I was in Priceline, buying last-minute essentials for our trip to the US (oh, didn't I mention? I fly out for a month tomorrow). The "CelebritySlim" weight-loss stuff is right next to the Belgian chocolate.
Yep. That's a winner, right there.
3:19 PM - link to this -
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
I've been reading Romanitas by Sophia McDougall. I'm a bit iffy about it. It's not the whole "but there are good reasons why Rome fell" (this being a "the Roman Empire still exists in 2004" story) because I don't care to begin with, and I also think that unless the reasons why it didn't are central to your story then they needn't be included. (Sidebar: I am a little frowny-face that there doesn't seem to have been any degree of philosophical advancement. Technological, yes, but slavery still exists, religion is still Roman and the class system remains. I find this, frankly, difficult to get past.)
But no, my problem is more that I'm 184 pages in (and it's a trade paperback) and I really don't feel like I've had 184 pages of story. It's a big novel, but I'm not sure it's a Big Story - at the moment, following four characters in their very insular concerns about the world, it feels like a very small story.
This has led me to pondering a concept never far from my heart: Fantasy Flab. The example I inevitably use when talking about this concept is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and specifically the book where Elayne has a bath for a whole twenty-page chapter. (In reading my own novel, Anthony made a note: "She gets into the bath on page 141. I'm counting.") I suppose, given the selling power and stature of Mr Jordan, I shouldn't be at all surprised that Fantasy Flab is starting to afflict more and more of the genre.
It can be summed up quite simply as: "Does this need to be this long?" Or: "Do we need to know this?"
When I'm giving an editor's report on a novel, invariably my general notes include a paragraph on scene selection and shaping. And however I phrase it in that paragraph, the gist is: Every scene must have a point, preferably more than one. Everything that doesn't serve a point can and should be cut out. The more points you can make every word serve, the tighter and better your writing will be.
Don't get me wrong. In the long writing versus short writing debate (also known as the fat books versus thin books) I stand on the side of the long and the fat. I don't want to read unless it's epic. I prefer to glean the facts from rich narrative than have them told to me succinctly. I see the charm of short writing - the elegance, the stark beauty of it - but I will always prefer the long.
But not that long.
Or rather, I suppose I should say, not long for long's sake. I think reviewers are too fond of phrases like "vividly imagined" and "richly detailed", and they've got the whole fantasy genre thinking that all writing needs fulsome detail. But Jane's trip to the corner store needn't be a whole chapter of vivid, rich step-by-step; it could be a paragraph of sharp-etched prose or, even better, Jane can just start the next scene with a bag of mixed lollies she didn't have before. The art of efficiency isn't dead in fantasy fiction, but it's certainly not being worn thin through overwork either.
The other common appearance in edits that I do is the phrase "Are these details necessary?" in the margins. I am, I admit, a bit ruthless. And as I starting skipping over pages of Romanitas as Marcus sat and thought and paced and ruminated and decided and demonstrably did not move the story forward, I wanted to reach for a pen to write in the margins.
It's a library book. So I scribbled on the internet instead.
3:39 PM - link to this -
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
I seem to have developed a fascination with Melbourne's lost railways.
This is rather less romantic than it sounds. Only a small part - the inner-circle city - of Melbourne's suburban rail network is underground, which makes the whole business of "lost railways" rather less Neverwhere and more something Google maps have been extremely helpful with. (Speaking of which, I experienced my first surround-vision streetview on Google maps yesterday. It's possible Google wants to turn the whole world into a first-person shooter. It's possible this will be awesome.)
Let's start at the beginning. Early last week, I ventured out into the slightly-further-out suburbs (this is a big thing for me; I'm very attached to the city) to try and find an Italian and possibly magical cobbler to make me a new pair of boots. This mission successfully discharged, I was skipping happily back down Nicholson Street when I realised I'd just crossed traintracks crossing the road. This perplexed me mightly, as to my right there was a building. The only patch of actual tracks was those that crossed the road; but in either direction, something of a cleared space of park ran.
I started my investigation playing with the Melways, and even there it's quite easy to trace where the railway used to run, from one eastern curve to the corresponding western curve, across the inner-northern suburbs. When I went to the online maps, it was even more obvious in the "satellite" option, a band of parkway and cycling track.
I attributed my early satisfaction with this discovery to the answering of a couple of old, if vague, questions. One, why the signs on the lines out to Clifton Hill say "Clifton Hill Loop", and another, why the western line going north first swings rather wildly out into a curve. Mysteries solved! Excellent work.
Where I went wrong, perhaps, was getting on wikipedia to try and find out some more about the history of the line, and perhaps why it was abandoned (because I think it'd be dead handy these days, but I suppose that's the sort of foresight that's easy to possess some sixty years after the fact). This was a problem, because I found that the article on this railway was part of an "abandoned railways of Melbourne" group. Now I'm fascinated by this "Outer Circle Line" that appears to have once run through the eastern suburbs. And let's not even get started on how interested I've always been in the fact that the St Kilda and Port Melbourne trainlines were converted into tramways.
The most hilarious part of all this is that I live - and have for the past five years lived - across the road from the Railfan Shop. I've been peering at the maps in the window, of Melbourne's past-and-present train network, and correlating places and dates to things I've been looking at. It's possibly only a matter of time before I actually go in, at which point I may spontaneously generate a mackintosh and turn into an old man. Stay tuned!
2:30 PM - link to this -
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Sunday, August 24, 2008
As per usual for the Melbourne Writers Festival, fantasy is strictly for children.
The year that really made me rant and wave my hands was the year (I think last year, but don't quote me on that) they had Kate Forsyth, internationally published author of something like 8 huge-selling fantasy novels. And what did they have her talking about? Her new, first YA fantasy novel. (I'm sure it's a great little book. Just... for fuck's sake, people.)
This year, they have Margo Lanagan, who is - fair enough - a YA author (though the borders are blurring more than ever between "adult" and "YA"... for everyone but the organisers of the MWF). She's involved in the first panel at the MWF that I've actually wanted to attend in all the years I've been perusing and bitterly spitting upon the program - Myths with a Twist, possessing the bold appellation: "Do fantasy writers avoid reality, or confront it more directly?" Oh glory! Oh frabjous day! Oh bollocks, it is - of course - on the Schools Program.
Because fantasy is for kids.
(To back this up, another panel Ms Lanagan is on is actually for growed-ups, but is charmingly entitled: "Other worlds: Worlds in which young readers can lose themselves." Gee, thanks.)
When I first came down to Melbourne, it was to attend the RMIT's celebrated Professional Writing and Editing program. I was a little bit nervous, because I am (just in case anyone didn't know) a genre writer. I read and write (and breathe and dream) fantasy. And I was worried that a snooty Melbourne writing course would turn up its literary nose at what I had to bring to the table. But it wasn't so. Everyone in the course - teachers and fellow students - was really interested in engaging with my work, and learning what my point of view could show in their own work. There was a hefty handful of other genre/speculative authors as well, to the point there my dozen-strong advanced novel course had another fantasy author in it as well.
If I was in any danger of considering that perhaps I'd been wrong about Melbourne, however, the Writers Festival reassures me every year that Melbourne is, actually, still completely snobbish about "literature". (To a certain extent, the same bias can be witnessed in The Age's coverage of books every weekend, though they are considerably more enlightened on the topic.)
It's not just fantasy (and sci-fi and horror) that get the shaft. Romance is another bastard cousin best not talked about. Which also makes me flail, because there's an incredible depth of talent (not to mention experience and publishing dollars) in Melbourne in speculative and romantic fiction. Crime gets a look-in - apparently it's acceptable, and we can possibly thank Text Publishing for that. And historical fiction has always been happy to tag along as literary fiction's more scholarly sibling.
Now, I freely, fully and brazenly admit that a lot of the stuff being merrily churned out upon the hamster wheel of Australia's lone spec-fic imprint - Harper Collins' Voyager - is mediocre and simplistic realist-storytelling pap (for which I'm absolutely certain we can all blame Sara Douglass). But there are Australian authors doing inventive, innovative, decidedly literary things with the fantasy genre (the mind springs immediately to KJ Bishop here - someone told me once she was a Melbourne girl, but I don't know whether that's true).
Despite that, at least as far as the Melbourne Writers Festival is concerned, fantasy remains just for kids. (It's enough to make me want to send them all a copy of KJ Parker's Shadow, because if that doesn't blow their minds out their ears, they're possibly too stuffy to live.)
11:18 AM - link to this -
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Monday, August 04, 2008
Gosh. I think it's done.
11:08 AM - link to this -
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