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Author: Matthew David Surridge

Vexed Hierarchies

Vexed Hierarchies

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Heroes in the WindAnother year’s drawing to a close, and with it the first full decade of the twenty-first century. It’s a time for looking back, for thinking over what’s happened and what’s going on, in fantasy fiction and elsewhere. I don’t pretend to be in a position to make any worthwhile assessment of fantasy as a whole; but I do want to write about a change that seems to be in process right now. I think it’s a positive change, and potentially a radical one. And I can remember the moment I realised it was happening.

It was when I saw a collection of Robert E. Howard short stories published by Penguin Books.

Let me firstly explain why this was a shock. When I was a kid, Penguin seemed to be a publisher of self-consciously literary books; orange-spined paperbacks featuring mostly English people doing resolutely ordinary everyday things. This wasn’t accurate, as Penguin published sf writers, from Fred Hoyle to Keith Laumer to Fred Saberhagen, as well as mysteries, and writers like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse; but the perception was that the orange-spined books were realist fiction, and ambitious on a level above the rest. They didn’t interest me at the time, but I gathered from the adults around me that these books represented, in some way that was never clearly articulated, a literary quality beyond the sf and fantasy that I was reading.

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H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival

H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival

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Howard Phillips LovecraftEveryone has their heresies. Things they believe, or things they perceive to be true, with which many if not most authorities would disagree. That’s especially so, I think, with readers. Everybody who reads is going to have a list of writers who they feel are unjustly praised or unjustly criticised. Or, in some cases, writers whose work is wrongly praised or criticised; writers accepted as great, for example, but who you think are great for some other reason than is held by most people.

I’ve got a bunch of these heresies. I want to talk here about one such: I believe that H.P. Lovecraft is not only a major writer, but a major stylist. I think his use of language is powerful and original. I think he’s often misread as failing to do things he has no interest in, and I think what he is interested in doing is not often discussed on its own terms.

Before going on to explain what I mean, I should probably make a couple of points clear. Firstly, I have no particular interest in discussing Lovecraft`s life and personality except to note that the desire of many critics to focus on Lovecraft as an individual may suggest a need to evade dealing with the horrors of his fiction. In any event, Lovecraft was not a static thinker; his perspectives and opinions on many things changed over the course of his life. In writing this post, therefore, I’m going to try to talk about “Lovecraft” as a back-formation from the texts of his stories; I mean simply that I’m going to write about what I see in the fiction, treated as a whole, and not worry much over the details of his biography.

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A Novel Superman

A Novel Superman

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The Last Son of KryptonMedia tie-in novels are common nowadays, and people have debated how good tie-in novels are and how good they can be. I don’t have any strong opinions, other than to note that a) the usual conditions under which tie-ins are written don’t seem encouraging; b) on the other hand, great books can be and have been written under much less encouraging conditions and much greater restrictions; and c) I’m really looking forward to reading Michael Moorcock’s Doctor Who novel.

But I will say this: when the question of the quality of media tie-in novels arises, there are two books I think of as both tie-in novels and excellent fiction in their own right. There may be more, but these two have stuck with me from a young age, and every time I re-read them (as I do every few years), I find they’re still powerful and resonant work. The language is tight, terse and moving. The characters are strong. The world is well-conceived, feeling fresh and new.

The books are Superman: Last Son of Krypton and Superman: Miracle Monday, by Elliot S! Maggin (follow the link to uncover the mystery of the exclamation point). Published to accompany the release of the first two Superman movies, the books have little to no connection with the movies as such, being instead original and utterly fascinating stories.

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Novel Writing: A Summation in Praise of Long Books

Novel Writing: A Summation in Praise of Long Books

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Nanop BadgeAnother NaNoWriMo has come and gone, with mixed results for me. I won, in that I wrote more than 50,000 words. But I didn’t come close to the target of twice that, which is what I was aiming for. In the past, my pace tended to pick up as the month ended; this time around a bad cold hampered my progress, and I didn’t even crack 60,000.

Still, there’s a sense in which I think I accomplished what I was after this month. I took an idea, or a collection of ideas, and started giving it form as an actual story. I wrote enough to gain a sense of the thing; how it’d be shaped, what sort of themes would be prominent, what kind of voice I’d use to tell the tale.

Perhaps the main point is that I learned what the scale of it would be. I started with the notion that I’d be writing two books, totalling maybe a bit more than 100,000 words; I know now that I’m working on a four-volume story, probably with a word count of between 300,000 and 400,000 words.

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Novel Writing: Symbolic Thinking

Novel Writing: Symbolic Thinking

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The Holy GrailHampered this past week by a bad cold, I’ve made only minimal progress in National Novel Writing Month (you can see my previous thoughts on this year’s NaNoWriMo here, here, here, and here). Still, a few things have become clear to me about the shape of my story; I seem to be writing, not a two-book story, but a four-book saga. Which is all right, since the idea of the story, Modred finding his way at the court of Arthur and beyond, was always meant to divide into four units; only now it seems those units are going to be longer than I’d expected.

But what’s surprising me so far is not how the material I expected to find in the story is arranging itself, but how unpredictable some of that material is. How symbols are choosing themselves, and manifesting in strange ways. And in ways of which I’m only vaguely conscious.

“Symbol” is in many ways a difficult word. What’s a symbol? The way I think of it, it’s an image in a story that means more than itself; specifically, an image that means more than can be explained. It’s an allusive image; a symbol typically seems to mean more than one thing, and usually gains resonance by being part of more than one symbol-system, whether the author was conscious of it or not. So a symbol can be defined as an image whose significance can be read many ways, but which can never be wholly captured by a non-narrative paraphrase.

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Novel Writing: The Hard Part

Novel Writing: The Hard Part

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The Sword in the StoneAs I write this, I’m closing in on the 50,000 word mark of my NaNoWriMo novel. I’m aiming for 100,000 words, which means I’m well behind my ideal pace, but if I can keep going for 6,000 words a day over the next week and a half, I should get there. So it’s still very possible. (You can read some thoughts on National Novel Writing Month here, some talk about the Arthurian legends that inspired my plot here, and a more detailed discussion of my plans over here.)

An outside observer might wonder what the point is. The book I write isn’t going to be very good; it’s a first draft, written in haste. Why not take it slower, and produce something better? But whatever I’d write would have to be reworked; that’s the way of things. Still, even assuming that this particular way of working is conducive to eventually producing something worthwhile … well, what is it that’s worthwhile, exactly? What, in short, is the point of writing this novel?

I don’t know if there’s really an answer to that. But why ask the question at all?

Only because that’s where I’m at with the novel.

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Novel Writing: Extrapolations

Novel Writing: Extrapolations

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Ford's MordredNaNoWriMo continues. I’m adding to my word count, generating text and ideas. Last week, I talked about Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which I’m using as a source text for my novel, and I mentioned that it can act as a spur to creativity.

This week, I’d like to give an example of what I meant, and go over some of the ways I’m rewriting Malory, and some of the ways I’ve interpreted him in ways that serve the purpose of my own tale. This will therefore be an unavoidably self-indulgent post.

My plan is for the story I’m writing to weave in and out around the events of Malory’s book, presenting bits of Le Morte d’Arthur from a new angle. I’m still going with the basic idea I outlined in my first post on NaNoWriMo; the Arthur story from Modred’s point of view, but a Modred who is half-elven and as deeply enmeshed in the politics of the elven world as of Camelot. Modred as a bitter moralist, struggling against fate; as I said, Modred as Elric.

So how do I get from there to a 50,000 word (or 100,000 word) novel?

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Novel Writing: Le Morte d’Arthur

Novel Writing: Le Morte d’Arthur

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Idylls of the KingNational Novel Writing Month is well underway for me. I’ve gotten a start on my novel, at the same time as I’m still getting the structure figured out. I’ll have some thoughts on my process, and what I’m learning, a bit later in this post; first, I want to write a bit about the subject I’m wrestling with, the Matter of Britain.

I’m writing an Arthurian fantasy. Like, I’d imagine, most people, I’ve been vaguely familiar with the stories of Arthur and his knights since I was very young. At different times in my life I’ve been more or less intensely interested in different aspects of the Arthurian tales and the way they developed over time; writing a story using that material, though, forces a new perspective on me.

I’ve had to think a lot about what precisely interests me about these stories. And which stories, in particular, have grabbed me? Why do they matter? Why do I want to write about them?

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After Halloween: Novel Writing

After Halloween: Novel Writing

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NaNoWriMo web badgeTonight, children go trick-or-treating, and many adults go to Halloween parties, thereby, perhaps, proving Ogden Nash’s line that children get more joy out of childhood than adults get out of adultery. For myself, though, I’ll be counting down the minutes to midnight, scrawling notes and making plans. Because at 12 AM, November 1, National Novel Writing Month begins.

National Novel Writing Month, more accurately International Novel Writing Month, is a worldwide challenge anyone can sign up for: you pledge to write 50,000 words in the month of November. You have to have those words written by midnight, November 30; otherwise, anything goes.

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The Book Fair

The Book Fair

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Book Fair flyerThe McGill book fair is the largest English-language used book sale in Montreal. It’s been held for decades, every October, on the second Wednesday and Thursday after Thanksgiving (which in Canada is on the second Monday in October). Every year an eclectic mix of thousands of books are sold, helping to raise money for scholarships.

I’ve been coming to the sale for about a dozen years. I’ve found novels by Lord Dunsany, a biography of C.S. Lewis, a book about Hypatia of Alexandria, a Dennis Wheatley omnibus, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Paul Park’s Celestis, a volume combining Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, collections of poetry by John Clare and Francois Villon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Southey and Don Marquis, a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds — and all of these (along with books by Neal Stephenson, Tad Williams, and T.H. White) in just one year, 2008, when I bought a total of 65 books for $161.

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