’ve done quite well in keeping to my writing resolutions this past month, but I haven’t been as successful as I might have been. I didn’t really get started until some days into January and I didn’t start keeping a log until the beginning of the second week. (Yes, I’ve been keeping a log in a spreadsheet!)
My primary resolution was to write for at least two hours every day, and that I seem to have kept. To be sure I missed one or two days, but I seem to have worked for about four hours every day between the 9th and 29th January. My best day was Tuesday the 17th when I wrote for nearly 7 hours. On average I’ve written around 1400 words each day, but I’m counting not just the words I’ve written creatively, but also everything I’ve written as translation work, for my blog, and in letters and tweets. I don’t think this is cheating (he said, crossing his fingers. All my writing is creative of course. )
My writing resolutions also included producing about 10,000 words for Elin’s Story: sadly I only managed half of that. Though my most productive day for creative writing was Tuesday 24th when I wrote nearly 2700 words, of which 2350 for Elin.
I was also supposed to write a complete short story, and to submit a short story to a market somewhere, this in order to live up to my commitment to the W1S1 project. Well, I started writing a short story and I managed to write 900 odd words for it, but I haven’t completed it yet. As for submitting a story, I have one to send but the mental threshold of making it ready and putting it in an addressed envelope turned out to be rather higher than I anticipated. I shall grit my teeth and send it off this month.
I did write a couple of articles (about 1800 words) and submit them together with a pitch to an online magazine. If they’re accepted then I have a market for, say, another 15 articles of about 500 words each submitted over the next five months. I don’t know whether web journalism really counts as story writing though; grey area maybe. About 6000 of the words I wrote were teaching material for Mera Förlag, and so something I will get paid for eventually. It would be nice to be paid for everything I wrote, but I’m grateful to have a small income at least for some of my writing.
I also resolved to try and publish at least one blog entry every week. I’ve managed to keep this resolution though it hasn’t been as easy as I had anticipated. I’m really not terribly satisfied with a couple of the blog entries I published in January. One (Resolutions) is the truncated remnants of a podcast script four times as long that I spent hours writing but eventually had to abandon. It was a disappointment, but I was right to abandon it – I was letting it take up far too much time and it wasn’t going anywhere.
Well, that’s my review of my writing in January. As I say, not as outstanding as I could have wished, but not a complete failure either. I’m hopeful I will be able to do better in February.
ovember is the cruelest month. Yes I know that TS Eliot thought it was April, but for me it’s November. As the days get shorter and darker and duller, so I begin to feel all my pleasure, all my delight, all my creativity, all of it, spiralling away like water down a plughole.
It’s like this every year and yet, for some strange reason, every year it surprises me.
I’m probably suffering from some obscure form of masochism. Why else, despite my seasonal affective disorder (not to mention my history of melancholia), would I choose to live in a country where every winter is a plunge towards Ragnarok?
Yet I’ve lived in Scandinavia for 29 winters now and every year it’s the same story. If I had the money and the opportunity perhaps I would choose to commute to the southern hemisphere, leaving around about October and returning sometime in March – or better still set up a permanent home somewhere on the equator. But things being as they are, here I am.
So it was really no surprise that despite the enthusiasm I expressed in my previous blog entry under this title – and despite my achievements at the beginning of October – that the latter half of that month saw me sinking into gloom. Although not a registered member of the Write1Submit1 community, during the first two weeks of October I wrote two short stories of about 6000 words each and although I didn’t submit either of them I did go to the trouble of finding possible markets and planning submissions before the darkness descended.
October blended into November and I lost my mirth. I did try rather hard (and with a certain amount of success) not to forego all my custom of exercise, but it went very heavily with my disposition and this goodly frame the Earth came to seem like a sterile promontory; and this brave o’erhanging firmament appeared no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Hamlet should be played in November.
Of course, my novel took a nosedive as well, deep into the mud, and nothing I could do – and I did try – seem to be able to revive my creativity.
But then came December and with it, Advent, and all the Swedish rituals of candles and lights and Lucia the Light-bearer began to revive my spirits. To help things along, I dug out my old daylight lamp and gave myself a good dose every morning while meditating over my cup of tea. I’ve no idea whether it does any actual good (in terms of raising serotonin levels) but it seems to have a positive psychosomatic effect on me.
Also, early in December I was introduced to a new piece of software (new to me) called Scrivener – intended for the writer having to cope with very long texts. I fell in love with it, bought the full version, installed it on my computer and spent most of the rest of the month transferring Elin’s Story and all my research into the format of a Scrivener project.
The eager beavers who annually produce a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo can laugh, but all I have to show for three and a half years writing on my first novel is about 35,000 words of text. (To be sure, I may have written getting on for 100,000 words of background and back story, but that doesn’t count.) I think we can safely say I will never take part in the National Novel Writing Month as long as the month in question is November.
And so comes Christmas and New Year and a time for resolutions and new beginnings. My New Year resolutions include writing at least 10,000 words of text for Elin’s Story per month, and writing at least one short story and submitting at least one short story in response to the W1S1 monthly challenge.
I also resolve to write at least one of these blog entries each month, to keep anyone who is interested up-to-date with my progress. (And I’ll publish it on TheSupercargo.com as well as on The Written Word Ning.)
couple of weeks ago a link passed along on Twitter took me to the Write One Sub One site. The W1S1 folk are inspired by Ray Bradbury’s early working method which he called “Persperistance”. This saw him writing a short story each week and immediately submitting it to a publisher. He was a young man at the time and an unpublished author, so it was a kind of training for him in story writing, deadline keeping and marketing. It also had a forward motion about it that carried him over the rejections when they started to come.
On the W1S1 site there’s a video clip from an interview with the elderly Bradbury where he talks about his method. About the rejections, he says that, when you’re writing at the intensity of a short story each week, you don’t really notice them. “You’re momentarily bothered, but you figure they’re all stupid … and your ego keeps you going.”
Can’t say that ever worked for me when I was 17. Every rejection brought me down, but then I wasn’t writing and submitting a story each week. I was doing what, I guess, many people do. I was writing a story (or a poem), submitting it and then waiting in agony for weeks. Finally, as time dulled my expectations, I might start a new piece. Then the rejection would come, and bury me in misery. Neither my ego nor my method of working were strong enough to break me out of that cycle.
It’s not, says Bradbury, that what you’ve written is actually good: “you look back later and you see that the stuff really is dreadful and shouldn’t have been bought by anyone!” But through sheer persistence, perspiration and the act of writing itself, over time he became a better writer and gradually he sold one or two, then ten or more until finally he was selling the majority of the stories he was writing.
The W1S1 people set themselves the task of emulating Bradbury during 2011 and have been writing and submitting either weekly or monthly, and reporting back to the blog, pepping one another and promoting the publishers who have accepted their stories. They are not writing – as far as I can see – specifically to sell (though I’m sure they’re happy if they manage that). What they are doing is submitting to a very wide range of publishers, including internet “flash fiction” publishers, and to competitions, where there is some sort of editorial process.
Added value
n the Internet world, anyone can be a publisher and for almost no cost and very little extra effort you can publish your stories (poems, articles, whatever) on the net whenever you want. (And you’re welcome look on this site under Articulations for some of my stuff. ) Some people will see what you’ve done; some may even read through to the end; very very occaionally you get a comment. But if you submit to an editor, you get very considerable added value.
First, you can be sure someone you don’t know and who doesn’t know you is going to read what you’ve written. Further, the editor is someone who has taken on the task presumably because he or she has an interest in literature, and will read what you’ve written with an impartial, critical eye. You need this because the probability is that a lot of what you write really is dreadful and shouldn’t be bought by anyone!
Bradbury’s perspiration and persistence did not break down the walls of the publishing houses by a process of attrition. Rather, his method was a way for him to develop as a writer. He developed because he wrote and re-wrote. His method also helped him surf over the post-rejection depression and continue to write and develop.
Painful though it is, editorial resistance and rejection is a necessary part of the process by which one becomes better as a writer.
The second value that submitting to a publisher gives is that, when you are accepted, you know you’re likely to reach a wider audience that if you simply published your writings yourself. Sure, you can pull out all the stops and learn to market your homepage, attract visitors, Facebook Likes and Google +1s, but … you wanted to be a writer, didn’t you? Not an Internet marketeer.
The edited sites (and the edited print publishers) are likely to have a greater audience than most of us can aspire to on our homepages because they are edited. Because they publish a selection of the best material that comes their way, they build up an audience of people who don’t want to wade through poor quality, unedited writings scattered all across the Internet in order to find that rare brilliant diamond. It’s easier and more certain to read the material published on an edited site – then perhaps you won’t like everything that’s served up there, but at least there’s a better chance that it’ll be of good quality.
The third major value I see in submitting to publishers is that as your work is published here and there, you build up a portfolio of published writing. Not only do you get better as a writer, but you are in an increasingly better position to approach the next publisher and be taken seriously. The top publishers, the ones who are in a position to pay you for your work, the ones who can commission writing, the people you go to with your 300,000 word novel or the manuscript of your Collected Works, they are even more difficult to reach than the e-zine and small press editors. But they are more likely to be civil if you already have a track record of editorial support.
Persperistance and The Supercargo
es, I’ve been turning this over in my mind for quite a while. Coming across Bradbury’s interview and the Write 1 Sub 1 site helped to crystallise it. It feels a bit late to join in the W1S1 crowd now – their year-long project has only a couple or three more months left to run. (Of course, if they decide to step on into 2012, then I might sign up.) But there’s nothing to stop me trying some Persperistance on my own.
So, from now for the next 6 months (it feels good to have an end to work towards), I’m going to try to write a short story each week and submit a short story each week. Maybe not the same story. I want to give myself a chance to re-read and rewrite. But that’s the plan.
And to start the ball rolling … between 29th September and 7th October (slightly more than a week, I know) I wrote the first short story I’ve written and completed for a long time. The working title is “Elephantasy” and it’s just about 6000 words long. Though it’s set about 20 years in the near future it’s less science fiction and more literary fiction (which seems to be the current genre name for fiction that doesn’t fall into any obvious genre). I shall put it aside now and let it rest and revisit it in a week or two before submitting it somewhere.
Granta’s 113th edition featured “The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists”, doing for Spanish writers (in translation) what the magazine has previously done for “The Best of Young British Novelists” (numbers 7, 43 & 81) and “The Best of Young American Novelists” (numbers 54 & 97).
As the editors of this edition Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles point out, this is the first time Granta has published a whole edition of non-English writers in translation. Personally, I think it’s to be welcomed on those grounds alone. (Apparently — this was news to me — Granta has been publishing a Spanish language edition for 7 years, though whether Granta en español is a translation from English or an independent Spanish language magazine I don’t know. I really hope it’s the latter.)
So, top marks for this effort!
It also gives me an opportunity to say something about the problems of creating an anthology of this sort. I’ll use Granta 113 as the example, but my comments apply equally to the earlier “Best of Young Novelists” (and similar collections under other mastheads).
How do you anthologise a novelist?
To give a fair picture of a writer’s ability in the form of a novel (which is a long and large piece of writing, with space for character development, extended description, and so much more), really, the only way is to publish a full novel (or perhaps a novella). Magazines just don’t have that space. I suppose they might try a serialisation, but Granta has, I think, only ever tried this on one occasion. (They serialised George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. in Numbers 2 & 3 in 1980.)
Instead magazines are more likely to publish extracts. But because extracts, naturally, are rarely self-contained, they tend to be jagged, obviously incomplete. It’s difficult to find a decent extract from a novel that fairly presents the author’s competence as a novelist.
For this reason, the usual practice is to publish short stories. Short stories are rounded, complete and show off a writer’s ability very nicely. The problem with them, though, is that they are not novels. If, like Granta in the “Best of …” series, the magazine promises novelists, then filling its pages with short stories is a bit of a cheat.
So why not call the anthology “The Best of Young Short Story Writers?” Apparently the general public don’t get nearly as enthusiastic over short stories as they do over novels. Short stories are like poems, they have a niche audience who love them, but in the wider world the reading public just won’t buy them like they’ll buy novels. At least, so I’m told.
So, in Granta 113 what we find are examples of writing by 22 novelists, 13 of whom are represented by short stories.
Beyond that, though, you’d expect the contributors all to have published at least one novel, wouldn’t you? I would. True, most of them have (and some have been very prolific), but there are three contributors who don’t seem actually to have completed and published one single novel yet. I’m still trying to work out how they qualify as “novelists”. I’d guess there was a slip in the meaning of the word between English and Spanish if I didn’t know Granta had performed the same sleight of hand with their earlier “Best of …” editions. (For example, Adam Mars-Jones appeared twice in Granta’s Best of British lists –- numbers 7 and 43 -– with a 10 year gap between, before managing to complete his first novel.)
To be fair, the editors are frank about this being a bit of a guess. They write:
In ten years’ time we will see if our choices were correct, how many of the writers in this collection will have lived up to their promise, how many of them will endure.
Looking on the bright side, though, it means the actual proven ability to write a novel is not a prerequisite for a young writer to be taken as a novelist. At least, not by that part of the literary establishment represented by the editors of literary magazines.
Maybe young writers might find that encouraging. (This somewhat older writer does! )
In her current blog entry, Swedish writer Inger Edelfeldt writes about the historical novel she once set out to write but abandoned. It was to take place in Milan in the 16th century. With fine self-irony, she describes her research efforts until finally, she gave up …
Jag är inte den sortens författare. Jag är lat eller nåt. Jag orkar inte ta reda på vilket skrå som stod i vilket gathörn år 1519, och vilket slags läder skorna gjordes av.
“I’m not that sort of writer. I’m lazy or something. I just can’t make the effort to find out which guild was based on which street corner in 1519, or what sort of leather shoes were made of.”
So unable to research the book, she abandoned it. (Even though, she writes, she really liked the first 100 pages she’d managed to write – which were set in the countryside and where she was more able to use her imagination.)
My situation seems in some ways the opposite. As a student of history (and one-time history teacher), I can’t stop myself researching. Whenever I come across a question, I have to go look for a true historical answer. It’s only when I’m satisfied that nobody knows the answer that I can let my imagination off the leash and dream up an answer or explanation.
Of course, writing the novel stop dead while all that’s going on.
I am coming around to the belief that successful historical novelists have a genetically inherited ability to balance fact and fantasy.
Dr Johnson is supposed to have said or written somewhere: “No one but a fool ever wrote for anything but money.”
I never found the source, but I think about the quote on and off, now and again, and wonder what he meant. Did he mean that he himself never wrote unless he was paid for his writing? Did he mean that people who wrote for other reasons than to be published for sale – poets, perhaps essayists, letter writers – that these people were universally fools.
Was he having a go at writers who kept publishers supplied with copy for their presses, but asked for nothing more than the kudos of seeing their names in print? Or did he write these words in anger when having written something on spec, he was unable to sell it? Did he classify himself as a fool? He didn’t think of himself in those terms generally, but he suffered from depression. (Melancholy. Johnson was the first person in print to mention the Black Dog.)
Perhaps it was just one of those aphorisms he forked out – funny at the time but not something that bears too close an investigation.
Still, I have also wondered what he might have thought of the Internet and the Blogosphere and all these hundreds of thousands of writers and hundreds of millions of words produced for a host of reasons, sometimes for money (but rarely for much money). And I’ve also wondered how he would have reacted to my situation, sitting here, morning after morning writing (or not writing) and counting my words.
Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a YouTube film in which Harlan Ellison demands that you “Pay the Writer!” I think Johnson might well approve.
Harlan Ellison is an American writer of short stories, novels, teleplays and criticism. His biggest success is in the field of science fiction and I particularly think of some of his short stories: “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, “A Boy and His Dog”, “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockmanâ€. He wrote one script for the original Star Trek series (and then had a falling out with Gene Rodenberry about it), and was ‘creative consultant’ on the long running TV SF series Babylon 5 (which he mentions in the film clip). He is famously litigious (see the Wikipedia entry on him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison) so I think I’d probably better not say any more.
What follows is a transcript of a part of the film clip. (The clip is embedded at the bottom of the this post.)
… Get a call yesterday from a little film company down here in the valley, and they’re doing the packaging for … Warner Brothers on Babylon 5, which I work on. And I did a very long, very interesting on-camera interview about the making of Babylon 5 – early on when Joe Straczynski hired me. And they wanna use it. Young woman calls me and she says: We’d like to use it on the DVD. Can that be arranged? And I said: Absolutely, all you gotta do is pay me. And she says: What?
I say: [voice rising] You gotta pay me! She said: [injecting a little femininity] Well, everybody else is just, you know, doing it for nothing. I said: well everybody else may be an asshole, but I’m not. I said: By what right would you call me an ask me to work for nothing? Do you get a pay check? Well, yes. I says: [Getting increasingly excited and stumbling over his words] Does you boss get a pay check? Do you pay the telecine guy? Do you pay the cameraman? Do you pay the cutters? Do you pay the teamsters when they schlep the your stuff on the trucks? Then how – don’t you pay U- then how d- … [becomes briefly incoherent] … Would you go to a gas station and expect free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have him take out your spleen for nothing? How dare you, call me and expect me to work for nothing!
[Does woman's voice] Well, it would be good publicity! I said: Lady, tell that to someone a little older than you who has just fallen off the turnip truck. There is no publicity value in my … interview being on your DVD. If you sell 2000 of them it’ll be great! And what are people gonna say? Oooh I really liked the way that guy gave that interview. I wonder if he’s ever written a book. Let me go and buy – There’s no publicity value. The only for me is if you put money in my hand cross my palm with silver, you can use my … interview. And she says. Well, all right. Thank you. And she hangs up. I’ll never hear from them. They want everything for nothing.
They wouldn’t go for five seconds without being paid. And they’ll bitch about how much they’re paid and want more. I should do a freebie for Warner Brothers?! … Fuck no! They always want the writer to work for nothing. And the problem is there’s so goddamn many writers who have no idea that they’re supposed to be paid every time they do something. They do it for nothing! [Dumb goofy] Gu-gu. They’re gonna look at me! I’m gonna be noticed! Guu.
The clip seems to be a trailer for a film about Ellison called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. If you can’t see the video below, the address on YouTube is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE
——————————————————– The above article was originally published on this blog on 11th February 2009.
On Wednesday last week, the post brought the latest edition of Granta number 113: “The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists”. Granta is launching a Spanish language edition and marking the occasion (and promoting it) by publishing in English translation the contents of the first Spanish edition.
As it happens I had just read the last story in my most recently received edition of Interzone, had nothing else in the pipeline and was able to pick up Granta and start reading directly.
For the uninitiated I should say that, at present, I subscribe regularly to just these two literary magazines. Granta according to its tagline is “The Magazine of New Writing”, and publishes a variety of literature, much in the belles-lettres genre, and reportage (and generally, though not in this edition, one piece of photo-journalism). Granta is a nice thick paperback, comes quarterly, and I’ve been subscribing since the 80s, since number 4. (Though there was that long hiatus after I had a falling out by post with the former editor, Bill Buford.)
Interzone, by contrast, is a magazine of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Almost Britain’s most successful magazine ever, in the field. (In saying this, one is always aware of New Worlds which hovers somewhere on the edge of consciousness out in an Oort Cloud of the mind.) Interzone was started by people I knew when I was a student, and I’ve subscribed without a break since the first edition. Interzone is also a good deal thinner than Granta; on the other hand, it comes bi-monthly.
So, with the last story in Interzone still reverberating, I picked up Granta and read the first story. Interesting contrast, interesting similarity in my reaction.
The Interzone story was “Millisent Ka Plays in Real Time” by Jason Sanford; the Granta story was “Cohiba” by Lucia Puenzo (translated by Valerie Miles).
Now, there’s not a lot on the surface that links these two stories, beyond the fact that both circle around creativity and are set in environments in which creative artists (might) exist. The authors are of a similar generation, both Americans (Sanford from the USA, Puenzo from Argentina), both successful in their respective fields, but I’m not sure that’s relevant. They both address current concerns, even though “Milliscent Ka” is set in a new-feudal future Los Angeles while “Cohiba” is in the very recent past (and set in a modern-day Cuba which, inevitably I suppose, feels trapped in a time-warp).
In “Milliscent Ka” newborn children are deliberately infected with additional, genetically engineered DNA, which allows a kind of internal bookkeeping. Every expense one incurs in life is recorded as debt in ones DNA; debts are repaid by indentured time-service to ones patron.
Milli … learns to play a viola donated by the Lady Lord … only 10 seconds of debt per day … and she learns to read in the donated school, a few minutes of debt for a day’s learning, and she plays basketball on the courts, five seconds of debt a game …
It’s not an attractive future, but it doesn’t seem implausible either. The situation is well set up and the fictional (science-fictional) economic premise on which Millisent Ka’s society is based is well established. To begin with, at least, Jason Sanford manages to avoid the common information-dump pitfall that traps so many SF writers. (The necessity to explain the complex scientific/pseudo-scientific premise on which the society of the story is grounded leads too many SF writers – and film-makers – into interminable exposition.) I got quite excited about this story and enjoyed it, too – for more than the first half.
In “Cohiba” we follow the narrator (who may be an avatar of Lucia Puenzo since she is obviously some sort of a film writer) around a film festival and masterclass in Havana. In the first scene she is in a crowded movie theatre watching a film that could be Supersize Me when the man sitting next to her opens his flies and masturbates, ejaculating on the back of the seat in front of him (and on the hair of the person sitting there). It certainly caught my attention. The man, whose name we learn is Cohiba, appears to be stalking the narrator, but ends up with “the Brasileira”, her roommate from the masterclass course.
This story is wonderfully descriptive of the experience of rushing from venue to venue of the festival in company with the narrator’s masterclass coursemates, the Brasiliera, oozing sex, the Basque with one leg shorter than the other, the giant Hungarian whose “stories are as exuberant as her body”. The crowds, sweat and smell of Cuba are well evoked, and there’s humour too, for example in the narrator’s response to the maestro.
Garcia Marquez is already seated at his desk. The Argentinean woman who arrived late, he says. I want today’s big idea. I tell him the story of a student who – for lack of ideas – decides to murder her maestro. He interrupts me immediately …
But, as the story progresses, I realise Cohiba is supposed to be a malignant character. I begin to pick up on the author’s belief that she’s describing an Havana suffused with menace. The problem is, I can’t feel it. The final sentence of the story is, I’m sure, supposed to echo in the reader’s mind, but my reaction was more of a mental shrug.
Much the same shrug, actually, as the one I gave at the end of “Milliscent Ka”.
Looking for a reason for my disappointment in each case, I come back to the story, the plot, the “big idea”.
There’s one fundamental difference between the two stories. For all the brilliance of his original idea, Jason Sanford is writing a commercial story. Lucia Puenzo is writing a self-consciously “literary” story (not to say she doesn’t want to sell it, but to a very different market).
Jason Sanford has found a “big idea” – in fact he has by my count at least four – but he’s trying to shoe-horn them all into the same small space. The format is wrong.
Lucia Puenzo makes fun of the “big idea”, but she has one nonetheless (possibly two or three). For some reason, though, she can’t convey them. (To be fair, it’s possible the translator is letting her down, but the descriptive passages are otherwise so good, there are no rough edges that I can find, the language flows. No, I think this is a probably a faithful translation. The problem isn’t there.)
In “Millisent Ka” it seems at first that the big idea is up at the front with the chromosome-encoded debt, but this is just the premise for the society in which Milli lives. After a bit you discover the big idea is actually that a genetic mutation in Milli herself erases her debt. She is able to take other people’s debt on to herself, and then allow her body to erase it. In this way she can set people free. This makes her a threat to the established social fabric of her world. She is found out and condemned to death.
Because this is a commercial story, though, Jason Sanford just can’t allow himself to end on a downbeat. It turns out that Millisent’s mutation is not natural but contrived, and by the same geneticist who devised the original debt-encoding DNA. Furthermore, the geneticist is still alive. (This immediately, and incredibly, foreshortens the period of time it must have taken for the society described to have come into being.) Beyond this, the geneticist is one of the feudal Lords and she devised the genetic mutation as a way to retain economic control.
Milliscent is a guinea pig, but she is also The One without which many a commercial SF tale cannot exist (see The Matrix). At the same time, she is also a damsel in distress who has to be rescued by a knight in shining armour – sorry, by her boyfriend who she has cleared of debt, but who voluntarily returns to servitude to save her life. And his selfless act combined with the musical talent that Milli suddenly, mysteriously acquires (after having been described as a mediocre player throughout the story) causes the feudal lord to have a change of heart and everything ends happily ever after.
In “Cohiba” the big idea is that Cohiba, who teaches at the University is a dangerous sexual predator, probably a murderer and quite possibly a paedophile with an unhealthy interest in his own daughter. I’m sure a commercial writer (Jason Stanford, perhaps) would be able to make an episode of an American TV criminal series out of all this, but Lucia Puenzo is determined not to be commercial. The result is that her story – in stark contrast to all her incidental description and characterisation – falls completely flat. I cannot believe in Cohiba as anything more than a 30 year old man with a retarded, adolescent interest in sex. At one point: Fear creeps up in the middle of two coffee plantations, but nothing otherwise builds or sustains fear in the story.
In the eyes of this reader, both these stories fail. Puenzo’s because she is so keen to avoid being commercial that she fails to build the story successfully to the punch line. While Sanford’s story collapses under the weight of its ideas and the author’s desperate efforts to provide an upbeat (commercial) ending.
Fortunately, all is not lost. Traditionally, SF short stories are testing grounds for ideas that may then be developed in novels. Some of the ideas in “Millisent Ka2 are well-worth pursuing and exploring. If Sanford can block his ears to the siren song of the formula ending, the novel might actually be worth reading. And suppose he could develop the novel in collaboration with a literary writer (Lucia Puenzo, for example) what a fascinating co-operative endeavour that might be!
Meanwhile, Lucia Puenzo is not just a “Young Spanish Language Writer”, she’s also a movie director with at least two internationally acclaimed films to her credit (XXY and El niño pez). I can well imagine this story as a film, and perhaps in that context – in co-operation with a good actor – she would be able to let herself infuse the character of Cohiba and the city of Havana with the menace they so singularly lack in the story.
For techincal reasons beyond my ability to comprehend, I can’t post the whole picture in the same post as the details. So, here are the poem and picture one more time.
Together in Cordoba – 2008
The light like
honey-fire
And the night warm-scented
In the Cathedral-Mosque
walking among the columns,
together
among the ancient columns
like palm stems
under arches
like palm fronds
and the windows of stone-lace
In the golden light before the door
the young couple
Greeting? Parting?
They clung to one another.
In my 51st year, just after Christmas, I started composing a series of poems to summarise my life. The idea was that each poem would encapsulate a memory from each of my 50 years. Each poem would be 50 words in length (though I would get to decide what counted as a word).
I was going to call the series 50/50.
The first 10 poems were easy, the next 5 came soon enough, but extracting the subsequent poems from my creative subconscious has been like drawing teeth. There are currently 24 I’m fairly happy with; a few more in note form. I’m wondering whether I can hope to complete the series before I turn 60.
The title might end up as 50/50ish.
Another idea I had, which might make the whole exercise more interesting for people who don’t know me, was to illustrate each poem with a picture. Or illustrate, say, every 10th poem. (I do realise this will make completeing the whole thing even more problematic.)
Be that as it may, I was recently invited to participate in an exercise of collaborative creativity over the Internet by one of my Twitter friends, Savannah (or @StarofSavannah to give her full Twitter monicker). (You can read more about Savannah’s project here: http://thewordinferno.blogspot.com/2010/11/love-project-collaboration.html) The invitation galvanized me into doing something. I found myself looking through photographs I took in Andalucia when Agneta and I were there just after my 50th birthday, and I started thinking about a 50/50 poem that might stand for 2008.
Deadlines can be remarkably helpful. Seven days early, here I am with a poem and an accompanying picture.
Together in Cordoba – 2008
The light like
honey-fire
And the night warm-scented
In the Cathedral-Mosque
walking among the columns,
together
among the ancient columns
like palm stems
under arches
like palm fronds
and the windows of stone-lace
In the golden light before the door
the young couple
Greeting? Parting?
They clung to one another.
A note on the picture: I photographed almost all the original images in early September, 2008. The two main panels as well as the framing columns are based on photos taken in the Cordoba Cathedral-Mosque. The doorway is one of the doors to the Cathedral-Mosque. The windows at the top ot the picture were photgraphed in the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The palm tree photo was taken in Seville. The loving couple, though, were snapped in Gothenburg about a year later.
In my mind as I made the picture were medieval and baroque alterpieces as well as the work of Gilbert and George.
The book was stuck in the mud, I was still feeling sorry for myself after a bout with the flu and suspicious the germs were coming back for another round, and my good lady wife was determined to give the flat a major dusting.
“Why don’t you go out to the cottage?”
Why not? The cottage is actually owned by my sister-in-law, but it’s been my wife’s family’s seaside retreat for decades. Mostly used in the summer, though I’ve had writing retreats there before when the snow has been piled high. Now it was cold and raw and rainy.
I packed my (non-Internet connected) laptop, a change of clothes, my sleeping-bag, some food and set off.
So that’s where I’ve been, with no Internet, no TV or radio, no other people. Just the sound of the sea breaking on the beach, the rain on the roof and the wind in the trees. Me, a computer, two electric heaters and a disturbingly large number of dead woodlice.
The afternoon after I arrived and early on the morning of the second, I took the camera and went for a couple of walks in the rain. Otherwise I worked. Wrote about 3500 words, so I was pleased.
The pictures were not terribly good. Not really enough light and the rain kept spotting the lense, but I think they’ll do at this resolution. I liked especially the blue light in earliest of the early morning pictures. I hope you do too!
’ve done quite well in keeping to my writing resolutions this past month, but I haven’t been as successful as I might have been. I didn’t really get started until some days into January and I didn’t start keeping a log until the beginning of the second week. (Yes, I’ve been keeping a log in a spreadsheet!)
) 
ovember is the cruelest month. Yes I know that TS Eliot thought it was April, but for me it’s November. As the days get shorter and darker and duller, so I begin to feel all my pleasure, all my delight, all my creativity, all of it, spiralling away like water down a plughole.
couple of weeks ago a link passed along on Twitter took me to the 
es, I’ve been turning this over in my mind for quite a while. Coming across Bradbury’s interview and the Write 1 Sub 1 site helped to crystallise it. It feels a bit late to join in the W1S1 crowd now – their year-long project has only a couple or three more months left to run. (Of course, if they decide to step on into 2012, then I might sign up.) But there’s nothing to stop me trying some Persperistance on my own. 
