The Passage

At the urging of a friend, recently I picked up and read Justin Cronin’s hot new novel of vampire apocalypse, The Passage. After I was done, I wrote him back with my thoughts. “You say you liked it,” he wrote back. “But you sure criticized it a lot.”

The Passage is one of those books that plays fast and loose with its storytelling predecessors, not even bothering to disguise its sources. It opens with a bunch of American tourists being attacked by bats in a remote corner of South America, like in some nineteen-fifties B-movie. Then it cuts to a section in which the U.S. Military, astonished by the regenerative powers the tourists develop after their attack, decide to militarize the virus; they inject it into twelve death row criminals—really the wisest choice for creating invincible killing machines in this kind of story, always—and one abandoned little girl. This part of the book is very much like every science fiction movie I’ve seen in the last twenty years in which the government is doing secret research, and a whole lot like Kate Bush’s song, “Experiment IV,” because you know it’s just going to go downhill from here.

And it does. In a section not so much similar to The Stand as directly cribbed from it, the virus escapes. The country is overrun; everyone dies. Everyone save 49 million vampires, that is, and a handful of survivors who resort to one last hope to keep the race alive.

Cut to a hundred years later. The possible last handful of human survivors has been living in a tiny colony in California, kept safe by arrays of blinding lights that keep the vampires at bay every night. The remaining men, women, and children are simple folk who know aught of the old ways, living from day to day, and from hand to mouth, in a simple existence, much like the people of The Village. Except they have some really highly-skilled engineers who know all about circuit boards and other stuff that surely comes in convenient later in the story. Actually, it’s more similar to the YA postapocalyptic novel The City of Ember, because bit by bit, the lights are going out, and soon will be gone forever. So naturally a group of intrepid and good-looking youths go venturing out into the vast wilderness that is now all that’s left of North America, to search for safety.

And this is where the novel turns into Logan’s Run, in which a bunch of naifs who’ve never before seen the world escape from their closed society and run into all kinds of weird stuff. There’s a Thunderdome, and a locomotive that the engineers who’ve never seen one before are miraculously able to fix, and creepy scenes in which the party enter and barely escape from a vampire-filled Las Vegas. There are Scrappy Military Men, and The Miracle Of Childbirth, and One Child to Save Them All, and because there weren’t enough unoriginal archetypes to fill out the book, not just a Wise Old Magic Negro Woman, but also a Saintly Psychic Wise Old Magic Negro African Nun.

The reason my friend recommended The Passage was that it’s got the stink of being a classy, literary vampire novel. Cronin has those MFA and literary award credentials that make it okay and even a little ironic for him to slum in genre fiction. One of my big problems with the book, though, is that the writing is often not very good. Not always. There will be lovely page after page in which he sucks you in, describing the sad, lonely landscape abandoned by people and left for ruin. Then he’ll write a few lines of dialogue and leave me astounded by how bad he is at it. After I read the book, I went back to see exactly what the proportion of types of prose was in The Passage. Cronin appears to write about twenty pages of internal monologue or description to every page of dialogue between characters, and with good reason. No one talks like any of his characters do. They’re all turgid and wooden the moment they open their mouths.

He’s not the most subtle of writers, either. In the Las Vegas sequence, which could have been one of the most creepy scenes in the book, he throws away and suspense about what will be happening by starting the scene with prose that runs pretty as follows:

“What is that awful smell?” asked Peter The Wimpy Hero, wishing his older, stronger brother were here, the older brother who had always taken care of him since the premature death of the father he had never known. Why did he wonder that, he wondered with a wondering thought? Was it perhaps because he felt he still had to prove himself? “I have never smelled anything like this awful smell during my idyllic but oh-so-sheltered days in the Colony.”

“By gosh, it is a giant pool of highly flammable methane,” said Alicia, the tough and reckless. Whipping around with the cat-like reflexes that she had learned at the knee of the old Colonel, she pointed her gun into the shadows, the darkling shadows that rippled and pulsed with inky malice. “Conveniently enough to blow up this entire deserted hotel! Imagine what could happen if someone were to throw a match into that murky morass, whether by accident or dire last resort!”

Peter gulped. “Golly, it sure is an awful smell. I sure do hope we do not have to resort to such drastic explosive measures to fend off vampires in three pages!”

Yeah. It’s pretty much like that in parts, all the way through.

Another thing I disliked about The Passage is that when the going gets intense, Cronin finds it easier to resort to flowery literary writing than to describe what’s actually going on. This left me confused after major plot points, because frankly, I couldn’t really figure out who was being attacked, who was dying, and who was dead after. Eventually I came up with a handy legend:

Pages of prose about red flowers blossoming on an pond of scarlet = A vampire is probably sucking someone’s blood.

Mystical prose about the winds whispering names and the trees stirring in response across a vast and empty world with but one question on its wooded lips = We haven’t driven home the little girl’s magical powers enough in recent chapters, so you’re getting a damned good dose.

Folksy southern dialect going nowhere = Must be talking about that Mentally Challenged Gentle Giant Black Magic Negro from The Green Mile again.

Pages upon pages about rats = Minor character about to be offed. Or mind-controlled. Or something.

Don’t even get me started about the book’s climax. The resolution was so silly, and so easy, and so improbable, that I was a little disappointed.

But here’s the thing: despite all my crabbing, and despite spending the entire time I read The Passage making mental notes about where I’d seen its elements before (and you have seen these elements before, ladies and gentlemen, every single one), it was really quite an exciting book. A page-turner. It’s hard to put down. He makes me want to read the other two books of the trilogy, just to see what happens.

It’s no easy feat to keep an audience engaged. To make a reader want more is the ultimate goal of any writer, literary or not. And even during the parts I was rolling my eyes, or smirking, or narrowing my gaze and thinking, oh, really?, there wasn’t a single page of The Passage in which I considered putting down the book and moving on to something else.

That is not in the least faint praise. It’s almost something of a recommendation, if you’re willing to take the book for what it is, and ignore the claims of Justin Cronin being the literary savior of the horror genre.

On Chloe

We had to have our cat Chloe put to sleep yesterday. She was deathly ill from complications relating to the virus that the cats passed around last week, that led to kidney complications.

Chloe was the crabbiest cat I’ve ever, ever had. She complained about everything. When we didn’t get up early enough in the morning, she would hop on the bed and glare. When she didn’t like her food, she would scowl and hang around, giving us the vulture’s death-gaze. If she thought you weren’t paying enough attention to her, she would walk up and let you know, loudly. She hated to have her claws clipped, she pretended to hate being brushed, she disliked the cold, she disliked the warmth. She didn’t like to be picked up, and she certainly didn’t tolerate being held on anyone’s lap. If I was upset, or crying, she had no qualms about marching over and telling me to shut the hell up.

When we adopted Fred, Chloe secretly enjoyed the new cat’s company (they played and slept together frequently), but she didn’t like admitting it. Like a teenaged girl with a bratty little sister, she’d growl and sneer every time Fred approached whenever Chloe was in one of her frequent moods. Sometimes we’d go to sleep at night—or more usually not—with Chloe sitting at the bottom of the mattress, growling in a low, warning tone when she’d see Fred ten feet away at the top of the stairs.

She was a high-maintenance cat. Sometimes I’d leave the house wearing more Chloe fur on my clothing than Chloe had on herself. Her coat was of the sort that, although allegedly non-clumping, turned into mats the moment one’s head was turned. From the time she was a kitten, Chloe refused to drink any water delivered in a mere cat dish. Oh, no. She insisted on nothing but the freshest running water from the tap. Whenever anyone approached a room with a faucet, whether it was the bathroom, or kitchen, or laundry room, she would be there, meowing at the top of her considerable lungs, demanding a drink. Or rather, demanding that you turn on the tap. Whether she actually drank from it was a question of her whim at the moment. She wanted you to turn on that tap so she’d have it as an option, damn it. Failing the tap, she would gladly imbibe from a human drinking glass. Even if the human was a visiting guest and didn’t particularly want her glass invaded by a milky-white cat’s snout.

Chloe was highly vain. She never heard the whirr of an electronic camera she didn’t like. The moment someone would pull one out, she’d pose in every shot. When our relator was taking photos of our house’s interior for the ad and web site, Chloe somehow managed to insinuate herself into almost every one, forcing the poor realtor to take most of them over so that it didn’t look like we lived in one of those cat person’s house on Hoarders. She knew she was beautiful, and would allow people to oooo and to ahhh over her—but not to touch her. That was going too far.

I will say that Chloe was the bravest cat I ever knew. When we adopted her, she promptly walked downstairs the first morning from the bedroom in which we’d locked her, the night before, slapped our two cats of the time, Sarah and Emma, and made it clear that if they messed around with her, she’d chop them into Tender Vittles. When she met our dog next door for the first time, she got so tired of his barking that she walked up to him, hauled off with a kitty fist, and punched him in the nose so that he ran away yelping. She was never afraid of the vacuum, or of visitors, or thunderstorms, or any of the things that send Fred and Sarah scampering under the beds. She met them all with scorn and disinterest and a sneer.

Despite the fact that she didn’t like to be picked up or cuddled, there were moments when Chloe could be very sweet. They always came at bedtime, when she’d curl up between us and purr loudly, or lie on my chest and rest her paws on my chin and lips so that I had no choice but to notice her, or when she’d butt the book I was reading out of my hands so that I’d have to pet her.

The last couple of days of her life, she’d been completely out of it. Her problems were so pronounced that she couldn’t walk, or breathe, or raise her head. I don’t think she knew where she was, most of the time. The vet had sent her home with us for a final night, when fluids and drugs didn’t seem to be working. And yesterday morning, when she curled up on the bed next to us in a ball and finally slept—really slept, not the labored half-sleep she’d been condemned to for a couple of days—it was something of a relief to have the old Chloe back again. Even if it was just for a few minutes. We lay there with her, and stroked her gently, and let her have the last bits of comfort we could give.

Chloe was the biggest pain in the ass. But she was our pain in the ass, and I loved her.

An Epidemic of Feline Proportions

Sarah is the oldest of our three cats. We adopted her shortly after moving into our first apartment together; she turned twenty last June. For a cat, that’s pretty damned old.

She’s been deaf for a couple of years now, our Sarah. She’s adjusted her life accordingly. If we’re out of the house, she’ll position herself somewhere—the kitchen counter, the dining room table—where’s it’s easy for her to see the back door open on our return. In the mornings, rather than listen for our steps on the upstairs floor or the creaking of the bed, she’ll sit directly outside the bedroom door, nose to the wood, so that there’s no way she’ll miss it opening, even if she’s asleep. Sarah’s a sweet old thing, and like most old folk, she lives a life centered around eating, trying to stay warm on even the hottest of days, and napping. For the last several months she’s been napping so silently and motionlessly that I’ve gotten into the habit of poking her when I walk by and asking, “You alive? All right then,” before moving on.

I thought this week, though, was going to be her last.

Two days before we left for Connecticut, Sarah started sneezing pretty constantly. I was worried enough when we left to ask our house sitter to keep an eye on her; he would search her out when he visited, poke her to make sure she was still among the living, and then report back to us. Chloe and Fred both started sneezing the day we left. When we came back home, last Thursday, we had a full-blown kitty epidemic on our hands.

Sarah was in particularly bad shape. The sitter told us she’d eaten every day up until Wednesday night; she hadn’t eaten a thing when we got home Thursday evening, and I couldn’t get her to express any interest in food either Friday or Saturday. Her eyes were streaming, her nose was dry, and her breathing was so stressed and dire that I could hear it several rooms away. She’d stopped grooming herself, which made me unconsciously start humming the “Smelly Cat” song from Friends every time I was near. When she walked, she tottered around on weak little legs. She completely lost her voice, and would let out pathetic, silent mews that you just know were meant to communicate her weak despair. I attempted to feed her warm chicken broth to keep her strength up, but it was too difficult for her to drink.

Saddest of all, instead of sprawling in her usual sleeping spots on the sofas and chairs, she holed up in dark, concealed places where she would attempt to sleep through her death rattle. I’d been steeling myself for her demise for months—she’s an unusually old cat, after all—but I knew this was the end. I tried to make the breathing easier by putting her in the bathroom with the shower running on hot, for the steam. She responded with silent meows and by curling up to sleep in the sink.

And then she bounced back. Yesterday she was eating again. A couple of days of the steam treatment put her breathing back to normal. Her voice returned. She’s bright-eyed and vocal again, and sleeping on the chairs and cuddling up to us for comfort once more. The vet had given us antibiotics for the cat’s colds, yesterday but she scarcely seems to need it any longer. She’s gotten through, and is in the enviable state of watching the other cats suffer.

Fred isn’t happy to be sick, and doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s easy to deal with, however, because she simply does what I’d do in her situation—she crawls under some bedcovers, pulls them over her head, and sleeps all day.

Chloe, however, is miserable, and wants to world to know it. She walks around with a snot-covered nose that defies cleaning, meowing her discontent at the top of her voice and demanding I do something about it. Sometimes she’ll sit, sullen and cantankerous, glaring at us with contempt.

Today I gave them a bit of the steam treatment in the bathroom, because Chloe in particular was wheezing fairly badly. Fred hunkered on the counter and breathed the vapors like a good girl. What did Chloe do? Protest at the top of her voice the moment I closed the door, and then jumped into the half-full bathtub and began to wade around in it. Just because she is the biggest feline drama queen I’ve ever known.

All afternoon she’s been glaring at me, wet and miserable and refusing to lick herself dry. I think I’m supposed to gather from her offended and aggrieved staring that some reparation is supposed to be made.

Mostly I’m just ignoring her, and waiting for those antibiotics to kick in.

Housework

The last three weeks of my life have been something of a whirlwind. The only thing I've done, basically from sun up until I flopped into my bed at night, has been to work on getting our house in order and on the market. For the most part, that's meant doing every repair and renovation we've neglected over the entire life of the house.

The den ceiling came first. It was yikes, two years ago that we had damage from pouring rains leaking through the skylights there; it ran in little sluices down the skylight well and down the sloped ceiling toward the wall, leaving behind a large, torn pucker between the drywall and the tape between its joints. That I had to slice, remove, sand, mud, sand, mud again, prime, and paint.

The front garden, which I've always thought too large and unwieldy for a reluctant gardener—which is the best way I can describe myself—needed to be weeded for curb appeal. I mean, really weeded, not given the half-assed let's grab the knee-high ones and no one will notice the rest treatment. Then I had to do the same with the back garden, and the side gardens. I have a lot of gardens, apparently. One those were done, I had to tackle cleaning up the curious lot on the side of the garage. The previous owners used the area to store their trailers, to give an idea of its size. The current owners—that is, the Mont and I—have tended to use it as a place to store the sort of yard refuse that requires care and planning to dispose. Large branches, for example, or crumpled-up metal garbage cans. The branches had to be broken down and tied into bundles that the city would accept, and then I had to whack the weeds and miniature trees that had sprung up since the last time I'd ventured back there a couple of years ago.

The front lawn needed to be re-sodded, since it could have been used to stage a fake lunar landing. Then it needed to be watered. And watered. And watered some more, every day, and every evening.

The upstairs bathroom. Oh my god, the upstairs bathroom. Where do I even begin? When we moved into the house, on the first first day we took possession I walked upstairs into the bathroom and took in all the details I'd apparently missed during the couple of times I'd visited while house-hunting. I looked at the metallic silver wallpaper printed with fluffy clouds in an entirely different shade of metallic silver. I observed the Pepto-Bismol-pink countertop. And then I promptly broke down and wept. For a couple of years, the Mont and I laughingly called it 'The Disco Bathroom' and threatened to install a mirrorball, but in the end the only thing we could think of to do with it was to strip the wallpaper, paint everything a shade of blue that we hoped would pass as 'tropical,' and endure the astonished comments of visitors to the house who left the bathroom complaining about bleeding eyes from the countertop.

Plainly, none of this would do for selling the house.

I'd intended to re-laminate the counter myself. It didn't seem that difficult. The laminate was relatively cheap—cheaper than a completely new top, anyway—and it seemed like the kind of thing I could do without too much cursing. Attacking the counter meant removing the bathroom sink, however, and that proved impossible to do, as I found out after an hour spent with my head in a cupboard with a wrench in my hands and a flashlight between my teeth, swearing at the top of my lungs before finally I had myself a good cry. I came upon Plan C when we were visiting Home Depot for some paint for the walls. Apparently they make such a thing as laminate paint these days. I bought a little jar of it, had it tinted, and took it home. A few days and a lot of sweat later, I emerged from a bathroom that was not only a lovely shade of cream, but had a delft blue countertop that looked as if it had been extruded in that very color. I also installed a new medicine cabinet (we'd never had one, and were storing our boxes of pills in the hot water pipe access cupboard), and mirrors. The Mont caulked the bathtub, and I installed crown molding around the top of the room.

It's not fully updated, but I don't think anyone would cry at it.

The spare bedroom had a patch of plaster on the walls that had been ruined eight or nine years ago before we'd had a new roof installed. I replastered and sanded the area, then painted that entire wall with a new accent color the shade of a Kraft caramel. The office ceiling had stains from the same event, so I primed those a hundred times and painted them.

I mopped the basement floor, and walls. I removed the alarm system electronic pad, since it no longer works, and sealed up the circuit box for the system. I sanded and painted the railing on the front porch, and pulled little grasses and weeds from the cracks in the driveway and the patio. I sprayed down the siding on the house and the garage to make it look clean, and washed all the windows.

And then I packed. Oh, how I packed. Our realtor had made the gentle suggestion that many people in the market for a house didn't care to enter a home in which every square space of wall was covered with bookcases and tall, hulking piles of books that looked as if they'd come straight out of the dustier stacks of the Hogwarts library. I took the hint, and spent day after day buying boxes from Home Depot (sixty-seven cents apiece for the small ones, in case anyone's looking for a bargain), filling them with my books, and then leaving them in the living room. Then the next day I'd go buy another twenty-five boxes and do it all over again. Then, once I was done with the books, I did the same thing with all our DVDs and CDs.

Finally the living room became unnavigable; we had to borrow a dolly from church in order to move everything into the garage, where it could be out of sight during the house showings. No lie—this was the single most painful part of the entire month, especially as we did it on one of the hottest days on record this summer.

The last part of the process was simply cleaning everything and staging the house to make it look half-civilized, before we could let anyone inside. In a hundred-year-old house, it's not easy to make everything look new. But at the very least, it can feign cleanliness.

Not until this last Sunday, when I bravely cut and fitted a new window to replace the one on the garage that's been broken for a decade, did I realize I'd come almost to the very end of the long list of tasks I'd begun assembling on the day I learned we were moving to Connecticut. The only thing remaining—painting the upstairs hall ceiling—was not something I intended to do on the eve of a whirlwind tour to my future home. It'll wait until I get home.

It's a shame that my list is done. All the work, the day-to-day tasks and the grim realities of trying to whip things into shape, kept me from worrying too much about other things. The little short-term goals gave me a roadmap to follow. It's easier to think about how to sand something smooth, or what color to paint a wall, than it is to wonder the whys and whens of selling the house, or packing, or the unknowns of the impending move. I was happier pretending to know what I needed to do next, rather than fretting about the formless shape of days to come.

New Book Cover Day

The best days are the days on which I'm presented with a new book cover. That is, when the book cover is as beautiful as this one:



I think it's my favorite of the trilogy. True, Petro looks a little like a lost Jonas brother, but check out the detailing on Emilia's uniform. And gosh, doesn't it look exciting?

Hacked!

My World of Warcraft account was hacked a few weeks ago. It’s not an experience I recommend.

I’ve always been pretty scrupulous about my account in the past. Although it’s true I hadn’t bought one of the authenticators—a little keychain device that supplies a unique code to accompany your login password that’s supposed to guarantee that the person who owns the account is the actual person signing in—nor downloaded the software authenticator for my phone. I wrongly assumed that because I never played the game on strangers’ computers, or took my laptop outside my home to play, that I’d be immune to people snitching my password.

I’d actually taken a break from the game for about a week, right before my account was hijacked. I hadn’t logged on for a solid eight days. Then I used Blizzard’s mobile armory application on my phone to sign out of a weekly raid—and that’s where I ran into trouble. I either used the application somewhere on the road using the cellular network, or else in a coffee shop where I’d been working. Bad move, either way. That night, at one in the morning, my email account received a notification that I’d requested a password change. At four in the morning, I got a notification that my account had been suspended for suspicious activity.

All it took was three hours for them to wreak total havoc with my accounts. My World of Warcraft characters are basically spread over two different servers, but all the wealth and time were concentrated on Perenolde. There the hacker managed to liquidate everything not only in eight different characters’ banks and inventories, but cleaned out the bank of my guild as well—or at least the tabs available to me. Most of my toons carried between four to seven thousand gold apiece; one of them had an artifact that regularly sells on the auction house for more than ten thousand gold.

When I finally was able to log in, every single one of my characters was naked. My action bars were screwed up—every single one of my toons had spells removed so that the hackers could substitute macros to make their liquidation go more quickly. My hunter’s pets had been released into the wild, never to be retrieved again. Every emblem and badge I’d earned through daily dungeons was gone. Some of my characters had been removed from my guild; three of them had been transferred onto other servers, and one to another account entirely.

All in the space of three hours. It was depressing.

I got it all back, of course. Blizzard after two weeks sent me via in-game mail all the items that had been taken from me, down to the last copper and badge (though my hunter never got his pets back). Moving those items back into my inventory took an hour or even more per character, though, and while I waited I found the Blizzard support crew incredibly unhelpful and in one case even rude. I’m still not completely cleaned up.

The only up side to the whole debacle is that in the end, I made in-game money off of it. The account got shut down while one of my characters, apparently chosen to be the liquidator, was posting all kinds of stuff in the auction house. His bags were stuffed with epic jewels, enchanting materials, cooking spices, and other salable stuff. After the ordeal I’d been through, I had no compunction whatsoever in auctioning it off and pocketing the three thousand gold I made. Additionally, a few of my characters cashed in some honor tokens to add some new accessories to their outfits, and my main druid cashed in the rest of the honor points to buy four mounts.

Small consolation, really, but I take what I can.

I have an authenticator now, by the way. I highly advocate it.

The murse

When I traveled to Toronto last week, I wanted to keep my travel footprint light. Instead of lugging around my laptop and its heavy cords and chargers, I thought I’d simply take my iPad. It has a tendency to rattle around my briefcase like a dried pea in a coconut shell, however, so I purchased a new carrier for it. A messenger bag.

Now, buying the thing, I was painfully aware that I was venturing into dangerous territory. Treacherous territory, in fact. Because while a briefcase is a manly enough accessory, a messenger bag—depending upon the make and the material—comes awfully close to being, well. A lady’s purse. A masculine lady’s purse, to be sure. A man-bag. A murse.

But my messenger bag, though a hairy-chested shade of khaki green and trimmed with leather in a bronco-buckin’ shade of brown, seemed closer to a grizzled old mail pouch carried by some smelly ‘baccy-chawin’ extra in a John Wayne western than something coveted by the Sex and the City cast, so I thought that perhaps I could get away with it. I do have a beard, after all.

My masculinity managed to deflect most of the man-purse comments from my traveling companions on the trip up. Then, when we got to the city, I thought to myself that handy as the bag had been for transporting my electronics and passports on the train, it would be a heck of a lot handier to put everything I’d need for the day in its pockets during the vacation itself. So I loaded it up with my baseball cap, sunglasses and case, camera, and phone. Then, for good measure, I threw in my sunscreen, a tin of mints, a little cloth for cleaning my phone and camera, and some headphones. And some Canadian change. And my subway pass.

It was when I was out on the street with my messenger bag hanging down my back, companionably flapping against me in a manly, manly way when I walked, that I realized I’d succumbed. I was carrying a purse. And what’s more, I didn’t care.

Toronto has an ordinance in which merchants now charge for carrying bags. So instead of paying, I would suggest that my travel companions put their purchases in my bag. “Stick it in my purse,” I said at one point, opening the mouth wide in a kitchen store. “Yes,” I said to several astonished, wide-mouthed friends. “I said purse. It’s a purse. I don’t give a darn. I love my purse. I love carrying a purse. So put your things in my purse and shut up about it.”

It’s telling that toward the end of our trip, when my little group walked into a department store with a display of luggage and bags, the others instantly started flocking over to the messenger bags and running their hands over them with little coos of pleasure.

So yes. I’m at peace with my purse. Shades of testosterone green and armpit-hair brown it may be, and a man-bag or a murse you may call it, but it’s a purse. I will carry it without shame.

Confessions of an iPad User

Dear people of the internet, particularly those who feel to hijack the comments sections of every tech web page with your anti-iPad screeds,

I own an iPad. I admit that I didn’t intend to buy one originally. I wasn’t a scoffer—I’d simply hoped to wait for the second generation. But then I played with them in the stores, and more particularly, got to sit down with one that a friend had bought, and I was hooked. I could easily see how I could fit one into my everyday life and work style.

So yes, I made a reservation and picked up an iPad a week and a half later. And here’s the thing: I really like my iPad. One of the first things I did was to put two-hundred and thirty-six of my favorite books on it, so that I could use it as a reading device. (And I haven’t even begun to score my classic favorites from Project Gutenberg, yet.) Yes, I could read books on my computer. I don’t like doing it though, any more than I enjoy watching movies or television programs on my computer when I could do it on my, you know. Television. Why do I like reading on my iPad so much? Because I can take it to bed. I can turn it sideways and read lying down. It weighs practically nothing. The screen is big. I can adjust the brightness and the typeface and the type size to suit my whims. I can hold it with one hand while I do my business on the john.

I use the iPad as my portable music library. The ForScore app allows me to organize PDF files of piano sheet music and have them all in one lightweight and easily transportable device. One that’s backlit, thank you very much. When I tap the glass, the page flips, and stays flipped. I can annotate and highlight sections. The app came with 1300 pages of sample piano music already installed. My repertoire consists of classical pieces in the public domain, so I’ve easily doubled that just by looking on public score repositories for stuff I already knew.

I’ve got access to all the internet services on my iPad that I really need. And I like the device because it’s slim and portable. I can stick it into its carrying case and take it out on the town without feeling compelled to drag along accessories and power cords and all the little things that my everyday computer would require. The battery lasts me a good dozen hours. I can use it at a table, or sitting in a comfy chair, or while I’m flat on my back. It carries a decent chunk of my music library. I have a word processor on it, so I can carry around copies of my latest manuscripts and work on new ones. It’s easy to type on. Easier still if I flip on my tiny bluetooth keyboard. It’s silent, cool, and suits me perfectly. And I suspect the thing hasn’t even come into its real heyday yet.

So this is what I don’t get, trolls of the internet. If I like a device, and if I find a lot of utility for it, why do you care if I bought it or not? I didn’t, as far as I’m aware, use your money for the purchase. That came out of my own bank account.

You can lecture me all you want about the alternatives. I can’t see myself propping a netbook up on a piano rack to play, much less annotating my score and flipping pages easily. I’m not going to take one into bed to read, either. I’m happy with what I have. Why do you care so much?

It seems to me that though they purport to be higher-minded and smarter than Apple fanboys, the Apple haters are an even more obnoxious breed. They hijack any internet forum they can to disparage Apple products, malign Apple users, and say anything they can to make themselves feel better about their own purchasing choices. Yet their pretense of despising anything ‘trendy’ is trendiness itself; jumping on a brand and its users on the internet isn’t a way of expressing your superior individuality. It’s just anonymous dog-piling, and takes no more thought than farting.

Dudes. Buy what you want. If it’s a Droid or a Windows product, it makes no never-mind to me. I don’t think any the less of you. Say what you want about me, but I honestly don’t believe that one’s computing purchases define me as an individual, any more than I believe wearing a shirt with an Abercrombie and Fitch logo will turn me into a sun-tanned catalog model, or slapping on American Apparel will turn me into an urban hipster. Bashing people for sport doesn’t make you a superior person. I buy what I like, if I like, and I let other people do the same.

Why don’t you?

Just a Friendly Little Cat

Chloe the Ragdoll cat was supposed to be non-clumping. That's how the breeder sold her as, anyway.

Of course, the breeder also said that Ragdolls were friendly and sweet and cuddly lap cats who loved to be with their owners, and in the fourteen years we've had Chloe, she's been crabby and neurotic and would never deign to do anything so lowly as to sit in anyone's lap. She does love to be with her owners, but it's only so she can point out in a whiny voice exactly how they are neglecting and mistreating her.

Perhaps a kitty Freud could cope with the neurosis. The only thing I can tackle is the clumping fur, and that's by giving her a bath regularly.

Which she hates.

Fred watched the whole proceedings with horror, then cringed away, and said, "Dude, WTF?"

To which Chloe glared.



Fred: "Seriously, WTF?!"



Beauty has its costs, though. Chloe's been swanning around the house ever since she dried off, looking glamorous and knowing it.

The Little Stranger

One of my all-time favorite books is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a pair of twin tales about the intertwined lives of a Victorian guttersnipe and a privileged, sheltered young lady. I’d already loved Waters for Tipping the Velvet, a literary box of bon-bons with a bold lesbian narrator whose picaresque journey through Victorian London’s music halls, back alleys, bedrooms, lands her in the arms of the organized labor movement. I’d loved the creepy, seductive Affinity, with its world of mediums and apparitions.

But Fingersmith manage to push every pleasure button in my system. Not only was it a ripping good read, but its intricate narrative structure provided twists and turns and double-crosses that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens would’ve been proud. Appalled, and proud.

When I recently finally got my hands on Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, I was a little apprehensive, however. Waters’ post-Fingersmith effort, The Night Watch, was set during and after World War II London, and though it was beautifully-written, it wasn’t exactly exciting. When I saw that The Little Stranger was also set after the war, I was slightly apprehensive. I needn’t have been.

Like The Turn of the Screw, The Little Stranger is a ghost story. Narrated in memoir style, the book is the tale of a physician of limited stature and means who becomes increasingly involved in the madness of a once-proud family of a country squire. Both the family and their rambling estate —which is the kind of architecture to which Mrs. Danvers might have been found, skulking about and mumbling about her precious Rebecca—are falling apart at the seams as the ghost of a lost child toys with its occupants, one by one.

The chills of The Little Stranger are subtle. The ghost manifests itself through the slightest of sounds and shadows, with only the smallest of traces left behind. As the doctor narrator struggles with his own skepticism and the dogma of modern-day science, the ghost eats away at the house’s inhabitants from within, leaving them empty and hollow at the core before doing away with them entirely. It’s a tale of subtle chills and goosebumps, rather than morbid images and shrieks.

In fact, the novel is so subtle that it wasn’t until I was three-quarters of the way through that I wondered to myself where it was going. From a literary standpoint it’s a great homage to Du Maurier, Henry James, Le Fanu, and most especially the very early Agatha Christie, but in reading, it seems very little more than a well-told fireside ghost tale. It wasn’t until I recalled the twisty, devious Waters of Fingersmith and Affliction that I realized exactly what was happening but was left unsaid in her story, and I plowed through the book’s last quarter, eager to see it resolved.

And it wasn’t. The book came to a suitable conclusion, but it was so ambiguous that it left the impression of something being omitted. It was like watching The Sixth Sense without that grand reveal at the end that snaps everything into perspective. There’s no peek behind the magician’s cabinet, to see how it all was done.

Only, of course, the reveal is there all along, for those who are sharp-eyed enough to find it. It’s in the novel’s lush first pages; it’s laid at its barest in its very last sentence. Understanding what’s really afoot in the novel requires reading it fairly closely, though. Judging the reviews from ordinary readers that I browsed through on the Amazon web site, most of which had kind of a um, what was the big deal? kind reaction, that might be a lost art.

For anyone who enjoys the milieu or a well-told tale, however, The Little Stranger is full of shivery, dreadful pleasures.

Scaredy-Cat

Our youngest pet, Fred, is a most satisfactory cat. She’s got spunk. She has a wicked sense of humor—or at least she does things that make me laugh, like settling next to one of the other cats while they’re napping, waiting until they’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, and then hauling off and clocking them. She’s sweet and purry at night, and a lap cat during the winter. She’s a chatterbox who’ll carry on entire conversations at the drop of the hat. She’s photogenic. She is a top-notch squirrel monitor at the back windows. And best of all, she always seems grateful to be living here.

As I said, most satisfactory.

However, she’s the archetypal scaredy-cat. The slightest disturbance and she’s off like a shot to hide somewhere. If she can’t hide beneath the den sofa, she’ll cower beneath the bed upstairs, or huddle beneath the staircase in the basement, shivering, until I go down there to find her. I’ll point a flashlight in her direction and see two tiny, frightened headlights for eyes shining back at me.

Fred is frightened of the following:

- Thunderstorms. The slightest bass roll in the distance will have her scurrying for the safety of a dark enclosure, from which she won’t emerge until two or three hours after the storm has passed.

- Rain. Because it accompanies thunderstorms, I imagine.

- Trucks. Because they sound like thunder.

- Construction. When our neighbor had a new driveway poured, poor Fred spent the entire day in the basement.

- The vacuum.

- The sound of the door opening to the closet where we store the vacuum.

- The doorbell. I don’t really know what the doorbell has ever done to her, but apparently they have a dicey relationship.

- People who enter the house after they ring the doorbell. If we have a party, Fred will stay upstairs all evening with big, alarmed eyes. Then halfway through the party she’ll decide to venture down, see what’s happening, and will discover that everyone pays her so much attention that she sticks around and looks adorable so people will fawn over her. Then we have to repeat the entire process for the next party.

- Branches falling from the trees.

- Raccoons.

- The sound of the smoke detector going off.

- When I turn on the vent fan over the stove. Because usually it’s a hasty precursor to the smoke detector going off.

- The sound of people crunching through leaves on the deck.

In some ways, Fred’s little phobia make it easier to deal with her. She’s the only cat I will take outdoors, accompanied, because I know that if she gets out of hand, all I have to do is stomp on the deck a few times or brandish a broom and there she is, scurrying back to the back door and cowering to be let in. In others, it’s a little bothersome. Finding her after a scare can be a pain, since she has a tendency to find the most out-of-the-way places in the house. We’ve taken to trying to anticipate the frightening moments and to put her beneath the blankets on our bed, where she feels safe, stays warm, and where we can find her easily.

I keep hoping she’ll outgrow some of her fears. So far, though, we’ve just become accustomed to the sight of a brown and black fuzzy streak zooming by.

Conversations with My Father: Fancy Food Edition

THE SCENE: An uncrowded Denny’s on Broad Street.

ME: I haven’t been to a Denny’s in forever.
MY FATHER: This will be a treat for you, then!
ME: Mmm. Denny’s. That’s a real treat, all right.
MY FATHER: Now. Let me explain the menu to you. I like the Build Your Own Grand Slam breakfast. It’s only $4.99. You get to choose four out of the ten items. I choose eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. You could choose eggs, pancakes, biscuits, and bacon. Or you could choose pancakes, bacon, sausage, and grits. Or you could pick an English muffin, eggs, ham, and. . . .
ME (my voice raised): I get it! Thank you!
MY FATHER: Are you always this grumpy in the mornings?
ME: So basically, when I’m in town, my role is to escort you to crappy chain restaurants?
MY FATHER (offended): Denny’s is not a crappy chain restaurant!
ME: Let me rephrase. My role is to escort you to every restaurant in town that has photos in the menus? We’ve been to IHOP, and Outback Steakhouse, and Golden Corral, and you were threatening the Olive Garden again.
MY FATHER: Well, when the Barramundis and I go out to dinner, they refuse to go to chain restaurants. They think it’s ‘important’ to support ‘local’ restaurants.
ME: I can’t say I disagree with them.
MY FATHER: They make me go to fancy breakfast places where I will get two eggs and a slice of toast for eight dollars. Eight dollars. At Denny’s, you can get a Build Your Own Grand Slam for $4.99, and you can get eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and sausage. Or eggs, wheat pancakes, ham. . . .
ME: I think we've covered this territory, thanks.
MY FATHER: Even at a fancy place like Appleby’s, you can get a better value for your money.
ME: To you, there’s basically Denny’s and Golden Corral, and then everything else is just fancy, isn’t there?
MY FATHER: What do you mean?
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Appleby’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy.
ME: Fancy or unfancy: Chili’s.
MY FATHER: Fancy!
ME: Bennigan’s?
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh, Fancy.
ME: Ruth Chris Steak House?
MY FATHER: So fancy.
ME: So to you, a Ruth Chris Steak House is on the same level of fanciness as an Appleby’s?
MY FATHER: Listen. Jon Stewart. You know Jon Stewart. You went to school with him.
ME: Yes, and he slept next to me in sweatpants for two semesters of abnormal psychology.
MY FATHER: Well Jon Stewart has a British sidekick and Jon Stewart was joking with him about how once his sidekick came to America and ate at Denny’s, the sidekick never wanted to go back.
ME: You don’t think Stewart was being ironic?
MY FATHER: No.
ME: Did I ever tell you about Cafe Muse back home? No? It’s one of those breakfast and lunch-only places. It was featured on Oprah because they have some kind of amazing grilled cheese sandwich and it gave Oprah’s girlfriend Gayle an orgasm.
MY FATHER: You’ve eaten there? Is it fancy?
ME: Oh, it’s very fancy. They have French toast there that’s slices of chocolate bred stuffed with vanilla-and-liqueur-laced cream cheese, then drizzled with chocolate sauce. I always get these amazing whole wheat pancakes with berries and homemade granola.
MY FATHER (with suspicion): How much?
ME: Twelve dollars.
MY FATHER: Oh gawrsh. Twelve dollars.
ME: And if you want bacon, it’s three dollars extra.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. Gawrsh!
ME: It’s fancy and delicious.
MY FATHER: Well what’s good enough for Jon Stewart is good enough for me and that includes Denny’s.
ME: Next time you come visit we’ll go to Cafe Muse.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. You are trying to kill me.

The Epigraphs of Cassaforte

During the editorial process of The Glass Maker’s Daughter, my original editor at Flux had a vision of prefixing the chapters with little quotations from fictional sources. The epigraphs could illuminate the chapter at hand, he said, or simply give color to the world I’d created.

Although for two or three minutes my reaction was grumpy (more work?! Dangit!), I threw myself into the project with enthusiasm. I’m the child of two historians. I know my source materials. So it was easy and fun for me to make up all manner of pretend source materials with a renaissance flavor—travelogues, letters, secret documents, journals, guide books. When I carried on the tradition with the two sequels, I wove in all manner of other types of imaginary source materials. Nursery rhymes. Broadsides. Popular sayings. With the chapter quotations in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice I was able to explain Cassaforte’s unique theatrical traditions without interrupting the flow of the narrative, for example.

Theatre is important in the novel, because it’s Nick’s experience with Armand Arturo’s Theatre of Marvels that gives him the acting chops necessary to masquerade as a dread privateer. Staged performances in Cassaforte are similar to commedia dell’arte, but who wants to interrupt the nonstop action gripping pirate tale to explain what commedia dell’arte might be? Not I. A few brushstrokes at the beginning of a chapter, however, from a fully-imaginary expert, and there it is.

What I don’t think most people realize when they read the chapter epigraphs is that they really tell a story unto themselves. I didn’t make up trivial facts, or irrelevant material. The epigraphs of The Glass Maker’s Daughter introduce characters and countries that appear in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice and set up an arc of action that carries on into The Nascenza Conspiracy. There are letters from a spy known as Gustophe Werner, for example, who doesn’t feature in the first book of the series, but is quite prominent by the third; it’s a long-range form of foreshadowing. I intended to clue in the reader that Cassaforte is not merely a country unto itself, but part of a vast world. And it’s a world that might not be completely enamored with the Cassaforteans and their magical blessings.

The epigraphs of The Buccaneer’s Apprentice are similarly forward-looking, but not quite as much so. They’re a little more self-contained, and if one reads between the sea shanties, the theatrical reviews, and the travelogues, they provide a lot of information that might otherwise go unnoticed. There are hints at relationships between the characters—where they’ve been and where they might be going in the future. Sometimes the epigraphs are wry commentary on the action that follows, or has immediately preceded.

Every quotation is there for a reason, though. They shouldn’t be overlooked.

In the department of cool things, I received a mockup for the cover of The Nascenza Conspiracy this week.



It’s a nifty concept, and I like the fact that it’ll have both protagonists, Petro Divetri and Emilia Fossi, on the cover. I did ask that in the final realization, which like the first two covers will be done by the totally awesome Blake Morrow, that Emilia be given an outfit that was a little more military-like, given that she’s supposed to be a palace guard in the book. “She’s looking a little bit like she’s on the way to a Young Republicans meeting,” I told my editor.

He wrote back, puzzled. “Does that mean she’s not a Young Republican?”

The Buccaneer's Apprentice

I'm happy to announce that The Buccaneer's Apprentice, the second novel of the Cassaforte Chronicles, is available for your reading pleasure.

It's a tale of nautical intrigue. It's a story about crooked card games. And it's a novel about an acting company so bad that it can only get engagements in foreign countries that haven't heard how terrible they are.

But mostly it's the story of a cursed seventeen-year-old who bluffs his way from lowly apprentice to the pirate master of the Azure Sea, in the days when an enemy armada is sailing for the shores of Cassaforte with deadly intent.

Here are a couple of places to purchase the book online:

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Amazon

The Buccaneer's Apprentice at Barnes & Noble

As always, I appreciate it when those of you who've read and enjoyed my books review them on Amazon or other sites.

One special note: I know some of you like to run down to your local bookstore, look for my novels, and then inform me that the bookstore doesn't have any copies left on their shelves. I'd like to gently remind my readers that I don't have control over the distribution of my novels. If your favorite bookstore doesn't have it in stock, ask them to restock and to order a copy for you from their warehouse. They'll be happy to help you, I'll be happy you bought a copy, and it'll arrive in a mere couple of days. Also, if your budget is low, don't be shy about asking your local public library to get a copy!

In Hartford, Hereford, & Hampshire, Hurricanes Hardly Happen

The British Empire is not dead. It has merely conquered Hollywood, with a vengeance.

Last night the Mont and I went out to see How to Train Your Dragon, which was all very well for a movie like that. The dragons were awfully cute, anyway. But it wasn’t more than two or three minutes into the proceedings when I realized that, oh gawrsh, this was going to be one of those movies in which the kids spoke with streetwise American cadences and the adults were all going to be growling out disapproval in the lilting tones of the British isles. Scotland, specifically. Never mind that in my head, ancient Vikings sound more like . . . I don’t know. More Scandanavian. Like ABBA. Hell, like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef.

One thing I know for certain, though is that Vikings very likely did not at all sound like weak imitations of Mike “I Know Only One Accent Other Than Canadian And You’re Going To Hear Me Do It Dammit” Myers doing Shrek.

Now, it’s not that I’m anti-British accents in films. In films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy when all the hobbitses are running around with hairy bare feet and talking to elves in Cockney, I’m fine. The original author was English. Ditto with the Narnia films. Harry Potter? The wizardly intonations of this updating of Tom Brown’s Schooldays is fine with me. I may even have harbored a few secret fantasies of Emma Watson’s Hermione telling me in a soft whisper that I was a very naughty lad who richly deserved a thrashing. And trust me, it’s all about the accent, in that particular scenario.

But that is neither here nor there. Those characters are rooted in the traditions of the Great Britain. Dragon-training Vikings are not. Nor, I would like to point out, is the pantheon of Greek gods. From what I saw in the Clash of the Titans trailer, the august collection of deities hanging around Mount Olympus could have been cast from the leftovers of some Merchant/Ivory period piece. And the female lead in the upcoming Prince of Persia? Wench sounds like Julie Andrews in Camelot.

It seems as if the movie industry uses patrician upper-class English aristo-modulations as shorthand for gods, wizards, nobility in any European non-English-speaking country, and other all-powerful creatures. The comic relief and the ogres get plucked from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and London’s East End. Ah well. I shouldn’t complain. At least the cliche keeps dozens of refugees from BBC Television employed, and lets a lot of people like Jake Gyllenhaal who shouldn’t be attempting accents, strut their stuff. But when the day comes that some barely-an-actor like Keanu Reeves is conscripted to adopt some plummy British accent so that audience are forced to sit through . . . oh. Sorry, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dangerous Liaisons.

Forgot about you. Poor things.

Ninjas vs. Pirates!

In honor of the April release of my novel, The Buccaneer’s Apprentice, as well as Ed Briant’s Choppy Socky Blues, my publisher, Flux, is giving away copies of both books to one lucky entrant with social networking savvy.

All you have to do is visit their Facebook page answers the age-old question: when it comes to pirates vs. ninjas, who’ll be the winner? I’m partial to pirates, myself, but I have to admit. Ninjas are pretty awesome.

You can tweet a reply @fluxbooks on Twitter, too!

The day I was forgotten

April first is the anniversary of my mom’s death. The day always makes me mopey.

This year I was trying to sift through my brain and find a memory I could focus upon that would best honor her. The one that kept coming to mind seemed so negative that I kept pushing it aside. I’ve learned the hard way, though, that ignoring my bossy brain only causes me trouble later down the road, so here it is:

After the sex education scandal that caused the great Cathy Smiley carpool debacle early in the second grade, I started taking the bus home from school. My dad would drive me to Brook Hill Elementary in the mornings, but when school would let out I’d board the smelly yellow school bus and take the half-hour ride back to my neighborhood. The bus stop was a good walk from my house for someone with little legs. By myself I’d take the sidewalk south, turn the corner, and then travel a very very long half-block east until I was across the street from my house.

Now, I lived on a busy thoroughfare. It was stately and green and lined with trees and crepe myrtle, yes, but it was essentially a four-lane artery that cars and trucks would take to cut between major roads. In the middle lay a broad median covered with grass and more crepe myrtle. To a second-grader who was still only six years old, that street was intimidatingly broad. More to the point, I wasn’t allowed to cross it by myself.

When I reached the spot across the street from my house, afternoons, I was supposed to stand on the sidewalk and wait for my mother. She would have been watching from the front windows, waiting for me. When I’d appear between the banks of shrubbery, she’d dash out, cross the street, take my hand, and lead me home. Day after day we followed this routine without fail.

Until one day in winter, that is. It had been snowing, I remember. As was typical in Richmond, it wasn’t really enough snow to cause a problem, but enough to give the air a certain winter crispness. As I did every day, I followed the sidewalk, turned the corner, and walked the long half-block to the spot where I always stood. Then I waited.

And waited. And waited.

I don’t know exactly what it was that kept my mom that afternoon—whether she was reading a book and got wrapped up in the plot, or whether she’d become absorbed in a crossword puzzle or a phone call or some task around the house—but she simply forgot to look out for me. I stood on the sidewalk, getting colder by the minute, waiting and waiting, but she never came. I was too good a boy to disobey the parental command that I was never to cross the street by myself. So I stood there, more and more impatient by the second, waiting for her to emerge, while the cars and trucks roared by.

The snow continued to fall. To me it seemed to get colder and colder. I began to contemplate crossing the road by myself, but couldn’t bring myself to attempt it. There were rules to it I hadn’t learned. I remember wondering what would happen if no one ever remembered me. Would it get dark? Would anyone be able to see me in the dark? Would I have to stand there forever?

It’s at this point in the story that I can hear my mother’s voice, wry and annoyed, saying, Oh, great, you came up a story of my failure. Thanks very much. But I suppose that the reason my brain kept forcing this story up to the surface is because of what happened afterward.

By the time my mother finally remembered me, I’d been standing there for perhaps forty minutes (though it seemed like hours to me). Hot tears were streaming down my face. I had to pee. My mother, appalled at herself, rushed out of the front door in nothing more than her housecoat and slippers, dashed through the mild late-afternoon traffic, knelt down in the snow next to me, and gave me an enormous hug. Then, half-carrying and half-guiding me, she rushed me back across the parkway, up the sidewalk, and into the warm house. All the way she uttered reproaches to herself and comforting words for me. Once she’d unbundled me from my wet clothing, she began boiling water. When I returned from the bathroom, my bladder emptied, I had a steaming cup of Swiss Miss in front of me, studded with miniature marshmallows. The television was on to whatever show I liked watching in the afternoons, and she wrapped me in my grandmother’s crocheted afghan. While she dried my hair with a dish towel, she promised over and over that she’d never forget me again.

I remember clearly feeling more badly for my mother that afternoon than I really did for myself. I never truly believed that I would’ve been stranded across the street in the dark, much less forever. That specter had been created only by my dramatic brain in overdrive. For the first time ever, though, I’d seen my mother as a fallible creature instead of the all-powerful, eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head omniscience she’d always been. The new knowledge that she had her failings and oversights didn’t frighten me, or make me feel as if I had an upper hand. For a fearful six-year-old who was too acutely aware of his faults, it merely comforted me to know that my mother made her own missteps as well.

And the very next day, once I was safely home, she and I walked down to the nearest busy street corner so that I could learn how to cross the street on my own, if something similar ever happened again. She still came out to meet me for the rest of the school year, but by the end of the week, I could perform the drill of looking both ways and crossing at the light to her total satisfaction.

It was my first baby step toward independence. Though it came at the price of a few tears on a snowy day, I don’t think there are many better memories to honor my mother than that.

The big chop

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working intently on making some revisions my editor had requested to the third book in the Cassaforte Chronicles. (Its former title, A Traveler to Nascenza, has been shelved, by the way, in favor of The Nascenza Conspiracy.)

For those of you who read The Glass Maker’s Daughter, the third book in the series focuses on Petro Divetri, the younger brother of the first novel’s heroine. After spending four years of increased scrutiny and expectation thanks to his sister’s fame and connections to the the country’s ruler, Petro is tired of constant attention. When he’s selected to represent his insula on a religious pilgrimage, he and his best friend decide to play a practical joke by swapping places. Petro gets to be a nobody for the course of a couple of weeks, while his friend gets to enjoy all the imagined privileges of being the glass maker’s son. But then everything goes wrong when political insurrectionists wishing to put pressure on the crown kidnap the friend, believing he’s Petro Divetri, and Petro’s left alone in the wilderness to stop them.

The book’s really a play on a familiar theme these days, that of a political group utilizing tactics of terror in order to frighten a population away from a popular leader. It’s a story of the extremes to which a political minority will resort when their candidate doesn’t assume a nation’s control—though I don’t necessarily think any of the young adults reading the book might pick up on the Obama vs. the teabaggers parallels, any more than they picked up on the echoes of 9/11 in the first book.

My wise editor enjoyed the book immensely, but made the suggestion that moving the kidnapping forward in the narrative would benefit the book’s structure. I didn’t disagree. What it meant, however, was that a lot of material needed to be cut. As any author can tell you, cutting can hurt. The chunk of pages I wanted to remove represented not only days and days of work, but great conversations, vibrant minor characters, detailed descriptions, and all kinds of information that might have to be relocated to other places and woven back into the novel’s web. Cutting substantially is not just a matter of lopping off a number of unessential words and hoping it adds up. It means judging every sentence, every paragraph, and deciding what’s essential and what’s merely colorful.

It’s hard.

I did it, though. In the end I chopped about thirty pages from the first one hundred. The first chapter I left more or less intact save for a little streamlining. From the second chapter I chopped the second half. The third chapter that originally took place with Petro and some of his insula-mates became a much shorter episode that took place in the headmistress’ office, and all of Petro’s classmates vanished. (That was the loss that stung the most, probably—a couple of the kids were really nicely drawn.) The fourth chapter I left alone, but the fifth, detailing the pilgrims’ first night on the road, I excised completely.

Although on a certain level I was a little sad to lose my minor characters, mostly I thought it a great intellectual challenge to figure out how to accomplish it. It was like a big game of Jenga. I removed as many sticks as possible to lighten the tower, but not so many that it lost any of its integrity, much less had any chance of tumbling down.

It’s unwise for a writer to think of his novel as untouchable. There’s always something that can be improved or polished. Sometimes an editor is going to make a request that sounds difficult. Approaching it as a game, however, or as a particularly tricky puzzle to solve makes it less daunting. Even fun.

The hard questions

A little later today I’m giving a talk to college students enrolled in a course about writing fiction for young adults. I know. Why am I not teaching this thing? I’m not really convinced that writing is the sort of thing that can be learned by everyone enlisted in a semester-long three-credit course, personally, but the good thing about a seminar is that the very presence of academic structure gives students every chance to succeed. The regular checkpoints, the guide markers along the way, the evaluations—they all give aspiring writers a solid pace to follow, and a sense of achievement by semester’s end when they’ve produced their three short stories or their workshop-vetted novella.

I’m not being asked to talk about the actual crafting of novels, at any rate. I got called in to talk about having a career as a published author. And this year, when I was looking over my standard outline of what I call The Fabulous Author Speech, I found myself scrubbing out roughly half of the old talk and adding a completely new section titled, Are you really sure you want to seek publication?

Much of my talks in the past, you see, have assumed that everyone listening to me blathering on naturally wants their volumes to appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. It’s the dream that aspiring authors confess when they approach me shyly. I know it’s the goal of many fine writers of my personal acquaintance. As an achievement it’s all well and good, but I know perfectly well that not everyone wants to go through the rigors of seeking publication, nor the exposure, nor the mental gymnastics it requires. The publishing business, as I stress in my talk, is not the ultimate reward for the most deserving; it’s merely a delivery system for writing that has a market and is at least competent.

So today I plan to give these students a few hard questions to ask themselves. What are your work habits? is the first. If you’re being completely honest with yourself, I plan to inquire, can you look at your past writing history and affirm that you’ll be able to finish a three-hundred-page book without stalling out after the first three chapters? Will you be able to finish it on a deadline? During the Christmas holidays when everyone wants you to be social and fun and keep the house clean? Will you be able to sit at the computer from eight in the morning until midnight when you know that deadline is approaching and you’re scared pantsless than you won’t be able to finish?

Do you have the financial resources and the time to write? I worked full-time when the first twelve of my books came out, drudging at my day job from nine to five and then writing from six-thirty to midnight all week. Sometimes I wrote four novels a year. One’s first (or second, or third) book is not going to make one financially independent overnight, and it could be several years before that first manuscript makes any money for you at all.

Are you able to write more than one novel? Because publishers don’t like one-trick ponies unless their names are Harper and Lee. And I’m pretty sure Lippincott would’ve loved a Mockingbird follow-up. It’s common for people to stall after writing one manuscript, but for the vast majority of writers one single completed product does not a career make.

Are you willing to be flexible? I’ve had an editor tell me, “I love your characters and setting and tone, but can you change the entire plot of the book?” I am currently working on revising a novel in which the editor has asked me to excise thirty to forty pages from the first one hundred. Painful as both scenarios are, they require jumping into them with enthusiasm and a sense of experiment and play, not regarding a manuscript as untouchable holy writ.

Are you writing for the right reasons? If you’re writing with the dream of having an editor call with the news that she loves your first book and that you are the most favored and talented person on earth, as a heavenly chorus of angels carol around you, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. If you dream of a beautiful book signing in which all your friends show up and fawn, and your foes have to grit their teeth over the catered appetizers and agree that you are the most fabulous person they know, or if you’re dreaming of a smart Manhattan luncheon in which you get to sip margaritas and reject dozens of book cover designs while your editors attempt to curry your favor, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. Same if you’re writing to get on Oprah. The reality of the writing life stinks: people will make fun of your pen name and not realize or care that they’re hurting your feelings. The book signings are often deadly dull and make you feel as if you’re a leper thrown into Borders in a quarantined area where no one dares to tread. You get stuck with book covers you hate, sometimes, and Oprah is never going to call. My father butchers the titles of my books; my partner does not read them. Very few of my immediate friends buy or read them. Most people will not realize how exciting it is to write for young adults, and look down upon you for writing for mere children. Or for writing fantasy. Or for writing for girls. Or for writing fiction. Most people think writing in general is like girls’ cheerleading in high school. It’s all very well to have fun with, but it’s not something one really considers as a full-time, acceptable, grown-up career. If you’re writing for the glory, or the fame, or for validation from your family and the public, you’re only going to be sadly disappointed, and disappointed quickly.

Finally and most importantly, Are you willing to pursue a bumpy path without shortcuts, even with no guarantee of success? That is, are you honestly willing to endure dozens and even hundreds of rejection letters—some of the quite cruel—that can debilitate your psyche? If not, perhaps now is not the time to follow the path. Are you willing to commit months and years of searching for your agent and publisher without giving in to the temptation of self-publishing just to have the momentary gratification of seeing your name on the cover of a book-like facsimile? It may resemble a book, it may be special-ordered through Amazon like a legitimately-published book, and it may give your mother something she can put on her coffee table, but precious few people are ever going to get their hands on it. Professional writer’s organizations will not recognize it when you apply for membership. Agents for future books you may compose will think twice about you, when you submit it as a credential. If you’re not willing to take the hard knocks gracefully, and keep sending out those query letters and synopses and to keep working on new projects for as long as it takes, now is not the time to follow the publishing path.

Because really, I want to say today, learning how to write is an admirable goal in itself, inside a classroom and without. Being published doesn’t make me a better writer; only challenging myself to develop my craft can do that. Being a published author just means I’ve managed to master the few self-promotional and marketing skills necessary to attract the attention of an agent, some editors, and a few publishing houses.

Being a better writer leads one to appreciate better the technical aspects of storytelling, and to recognize what makes a good story successful and a bad one dreadful to endure. Knowing how storytellers (and script writers) meticulously emphasize elements and manipulate their characters will spoil (let's say) every M. Night Shyamalan movie for you ten minutes into the screening, but it helps you appreciate how a script can work on a technical level (hi there, The Sixth Sense!) or help you understand why they fail (hello, Lady in the Water!). Being a better writer helps you understand why the people around you, from your eccentric aunt to your co-workers to your mate, choose the stories they share. The manner in which they relate those stories—do they rush for the payoff, or slowly relish the humorous ironies or rich details, or do they simply give the briefest and most perfunctory outline in order to conclude the conversation?—will educate you, the writer and the listener, in what is most important in their lives. Writing well helps you learn those things. Being published does not.

Even if your only intention is to write for yourself, or for your children, or in order to become the very best Spock-on-Malfoy internet fan fiction writer ever, good writing is going to help you become more observant, I plan to tell these people. It’s going to make you more insightful, and hopefully more understanding—both of yourself and the world around you. That, I intend to say, is no small nor negligible achievement.

And for the love of God, please include with your queries a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

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The Buccaneer's Apprentice: V. Briceland

Seventeen-year-old indentured servant Nic is cursed: all of his masters have met early, violent deaths (and deserved them, too). Nic hopes his luck is changing when he winds up with shrewd but jovial Armand Arturo, owner of the Theatre of Marvels—until their ship is attacked by pirates and Nic washes up on a deserted island. His quest for revenge becomes a quest to save the land of Cassaforte from invasion, aided by an unusual crew and an enchanted ship. Briceland’s spirited companion to The Glass Maker’s Daughter (2009) blends charismatic characters, magic, piracy, theater, and romance into a fantastical sea adventure.

Influences: Dickens

It’s largely because of Charles Dickens that I dropped out of my Ph.D. program, twenty years ago. Bleak House, specifically. No, I know what you’re thinking. Generations of grad school students in British literature approached Bleak House with a similar enthusiasm they might muster to an appointment for a root canal.

I wasn’t one of those students. I’d read Great Expectations in high school, and had been assigned Hard Times for a history class. I was of course familiar with A Christmas Carol, or at least the multiple adaptations of it for film and television. But Bleak House was revelatory. The moment I picked it up, I was gripped by the story with all its twists and turns, and was overwhelmed—in a good way—by the overabundance of characters and dialogue. I felt as if I’d been sat at a giant buffet table covered with all manner of exotic foods, all of them fragrant in their own special ways, and informed that I had all the leisure in the world to enjoy it.

Well, I was a doctoral student on a fellowship. I did have all the leisure in the world to enjoy it, and for long days and nights I plopped myself down on the sofa with my stereo on and a bowl of snacks at my side, while I raced through the pages. There were times I knew I should take a break at the end of a chapter, but I kept turning the pages, because I had to know what happened next. It was really just that good.

In class, the first night we discussed the novel, I listened attentively to the professor’s lecture about the British legal system, and took notes when he discussed the book’s unreliable narrator. I didn’t at all disagree with any of the cool, analytical comments that the other students made about the book’s twin narrative structures, or flinch much when the students who wanted to show off their familiarity with Derrida and Foucault invoked the names of their dark masters.

Something was missing from the conversation, though. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. Not until we’d had an hour and a half of dispassionate conversation about the book’s structure and technique, of tossing back and forth the names of famous theoreticians, and of discourse that was interesting yet dry as dust, did I ask a question at the end of class. “Didn’t anyone else think the book was exciting?” I asked around the table. “I mean, didn’t anyone else enjoy it?” I mean, come one! Bleak House has character die from spontaneous combustion, for crying out loud!

The rest of the students and the faculty member looked at me as if I were a lunatic. It was at that moment I realized that at a certain level, including graduate school, one isn’t supposed to admit to sensations such as enjoyment. To admit to being excited by a book’s plot is, well, juvenile. There’s an implication that if one’s relishing a story, it’s impossible to have one’s critical sensors engaged. Having fun is for kids. Serious professionals don’t enjoy what they do. It was then that I had the first inkling that perhaps I really didn’t belong in the academic world. Many more were to come.

Dickens has been one of my very favorite authors ever since. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I riffed on bits Great Expectations in my first novel for adults, Calendar Girl. My upcoming The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is an unabashed homage to what I consider one of my favorite parts of Nicholas Nickleby, namely the too-brief section in which Nicholas and Smike travel the countryside with the Crummles’ theatrical troupe. It might strike some people as odd, though, that I haven’t read all of Dickens’ works. I pick one up every three or four years and dive in, making it last for a month or more, relishing every well-turned minor role and sentimental scene and scowling at every villain. Dickens’ heroes and heroines are inevitably always a little bit of wet dishrags to me, but they’re surrounded by such a vivid swirl of action and colorful characters that it’s hard to dislike them.

I haven’t read them all because I’ve enjoyed knowing, for a couple of decades now, that I have a few more to go. I like knowing that sometime in the future, I’ll succumb and enjoy the familiar thrill of immersing myself into one of Dickens’ worlds and swimming in it for weeks. Right now, I’m fascinated with Little Dorrit, the riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of intertwined families and a French murderer. It’s kept me awake late at nights. I’ve had to restrain myself from watching any further in the 2008 BBC television adaptation than I’ve reached in the book. It’s difficult, because the cast (which seems to have been assembled from the casts of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Clatterford) is terrific, and because my actor boyfriend Russell Tovey breaks my heart in every scene in which he appears.

When I’m reading Charles Dickens, it is the best of times. It is the worst of times. It is . . . no, wait. I haven’t read that one yet.

Caprica

I was much too late to jump onto the Battlestar Galactica spacewagon when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi channel several years ago. By the time I really became aware of the series as a geek cultural phenomenon, it was already half-over.

Now, I like science fiction as a genre. Most of the new fiction I read tends to be SF. I’d seen the original Battlestar Galactica when I was a kid and had dismissed it as a Star Wars ripoff. I’d never been fond of Star Wars, even though my childhood occurred in the epicenter of its cultural impact. I’d never been a fan of Star Trek either, for that matter. My fondness for Doctor Who and Firefly notwithstanding, I think it’s fairly safe to make the generalization that I’m not a fan of the space opera, with its captains standing steadfastly in their bridges against the enemies to the human race, its babble about hyperspace jumping, and the shooting of big lasers between spaceships.

So when it came to the remake of BSG, I contented myself with following my friends’ excited LiveJournal posts about the series. By the time the show finished its run I had a general idea of its arc, and judged it safe finally to dip my toe in the waters, and watch the miniseries that started the whole reboot. And wow, was I impressed with it. I found the miniseries exciting. I loved its premise of a global holocaust caused by the human-looking, but totally mechanical, race of Cylons, and I really liked the notion of the only survivors being an unlikely assortment of officials aboard a decommissioned military spaceship turned into a museum and educational center. I was hooked.

Hooked for the duration of the miniseries, anyway. Almost immediately the series went off the rails for me. Fans of the show have tried to rationalize it away for me, but I see Battlestar Galactica as suffering from a contradiction in its premise set out by the miniseries—that the only scraps of humanity left to battle the Cylons are a disorganized, random group overlooked in the attack against their home planet of Caprica, who become the least likely heroes ever to defend a race against genocide—and the premise pursued in the rest of the series, which is that those aboard the Galactica are unique and special snowflakes who have been heavily infiltrated by Cylons years in advance in order to achieve some mystical goal. The series tries to have it both ways with both the notion of the humans as accidental spontaneous heroes, and the premise of this has all been planned, and the two never really gel for me. Plus, there are all the sequences in which spaceships shoot lasers at each other, which is usually the point in the program I pick up my phone and begin playing Puzzle Quest.

I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the DVDs of Battlestar Galactica, which is about the level of my enthusiasm for the show as well, so it was with a little bit of reluctance that I began watching its prequel/spinoff show on the renamed SyFy, Caprica. I’m happy to say, however, that not only am I totally hooked on Caprica, but that it’s probably the show I look forward to most these days.

It’s the simplicity of Caprica’s premise that keeps me coming back. In the highly technological world of Caprica that’s blown up sixty years later in Battlestar Galactica, an inventor and tech whiz played by Eric Stoltz has devised the first of the mechanical Cylons. His daughter, the bratty and brilliant Zoe, has managed to create an enduring version of herself in (for lack of a better term) cyberspace. When Zoe’s accidentally killed in an act of terrorism, Stoltz’s character retrieves her online avatar and infuses it into the mechanical Cylon. He believes the experiment is unsuccessful, but what he’s done is to give the mechanical being Zoe’s sentience, with chilling results for the human race.

The show plays with the notion of the teenaged girl in the oversized robot’s body with both humor and suspense as it cuts between shots of the gleaming silvery hulk and Zoe’s diminutive form. Like so many adolescents, Zoe’s both a monster and a little girl at the same time. When she’s not blowing up multiple targets with her machine gun hands, she’s sneaking away and talking to her best friend on the phone. Cylon Zoe is as sullen and silent as a sulking teen girl (and it’s rather humorous to think of the Cylon war that’s to come as the apex of an adolescent brat’s temper tantrum), but when her father asks her to strut about his company’s boardroom, the robot does so with obvious relish, proud of her dad’s accomplishments. When he orders her to rip off her arm mere moments later, to prove her absolute obedience to him, it’s blood-curdling to watch. He has no idea what his daughter has become, and she has no intentions of telling him—the standoff of the generations, only in cybernetic form. A teen's cry of you don't understand meeeeee! only rings louder when the teen in question is two tons of metal and electronics.

The show’s rife with subplots involving the Adama family, with its roots in organized crime (and their equally-deceased teen daughter, whose linger cyberspace identity becomes the biggest gangster of all), and with a sect of religious fanatics whose terrorism provides the sparks of violence that pinpoint what’s otherwise been an intellectually-driven plot. Every week I keep coming back for more, and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

It seems to me, though, that there are two kinds of science fiction fans. There are those like me who tend to like their stories earthbound, or at least planet-bound, and then there are those who like the big spaceships with the big lasers. For fans who only like the space shoot-em-ups, however, I’m afraid Caprica might be a little bit of a disappointment. However, Caprica is the kind of science fiction I most enjoy: an interplay of ideas and science with a story that sucks me in on both cerebral and emotional levels.

Bagels, Einstein

The Mont was in Cincinnati for the better part of last week, so while he was gone I thought I’d try my hand at some baking. It’s easier to do such things with a little privacy, so I can avoid questions like, ‘What’re you making?’ or ‘What’s that smell?’ or ‘Why is the kitchen covered with flour?’

My experiment for the week was bagels. I’m not sure why, but I’d always assumed that bagels were tough to make—but they’re not. I already had three pounds of whole wheat dough I’d made sitting in the freezer, ready to go. I took a pound of it, flattened it out and sprinkled it with a cinnamon-sugar mix and some raisins, rolled it up like a jelly roll, then squeezed off portions that I formed into the traditional bagel shape. I let them rise a bit, dunked them in a bath of boiling water doctored with baking soda, then baked them on a hot stone.

I couldn’t believe how intense the smell when I pulled the half-dozen bagels from the oven; it was as if heaven itself had opened a bakery in my neighborhood. Even the cats lifted their heads to sniff at the spicy fragrances filling the house. When the bagels were cool enough to touch, I bit into one. The crust was hard and crunchy to the bite, and the middle moist and sweet and full of plump raisins. In a word, they were amazing.

A couple of days later I was inspired enough to try another variation with more of the whole-wheat dough. This time I filled the dough with a mixture of brown sugar, dried cherries, and crushed chocolate chips. The water bath turned out to be a lot messier, since the chocolate near the surface had a tendency to melt quickly. The result was a lot like boiling wads of dough in a vat of Swiss Miss—aromatic, certainly, but not exactly easy to clean up. The bagels themselves turned out to be just as delicious.

So in my sudden enthusiasm for bagels, I’ve been trying to think of other variations to attempt. I’ve always liked the cheese bagels, certainly. And I think a bagel with dried apple, brown sugar, and cinnamon (perhaps with a streusel topping) could be really tasty as well.

When the Mont came home yesterday, I pulled out the bags of bagels from the freezer to display. “Huh!” he said, peering at them closely. “Interesting. They look like turds.”

Martha Stewart never had to deal with these things.