David R Slayton

Jun232010

Had to Share

Laura Miller’s Salon piece on self publishing. The section on slush was what I found the most interesting:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue. You walk in the door pledging your soul to literature, and you walk out with a crazed glint in your eyes, thinking that the Hitler Youth guy who said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver” might have had a point after all. Recovery is possible, but it’ll take a while (apply liberal doses of F. Scott Fitzgerald). In the meantime, instead of picking up every new manuscript with an open mind and a tiny nibbling hope, you learn to expect the worst. Because almost every time, the worst is exactly what you’ll get.

I’m sure Miller’s article will be getting a lot of discussion on the publishing blogs, and I’m very interested in seeing how it’s received. I obviously have a stake in this matter, and I’m one of the partial. But I also know that my book under the bed was rightfully rejected. Does the query process truly act as quality control, or is it stiffing good books? All the reading I’m doing is beginning to hint to both.

Jun172010

Trick, Treat, and Maybe Twitter

I’ve always had a little taste for the macabre or the spooky. While I went through my Goth phase post high school and fell deeply in love with Anne Rice’s vampire series, I left the supernatural behind for a good while. Probably it was college. Entering an English Lit program drove me to read “serious” books, and I had to slake my thirst on the ghost scene in Hamlet or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While I didn’t really return to the supernatural until recently, my love for it was always there. I’ve especially always enjoyed a good intersection of epic fantasy and the paranormal.

In recent years I’ve been getting my fix through Gail Z. Martin’s Chronicles of the Necromancer. I’m excited to see where she takes the new arc. Gail has been kind enough to provide us with a sneak peek of her new book, The Sworn, coming in February next year:

As plague and famine scourge the winter kingdoms, a vast invasion force is mustering from beyond the northern seas. And at its heart, a dark spirit mage wields the blood magic of ancient, vanquished gods. Summoner-King Martris Drayke must attempt to meet this great threat, gathering an army from a country ravaged by civil war. Drayke must seek new allies from among the living – and the dead –- as an untested generation of rulers face their first battle. Then someone disturbs the legendary Dread as they rest in a millennia-long slumber beneath sacred barrows. Their warrior guardians, the Sworn, know the Dread could be pivotal as a force for great good or evil. But if it’s the latter, could even the Summoner-King’s sorcery prevail?

Gail Z. Martin is the author of The Summoner, The Blood King and Dark Haven in the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, published by Solaris Books. The Sworn marks her move to Orbit Books. The books have garnered praise from reviewers as well as strong sales and spots on several bestseller lists. Learn more at www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com

Gail might finally be the reason I get dragged onto Twitter, as she’s going to twitter the first chapter of The Sworn on June 21st (www.Twitter.com/GailZMartin). I’m hoping we’ll see more Tris’s power set, and see wider application of his summoning abilities.

One place Gail really shines is settings: she’s created a great religious division based on various aspects of a single goddess. With her exploring various kingdoms in the world of the Summoner, I’m anxious to see how the goddess takes to these vanquished gods infringing on her territory. Martin is upping the stakes, which can only be a good thing for a series. Hope you join us for the ride!

Jun142010

The Delicate Balance of Setting and Detail

It’s a rainy, humid weekend in Denver, which makes me a little homesick for Oklahoma. After my last post’s suggestion to slow down and listen, I wanted to focus on another bit of advice that got pushed to the side: which is to observe. Growing up in Oklahoma, I was certainly exposed to severe weather. The distinct flatness made you feel like the sky went on forever while the land just floated beneath the clouds. But these aren’t the only elements to Oklahoma as a setting. There’s the red mud, which smells a bit sulfurous and clings to everything, especially after an autumn rain has kicked it up to the car hoods or the middle trunk of the blackjack oaks. There are fields of switch grass, sometimes flooded, with dilapidated barns falling to bits, and catfish-infested lakes, blue and shining, but full of gritty water that becomes truly purple at sunset. The smells of Oklahoma are dusty, verdant, and always a little a damp in flavor. I remember a classic car, model T era, just lying on a ravine slope near a lake and rusting slowly to death. I recall miles of weathered cattle fencing often displaying rusted signs for stores and brands long out of business. Such imagery makes it easy to paint the poverty and decay I saw in Oklahoma growing up, but it also generalizes a setting which has malls, rock climbing gyms set in old grain silos, incredible botanic gardens, and a sprawling zoo. When I tell people I’m from Oklahoma I usually get a refrain from the musical or some question like “did you ride horses to school?”

It’s easy to reduce setting to a repetitive stereotype, and such generalizations occur to us because they are convenient. We use them to summarize someone or somewhere quickly and in doing so we often misconstrue. Yet a writer can go too far in the other direction: we can describe a setting to death. This is a particular pitfall in epic fantasy, where writers strive to bring a world alive. There’s a fine line between injecting realism and over-burdening or over-sharing. The less like our world the fantasy is, the harder the job of conveying the setting to the reader in a concise fashion. All of the Oklahoma details above are things I’ve pulled from memory, and I could easily continue in this vein for a long while, but it’s important to know when to pull back from setting. Setting is a character, an essential element to your story, and an important tool in your writing kit; but setting alone is devoid of purpose. The further I take my writing, the more I see it as systemic: each element is crucial and interrelated to the others. Setting must be connected to character, to plot, and conflict in order for it to purpose. No element of your work should be static unless its static quality drives the tension. For example, a small town kid who desperately wants a change in her life and feels strangled by the unchanging environment. As you observe the world around you and craft setting for your stories, it’s important to include details that bring the setting alive and surpass the easy stereotype. It is equally important that the characters inhabit the setting in a relatable way: engage all five senses with critical details. Balance this with the level of detail. Don’t overwhelm the reader with non-essential information but engage them. So much of writing is a delicate balancing act and learning to use your voice to walk the very fine line that’s right for your work.

Jun122010

Slow Down: Pace, Plot, and Observation

I used to take walks with my ex, before we were exes, wandering the city, street to street, alley to alley. I found it utterly boring. I needed a destination, somewhere to go, a point to it all. It’s one more thing I should apologize for. I’ve since learned to meander, ambulate, and drift. I’ll take turns down new streets because I like the house on the corner or into an alley based on the graffiti. This tactic is a great way to think, to plot, to turn ideas over and let them rise like bread. It’s not a bad method of warming up my brain and slipping into my character’s skin.

It’s also become one of my favorite ways of capturing unique details, images and snippets that I file away for later use. You observe more at the slower pace of walking. You hear more without the muting of car windows or the rush of the wind. Landscape and setting don’t pass you by. As I’m often reminded when a fox crosses my path in the park, cities are full of unexpected wildlife, people, and details. Things jump out at you more clearly, but most importantly you learn to slow your mind down. When I’m writing I tend to get very excited about ideas, many of which aren’t bad, but they don’t fit the scene or piece. It’s important to check ideas before I just start altering a work; and I often find the idea isn’t going to work and file it away for later. Rewriting a scene without thinking it through can be disastrous. A story is a tapestry. Once you start pulling threads or introducing new images you may create problems that ripple through the entire work. I realized in my latest edit that I was putting all of the revelations at the climax, and while this effectively brought the plot to a tightly written end, it created a desert of meaningful events in the preceding section. An edit later and I’ve moved things around a little. The pace of the novel is less like a sudden crescendo, where all of the secrets unravel at once, and more like a gradual ascent, with peaks and valleys of revelation until the most major secret stand exposed. You need little rests along the way, accomplishments, and respite from whatever is hounding you.

The trick to understanding that I needed to make the change was feeling the novel’s tempo and knowing where to speed up or slow down. When I looked at the points in the book where the story crawled I often found a lot of slack, extra writing that while not bad, didn’t contribute to moving the story forward. Cutting these pieces and repurposing their strongest lines at other points went a long ways to speeding the book up. I had to get go of a pre-determined word count and give the story what it needed most.

Each story has its own pace: a cross-country chase will feel very different than a cozy murder mystery. The best trick I’ve found for learning my story’s pace is to read it aloud to myself, which certainly earns me a few interesting glances on the bus. I’m fortunate that I studied poetry so long. It helps me a lot with understanding the iambic rhythms of English and if I’m lucky, avoiding staccato beats.

I guess if there’s any advice in this post it’s to listen: to your work, to your environment. Try to get a feel for the world around you with a pointless walk, unplugged from technology. Leave your phone behind, your iPod, and your laptop. Bring nothing but your eyes, your feet, a notebook and a pen. When you’ve got a story finished, take it with you. Find somewhere quiet to sit and read it aloud.

Jun42010

On Writing a Series: Conflict and Endings

Last night I had one of those stressful dreams, the kind where you need to be in two places at once as the universe throws up every possible obstacle to your goal. In this case I needed a haircut to avoid looking like Shaggy Peter, but it was my barber’s birthday and I wasn’t going to get any service without bringing a bottle of wine. But the downtown liquor store was closed, and it was raining, increasing my bedraggled state. I overcame the obstacle by ducking into a restaurant and ordering a bottle of wine, remembering that Denver allows you to take your bottle to go, but the victory came with a call from my boss. I was supposed to be somewhere else, a crucial meeting for my day job, while simultaneously realizing that I needed to get to my writing class, which started in a few minutes. I woke with a flood of relief that it had only been a dream. Yet the conflict and frustration I’d felt were very real. The possibility for the dilemma was realistic, as was the setback after a little victory. The tension inherent in the need to be in two places at once is common enough in a modern life.

I’ve been trying for a while to find a microsm of conflict, something that embodies the tension that fuels a story’s forward motion. The dream did a great job of that. It also pointed me to an obvious truth: conflict isn’t just a factor in engaging fiction. It’s a constant in our lives. A character with an ideal existence, without a compelling conflict, isn’t someone we can relate to. One reason serial characters work is that reality is always messy, always full of strife, so the protagonist in a series is never going to run out of issues needing resolution. A good series will keep a few conflicts bubbling, issues that must be dealt with sometime but aren’t going to be addressed right now because a more immediate problem is draining the main character’s attention. Isn’t that like life? We have so much to handle and only so much time or so many resources to do it. Good conflict is Sisyphean. You get the stone up the hill a little farther each day, but it rolls back down. A strong series lets its protagonist win, make some gains in where the stone ends up, but there’s always going to be more pushing. Simultaneously, your hero needs a victory now and then. Without it, your readers will despair. The story has to satisfy and yet ring true.

This brings us to the ending and the topic of wish fulfillment, which is a problem I think largely inherent in my genre. You commonly encounter “super characters” in fantasy, and the problem in being superhuman, in having a vast well of power which comes without a cost, is that such a character is above us, and again, isn’t relatable.

The ultimate victory, getting the rock to the summit or a milestone, needs a price. We seldom achieve anything important in life that’s not costly: the time we put into a degree, the loss of our idealism as we grow up, the stress of planning a wedding, or the pain of giving birth. Good stories have a bittersweet ending. If everybody lives, if everyone makes it out of the trap, the conflict is revealed as artificial and the ending rings false. There is a good reason why only fairy tales regularly end with happily ever after. It’s no coincidence that many of Shakespeare’s tragedies begin with a wedding while many of his comedies end with one. Life gets in the way of happily ever after. The wedding may end the conflict between two rival families, but now the couple must negotiate the difficulties in producing an heir, changing diapers, managing their money, and dealing with treachery in the household. Happily ever after is a pleasant dream, but you’ve got to wake to reality sometime, and that means conflict.

May232010

The Cycle and Struggle of Writing

There’s been a wave of blog posts lately regarding rejection in writing, reiterating how hard it is get published and succeed. I don’t feel the need to beat that horse, but I do want to talk a bit about what we learn when we start writing and aspire to publication. First, let me give credit to the wonderful Betsy Lerner, whose post put the bug in my head.

I had an idea early on that writing a book was only the first step. Having watched my aunt struggle to publish in my teens, I used to say that writing the book was only half the battle. Now I’m pretty convinced that the initial writing is closer to ten percent. There’s querying (which in of itself is not a simple process), coming up with a marketing plan, networking, learning to write a strong synopsis and elevator pitch, avoiding scammers, and thickening your skin till it has the consistency of concrete. You need to be actively reading all the while to keep the rhythms of English close at hand. There are a lot of decision points mixed throughout this process: is a critique group right for you? Should you blog, use social network sites like Facebook, invest in a website, joins local associations, and invest the money to attend conferences? Then there is the writing itself, revisions, polishing, and growing in your craft.

One of the biggest misconceptions I face in telling people I write is that it’s an automatic sign of success, having written a book. Just explaining the idea of a practice manuscript can be a bit draining.

So why write and persist when the process is so hard? The easiest answer is that I love it. It defines me. The few times in my life when I’m put it away, tried to walk away, have been the most depressing I’ve had. Each step in the process of writing and publishing is a lesson, a learning experience, and a struggle. When it all gets me down, especially the notion that I might never publish in an industry undergoing seismic upheaval, I turn to my computer, fire up Word, and start a new project. I try to find that spark that first drove me to want to write down a story. The best answer to getting frustrated with writing, perhaps ironically, is to write.

May222010

A Dark Musicbox – Sssh, I’m Listening

Last Saturday I was introduced to a Japanese accoustic band named Mono. They played the local Bluebird Theatre, and I was given a ticket by a friend. What an excellent little present, perfectly wrapped in surprise and scant expectation since I knew nothing about their sound before walking in the door.

Labeled post-rock by my friends*, Mono uses no vocals. I would have been carried away into the music, except for the strange Denver habit of choosing to hold complex personal conversations at concerts. (This may be true for other cities, but I seem to experience especially here). Good acoustic music builds from quiet to crescendo, something Mono does with a delicate, almost tinny, skill. Unfortuantely the quiet parts of songs are where people decide it’s an excellent time to discuss anything from their redecoration to what breed of dog they think is the ugliest. It’s something that’s been bugging me for a long time, and I usually attempt to avoid such Internet rants: but seriously, people, if you want to have these conversations in a public venue, why don’t you go to a coffee shop instead of paying upwards of $50 for a concert ticket?

I’ve found a new sound to brainstorm to, and I’ve happily ripped the cds into my iPod, where thankfully my earbuds will let me be alone with the music. Give Mono a listen, and if you get the chance, see them live. It’s impressive that they maintain such a complex sound in a live environment.

*I have no idea what that means, but Geoff’s comparison to Sigur Ros helped.

May152010

Roma: A Week in the Eternal City was just what I needed.

I’m an unabashed philhellene. I focused heavily on ancient Greece during my history degree and wrote my senior thesis on another fan of the culture, the Emperor Hadrian. I’m fully aware of the permanent mark he left on Greece. Many of the ancient monuments still extant in Athens were commissioned by Hadrian. What I hadn’t realized was how deeply he’d also left his mark on Rome, the city he ruled but spent so little time in. I knew the Pantheon would be a sight to behold, the last standing pagan temple which survived through its conversion to a Christian church, but without even taking a trip to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, his stamp is permanently etched onto Rome. He showed up in so many spots I felt he was haunting me: his bust was a constant presence, his name often arose in museums. One of the first impressive pieces in the Vatican Museum is a great pinecone from Hadrian’s Villa, and the Antinous of the Vatican is the largest and most detailed of the several I’ve seen.

If you’ve guessed that I’ve just returned from a week in Rome, you’re right. It was an incredible trip, and went smoothly up until the very end, when the volcanic ash cloud and some other incidents delayed our return. I also had a last minute confrontation in the rainy pre-dawn morning waiting on our cab to the airport, one of the only times in my eight trips to Europe when I thought I may come under physical assault. These misadventures aside, the journey was a feast of art, history, and some of the most incredible food I’ve ever eaten. My good friend Sara Meyer, celebrating her own graduation from her Master’s program, was a phenomenal traveling companion, ferreting out little churches and teaching me a ton about competitive commissions in the Renaissance. I’ve been assembling a full Facebook gallery of the pictures and I’ll keep captioning and editing over the next few weeks. Friend me if you’ve any interest.

Rome is a dizzying blend of food, architecture, art, and culture. I’d been warned again and again about pickpockets, beggars, and that my companion was going to suffer some serious male harassment. None of these warnings proved true, though I was half-hoping Jenny’s story about women throwing their babies at you so they could pick your pocket when you caught the infant was more than just a colorful urban myth.

On the final day of the trip I got to visit the Protestant Cemetery where John Keats, a major subject during my English degree, is buried. His tombstone, set beside his friend Joseph Severn, was a quiet pinnacle to a great adventure. A week wasn’t enough, so I’m hoping to return in the next two years.

A couple of tips for Rome:

The Roma Pass purchase was 26 Euro each and paid for itself quickly: It let us skip all the lines to the big sights like the Coliseum. It also served as a Metro and Bus pass, though we only used the Metro to reach the Vatican one rainy morning and preferred long walks with constant side trips. Its only cons were that it was only good for three days, it only gets you into two sites free (the rest are merely discounted), so use it for the big ticket items like the Forum and save the discount for cheaper events like the Castle of Angels (Hadrian’s Mausoleum). We ended up buying two to get through the whole week but I’ve no regrets there.

Getting there on May 1st meant we missed the American student press, but there were still a lot of student groups, mostly French, and this means the Vatican was extremely crowded. We tacked onto a tour group, largely for the advantage of skipping lines, but the group pushed past all the antiquities in the Museum in order to rush to the Sistine Chapel. Our tour guide, Angelo, had an American mother so his English was perfect and he happily pointed out details that dispelled or confirmed bits of Dan Brown lore (for you haters or lovers). The company was www.livitaly.com, and I’m a fan.

I’ve got to mention our bed and breakfast, the Residenza Ki. They treated us great. My tripadvisor review is here.

For food we piggybacked on Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s technique of asking locals where to eat, though we also had some great meals by choosing places at random. I can definitely say that we didn’t have a bad meal, and our dinner the last night was certainly delivered with a bit of flare as the manager brought out the pig’s head to show the patrons.

Apr282010

Everyone Wants Something

In good fiction, it’s clearly true: Dexter wants to kill his victims; Emma Woodhouse wants to avoid marriage; and Tom Builder wants to build a cathedral. A key aspect of a fictional character’s life is their driving desire: it’s almost Platonic. They’ve a purpose to fulfill and often approach it with singular drive that borders on obsession. Tension and conflict arise in their setbacks, but with turn of the story’s cycle, they move a bit closer to their goal.

Lately I’ve been diving into books that have long needed reading. Ken Follett’s the Pillars of the Earth finally came to the top of the stack, and like Wonder Boys, it’s another book I wish I’d read years ago. Follett has one of the strongest voices I’ve encountered, and as I continue to read through George R.R. Martin’s catalog, I find myself comparing them. Follett fully distills his characters down to their desires, and the wheel of the story turns, with the characters achieving a milestone towards their goal before getting subjected to a hard knockdown with a long recovery period.

Tom Builder, the book’s first point of view character, reminded me of Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s the Fountainhead: one individual struggling against a world of chaos which works in concert to pull him down. But Follett doesn’t limit our point of view (POV) to Tom. He slips from one POV to another with the deftest handling I’ve seen. One character spies another on the road and we transition with a clean break to the second character. Where Martin has drawn his story out to an inevitable seven volumes, Follett’s tale is self-contained, and I have to admire the neat wrap up. While they are two different genres, I feel any author can pick up some good mechanical tips from Follett. One advantage of the self-contained book is that I didn’t grow weary of the story cycle. Even a little time spent in the antagonist’s head was interesting, whereas with Martin I feel that his fourth book in the series, a Feast for Crows, is largely spent with individuals who I’m less interested in. Martin remains a master, but I lack the grudging admiration for Queen Cersei that I felt for Tyrion, an antagonist in previous volumes. Follett puts us in the head of his antagonist and while it’s a vile place, I was immediately struck but the clear lack of intelligence and self-awareness of the villain. There’s never any confusion about whose head we’re in. In writing about master craftsmen, Follett displays some remarkable skill of his own.

Mar262010

Fatal Footprints: Comments on Donovan Webster’s Aftermath

Getting a degree in History was one of the most edifying things I’ve done. Even the most boring of classes, taught by the most burned-out professor, gave me insight into something new. My history degree taught me to research, made me a better academic writer, a more critical thinker, and helped me see patterns in human progress.

In fantasy, we often write history. If you look at Tolkien, Martin, Brooks, or other authors in the epic style, they’re largely constructing a fictional history, often with a little inspiration from actual events. Our characters inhabit worlds filled with the ruins of former civilizations, which they explore, contend with, and struggle to understand. History informs us, shapes our cities and prejudices, and in some cases, gets us killed.

Aftermath: the Remnants of War is a journalistic travel-book, but Donovan Webster, is far from your average tourist. His purpose was to explore sites left affected by war. I first heard of the book through Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, and I’m glad I took Carlin’s advice and ordered the book. While Carlin discusses Donovan’s account of the bodies and bones still scattered for miles by the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, I found the discussion on Verdun’s shell-laden forest to be the most compelling. A first hand account of the topic, with the author handling the shells and following them to their eventual demolition, put me to work looking at maps of the two World Wars and the areas still affected by them, usually to the point of being off limits. Webster’s analysis of landmines, where they come from and who deploys them to infect their borders was bone-chilling. It is so easy for us to think of war as a fictional thing, to look at its glories and rewards, but to forget its detrius and the effects it has over the long term. We’ve left the century of the two world wars behind, but still it leaves a lethal legacy as shells work their way to the surface.

In fantasy, we work for realistic accounts of fantastic warfare: dragons swoop from the sky raining fire on infantry; spells are slung like so much artillery across magically-scarred battlefields; but it’s very easy to lose sight of the human aspect of these events. Books like Aftermath help me keep my grounding when I describe large-scale violence, and they help me remember that unlike my pen and paper creations, real war affects flesh and blood people, often for far longer than we ever intended.

I’m highly recommending this book to you. It has great stats to back up the well-written descriptions, and Donovan kept me riveted as he circled the globe. Any student of modern history should read this, as well as any world traveler, if only so you’ll know where to step.

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