Service Interuption: NaNoWriMo

At the last minute I was persuaded to take part in the National Novel Writing Month, and so I may not be able to publish at my usual speed. But on the other hand, I should have what we in the academic community call "a shit-ton of new crap," to show you all on a regular basis.

Like now.

Book 1 of my ongoing translation project, The Wizard Diaries. This one won't count for NaNoWriMo, as I started it before November but finished exactly on October 31, but everything after that page officially counts, just so no literary nazis come breaking down my door and finding all the Kevin J. Anderson novels under my floorboards.

EDIT: Yes, I know they don't allow existing works. I don't care. I'm not doing this to win. I'm doing it to write. Anybody who complains can go screw, I'm not doing this to appease them or anyone else. This is my story.

Great Works #3: The Iliad, Part 4

All art is communication, and through the medium of their art - whether it be musical, visual or narrative - the artist endeavors to transmit their message, their essential truthful statement about the world, something that is both hidden to the casual eye and omnipresent upon revelation. I've said this before, but it's a very important thing to say, bears repetition. This is why people read and keep reading the same stories over and over for generations, centuries and millenia on end. People superficially engage themselves for the clever plots and the dynamic characters and the spectacularly graphic sex, but they put those books down with the other Dan Brown novels and never pick them up again. The stories that mean the most are the ones who speak to the human spirit even when separated from their original culture. And the strength of the Iliad is that it can give the same message to people today as it did when it was written: In whatever age, the story is about how a civilized man should act.

To do this, we'll have to look at three of the central characters, Paris, Hector, and Achilles. When Paris stole Helen, he was committing a breach of hospitality, and hospitality was the most sacred law to the ancient Greeks. As was the custom of the time, Paris could have avoided conflict by returning Helen, and if he didn't, the Greeks would have no choice but to go to war with him, and therefore with Troy. Paris is seen as a cultural millstone around the neck of every Trojan. He uses a bow instead of a spear, indicating that he is a coward, not a brave man; he spends the whole war either in his bedroom attempting to seduce Helen or getting punched in the face; and even his own brother Hector constantly berates him for being a tremendous sack of tears and failure. He's an example of everything the Greeks would have decried in a man, one who violates the law, avoids responsibility and leeches off his betters for his very survival.

Hector is his exact opposite, and he's the most honorable person in the entire poem. He's devoted to his family and children, he fights for the honor of his city and his brother, standing by them even though they may be in the wrong, and bravely leads his men into battle against a far superior force, even overcoming his fears and battling Achilles despite being certain of death. He exemplifies all the values expected of an honorable ancient Greek man. And he dies for it. The Iliad is often referred to as the Tragedy of Hector, because despite all his efforts he falls victim to a tragic flaw he has no control over - being the older brother of a colossoal throbbing dickhead.

Finally, Achilles is a fighter, he's a warrior destined for greatness in battle, he's strong and invincible and pretty much the only man in the entire Greek army who can actually make a dent in the Trojan forces without a deity backing them up, but yet he shies away from war at every opportunity. Before the war he dressed up as a court maiden to avoid conflict, and the very first thing we do is have a hissy fit becuase Agamemnon stole his love-slave. He then cries to his mother because the king was being mean to him and spends the rest of the epic having a sulk in his tent. As a direct consequence of this, his lover Patroclus tries to fight in his place and gets killed for it, which is the only thing that gets him to stop sulking, reconcile his differences with Agamemnon and start doing his damn job of fighting Trojans.

Some have said that Hector is the hero of the Iliad, and that could be true, both Achilles and Hector could be seen as heroic people, but Achilles is clearly the protagonist, because the actions of the narrative are centered around his character growth. A man can't solve his problems by avoiding them, he has to go and take the proper action. If a problem can be talked through and resolved peacefully, it should be, and let the peace of a civilized society continue. Conversely, if violence should erupt, it has to be met and not shied away from, for to submit in the face of violence leads to death, whether the death of the individual or the death of the society. In a more compact, elegant statement, a man is one who takes action.

Respect for Writing: Seat of Your Pants

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to post on friday, as it was the night of the full moon, and I had to attend the Satyanarayan Puja. Also I kinda forgot to read any of the Iliad last week. It happens. Also, as you can tell, I'm shifting from Monday-Friday to Tuesday-Friday, because it's Monday, and I already have slightly more impositions upon my time than are permissible by law. Moving on!

I recently came across some of my old works when I was young and full of life and my hair hadn't yet been bleached white by years of fear at my own dwindling soul-essence and hatred for baggy pants. And oh, by the hoary hoasts of hoggarth, I could not burn those things fast enough.

The thing is, way back in the day, I was stupid and foolish and all full of myself, as opposed to the present, where I merely have a healthy and unclouded view of my own superiority. But one of the few things I find myself unable to do, either then or now, is to write unprepared, but back then I tried anyway.

Back when I was young and just getting started out, all the writers I really wanted to read were in the pulp mags. They were like... like the comic funnybooks, but for literate people. And I was just entranced by them, I wanted to be one of them so badly, to get my name out among the world. H.P. Lovecraft was in pulp, I understand you kids liked him. Tarzan, Conan, Sherlock Holmes, all of them got their start in the pulp mags. Even Dune was a pulp story and that's actual literature, with research and themes stuff. And every one of the best speculative fiction authors got started in the pulps: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, L. Ron Hubbard...

It may not be the best thing to say, but I was very influenced by L. Ron Hubbard. The young Hubbard, before all the... well, my lawyers and the strange men in the van that's been parked outside my house for the past two weeks have advised me to refrain from some of the more inflammatory comments. I'm sure Guy Fawkes will be making a statement rather similar to my previously expressed opinions at some point in the foreseeable future, this will be a total coincidence.

Anyway, the thing is that pulp mags tended heavily towards the "just get it banged out in a month, people are going to buy this rag no matter what," school of writing, and that meant all the pulp authors had to be great at writing quality work extremely fast. But what L. Ron would do is he'd take a roll of butcher paper, feed it into his typewriter and then he'd just start writing until he was done, and then he'd just cut it into pages and mail it to his publishers. And then he founded a religion.

I tried to do the same thing, but, as I was a broke person of an unrevealed age, I could only afford a roll of toilet paper. It was difficult to get content into the margins, but it was much easier to get it paginated. And, as my prospective publishers demonstrated, the paper was appropriate for the quality of the writing. Worst self-addressed stamped envelope I ever sent... The religion didn't work out well either.

But the thing is that some people just can't do that kind of writing. I'm certainly not. And J.R.R. Tolkien was never in pulp, he spent years, even decades writing his novels, and that's not even counting the languages he "invented." Hmph... like those weren't the secret letters of the fairy-kings, he's deceived the world for far too long. But we can skin that adorable kitten later. The point is that there's no right way. I wish I could talk more about how to write this way, but after my first few failures I deliberately developed a drinking problem in order to wipe those memories from my mind. But next time, I'll tell you what does work for me.

Respect for Writing: A Paper Soul

Let's see, the next tweet I twittered was, "Books are extensions of the authors, arduous to write, but not painful. If you have to fight for every word, you're not being yourself."

The crucial difference here is between arduous and painful. Anything worthwhile is in some way arduous. It's arduous to make a long trip, or to exercise oneself into a fit shape or even to hit a selection of alphabetical keys in rapid succession a few hundred thousand billion times until you have a stack of bound papers that could be used as a doorstop or a blunt instrument or, in extreme conditions, an evening's entertainment. It's painful to have to walk a long distance in pants made of razors, to exercise by repeatedly bench-pressing bars of red-hot steel and to have to force out every word with clenched teeth and white knuckles. Writing needs to flow from the heart and the soul like a great flowing river bursting from a dam.

Nevertheless, that doesn't mean it's something easy to do. It's all a matter of communication, like any form of art, the author is trying to say something to the audience through the medium of text. Some things are naturally easier to communicate than others. Telling a lie, for example, is a stressful situation, physically and mentally. You're trying to convince other people of something that isn't true, and in doing so you're trying to convince yourself of something you don't really believe, which is where the stress... lies. That's a horrible pun and I'm ashamed of it. But this is what trying to write something when it doesn't come from the soul, that doesn't come from the central message you want to convey. This is writing made painful, for every achievement you

But something can be just as difficult to say because it's true. This is the essence of literature, the soul of art, the ability to convey a great essential truth about the universe, something that the author believes well down in the darkest pit of his heart, that place inside every living thing where we become more than just flesh and bone, pumping blood and air through sacks of meat in an endless drive to propagate our species, the point where our animal nature ends and our humanity begins. This is the goal of every artist, to take your inner humanity, the deepest, most wonderful parts of your soul and shout them to all corners of the world.

And it's not easy. It's never, ever easy. There's nothing harder or more risky to your psyche than trying to bare your essence to the great unfeeling masses, and nothing more painful than failing at it. But even in failure, there's nothing anybody can do that's more worthwhile.

Great Works #3: The Iliad, Part 3

The Iliad becomes much harder to read once Diomedes is drop-kicked out of the plot, because with him gone you find that you have to start caring about the characters. And this is where the true face of the Iliad is revealed, peeling away the thin chocolate coating of an action epic for the thick peanut butter center of a proto-nihilistic tragedy.

The fact that the Iliad is actually a tragedy is something that most people never even realize, and by "most people" I of course mean "film producers." It's not difficult to miss, though, for after all, the story is the first true war epic, it starred Achilles, the manliest man in the Greek mythology since Herakles skinned an invincible lion and wore it as a hat, and the plot is about him and one hundred and thirty thousand of his soldier friends strapping on their sculpted muscle breastplates and their helmets with big red rooster combs and hurling their long, hard, pointy spears at another hundred thousand men. This couldn't possibly be seen as anything less than the ultimate in masculinity.

But in the same way that a certain Brad Pitt movie stops making sense when you realize that this so-called "plausible history behind the myth" bears as much resemblance to the events in question as does the average moon landing conspiracy, the common perception of the Iliad falls apart as soon as you examine the fine details.

The most pressing and obvious detail is that every character has a name, a hometown and at least two generations worth of family history. I'm not just talking about the important characters, I'm referring to everybody. There are characters whose only role in the story is to take a spear between both arsecheeks who get more backstory than the protagonists of most action movies. Every one of these people is a real person with a life and a family and a bloody, horrific death scene.

And if a soldier really did get a spear up the brown eye, Homer would tell us about it. He'd tell us where the spear hit, how it cut through his flesh, chipped off his pelvic bone and punctured his bladder, and then how he died face-down in the dirt as enemy soldiers came to loot his armor and leave his naked body for the jackals. This is not the glorious conflict of the god-men of a bygone era, this is ten years of lives spent in vain.

The entire bloody story is the same way, and it's so far removed from the popular perception of events that it almost seems to be a deconstruction of itself. Take the age-old story of Helen, the face who launched a thousand ships. While it's true that every Greek kingdom arrived to defend her from her Trojan captors, the only reason they even showed up was because they had signed a mutual defense pact, with some - including Odysseus and Achilles among them - concocting full-blown sitcom zany schemes to get out of their obligations. The Greeks were fighting no more for the love of Helen than Kaiser Wilhelm was fighting out of his admiration for Archduke Ferdinand's spectacular mustache.

And then there's the whole reason this thing got started, the Judgement of Paris. One mortal man decides that Aphrodite has a nicer ass than Athena or Hera, and so as a reward, Aphrodite starts an international incident in his name, and Athena takes the other side because she's jealous. All of this, ten years of war, was because the gods had a disagreement. A disagreement that wasn't even strong enough for the gods to even fight each other directly, instead setting up a proxy war using just about everybody in their worship base. And this is perfectly in character for the Greek gods. It's something that was expected of them.

But what really, truly, beyond all question makes this story into a tragedy is the moral, the underlying idea that love is evil and will get you killed. Late in the story, while Achilles is too busy sulking and listening to Jimmy Eat World, Patroclus, Achilles' boyfriend, dresses up in Achilles' armor and fights in his name because so that everybody would think that Achilles was the hero of the war, and he gets killed by Hector, who's fighting to defend his little brother, Paris, even though he started the whole war because he couldn't keep it in his tunic. And then Hector gets killed by Achilles, who's fighting to avenge his lover-boy, and then he finally gets killed by Paris, who's fighting in order to keep having sex with the pretty girl he kidnapped on her wedding night instead of returning her and ending the goddamn war!

But then the selfish bastard gets killed by some C-list mythological figure anyway, so maybe the moral is that you, yes you, with the good job and the happy family life and the the cute little pet Alsatian dog, your life could end at any moment at the whims of almighty pagan nature spirits who care about your life and your hopes and dreams about as much as I care about the well-being of Professor Plum.

And then the sequel is a wacky road comedy with sexy fish ladies and a heartwarming dog.

Respect for Writing: When NOT To Write

I took that last week off to prove a point. And also laziness. But the laziness was in service of a point!

It's important to realize that just because you can write, that you're able to get out the amount of material you need to meet your quota, doesn't at all mean that you should. Obviously, the world isn't perfect, there's always going to be something interfering with your life, whether it's a job or an illness or simply a poor emotional state. This past week, for example, I had to care for a pet dog. There are usually a lot of people at the stately McLeod Estate, but for some cryptic, multidimensional Venn Diagram of reasons, all of the assorted hangers-on, serfs and evil minions were absent, and my dog, Matilda, was particularly disturbed by the lack of activity. She was barking at nothing, eating and sleeping at odd hours - waking me up with her, of course, and generally needing full-time care and comfort. I was happy to do it, but such an endeavor took up all of my time and did considerable damage to my circadian rhythms. I had to avoid all work on my book, on my blog, and I even had to cancel my classes from exhaustion.

However, the crucial point is that I chose not to work. I knew that trying to do so when I was so far from peak efficiency would be bad for everybody involved, and once I had made my decision it was actually hard to stick to it. I found myself actually struggling not to write. And every writer has to be able to discern their individual threshold for such a thing, and they have to have the discipline not to misuse it. There's an entire world of difference between being unable to write and simply not feeling like writing, and between being unable to write and being unable to write anything that's not crap. Not feeling like writing is an obstacle to overcome, to bring greater discipline in the act of beating one's own limits, and writing crap is a blessing in disguise, for it's hard to make a good crop without shoveling manure on it.

Respect for Writing: Quotas

One thing I had set out to do with this blog was to take my tiny little Twittel posts about writing and expand them into something deeper, something more in-depth and something that isn't entirely useless.

The first one on the list was "Quotas are a writer's best friend and worst enemy, they force you to write more than you want. Can't get in the habit of writing "enough.""

One of the most common misunderstandings about writing - or any other creative work, I would assume - is that they aren't simple works of creative expression, they're acts of physical labor. It isn't simply enough to have ideas, for even the most truly brilliant idea can flounder and die when not allowed to develop. A book is like the child of an author. The printed word is the flesh, giving it shape and agency and the ability to grow and change. The idea at the heart is the soul, that strange ineffable spark that exists in all things, giving some meaning greater than mere existence, the quality for love. But labor is the mother's milk, and both the body and the soul will die unloved in the crib without it.

Consider the expenditure of effort and creativity involved in construction of a house. It begins with the architect, the designs of a specialize artist, but by themselves, his work is nothing but a picture. It can provide no shelter or warmth or protection. It's worthless without the tremendous labor of construction expended upon it.

Conversely, labor without a design is equally worthless. A house is more than an assemblage of brick and wood thrown together without a care for design. It needs a schema, an underlying design that gives it form, function and aesthetic appeal. I suppose I should discuss the importance of the literary schema, but this is not the place.

What this means is that writing cannot be done lackadaisically. A construction worker can't lazily build a house, half-heartedly placing a handful of bricks whenever it suits him. It takes him disciplined, regimental attitude towards his work in order to truly accomplish anything. That is what writers must be. We must always be working, always be serious and always pushing ourselves past our limits, for without this strife, not only will we never truly achieve anything, we will never be able to improve, for it is only through overcoming challenges, both external and internal, do we ever develop as human beings.