thebookishowl.com

IT MAKES ALL SENSE for writers of any type to begin experimenting in what I call “pop” fiction. Fiction designed to be popular, populist, and at the same time, very much intended to be art.

Write your literary stories 90% of the time. But also try your hand at pop. Do it, and if it’s in any way pop I’ll post it at my American Pop Lit blog, which is a blog devoted not to the ultimate, “serious” literary product– but to experiments at POP.

This is what I’ve been posting there myself. Yes, much of it might be considered to be bad writing. The tales break many of today’s literary rules. When you’re creating something new, you’re going to be bad at it until you become good– until you get to the finished point which exists now only as an ideal within your head. You need to imagine the ideal, then try to produce it.

Think of creating an entirely new kind of automobile. Your first prototypes likely won’t run– or they won’t run the way you want them to run. This is fine as long as each attempt gets you closer to the goal. It might take a hundred attempts– or a thousand. At the end of the line awaits the produced vision, the revolutionary answer to sweep the board of the status quo.

This is what the progress of art has ever been about.
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THE BABE RUTH EXAMPLE
The most profound thing baseball player Ty Cobb ever said was his insight into why and how Babe Ruth was able to revolutionize the sport. A sport at which, before the Babe appeared, Cobb had been dominant. Cobb exemplified the dead ball era, when precision and control when hitting the ball was the norm.

Babe Ruth was a pitcher. It didn’t matter if he made hits or not. He was presumed to be an out.

Having no pressure on himself, Babe Ruth began experimenting with his batting swing. He didn’t take himself too seriously. He didn’t care if he struck out, or looked foolish while doing so. He didn’t have the vanity and self-importance of a Ty Cobb.

To amuse himself, Ruth began swinging as hard as he possibly could to see how far he could hit the era’s rock of a baseball. Often he swung so hard he fell down. Other times he hit the ball farther than anyone before him ever had. The crowds took notice, as did the lords of the sport. The game was transformed. Its popularity, along with the popularity of Ruth, skyrocketed.

What’s the lesson for writers?

You can’t be afraid of looking foolish.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

KJ Parker at Wikipedia
Read KJ Parker’ story Amor Vincit Omnia HERE
Order The Hammer HERE
Read FBC Rv of Blue and Gold
Read FBC Rv of The Folding Knife
Read FBC Rv of Purple & Black
Read FBC Rv of A Rich Full Week
Read FBC Rv of The Scavenger Trilogy

INTRODUCTION:Pseudonymous author KJ Parker has made a name in fantasy with 12 novels, 2 long novellas/short novels and 2 short stories of which you can read Amor Vincit Omnia free online at the Subterranean site and get a flavor of the author’s work.

I have talked about The Scavenger trilogy, while the standalone The Folding Knife is one of my top five novels of 2010. The author’s books share some characteristics: setting in a generic pre-industrial society with Roman/Byzantine overtones and naming conventions, dark humor, detached narration, love of details especially about metal working, sword fighting and pre-industrial engineering, themes of betrayal, civilization versus “barbarians”, group of extraordinary friends and family feuds that spill into the larger picture.

The Hammer expresses some of these themes to perfection, using a far-off colony island of an unnamed aristocratic republic whose population is rigidly divided into three: an isolated exiled noble family, the met’Ocs and their patriarch whose shadow looms over the novel, though we mostly see his three sons in action, the subsistence-level farmer colonists who regard the met’Ocs with a mixture of fear, resentment and jealousy and the enigmatic and remote natives who seem to be incomprehensible to the mainlanders and with whom the colonists thinks they have an unspoken truce. Crossing the implied and sometimes formal boundaries, Gignomai, the youngest met’Oc tries to fulfill what he perceives to be his destiny…

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: For readers familiar with KJ Parker’s work, The Hammer can be summarized as the family drama of The Fencer series, the driven hero of The Folding Knife and the setup of The Company.

On a big island, there is a small subsistence 70 year old colony of farmers and shopkeepers mostly indentured, taxed and generally kept at that level by Home on the mainland through a charter to The Company which brings them the needed goods in return for large amounts of beef and animal skins/pelts; the colonists are allowed no weapons and no ships.

But on a nearby plateau – The Tabletop – impregnable from 3 parts and walled on the 4th – an exiled noble family from Home, the met’Ocs made their – illegal as far as Home is concerned but nobody bothers since they still have friends in power – estate/fortress and they are armed and pretend to keep Home’s traditions, though they are poorer than the colonists in many respects, except in books, some more advanced stuff from Home and weapons; of course most of them are dreaming of being recalled and reinstated if their allies manage to gain control Home. The current generation, third since their exile, consists of 3 brothers and a sister, while their father is the patriarch with absolute powers – including life or death – and their mother imported from Home is negligible.

Stheno(mai) the elder and a huge man is the “farmer” in charge with feeding and clothing them and is continually harried by this or that. Luso(mai) the second son is the hunter/warrior who keeps the peace and leads a “gang” recruited from the no-gooders of the colony with occasional cattle raids – the colonists do not mind that since all cattle is Company’s – but sometimes for other stuff like pigs or chickens about which the colonists care but can do little not having guns…
Gignomai the youngest is more or less surplus so he has no definite role which allows him to “break out” often to the colony where his best friend Furio Opello is the son and nephew of the most important men there by some accounts since they run the monopoly store that sells Company’s goods.

We see Gig at age 7, mysteriously called “Seven Years Before” when he solves a problem with an animal eating the chickens, at 14 in the “Year When”, in charge of some pigs, his “first command” and finally from age 21 on – “Seven Years After” – when he decides to leave Tabletop and make a living for himself away from his weird family; or maybe he has different and more momentous plans…

Then there are the “savages”, the original nomadic inhabitants of the island who had so far left the colony in peace. And of course things will never be the same…

The Hammer is more personal and intimate than the author’s earlier books and in some sense it is the “cheeriest” of all, though of course the term is relative. The novel also asks some of the questions that the author has been exploring in his fiction: how far does one go for “justice”, how far does one go for a “noble cause”, can a “bad” person do considerably more “general good” than a “good” person, what is civilization?

The Folding Knife treated the same themes at a more impersonal, state politics level, but here everything is close and personal with no quarter given. The dark humor and superb style of the author are on display continually through the novel, while the twists, turns, jaw dropping moments characteristic of a KJ Parker novel materialize often, sometimes in ways familiar from other novels though with enough of a change to read anew, sometimes in ways that confounded my expectations as a “veteran” KJ Parker reader.

We also have the occasion to meet a remarkable set of characters including a mainland aristo cousin of the met’Ocs who is on a “temporary” trip to avoid trial for “sort-of murdering” her husband as she charmingly puts it to Gig, all for his or at least his family’s own good by the way, though understandably said family does not quite see it that way, a shopkeeper who finds himself in charge of more than his store and tries to “do good”, an elderly native who is quite weird to say the least and a girl shipped from Home to her uncles on the Island and who dreams to become a doctor in a staunch patriarchal society, though the always enigmatic Gignomai, the good natured Furio and the other two met’Oc brothers are center stage throughout.

While in The Folding Knife, “the knife” was clear from page one though of course its true significance had to wait a little to be uncovered, here “the hammer” is more ambiguous since there are a bunch of them, literal in several incarnations – usual hammer for nails, huge hammer in a forge, hammer of a gun – and figurative that play important roles…

As a big fan of the author’s work, I had the highest expectations for The Hammer (A++ and provisional top novel of 2011) and they were surpassed because in addition to the usual great stuff I expected and got – characters, memorable moments, prose style, twists and turns – the novel has great balance and offers a truly complete and satisfying experience you want to revisit often.

Fantasy Book Critic

Everyone’s comments yesterday about my story idea were very helpful and have helped me edit my idea and make it more reasonable and interesting. I would now like to share my new idea so that you all can see where I really will be going with this and what I will be presenting.

So my story is going to focus on when my dragon meets Shawna and the story is going to be in the dragon’s point of view. His name will be Zarkney which was the last name of my previous villan. The fantasy land will still be called Merenasia and the title is still A Walk on the Wild Side. It also will still involve the fantasy and philosophy themes of adventure, right or wrong/good vs. evil, animal-human bond and companionship, courage, love and coming of age. I am also going to try to only let my listeners/readers be aware that Zarkney is a dragon when its the end of the short story. For the most part I will try to make him sound like just another person.

The plot for my story is now the following: Zarkney is fed up with his lot and his home and decides to leave. As he is traveling he notices this girl called Shawna who he starts to follow without her being aware of it. As they travel Shawna almost gets in some trouble with some troublemakers on the road. When Shawna isn’t looking Zarkney takes care of it and kills or scares off the troublemakers. This is when Zarkney and Shawna actually come face to face because Zarkney is just too late in going back into hiding when Shawna turns around and sees him. She does freak out at first until she realizes what he has done and starts to trust him and lets him come along with her on her journey. Their bond starts to grow and he begins to like her. The story will end with both characters having matured mentally and the reveal of Zarkney’s true persona as a dragon to the readers/listeners.

Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog

So this is probably a horrible idea that I’m writing this at 1 in the morning. But! I noticed that I was slacking on my blogs, so I decided that I needed to write one. And what is on my mind right now is why during the holiday season everyone decides to get happier and nicer (generally speaking).

Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog

- Read our reviews of Plague of Spells and City of Torment
- Buy Key of Stars from Amazon
- Visit Bruce R. Cordell’s Blog

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City of Torment, the second book in Bruce R. Cordell’s excellent Abolethic Sovereignty trilogy, ended as all penultimate installments tend to: with the bad guys poised to obliterate life, and the good guys reeling from near-total defeat. In Key of Stars, the final book, readers travel the final stretch on a road that leads to either ruin or salvation, and they do so in the company of characters that Cordell has once again brought to vivid life.

As in Plague of Spells and City of Torment, the characters in Key of Stars are nuanced and realistic. Raidon, Japheth, and the rest of the gang are all present and accounted for, as are a few new faces along with old ones that haven’t gotten as much screen time as the main roster. Cordell keeps things interesting by pairing up characters who have not spent much time in each others’ company, which allows light to be shed on previously unexplored facets of a character’s composition.

It is because the story and characters are so excellent that the change of pace near the middle of the book, which inches forward like gridlocked traffic after speeding along in the beginning, felt so abrupt. Upon closer examination of why the pace so drastically changed, I’ve determined the source to be Cordell’s increased focus on some characters with whom we haven’t spent much time in the past. Multiple perspectives are to be expected in fantasy series, which tend to features casts of dozens or even hundreds. But in the third book of a trilogy, readers have spent the bulk of their time following the exploits of certain characters, good and bad, to whom they’ve become attached.

It’s not that the characters in question aren’t interesting; it’s that I find others to be more interesting because I’ve spent two books getting to know them. Therefore, this should be considered more of a subjective dislike rather than an objective one that affects the book negatively.

Despite my personal qualm, Key of Stars–the first and third segments in particular–is a cornucopia of battle, intrigue, romance, and character advancement; all the ingredients that make a good fantasy novel. The middle might seem slower than the rest depending on your reception to new and infrequently visited perspectives, but if you’re reading Key of Stars, you’ve likely experienced the first two books and will not be disappointed with the time you’ve invested in the story.

Fantasy Book Critic

Well I guess this is it, no more discussing crazy philosophical ways of life with the lot of you. A sad day indeed. Though I must say it will give my brain a bit of a rest; thinking about the meaning of life and other dimensions is really quite frazzling! But it was a good time all the same. I leave you with an assortment of pictures that I feel represent the semester we shared with each other.

http://portent.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/odd-statues.jpg

http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/57500/Odd-Tree-Incident-57872.jpg

http://www.fugly.com/media/IMAGES/Gross/strange-toilet-candy.jpg

http://mydisguises.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/strange-kids-costumes-2.jpg

Glitter: The Unity College Fantasy Literature & Philosophy Blog

Since I clearly didn’t come through with the “regular updates” on my Keats and Contemporary Poetry seminar I promised back in the fall, maybe now I can at least post some highlights of the semester that (as of today, with grading at last done–hooray!) was.

Among the great things this semester were the class presentations—knowledgeable, informative and fun—in which students introduced contemporary poems, not on the syllabus, with some relationship to Keats; I made some discoveries this way. We had a fascinating discussion for example about “This Living Hand” from Dean Young’s collection Skid, a book I hadn’t read (sadly, word is that Dean Young is himself very ill right now…). I like the idea of having students bring in their own discoveries (sort of like show-and-tell) rather than presenting on a text I’ve assigned (where we’re both conscious of the fact that I, as the instructor, have a stake in the material and take on the material they’re not fully aware of until after their presentation).

I’d been wondering at the start of the semester how the mix of MA and MFA students in the course would work out. The two groups had different styles of reading and different knowledge bases (when talking about a poem, for example, the MFAs tended to start with form and technique, and the lit. students tended to start with interpretation; the MFA students were more comfortable voicing evaluative judgments on poems, and of course had a much greater familiarity with the world of contemporary poetry they’re a part of). There were some moments of tension around the sense that there really were two communities of readers in the class, but for the most part I think these got resolved productively, and overall the class had a very strong collaborative spirit. Those moments of tension were instructive, too, reminding me as well as the students that not only do different texts demand different reading strategies, but different readers in the same classroom approach the same texts with differing techniques, goals, and expectations—a point that’s now just a given of our theory, of course, but that’s nonetheless (perhaps because of its obviousness to us on the level of theorizing about reading) sometimes difficult to plan for and manage in the classroom. And such a conflict in approaches to texts happens less often, in my experience, in undergraduate classes in the major, where all the students tend to have very similar training.  Maureen McLane’s engaging essay “Romanticism, or Now: Learning to Read in Postmodern”  proved helpful to me and my students in thinking about these issues, and in dealing with the frustration experienced by some of my students when their trusted critical tools didn’t work on certain poems (postmodern poems, or even Hyperion—which to some students was among the most foreign things we read!). (Following up on Deidre’s earlier post about note-taking, by the way, Maureen charmingly reproduces in the essay her own undergraduate notes on a poem).

And certainly one of the semester’s highlights was a delightful visit from the poet Stanley Plumly, who very generously traveled around the Washington Beltway (no easy feat, given all the traffic) to talk with us about Keats and contemporary poetry, and especially his recent Posthumous Keats. Now that’s a pedagogical strategy I strongly recommend: get a distinguished poet and gifted raconteur like Plumly to come dazzle your students with an extraordinary store of insights and anecdotes! Even if it’s anticlimactic when your visitor leaves and it’s just you in front of the classroom again, your students will be buzzing with ideas and comments, as mine were. Plumly’s visit got us thinking especially about the role of biography in the classroom and in our relationship to poetry more generally; that’s a topic worth a post of its own, coming soon (I hope)!

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

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I recently did a cover post with the books read in 2010 up to early December. Now I will present my personal list of top 25 novels published in 2010 in ranked order as a collated cover post. For the titles on the list, you can go HERE, while all but one have FBC reviews indexed HERE. I have read some of them in 2009 as advance review copies, so not all will appear in the ‘read in 2010′ cover collage.

Actually this list has 28 titles since I consider two pairs of series books (both #4 and #5 for that matter) published in 2010 as two combos for ranking purposes and I wanted to include the much controversial The Left Hand of God after all…

With 17 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though three of them have also literary overtones, only one being closer to genre and a contemporary literary one, the books above are the ones that most reflect what I appreciate and enjoy in fiction – first and foremost “interesting-ness” in content, second flowing prose without narrative walls and finally “literary-ness” in aspects different from the narrative flow. While the list itself is of course a personal choice one with no claim to anything beyond, some of the choices are even more personal so to speak…

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Fantasy Book Critic