More Things Emerge from the Murk

So the revised ego book case, with all my books, which looks really clean and neat, at least for the moment. And the ray gun my son made for me, second shelf up, something he spotted in an old toy catalog years ago. It's cast resin and hand-painted. I made the dial using PageMaker. (Three settings: Stun, Maim, Kill ...)  Ergonomical design, handle-to-body, a natural pointer, and with the narrowing grips toward the little finger end it fits the hand really well ...

Odds 'n' Ends

Still slogging through the house reboot, and came across some things I found interesting.

First, the inspirational books that have been in my rack for years: Lord of Light, The Lani People, Thongor of Lemuria, Wizard of the Pigeons, and The Elements of Style.

A lot of my reference books are going into boxes, what with the internet lurking right there if I need a handy fact. But these helped shape me as a writer, and they are worth their weight in gold. Even the Lin Carter, which is awful. That's why I keep it there, to remind myself that he made a living writing stuff like that, I surely can ...

The fascinating thing was a letter that fell out of a file, in which I got a response from the Baton Rouge Police Department, in 1970. We were still living in L.A., but about to move back to B.R., and it seems I applied for a job there; leastways enough to get a response.

I have absolutely no memory of that, none whatsoever.

What could I have been thinking? 

MONDAY UPDATE:

Most of the stuff is moved back into place. New configuration for my office, down one book case and a lot of knick-knacks packed away. Got new lamps here and there, shelves less burdened, and the walls repainted and new carpets, a much-neatened and improved space.

Not done yet, but progress is being made ...

Hoarders

So, the living room, after the floor and carpet guys are gone and before the stuff goes back to where it belongs, or away. I feel like somebody is going to do an intervention and we'll wind up on an episode of Hoarders: Oh, look at those old people's house. How sad is that, they live like that ... ?

Old Friends in Fiction

Let's talk a little bit about series novels; books that span an arc of multiple titles, from three or four to a score or more. As somebody who has plied those pulp lanes myself a time or five, I am admittedly biased in their favor, and I thought I might address in passing the why of that. 

It's true that a good stand-alone novel can be a treasure that needs neither sequel nor prequel. The tale is told, it is complete, and adding more would gild the lily. Lonesome Dove, say. Moby Dick. Said everything that needed to be said, and more isn't necessary.

Even though, like Dune, sometimes more is necessary to keep bread on the writer's table. 

And sometimes fans demand it. I would love to have seen a sequel to Zelazny's Lord of Light. Actually, I'd love to be the guy to write it ...

Other books can be made richer by further adventures. Lord of the Rings would probably not have been so epic jammed into a single volume. Hard to imagine Asimov's Foundation Trilogy as a single book. Travis McGee needed the room. So did Mike Hammer; George R.R. Martin has what? Eight million pages? done in the Fire and Ice saga, and the monsters haven't even come over the wall yet ...

Our culture loves expanded stories. Look at movie sequels or series television. 

It seems almost axiomatic that the first or second movie in a popular franchise is the best of the bunch. After that, bullets fly every which way. Aliens? The first one was spooky, the second one better, III and IV? Sucked. And yet, I went, even though I was sorry ...

Find a drama you love, a soap opera, sitcom, and you'll tune in week after week. If it's a cop or spy or science fiction show, the suspension of disbelief is pretty big to keep any kind of tension going, because unless an actor gets pissy and fired (or actually dies), they aren't going to kill off the star of a network show and everybody knows it. You have to pretend there is real jeopardy. If it gets too scary, you can always comfort yourself knowing they won't kill her. Leastways on network, non-cable stuff. 

Cable can take 'em out left, right, and center, and does. Sometimes they decide to do so at the end of a run, ala Saving Grace, but they do kill major characters in ways that would make NBC, CBC, ABC, and even Fox cry out and have seizures.

And where are the movies for Deadwood, I want to know? 

Beckett gets shot in the heart at the end of the season? You can bet the farm and all the red leg chickens she'll be back next year. If you have a big ensemble cast? Yeah, you can knock off red shirts or supporting characters hither and yon. But: Jim Rockford was clunked on the head enough so he must have felt like a tent peg at a traveling circus, and I never once worried that he would die from that, or being shot, or being thrown off a cliff. He was the show. 

There have been exceptions to the rule, but they few and far between, especially on the non-cable shows. 

(George Martin kills 'em like flies in his fantasy novel series. I mean, nobody is safe, including your favorites. If you haven't read them, trust me here, some of the folks you love on the HBO series die in the books. No need to say "die horribly" because that's what George does.)

In a book series, once you are hooked, you tend to look forward to the next one, even if the quality declines. And the quality almost always does decline after a certain number, which varies from writer to writer. I was told by an editor once that an SF or fantasy series was usually good for ten or twelve books, and after that, people tended to stop buying them. Some of my favorite mystery writers in a series couldn't keep me interested by the tenth book. They got into a pattern, the books flew on auto-pilot, and at some point, I shrugged and stopped going on that flight. 

Others, even though they were getting tired and repeating themselves, kept collecting my money because I was so attached to the characters I couldn't let them go. John D. MacDonald was tiring of Travis and Meyer, the villains generic psychopaths, but as long as he wrote them, I bought them. Of course, he had a level of quality below which he didn't fall, and at his worst, was much better than many other writers are at their best.

Sue Grafton lost me halfway through the alphabet, mostly because her detective kept leaving her gun home and doing stupid shit. 

After the Burke novels, I tried a couple more of Vachss books and gave up. I'd kept turning up for Burke and his extended family, but without that, the newer ones didn't do it for me, and even that series had gone down. The first five or six were lean and mean, the last few got really preachy. (We tend to do that, writers, and I include myself here. I am aware that I had fans who read my stuff for a while, then elected to stop. I understand that.)

I read all of Parker's Spencer series, even though they were after a while clones. I liked Jesse Stone better, he was a more interesting character, but Spencer and Pearl and Hawk and Susan and the assorted back-up were like having a beer with old friends and telling stories.

The point of this, I suppose, is that stories take what they take to tell them properly, and  some can be short and sweet, and other longer and drawn out. Tapas or a sit-down dinner are both satisfying, in the right circumstances. And many of us are into to the super-long form, probably because we think that if a little is good, then a lot is ever so much better ... 

Hulahula Knows

Somehow, I missed the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. I knew it was coming up, and I usually don't go, but they were premiering Heartshot this year, a short film based on a story my buddy Mike Byers wrote back in the day. I was planning on dropping round to meet the director and blap! I missed it. (Mike's story was a magazine-killer, i.e., a piece you sell to a market, which then goes belly-up. Writers tend to blame themselves for this. I believe this one killed two magazines, which is short of my own personal best of three.)

Um. Anyway, I was going to get a copy of the DVD and some goodies, for having chipped in a little to the Indiegogo campaign that helped fund the movie. Sorry I missed it, but I will eventually get the DVD, which not only won the short film division at the Lovecraft gathering, but which has gotten great reviews on places like Ain't It Cool News.

You can check out their FB page here. 

And the Beat Goes on ...

Jude skirts the cutout underlayment, above.

Similar view, sans Jude, new underlay, below:

Below, washroom, before and somewhat after ...

Below: The hump in front of the dishwasher has been cut out for new plywood.

Interesting that we have board floors instead of plywood.

...  and the saws and hammers and scrinches go on, too. 

The dogs are unhappy. The cat disappeared yesterday when the floor guys walked in. Our kitchen stuff is in the dining room, below:

When the cat came home last night, he walked around meowing: What have you done? Where is my stuff? Why is it echoing in here?

Pretty much I relate to that.

The plumber is plumbing. Probably gonna wind up replacing our old-generation low-flow toilets, the youngest of which is seventeen, because they don't work worth, well, a crap ...
The selling point on the new ones, which aren't that spendy, is that you can flush a dozen golf balls or kid's wiggly toys down 'em. The old 1.6's struggled with two sheets of TP, and more often than not, need a second flush, which not only didn't save water, it used more.  

The original toilet is from the house's construction, 1969. Do the math, forty-four years. All of them I've replaced the works in all the tanks several times. (And if you didn't know? On ceramic toilets, the date it was made is usually stamped inside the lid or back of the tank, something I learned from a real estate agent who used it to catch people out. How old did you say the house was? Really? Odd that the original plumbing was made five years before the place was built? Business must have been really slow at the local hardware store, hey?)

There are writers who really don't like to write per se, they like to have written, if you take my meaning. Being able to point at the finished book is cool, but the process of doing it is, to them, less fun. Not me, I like the first draft the most, but I understand it; 'cause that's how I feel about remodeling. Once it is done, I'll enjoying pointing to it. Meanwhile? Not so much ...

Idle Hands/Devil's Workshop ...

Methodist Youth Camp

So the floor guys are here and there is much grinding and sawing and hammering and nails being prized out going on. 

Had our first glitch before the guy got here–the material that was supposed to be ready to pick up, having been ordered a month ago? Wasn't there ...

And, of course, the floor behind the washer is rotted out because there is a leaking drain pipe in the wall. Want a plumber in a hurry? Good luck with that. Tomorrow, earliest, and four down the list to find that one. And maybe the foundation there needs to be replaced.

This week-to-ten-day project and we're all done? Not gonna happen. Not that I ever expected it to, but ...

I could put on headphones and try to get some real work done, amidst the unhappy-because-we-are-doing-this-stuff dogs who will be behind the baby gate with me. Or hiding out back, but I think the stress level might be a tad high for meaningful work.

First, it'll be the floor guys. Then the rug guys. Then the kitchen counter-top guys. Oh, and the plumber. The week ahead will be busy, musical furniture as this-and-that goes into the garage or down the hall and then back to make room for the-0ther. We did our first round of that this morning, moving stuff around. 'Tis but a scratch on the surface ...

So, other than jumping up and down and tearing out my hair, what to do ... ? 

Recently, I did a post about The Duck of Darkness, and I mentioned the first (and only) Silverlake Writers Workshop, (a shorter and less complex version of Milford/Clarion,) at which I was an attendee, back in 1978.

Its been thirty-five years and I haven't kept track of all the other folks who were there. Some of them I still know, some I've seen book stuff on since, but I thought it might be amusing to do a "Whatever happened to ... ?" post. For my own edification, mostly, but if you want to read over my shoulder ...

Most of us were at about the same level of success, having sold a few stories each; Reaves was, as I recall, the only attendee who had sold and published a novel, with a second one about to hit the racks.

Here's the list of players as I recall in no particular order. A few notes about each one, as accurate as I can make 'em:

Pat Murphy won Nebula Awards for her second novel The Falling Woman (1986) and a novelette, "Rachel in Love," that same year. She quit fiction writing for a couple decades, and worked at a San Francisco museum, The Exploritorium, where, among other things, she wrote non-fiction. She and Karen Joy Fowler co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, which was sometimes, as I recall, funded by bake sales. She has a black belt in kenpo, and lives in San Francisco.

George Guthridge has since written five novels and more than seventy short stories, including collaborations on a couple of short pieces for Asimov's and F&SF with Yours Truly. He's been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula, and with Janet Berliner, won the Stoker Award for their novel, Children of the Dusk. After a real estate crash in which he lost a whole bunch of property, he moved to Gambell, Alaska, where he taught high school and coached students to academic championships in national competitions. Eventually he become a college professor at a university in Anchorage.

Glenn Chang, who had a Ph.D in physics, wrote short stories for various collections in the 1980s, including a novella for Robert Silverberg's collection, The Edge of Space.

Avon Swofford wrote short stories for various anthologies in the 1980's and went to work for The Monitor Institute, a business/philanthropy consulting firm. She has a black belt in some martial art, and lives in the California bay area.

Cherie Wilkerson wrote for animated kidvid in the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, and contributed short stories to various SF, fantasy, and horror anthologies. She has done comic book work on  a Nightwing/Speedy story with Marv Wolfman. Since 1996, she has been a freelance copy editor. 

Raymond Embrak moved into hardboiled noir mysteries, and now lists himself as an independent self-published author, with a number of novels available.

Evelyn Sharenov writes mostly non-fiction these days, and has had material published in anthologies and The New York Times. Retired as a mental health nurse, she worked with psychiatric patients, and posted a blog for Psychology Today. She is a poet, editor, writer, plays classical piano, and lives with her husband near Portland, Oregon.

Susan C. Petrey (1945-1980) was a Portland, Oregon short story writer. One of her workshopped pieces, "Spidersong," which was roundly panned at the Silverlake Workshop, won the Locus poll for Best Short Story, 1981; and got Sue nominations for the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She wrote but nine stories, most of which were published after her death from an accidental drug overdose in 1980; the annual Orycon scholarship to Clarion is named for her. 

Richard Kadrey has written dozens of short stories and and eight novels, including the popular Sandman Slim series, and his Wired cover story "Carbon Copy," was made into a TV movie, After Amy,  in 2001, starring Bridget Fonda. At the time of the Silverlake Workshop, he was still a student of martial arts–we even did a little light sparring, as I recall.

Richard Kearns (1951-2012) was a Clarion grad, (as were several other of the Silverlake crew) and wrote short stories, poetry, and was nominated for the Nebula Award. He taught journalism, worked as a writer, reporter, graphic designer, and desktop publishing consultant. He contracted the AIDS virus in 1987, became an activist for medical marijuana, taught Quigong, and was a certified group exercise teacher. 

Michael Reaves is a long-time animation writer, having written hundreds of episodes for dozens of television shows, winning an Emmy for Batman: The Animated Series. He has written novels, short stories, live-action TV, movies scripts, not a few of which were in collaboration with Yours Truly. He developed Parkinson's Disease in his forties, and blogs about it here.

Arthur Byron Cover was an early Clarion grad who went on to write a bunch of short fiction, tie-in books, original novels, and animation for television. He and his wife Lydia, also a writer, opened and ran the well-known Los Angeles bookstore, Dangerous Visions, eventually closing the brick-and-board version in favor of an online store, which he manages today. 

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) needs no introduction to F&SF readers. He's included here because he was a teacher and mentor to several of the Silverlake crew, and at the time of the conference, was living in the same small apartment complex as Michael Reaves; he was part of the attendee flow to and from the camp. 

Have a Look at This ...

This is pretty fascinating stuff,  a woman doing a performance involving a feather and some odd-looking sticks. It takes a while, eight minutes, you don't need the sound, but it is worth seeing.

Trust me. 

Back Yard Small Again

The fence guys are done, just wrapping it up hauling tools away. Great job, quick, reasonable price, pleasant demeanor, can't beat that.

If you are in the Portland west side area, in need of a fence or deck? Check them out. Brothers, John and Roman, Lake Fence, and got my recommendations: Tell 'em Steve in Beaverton who looks like their brother Steve sent you ...

The Duck of Darkness

Came across this image on FB today, and had to laugh at an old memory it conjured up. The story of the Coveted Thelma Award is here, and it it, the tale of The Duck of Darkness. 

Basically, I was at my first–and only–writer's retreat, waaay back in the day, 1978, down in L.A. This was a homegrown version of Milford or Clarion, with a bunch of newbie writers at a Black Widow spider-infested Methodist youth camp in the hills, over a week twixt Christmas and New Year's. We brought stories, passed them around, made comments, and tried to learn how to write better as a result.

We cooked, we workshopped, we drank cheap wine, we slept in bunk beds, we bonded. 

Most of those folks did grow up to working-pro writer status, including among 'em Michael Reaves, Evelyn Sharenov, George Guthridge, Pat Murphy, Richard Kadrey, Sue Petrie, and Yours Truly. The full list is on the linked page above.

Um. Anyway, I brought a downbeat, sorta-depressing piece called The Duke of Darkness. The guy running the thing, Richard Kearns, put cover sheets on the stories before we passed them around, and retitled mine The Duck of Darkness. Which humor killed any chance of anybody reading it seriously. I was beset with comments that tended to run toward:

"Quack, quack, quack! he quacked evilly ...

Har, har, fuck-you, har ...

Pissed me off. 

This was the same workshop wherein my longtime collaborator Reaves had his name deliberately misspelled to "Reeves," because Kearns knew that pissed him off.

One of Reaves's stories got comments  like this: "Well, this is well-written and slick and all, but ..."

So, for a time, we nicknamed each other "Slick," and "Duke," and developed enough of a bond that we started corresponding and eventually collaborating. 

I don't know where that story is today, I shelved it right after the conference. Couldn't look at it ...

Meanwhile, I was into cartooning, and sometimes I'd doodle on letters I sent out. This was back in the pre-internet days when paper and snailmail were in vogue. Ask your grandfather what this means.

I did a toon on a letter I sent to Kearns, a little image of a duck in a cowled robe, an evil grin, and a reaper's axe in hand, just to show I had a sense of humor. Kearns, working at a print shop, copied the image, added my address, and sent me a ream of paper as a letterhead. Since it was way funny by then, I used that as my letterhead until I ran out or moved. I can't seem to find any of it about; too bad, it was cute.

Eventually, I made a tacky little statuette of the Duck of Darkness out of Sculpy and sent it to Reaves. The paint never quite dried, so it was literally tacky until it collected enough dust to cover it ...

We were easily amused in those days ...