Psychedelia Gothique

Contemporary Satire Vonnegut did it!  Committed satire. Over and over in fact. Although some critics didn’t think he wrote satire at all; apparently, even though his work was intended to make fun of modern life and capitalist values, it doesn’t do so with the intent of inspiring action that would reform the system. "Not satire." say those critics.                  "Hahaha," say I.  Any lack of intention to inspire change is merely a technicality –  simply a consequence of the times we live in – where the power structures, corruption, self-delusion and  sheer vastness of our modern world is too embedded, complex and amoral to be changed by a guy with a writing pad or keyboard firing shots at the establishment. It’s about as effective as dropping a bomb in a video game. It may affect the outcome of that particular game, but is otherwise of no consequence at all to life, the universe and everything.  If you do an intern...

While sending out query letters to agents, one thing you are expected to supply is a list of books that are similar to the book you are pitching. With The Human Template , this seemed impossible. One thing my early readers consistently told me was that they had never read anything like my book before. I’m a longtime believer in the adage “There’s nothing new under the Sun,” so I didn’t buy into this notion right away. Yet, it didn’t really help me to come up with any real comparisons. When I first started sending queries, my response was usually to mention a couple of   influences - rather than similar books. One of my favourite genre-books ever is The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I consider it to have the best opening of any sff book I have ever read and one of my clear goals is to be as good a writer as Michael Swanwick. Rereading his Vacuum Flowers while I was working on my diptych, I was briefly pumped to feel that my book is both stylistically similar ...

The longer I work on something, the more likely it is I’ll drift at some point into a creative doldrums, where I spend days or even weeks,   tweaking this, tweaking that, agonizing over a single phrase, sometimes a single word, writing in circles, rewriting the same scenes over and over and then finally just deleting them. But if I don’t lose hope, if I keep at it long enough, I generally catch a favourable wind at some point that fills my sails and carries me very quickly – sometimes almost out of control – to the end of a story or chapter. Sometimes the storm of inspiration and enthusiasm dies down suddenly, other times, it carries me right into the next chapter or next project. But one thing it almost inevitably does, is give me an unduly optimistic feeling about what I’ve just written. You’d think Shakespeare himself never penned such a masterpiece! I generally get over this quickly – usually as soon as I start to reread it. But every once in a while, the work turns...

I’ve been writing fiction since Junior High School, took creative writing in university and starting publishing short stories (and a few poems) in the 1980s.  I never tried writing a novel until I was in my forties, and the path was fraught with hazards, the road, littered with unfinished manuscripts. Here we are in 2019, and I am just finishing the fourth draft of my first novel to go beyond first draft. Was it worth all the angst and self-flagellation I’ve put myself through over the years? Am I qualified to make that call before I have actually published it and received reader and market feedback? Can I do it credibly? Hmm. Okay, be that way. I’ll do it anyway. 1)       The best reason to write a novel is because you can’t not write it. You persevere through the obstacles, risk alienating your family (because you need that private time to write), and face 100+ rejections when you try to try to find an agent and a publisher. And then you...

I've talked a lot about my novel in progress. This is page one of the current draft. Comments are more than welcome. Do you find this intriguing? Or is it offputting? It is in a different voice than most of the novel (and one of my Beta readers says the style and tone are misleading in that it doesn't hint at the action and wit that suffuse the rest of the book). But it does set readers up for a story where the trees are major characters. “This is a pivotal moment in the histories of both our species!” The voice is warm, the elocution, precise. The humanoid figure on centre stage in everyone’s minds, bows deeply. Naked, its skin is the colour and texture of tree bark, and it displays neither male nor female characteristics. “These sessions will teach you about the BioGrid and the history of your own society. We learned from Glory, not to give you the information all at once. It works best when learned in increments.” Standing straight and sweeping its hands down its b...

It’s easier to write about stuff when you’re actually going through it – so I’m going to save my blog posts about self-publishing until I am actually back in the throes of doing it. Approach it like a reporter. In fact - that's what I will do with the whole publishing process.  Ergo, Avenging Glory will be coming out as a novel sometime in the next few years. Whether or not it will be published is not the question - the only question is, how? Traditional, hybrid, or self-published?  For the first while, I will be exploring the traditional route. If and when I do hit paydirt and start down that path, the process will be considerably longer – most likely entailing the hiring of an agent, the search for a publisher, working with the agent and/or editor on the mss, and then ultimately publishing the book, a pipeline I have been told can go on for as long as three years. If I self-published the entire project, it could be done in a window as short  as a few days...

The more prolific I've been getting, the more settled I am getting into a particular process of writing that works for me. FIRST DRAFT: Summarize like a madman. Here are the characters and this is the plot - what happens in the story. I'll tinker with the mechanics and milieu to make it as interesting as possible. This is the stage where I'll often decide the style and intent of the story. I keep working on this until I come up with an interesting potential ending. SECOND DRAFT The next draft is to develop the characters, by asking what kind of character would get him or herself into a position like this and why. All the stories I'm writing these days are about relationships. Sometimes parents and children, sometimes siblings, sometimes lovers and sometimes more than one of the above. Creating realistic relationships with a few lines of dialogue is just about the most fun in fiction writing. The quirkier the characters, the more fun this part of the process is. ...