Words, Words, Words

 

My parents always had a stack of books on the hob. One of my earliest birthday presents (my fifth or sixth, I think) was a hard cover book, the first in a series aimed at kids that I collected avidly over the next few years. School libraries kept me entertained with the “Henry and Beezus” novels by Beverly Cleary and horse stories galore by Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley. I was so obsessed with horses, in fact, that my first crack at writing a novel myself (at age twelve) was about a girl and a wild horse. Not surprisingly, it was never finished.

I read a bunch of other things at the same time – “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist” spring to mind (where were Mum and Dad??) – then I tripped into my teens and discovered historical fiction. As my genre identity developed, bodice rippers shared shelf space with classic tales of kings and queens. A copy of Kathleen Winsor’s “Forever Amber” yet resides in my home library, along with Jean Plaidy’s Charles II trilogy and Dorothy Dunnett’s six-volume “Lymond Chronicle”. Lymond in particular was a coup for sixteen-year-old me, given the thickness of each volume and the tiny print on every page. But, man, it was a compelling ride from my perennial place on the sofa. It’s definitely a repeat read.

Reading it then probably saved my sanity in the daily struggle with my bones.

Sometimes I overreached. As a teenager in the 1970s, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that an author named Taylor Caldwell was actually a woman, but because “The Arm and the Darkness” had musketeers on the cover, I bought it in paperback and sat down to read.

I started but didn’t finish it. I’m not sure why; I think the subject was heavier than expected for the space I was in at the time. When I evolved to where I might have been able to sift the story from the excessive wordage, my focus had shifted from swashbucklers to night crawlers thanks to my older sister’s copy of “Interview with the Vampire”. From there, science fiction and fantasy pretty well owned me, though I maintain a deep and abiding love for the seventeenth century.

Yep, I’ve read a lot of books in my life. Lately, though, I’ve made a conscious effort to try new things, and I have discovered jewels in Indigenous and mainstream literature. Conversely, I’m equally inclined to revisit old favourites. Amazon may be an evil entity trying to swallow the world, but it’s also provided a means by which I can explore other worlds without leaving the house. In a COVID environment, it’s a handy tool. Handier still is the Kindle that allows me to read in bed without concussing myself when the book falls forward. Anyway, one night while pondering where to search next, I wondered if Taylor Caldwell was still in print. I remembered the book I couldn’t finish and wondered if I could grasp the story now. I did the search, and darned if “The Arm and the Darkness” isn’t available in a Kindle edition.

So I bought it. Downloaded it. Whatever.

It’s still a wordy read. It’s written in the style of the old masters—Dumas and Cervantes and their contemporaries—so I have to wade through a ton of narrative to find the plot itself, but at least I’m old enough to understand what’s happening and why. A lot of it escaped me the first time. Truth, the style is too cumbersome, though I see now how it might have influenced my own tendency to overwrite—a tendency, might I add, that I’ve tried to change over the years. I also must have read more of it than I thought the first time; a lot of it is familiar though the nuances are definitely easier to espy. I have just reached the point where memory fails and am moving into deeper water. The adventure I had anticipated as a teenager appears to be more of a cerebral treatise on religion and the social hierarchy—but I am finally old enough to get the point.

Took me a while, eh?

Serial Reader

The ninth—and, so I’ve heard, the last—Cal Leandros novel is due for release in August. I’ve requested it for my birthday and am presently blasting through the three volumes preceding so I can hit the ground running in September. I spent most of the weekend with my nose in Blackout, white-knuckling with Cal and Co. while deftly avoiding work on the novel.

I admit, I’m stuck and I don’t know how to fix it.

So it’s been handy having an excuse to ignore it. The Cal series is a nightmare ride that just won’t quit. I’ve raved about it before and won’t repeat myself here except to say again, damn, I wish I’d written it. I love a good series. I started as a kid with The Happy Hollisters, graduated to Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion in my tweens, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicle in my teens and from then … heck, I started writing my own. My bookshelves are loaded with multi-volume sets: E.E. Knight’s The Vampire Earth, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (to volume 8; after that, it got stupid), Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros novels, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, of course, and most recently, the Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine. I get comfortable in another world and off I go.

Not sure what it says about me that I’m so comfy reading about guns and monsters and incestuous siblings, especially given my outwardly positive, optimistic mantra-chanting appearance. Perhaps I’ll simply file the irony under “contrast” and proceed on my merry way.

No More FGTs

Erin Morgenstern’s final Flax-Golden Tale was posted today, five years almost to the day from when she posted her first one. She says she started them when her blog was “newish and I wanted to show I was a proper writer who wrote things.”

She also wanted to do something inspired by the Mysteries of Harold Burdick—I had no idea what the Mysteries of Harold Burdick are, so I clicked on the link in her post and found myself at Chris Van Allsburg’s website. I don’t know who he is, either (I reckon he’s a writer, there are so darned many of us, mostly unknown to each other), but the history of the Mysteries is there, and wow, is it a creepy/cool story.

Read it here. Me paraphrasing would do it no justice anyway. The point of this piece is that, after July 11, there will be no more FGTs at erinmorgenstern.com.

Rats.

Her weekly ten-sentence stories have been a staple in my routine since I first read The Night Circus. Just as she was inspired by the Harold Burdick story, so have I been inspired by her Flax-Golden Tales. They are primarily why I decided to do my writing exercises, those odd little pieces attached to a photograph and often left dangling for the reader to finish in his/her imagination. I haven’t set myself the same parameters, though I try to draft something wonderful in twenty minutes or less. Some hit, some miss, all are me stretching my skill and imagination beyond my comfort level. Almost all of my writing is inspired by pictures, other writers’ works, music, lyrics, poetry, movies—if someone else has produced it, I can springboard from it. I can even do some things better, though at present I am no longer sure (if I ever was) what my preference really is. Is it personal non-fiction? Fantasy? Urban fantasy? Short fiction? Serial work? The never-ending novel? I know what I like to write, but I don’t want to be locked into a genre, either.

I am just a writer who wants to write things.

Steampunk Rampant

These are not the people I work with - honest!
I "borrowed" this pic off the Internet

I spend a lot of time in the sci-fi/fantasy section of the local bookstore. Ter can visit the magazine rack, the cooking section, the new releases section, the biography and history sections and the kids’ section, and return to find that I’ve reached the authors whose surnames start with the letter H. I pick up a lot of books, scan the back covers, study the artwork, maybe read the first few paragraphs, and then return them to the shelf. I’m not sure what prompts me to start reading in earnest. It’s one of the great mysteries in my life.

Apparently steampunk has been around for years, but has only recently become popular in the mainstream – or at least in the sci-fi/fantasy section. I don’t get it. I wish that I did. I think that I should, given that it’s usually set in the Victorian era and features magic, otherworldly critters and the ubiquitous star-crossed romance. Back in the day, I was deeply inspired by the Victorian age. My vampires flourished in that setting, as did just about everyone else’s. I love the clothes, the culture, the trappings and even, to some degree, the science. It was, after all, the time of great industrial advancement and of literature, come to that. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were probably the original steampunk authors. Not that I read either of them, because I didn’t. But I saw The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau at the movies and thought they were pretty cool.

So now works of steampunk fiction are sprouting on the shelves beside urban fantasy, high fantasy and science fiction. There’s a whole fashion industry based on the genre, and there’s a steampunk convention held somewhere in Victoria every year. I guess that’s only proper, given that the city is named for the applicable Queen. Last year, a gang from my office attended an absinthe tasting party at the Union Club and I might have gone, except that you had to wear steampunk duds and are you kidding? I have problems pulling together business casual. Corsets, bustles, goggles and ray guns are not in my repertoire – and if they were, it would be for private entertainment only. I saw the photographs, though, and the group looked absolutely authentic. They were having a ball into the bargain—and the pics were taken before the tasting.

Eventually, I’ll succumb and read a steampunk novel, just to see if I’ve gaffed and may be missing out on something ultra-fabulous. I doubt I will ever write one, though, and that may be my first hint. If the best writers write what they want to read, then I’m unlikely to go there … but I’ve also learned never to say “never”.