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You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

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A princess of mars-smallLast week I talked about my Window Theory of Emotional Response and I got some responses from people telling me about some books and films they’d encountered after the window had closed for them – and one or two who talked about works they’d loved once, but no more. Works where the window had once been open and was now closed.

It was pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about stuff we merely liked, or thought well of, but rather stuff that changed the world for us. Where the earth moved, the stars realigned and our understanding of the world was either fundamentally reordered or fundamentally approved.

We all know you can’t go home again. You’re not going to be able to relive that feeling of shock and awe, that feeling that the world just re-oriented itself, by rereading the book that did it for you or re-watching the movie or the TV series. Sometimes it happens that revisiting Parnassus leads us to feel it’s just a hill in Greece.

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Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

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Sherlock Holmes dang itAn American judge has ruled that Sherlock Holmes is in the Public Domain.

Say what? If you’re like me, you’ve had some trouble wrapping your head around the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective wasn’t already in the public domain. His first appearance, in the short novel A Study in Scarlet, was in 1887, and he appeared in a total of four novels and 56 short stories between then and 1927. To my mind that’s the pre-pulp era, roughly contemporary with the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let’s review. If most of Robert E. Howard Conan tales, published between 1932 -1936, are in the public domain — and in fact, virtually all literary works published before January 1, 1923 are no longer covered by United States copyright law — what’s the deal with Sherlock Holmes?

Well. Near as I understand it, the Conan Doyle Estate bases their claim on the fact that the last Holmes story was published in 1927, and the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Irene Adler, etc. were not truly completed until then. The Estate has challenged any production that tried to make use of the characters — and indeed, popular TV series like the BBC’s Sherlock, and CBS’s Elementary, have paid a license.

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World Building Historical Fiction using Military Thinking

World Building Historical Fiction using Military Thinking

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WOTR SKII 255
“…when I got the gig to write Historical Adventure tie-ins for the Paradox War of the Roses game, I was a bit terrified.”

If you read my blog, you’ll know I’m not a great fan of authorial self loathing and all that angst. However, when I got the gig to write Historical Adventure tie-ins for the Paradox War of the Roses game, I was a bit terrified. Rather than angsting over my ability to tell a story — I’d signed the contract so it was bit late for that! — I was overwhelmed by the task of using a real world historical setting.

Obviously, I was afraid of missing an obvious facet of Medieval life and then being pounced at by some of the hundreds of thousands of members of the Living History/Historical Reenactment/SCA/HEMA community.

However, the most pressing problem was; How was I to grok a historical setting well enough for it to become a my sandbox? I’d tackled this once before when writing a YA Dark Age yarn and found that a lot of the thinking had already been done for me by a group whose lives and, sometimes, homeland relied on untangling the world in order to make systematic sense of it: the Military…

Though not all the conflict is physical,  an archetypal adventure story is not so different from a series of one or more combat missions. Simplifying greatly, military thinking makes sense of these on three levels:

  • Strategic – The broad movement of armies in the pursuit of long term objectives driven by economics, diplomacy, and politics; “In order to secure our flanks, we shall make this country submit to us and do so by invading from the north and seizing its capital city.”
  • Operational – Maneuvering towards objectives during the resulting campaigns and battles; “You will seize these bridges and hold them so that our tanks can use them.”
  • Tactical – Achieving the objectives through fighting anything from a fullscale battle to a squad level action; “You guys set the mortar up over there and lay down smoke…”

This gives us three different ways of seeing anything in our story world.

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This Will Be On The Test

This Will Be On The Test

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Treasure IslandI don’t know whether it’s the controversy over the character Turiel in the upcoming The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but there’s been a big swell of interest lately in the Bechdel Test. You know what that is, right? Generally applied to movies and TV shows, it determines whether women are represented equitably. In order to pass the test,  there must be two female characters who have names; they must at some point speak to each other; they must speak about something other than men. Seems simple.

I remember my father once telling me that Treasure Island had no women in it. He seemed to think this was a good thing. He was wrong, of course, except that he was also right. What he didn’t realize was that the film he was familiar with had no women, but that wasn’t also true of the book. Jim Hawkins does have a mother.  We could argue, however, that the film guys got it right, since Mrs. Hawkins does little or nothing to forward the plot.

So Treasure Island, whether print or celluloid, fails the Bechdel Test.

Most films/shows don’t pass the test, even the ones we fantasy and SF lovers love the most. Big Bang Theory doesn’t pass, even though there are three named female characters (and not because Penny, as my friend Jim Hines has pointed out, has no last name). Stargate passes, at least SG1 – they were smart to make the doctor a woman, since that gives plenty of room for non-guy related conversation. It’s been a while, but I believe that Star Trek: Voyager passes (between Captain Janeway, B’lanna Torres, and Seven-of-Nine) and TNG as well – remember, the doctor’s a woman.

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So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

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“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

Neil Gaiman
“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

And repeat.

Yes, I was at a Neil Gaiman reading. And Gaiman, of course, rocks.

He doesn’t write about talking squids, but much of his output falls squarely in the Fantasy and Science Fiction category. Judging from the beer bellies and black T-shirts at the event, we geeks know this — hard to miss when he’s written Batman, Babylon 5, and Dr Who. And of course, a good whack of his prose fiction counts as Fantasy.

What’s interesting is that the non-geeks don’t seem to get this. To them he’s this wonderful, off the wall, creative genius, the sole acceptable purveyor of vampires and werewolves and Old Gods. If they are aware of the wider genre(s), they dismiss them as “sweaty handed nerd stuff.” Rayguns and space rockets are fine in Dr Who, but not elsewhere.

You see the same thing with Tolkien and also our local hero, JK Rowling. People who are snotty about anything with magic on the cover, go crazy over the Potterverse and Middle Earth; “It’s not Fantasy, it’s Children’s Fiction/Literature.”

This is maddening. Geeks are people too. How unfair to be sneered at, put down, for one’s tastes by the same people who are embracing them. It’s like being beaten up for “being a Paddy” by a party of drunks on their way home from Riverdance.

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Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

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SFWA logoSo, I saw that SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) is raising their qualifying payrate from 5 cents/word to 6 cents/word. This rate is part of SFWA’s formula for determining whether a market or an individual sale is a professional sale for the purposes of qualifying for SFWA membership. With some other minor details, a writer can qualify for full SFWA membership with three professional short fiction sales, or the sale of one novel at professional pay.

The last time SFWA raised its qualifying rate was nine years ago, when social media was less developed than now, and I’ve already seen some reactions about what this will mean for magazines that qualify right now at 5 cents/word. Short fiction economics being what they are, a few magazines will be at a decision point. Do they incur the costs of raising their pay rates and remaining SFWA-qualifying markets, or do they remain at 5 cents/word and possibly lose out on that part of the author population that is looking for SFWA membership? Many magazines are volunteer-run operations (bless them!) and/or are running losses, and/or are making ends meet with grants and kickstarter campaigns. Publishing is not a business you go into to make money. Hayden Trenholm, publisher of Bundoran Press, often tosses out the old saw that the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a big fortune.

Writers (and publishers) are human beings. They pour their hearts into acts of creation in defiance of odds and common sense (once again, bless them, and me, who participates in the insanity of creation against all advice just as much as anyone else). We all ache for acceptance and recognition of our art, and SFWA is powerful professional recognition. Someone is saying “You are good, we welcome you to our group.” Heady stuff for any artist, although that’s not exactly the wording on the acceptance note. Whether or not you subscribe to the whole professional association thing, our reactions as artists are very much human.

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Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

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Red Plant Blues Last week I was talking about dystopias and satires, urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and further thought has led me to observe that genre can be a tricky thing. Of course, I was really talking about how definitions change and evolve, and how we all fight the changes we don’t agree with. I didn’t really talk about the difference between nouns and adjectives. I didn’t mention that something can be dystopian, without being, actually, a dystopia. Or that something can have satirical elements, without being, technically, a satire.

After all, practically everything we read – or watch for that matter – has a romantic element, but that doesn’t mean we’re reading romance novels, or watching rom-coms.

Total aside: is there a rom-trag genre? Wuthering Heights, maybe? Rebecca? Truly, Madly, Deeply?

Anyway. I’ve actually had a romance novel published, so I think of myself as someone uniquely qualified to talk about that aspect of crossing genres.

As with any other genre, romance has characteristic conventions, but what really makes a romance novel a romance novel is that it tells the story of a very precise portion of the protagonists’ lives. Specifically, it tells the story of how they met the person they love, and began spending the rest of their lives together. Other things are very likely happening to the characters at the same time. They have work lives, social lives, family obligations. They may have crimes to commit or solve. But if the main plot concerns their love life, then it’s a romance. If there’s also a mystery/crime, that means there’s a mystery element, one that exists only to allow the characters to meet, interact, and so forth.

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Heroic Historical and Uncomfortable Truths

Heroic Historical and Uncomfortable Truths

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large_towton
A winter battle. How positively…

People often quote LP Hartley (without having any idea they’re quoting him, or who he was, me included) — “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

To an extent you can take a tourist attitude and go, “Look at the funny foreigners. How romantic!”

Distance in time fosters distance in morality, making it — for example — entirely acceptable to offer Battle of Towton greetings cards. A winter battle. How positively Christmassy!

Or for the Scottish Borders Council to adopt the Border Reiver as a logo.

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The Powerful Geek

The Powerful Geek

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Darth Vader in a suit-smallWhen I was ten years old, my father enrolled my brother and me into martial arts classes given at the local YMCA. It was a two-class session, starting with tae kwon do and then switching to judo for the second hour. It was my first real experience with physical training outside of school gym class. I was hooked right away.

At first, I really preferred the tae kwon do with its blocks and punches and kicks that somewhat resembled what my brother and I watched on Black Belt Theater on Saturday afternoons. The judo, on the other hand, was a lot more work. The instructor spent half the class running us through fairly rigorous calisthenics, followed by grappling and throws.

Now, by the time we began these lessons, I was already a fantasy- and scifi-loving geek. I was into Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Conan, and superheroes. For me, martial arts were a real-life connection to the heroic feats that permeated those works. Bruce Lee was one of my earliest personal icons. As I got older and went college, I added bodybuilding to my repertoire. After graduating, I worked for fourteen years as a guard at a maximum-security juvenile detention center, where my training was put to practical use.

It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in psychology to realize I was undergoing a transformation in all this. Studying these arts and working out allowed me to model the attributes of my childhood heroes. Yet, in aping these heroic qualities, I was also feeding my inner fantasy life. It helped me to make the decision to pursue fantasy writing as a career, as if it were a natural step on my personal journey.

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The Uses of Ghosts

The Uses of Ghosts

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living-with-ghostsWhile Black Gate readers may (fairly) view me as a sword-and-sorcery writer, thanks to the Tales Of Gemen the Antiques Dealer, a good many of those who have stumbled across my fiction might (fairly) think of me as a horror writer. Since I never expected to fall into that particular category, I’ve been doing a good deal of soul-searching as to the value of what I’m up to – the value, as it were, of basing so much of my tale-spinning on the supernatural instead of, for example, “real life.”

Dare I take this moment to point out that an entirely different set of readers might quite reasonably think of me as a writer of literary fiction?  Yeah, I wear that hat, too.

This odd combination of multiple caps has led me to the following conclusion: ghosts are a tool in the writer’s toolbox, as specific as more established weaponry like setting, length, voice, and theme.

Without further ado, I offer my list of why Things That Go Bump In the Night have worth. I don’t expect this to be an exhaustive list, but I trust that I have made a good start. Perhaps you, gentle reader, will be inspired to add to the till?

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