David R Slayton

Mar262011

A Lucky Coincidence Between Research and Exhibition

A good brief history book is a gloss, covering a topic and referring to larger works. It’s excellent for getting you started and pointing you down further roads if you wish to take them. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly is such a book.

Cordingly pinpoints a singular era in the vast history of piracy, focusing almost exclusively on the Golden Age, when the New World was sending gold back to the Old by the shipload in exchange for slaves from Africa. He draws on the texts that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe while also drawing extensively on naval records.

Where the book comes alive are the areas where Cordingly analyzes a pirate’s fictional depiction, such as in Treasure Island or Peter Pan, and compares it to the historical record. Cordingly navigates the differences between the two and notes how right fiction has often gotten it. He delves into the appeal of piracy, revealing why so many would gladly take to it. He also does not shy away from discussing piracy’s darker side: torture, the impacts of slavery, racial tensions, class, and economic motivations while dispelling a few myths about the romantic gentleman pirate along the way.

One wreck Cordingly references more than once is the Whydah, a slave ship captured by a North American pirate named Sam Bellamy and converted for his use. Its artifacts and history are beautifully assembled in the Real Pirates exhibition currently at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The combination of reading Cordingly’s book and touring the Whydah exhibition truly brought the research to life. There are many references to ships and places in the exhibition which Cordingly explores, and the exhibition provides a close up on the Whydah which Cordingly did not.

The exhibition is probably the best I’ve seen. The collection is assembled in such a way that you follow the history of various crew members through their careers and deaths, moving through set pieces that would make your local Renaissance Fair cry. I was impressed by the actors drifting through the exhibition. They provided a nice bit of unconsidered perspective, such as those of the wives left behind.

The ship’s own history is discussed, as are the modifications necessary to convert her from slaver to pirate vessel. The exhibition also helped by clarifying terms Cordingly used without definition. I can tell a pink from a sloop now, should the need ever arise. While the exhibition does not polish over the role of the slave trade in piracy, it perhaps takes the democracy of pirate crews to a bit of an idealized place.

It’s not often that I’m lucky enough to see a tactile display at the same time I’m reading a good book on a historical topic. If you can catch the exhibition when it comes to your area I recommend it, and I recommend Cordingly’s book even more highly.

Mar262011

The Point Might Be the Journey, but the Destination Still Matters

A book’s ending has to satisfy. You want to close the door on your story in a way that lets the reader move on, knowing it’s finished. Maybe you conclude on a question or open a new door, but either way you turn out the lights and close up shop. Something has to indicate that a book is done. In a series you might leave with a cliffhanger or a new development, a wrinkle that will grow into the next book’s conflict.

Endings are tricky things. A good one leaves you with a positive remembrance of the book. Bad endings can make the entire exercise of reading the story unfulfilling, like a long meal capped with a flavorless dessert. When I look back on the books that really captured my attention, their endings are usually strong. They evoke emotion years later, such as in Three Junes when two major characters drive into New York. When I try to specifically think of books whose endings were weak, I have a harder time. The books themselves are less memorable. Some books, Smilla’s Sense of Snow comes to mind, do not seem to know where to end. They just come to an abrupt stop. Cliffhangers that are never resolved trouble me the most. Much like a television series which is suddenly canceled, you’re left wondering how the story ended.

In fantasy, the story is too often a showcase for the world, a vast travelogue for amazing places and robust vistas. Endings can become less important. The longer a series, the more epic the scope, the more weight gets placed on the climax and the subsequent conclusion. The payoff has to be worth the buildup, or the reader is let down. I often find that the climax isn’t the part that sticks with us. The villain is defeated, the world saved, but there’s always that little moment after that truly settles in as the bit we remember. The ending has the opportunity to sound a little quieter, The heroes retire. Luke joins his circle of friends at the campfire. Terry Brooks seems fond of marrying his heroes, giving them a reason to leave the adventuring life behind. Jim Grimsley, ended Dream Boy with a mystery that I still ponder to this day.

Beginnings are when you hook the reader, drawing them in. Middles are where you hold them. It’s crucial that you don’t lose them when the pace slows a little and the characters catch their breath. But every part of a story is important, so don’t forget the ending.

Feb82011

The Lost Works of You and Me

When you get degrees in history and literature, there are some books you read over and over. I wrote paper after paper on Hamlet and King Lear, increasing my understanding each time, but probably no works crossed my path more often than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer came up often in both disciplines, always with a different emphasis, but still reliably and repeatedly. Along the way I learned that the main reason Homer remains with us is the sheer number of copies available to us, usually preserved in Egypt’s dry dry sand.

The lens of history can be terribly foggy. We have to make a lot of assumptions, and it’s important to note that archaeology is still a relatively young field. Early archaeologists did a lot of damage to sites and artifacts, some of which we’re still trying to sort out. My favorite example was Heinrich Schliemann’s dynamiting of Mycenae. He leveled the city’s entrance ramp and many structures in his rush to find the bits of gold that must have been brought from Troy.

What will future civilizations think of our society? Will they exhume our houses, libraries, and used bookstores then decide that Harry Potter was our national epic? Will they think we considered wizards and witches mythological figures like gods and mistake super-hero action figures for idols?

Will our literature become so digitized that it fades away as the hard drives slowly decay? Will there be anything left of us for future civilizations to study, or will archaeology itself be entirely digital as computer scientists try to figure out how to read our books by decoding binary language as we’ve struggled with Linear A? It’s a dire thought, the idea of everything we’ve committed to disk just fading away.

If I ever wrote a memoir it would be in winter. Winter makes me nostalgic. I’ve been looking online at book covers, movie trailers, and toys from my childhood. So much of what was important to us gets eroded. So much of what we consider immortal in our culture isn’t. I would love to think that the books I write will outlast me, that the books I have written but could not publish will be valued by someone later on; but I would guess that even when I do publish what will remain behind are the Dan Browns, J.K. Rowlings, and the Gideon Bibles. I’ve never written out of a desire for immortality, or with the idea that it would make me fabulously wealthy. I’m grateful to have the passion to do it and what I hope is a modest talent. That has to be enough for me today.

Feb32011

My Own Two Cents: Why I Hate My Kindle

I love technology. I may write about fantastic societies without computers or electronics, but I still love my iPod, my netbook, and my Playstation. Despite this, I hate my Kindle.

It was a generous Christmas gift, and I’ve been trying to experiment and work around my initial impressions, but so far any attempt to find a more positive angle hasn’t worked.

Let’s start with the consumption problem. When I buy a latte in a disposable cup and drink it, it’s been consumed. I trash the cup, I notice the expense on my debit card statement, and I move on. I’ve consumed something, and it is wholly gone. Books on the Kindle feel the same way for me. I can’t give them to a friend, donate them to the Denver Children’s Home, sell , or trade them. The book I purchased for the Kindle was the same price as a paperback, and it’s gone. I’m never going to read it again. From an author’s standpoint, this is a good thing: a single copy for a single reader, so a book will have higher sales figures, but it also impacts the ability of a reader to spread the book’s popularity by word of mouth or loaning it out. If eBook’s cost were lower than a paperback it might appeal to me.

The second problem involves the portability: I can use the Kindle to load up on books so that say, on a two week trip to Europe, I’m not toting around as much weight. But I can’t use the Kindle during takeoff and landing, two periods when I’m most likely to read while everyone else watches the belt bit or braces for impact.

I thought perhaps the vocal feature would be useful: I could listen to any book I purchased, but that quickly proved grating. It was like being read to by Stephen Hawking, so I’m more likely to pay for an Audible book that I can stand to listen to.

A friend pointed out that pdfs can be transferred over, but this did not work very well either. I have a lot of reference books, mostly historical, that could be usefully stored in a digital form, but the Kindle doesn’t handle viewing them very well. You need to zoom in and around in order to see the pages. This kills the pdf’s ease of use completely, and I’m more likely to stick with my netbook. This problem might be solved by upgrading to the larger version, but that would further degrade the portability factor.

I am sure that the environmental impact of printing a book and shipping it to a store outweighs the cost of transmitting it wirelessly to the Kindle, but I’m also tired of having to charge the various devices in my life. A book is perfectly serviceable. It does not require a battery or one more cord in a drawer.

These are my own impressions, and two friends swear I’ll come around, that in no time the Kindle will be as indispensable to my life as my iPod, but so far I have to say that I’m going to stick with killing trees and browsing bookstores.

Jan302011

Shades of Grey Don’t Always Look Good On Me

Sometimes, I need my heroes to be heroic. They do the right thing not because it’s convenient, but because they’re driven to it by their morality and nature. Personally, I write reluctant heroes. They do the right thing, but they’re pushed there. They can see the shades of grey in the world and might resist the call to do the right thing, but they ultimately rise to the occasion.

After reading a lot of “realistic” fantasy, where innocence is brutally punished, and even the good guys struggle to take the right course of action, it’s good to spend some time with better people. I’m ripping my way through Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series and loving every minute of it. Sure, we lose some of the tension in the good guys being so good, as we know a fall from grace isn’t around the corner, and Butcher seems hesitant to kill his characters to raise the stakes, but it’s still a hell of a ride.

Like Mistborn, Alera’s world has a tightly defined magic system. Butcher gives us an elemental based magic that makes easy sense. A few of the good guys have god-like powers, but he balances this nicely by providing the same to the villains. He draws a bit too deeply on Roman history for me in the series, but I’ve only spotted one blatantly ripped off moment so far. Yet these books are page turners. After a strict diet of first person point of view in the Dresden Files, I’m happy to say that Butcher can work the third person limited with just as much skill.

What I like most about this series are the characters. They do the right thing. They are heroes, so while they are often tempted to compromise, I never doubt them. They’re also clever. They solve their problems using their heads more than their blades. It’s a refreshing change from stories where a hero can’t make a connection that the reader made fifty pages ago. Shades of grey, or doing the wrong thing for the right reason, are for the villains. It may not be realistic, and it can feel a little didactic at times, but it’s still a nice change.

I should also say that Butcher has done a great job of taking Roman military tactics and adding magic. He fully embraces what would change about a legion’s standard formation and attack when coupled with fliers and casters capable of tossing fireballs against the enemy. And the action scenes are lively, busy, but without becoming a slog of gore that I want to hurry past.

Jan252011

The Dark is Always Out There

We live in amazing times. The level of our technology, health, sanitation, and literacy are unmatched in recorded human development. Sometimes, especially in the wake of tragedy, it’s hard to remember that. The current popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction tells me that on some level, we know how fleeting the light of civilization is. As we stock up on canned goods, we know that a Dark Age is not very hard to achieve, and a little social or economic decline can go a long way.
When we think about the Dark Ages, most of us reflect on the European medieval period: castles, knights, and ladies in towers. Fantasy has traditionally drawn on these elements, to the point that they can be considered cliché. Books like the Silver Phoenix try to branch out, and take other periods as influence, yet I’m still drawn to the European Middle Ages, to reading about them and writing about them, perhaps because of the day to day struggle for survival in those times.

We know that the period after the Fall of Rome’s western half was disastrous. The light of literacy largely went out, leaving us with scant records of the period.

What we do know about the early Middle Ages is that they weren’t easy. No element of modern life, clean running water, proper shelter for wars or the elements, was widely available. The smell alone might bowl you over. Disease was rampant, misunderstood, and largely untreatable. Work was constant, leisure rare, and privacy largely unknown.

In fantasy we romanticize an age of struggle, where human life was short and cheap. I think on these details and shudder at the notion of living in such a world, and I find myself grateful for what we’ve achieved in our era. Our world remains flawed and violent, with tragedies , crime, and intense disagreements which in of themselves are a luxury. It gets me down from time to time, but I can easily turn on my faucet, watch the water spiral out, and thank what I believe in that I live when and where I do.

Dec122010

The Kind of Book I Want to Write: Gushing Over Mistborn

I read a lot of good books, and I’m fortunate to have people in my life with great taste. Sometimes I pick a book up at random, without any prior knowledge. I got lucky with my latest grab, though as usual, I’m the last to the party. It’s rare that I finish a book I like so much that I want to give it as a Christmas present, but I just finished Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, and I’m really anxious to open volume two. Mistborn is epic in scale, with the requisite world-threatening plot, magic, monsters, and some good action. There’s a nice balance of coming of age and political manipulations thrown against a relatively small setting. There’s also a romance plot that stays safely, sweetly, on the PG side. This is a long book, not quite at the eye-rending size of George R. R. Martin, but the paperback weighs in at 675 pages. Yet she’s a page turner. I was never bored with Mistborn. While there are points of view in Martin that I wish would just hurry along so I can get back to someone I care about more, the POV switches in Mistborn are just long enough.

Though there are relatively few points of view, the book does have more than one. It’s a nice change from my reading in urban fantasy or young adult, where a single point of view is the norm. I didn’t mind the switches in Mistborn: they’re well-timed, which brings me to the point that this book is well edited. Transitions are handled very well. Smooth breaks are achieved throughout, and I didn’t spot a single typo or spelling error.

Sanderson uses some techniques that really set the book apart for me. First, the narrative within a narrative works very well. These are journal vignettes, short paragraphs that start every chapter. They quickly come to have grave importance to the book’s plot as well as tie the reader into the characters’ lives: they’re reading the journal with you, and even more anxious for it to make sense as their lives depend on it. Generally these sorts of insertions into fantasy just serve to build the world and ultimately detract from the action. They don’t often reflect the plot so tightly.

The book has been praised for its magic system, though I must admit, despite its originality, that aspect never really grabbed me. How the magic is used works great, but the actual mechanics are a bit too cleanly defined for my taste. Things got a bit matrix-y in the action sequences, but I still enjoyed them. The characters get pushed to the limits of their power reserves, and often risk running out of fuel at the critical moment.

Epic fantasy is a genre that I often worry about. Does it have a future when urban fantasy has become so popular and fewer agents seem to be representing the epic side? I love epic fantasy, yet two of the three books I’ve put down in the last few years have been epic fantasies that were boring me to death. Mistborn renews my faith in the genre. It’s ultimately an underdog tale. I’ve never so clearly felt that the heroes are badly outmatched. They doubt their chance of success openly, yet as good heroes should, they keep climbing that hill. Sanderson gives his characters heart. Whereas Martin maintains a distance, letting you know that anyone can bite it anytime, Sanderson isn’t afraid to show us the charisma of the doomed. Great power doesn’t equal invincibility if you want your readers to stay hooked.

Go read Mistborn if you haven’t yet. I recommend just picking up the trilogy. You’re going to want to open book two the moment you put the first one down.

Dec122010

Cheating on Book Club: Monsters by the Sea

I say without any intended irony that I think the Percy Jackson books are a thoroughly American series. Despite their emphasis on the Greek myths, the characters have a focus on American food and soda brands, but Percy also has a directness and mindset that impresses me more than a certain British boy wizard.

At a wedding in Mexico, with some time to lounge, I picked up book two in the series: the Sea of Monsters, and we got along quite well; so well that I wouldn’t have minded having the third book available while digging my toes into the sand and watching the sea roil.

While reading Atonement and other literary fiction works mental muscles that need developing, reading a good fantasy or two, even those for a younger audience, reminds me why I love my genre.

The second volume picks up the pace and pulls in the slack. It’s slimmer than the Lightning Thief and a better read. Rick Riordan draws on the Odyssey in funny ways, with a witty jab at Penelope’s adventures in weaving and an update to certain other bits that I won’t spoil. I appreciated a toning down of the sillier mythic reinventions, something that cluttered up the first book for me, though if you know the tales, you’ll quickly spot where chapters are going.

The main character, Percy, grows a bit. He’s not perfect, and his flaws are human and relatable. They fit a boy moving towards adulthood. His demi-god powers take a major leap forward, but Percy gets some setbacks too, which was a nice touch.
The Sea of Monsters is a breezy read. There’s not a lot else to say. I liked it, and it ended on a great twist which makes me anxious to see where things go. If I’ve a critique of the book it’s that the chapter headings often act as spoilers. Major developments are given away there. For the younger reader, to whom the book is written, this might not be the case; but I wouldn’t have minded if Riordan had stretched out the surprises. My other critique is copy editing. This book is slight, and I spotted two copy problems. The first was early, on page eight. It’s an area I’m working hard on in my own work so it really jumps out at me when such a best-selling book makes errors.

Nov62010

Flashbacks and Memories

Memory is a deep component of our personal story. As writers, it’s a source of material and a means to add texture to our characters. While I fight nostalgia when writing, afraid to create something that is too sanitized or sentimental, when I become stuck on a scene or plot point, it helps to look back in my life and find how a younger self would have dealt with something. This a key quality in writing young adult fiction, imbuing it with senses and reactions appropriate to the protagonists’ age when everything was just a bit more intensely.

Characters arrive with memories of their own, and they can bring their memories to life in vivid detail. Writing allows for time travel in many ways, not the least being the use of flashbacks to explore the past.

For flashbacks to function, they have to deeply impact the current chronology without overwhelming its story. Like points of view, they need to possess both merit and resonance. I always think of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye as the gold standard for flashbacks: the chronology in that book synchs past and present, with the present usually being the weaker of the two.

As I write the current work-in-progress, I’m struggling with the use of flashbacks. Fully half of the book is planned to occur in the main character’s past. But as I read through the current draft to find the rhythm, I find the pace slows when I hit the first memory. It soon picks up again, but any drag on the story is a problem. In genre fiction, pace can be everything. I want my readers turning the pages, into the night, over-sleeping and being late to work because they could not stop reading my books. Backstory is often boring and so often very unnecessary. If events in a character’s past are so important to their lives, shouldn’t those events be the plot of the book?

Some books, like the Steel Remains, limit the flashback sequences to either small vignettes or single scenes which reveal the key moments of a character’s history. This keeps the story moving and only derails the chronology to give you what is essential in the character’s past. Flashbacks can only hold so much tension: you already know the main character has survived. Death is not a potential. Perhaps he was greatly affected by those events, even shaped by them: but like all good fiction, the boring parts should be left out. An important part of making flashbacks work is to twist readers’ expectations one way in the present, but unfold events in an unexpected means in the past. You know he survived, but there are unknowns in the how or the things he had to do to keep himself alive.

Flashbacks are more than memories. They are scenes in a character’s life, and they should be given as much life as possible in order to keep them active and engaging. It’s just one more place where “show don’t tell” is the rule.

Oct132010

Book Club: Atonement

In case you missed it in the comments, the novel for book club this month is Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Sorry for the delay on this post. I’ll work at being more prompt.

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