the arguments that I've seen against gun control are at best specious. The Second Amendment establishes a contingent right, not an absolute right. The Constitution at that time prohibited standing armies (Article I, Section 8, Clause 12), leaving the militia as the only regularly organized armed force. The "right to keep and bear arms" is thus that of the National Guard. This interpretation is also consistent with the normal use of "People" in the collective, not individual. The NRA (and other, more extreme elements) have categorically refused to even attempt to refute this argument. Instead, they assume their desired conclusion. Finally, there's the "Freemen" et al. side to this. If things are in fact so bad that people must rise in armed rebellion against the federal government, who cares if they have a federal legal right to own the firepower to do so? After the revolution, the losers will probably be dead. To borrow a line from Robin Williams, I haven't seen too many deer wearing body armor and shooting back lately. The only reason to own a Tek-9, Uzi, or, for that matter, 9mm Glock semiauto pistol is to kill people. The whole point of a State (as developed over the last 600 years or so) is to at least attempt to restrict who has the right and the power to kill people to instruments of the State. I'm not looking forward to a return to feodality, warlords, etc. I suppose some would argue that such a return has already happened. Whether that's true or not, we shouldn't be putting firepower greater than that of a WWII infantryman in the hands of adolescents, well-adjusted or otherwise. 27 May Lots of legal writing over the last few days. I've been doing estate planning (mostly writing up wills). One is for an unmarried partnership (Illinois doesn't recognize same-sex marriages) in which one of the families is cool, and the other decidedly is not. However, each of these partners has become very financially successful, and the uncool family certainly wouldn't mind getting their fingers on the money. (By the way, I cleared this mention with both members of the couple. I wish more legal thriller writers would think of getting prior clearance.) It's next to impossible under Illinois law to meet their needs with a will, so I've had to establish trusts for the two of them. But that, of course, has to pass muster with the IRS, which frowns on gifts of more than $10,000 in any year (whether from a relative or not, although there is different tax treatment). All of which leads to a speculative fiction point: Have you ever noticed just how much "feminist" (or at least "pro-female") speculative fiction includes heroines who grew up in societies with fairly strict primogeniture? One could, I suppose, argue that's partially because so many fantasy societies are merely overgrown hunter-gatherer bands, and males were the dominant hunters (and thus obtained leadership responsibility). The opposite is also true—matriarchal societies are just as bigoted as patriarchal ones. This would be almost amusing if it wasn't such a distortion of the historical record. Only a minority of societies in world history either side of "medieval" technoculture had strict devise in either gender. Not even the majority in Northwest Europe. OK. That's fine. Americans wouldn't know the difference, so why not? But what about all of those space empires that seem to have more in common with Rome and Constantinople than with the US, PRC, or USSR? There isn't much hunter-gatherer about spaceships and ray guns. Or at least, there isn't supposed to be . . . Of course, contemporary American and European business empires act that way, so maybe it can be excused as "business as usual." That itself, however, says volumes about lack of imagination. I always thought that speculative fiction was the "literature of the imagination." 30 May I got my monthly package from the SF Writers' Idea Service in Schenectedy the other day. (I'm cheap. The weekly service costs five times as much for the same number of ideas.) As usual, it's half losers, one-quarter repeats, one-sixth nothing special, and one-twelfth worth using. At least, that's my batting average. Nobody has even commented on the May 20th entry. That's one example of how I use that package from Schenectedy. Sometimes, the idea the service sends is just a hint of where to find the real idea. The first example I listed came from an idea that says "Start with Moby Dick." Well, I took it literally. I took the start of Melville's overblown, somewhat overrated novel and ran with it. A "long short" came out the other end as a complete draft about 6 hours later (5,500 words). (For some reason, my default length seems to be 5,000 words, plus or minus 10%. That can make it darned hard to sell, as that is an awkward length for commercial publications.) I've set it aside to look at again in a couple more weeks. While I was typing away, another thought came to me. This is the crux of fiction for me:
In "standard English," this means something like this: A story's plot, characterization, and theme really mean nothing outside of the story's style and environment. Simultaneously, style and environment are meaningless without plot, characterization, and theme. Still simultaneously, each of those five components infuses each of the other components. And still simultaneously, an attempt to analyze any of the components by itself is ultimately futile, because the attempt is self-referential. (Ironically, of course, since language is linear, not simultaneous, this attempt to explain that bit of symbolic logic is inherently incomplete.) And I'm waiting for another package from Schenectedy. (Makes a darned good excuse for not writing more.) More status reports:
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