Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

When I was younger, I had a plan that involved growing up to be a minister. In a way, that plan never left me, since I did become ordained through the Universal Life Church, an ordainment every bit as legal as any other, but probably not taken too seriously in most circles. I also had a plan that involved growing up to be a great writer. That plan is also still kicking and breathing, and the question that keeps cropping up – one I’d like to address in this installment of Storytellers Unplugged, is simple. How is the status of “great writer” achieved? Whose judgment is required to make it so? Similar questions could be aimed at the churches who would not consider me an ordained minister, and I think my feelings on that score reflect a greater reality I can apply to writing, and to other aspects of my life.

Let’s put it into perspective. Good, great, lousy, and functional are all words that can be used to modify other words. If you apply them to writing, you require more input to make their meaning clear. The merit of a thing requires a judgment. So, to really assess what’s what, you have to know up front exactly whose word you’re going to accept as the authority.

In the case of my ordainment, it’s a simple question. The only person it matters to is me. I can make what I want of it, but I’m not likely to have folks debating over whether or not I’m a good minister. When you start looking at other roads to the ministry though – different faiths, organized religions and parochial education, you add layers of judgment, and every time you add such a layer, you add the possibility of layers of failure. You can have a rogue priest or a minister who breaks off from the religious canon he’s trained in, but you will never erase the stigma caused by their decisions, made after the fact, to deviate from set beliefs.

I face no such constraints. I represent a ministry that caters to Druids, Wiccans, Shamans, Christians, and any other faith you happen to believe in. In fact, if you really wanted to start your own religion, the best way to do so would be to get ordainment in that faith through the Universal Life Ministry, write a course on your faith, and submit it to their system to be broadcast to Reverends far and wide (among whose number you’ll find at least one cat that I know of). There are no regulations in my faith against which I should be judged, so I’m left with one criterion. In my mind, how do I feel about it? Do I feel like I’m a good proponent of my faith? Do I feel like a good minister? A great minister? I’ll leave that answer for a different time, but as an example it helps me with what’s coming next.

Writing. I recently participated (and am participating, though I’m uncertain why) in a debate that started with the flawed question “Is a great writer one who writes for a lesser, or greater audience?” That might be slightly paraphrased, but the illogic of it is intact. We now go to the criteria. Who or what group will be the judge of good, great, lousy and / or adequate? Isn’t it likely that a great writer is a great writer, and that the audience, the size of the audience, etc. is totally dislocated from the judgment? I think the answer to that is obvious, and my intention isn’t to bring that odd debate here. The question that I’d like to pose instead is, do we put layers of judgment on our shoulders and allow the possible layers of failure to cause us unnecessary stress?

For example. Say I just sat down to write a story – first time out of the gates, no expectations, just had an idea and thought, hey, I should write this down. If there is no outside expectation at this point, no reader in mind, no audience in mind, no market in mind, and so forth, I think I will write with a freedom that can’t ever be regained once one heads into any other type or level of writing. The more people who look at the work, the more angles it is attacked from and the more levels of possible failure are packed in on top, the deeper, thicker, and more complex the pressures acting on the writer, and the writing, become. Say I show that story to one person, and they love it. I’m likely to be pretty pleased, but the next thing I’ll probably want is to have more people like it. Eventually I’ll show it to someone with a critical eye, a bad attitude, or more experience, and they will tell me – honestly – what they think.

From that point on, everything changes. All bets are off. I will wonder what that person will think next time. I will wonder if the people who liked it really liked it, or just said so to make me happy. I’ll wonder if I did it right. I’ll wonder how to make it better, how to please more people, and I’ll worry over other critics who might weigh in that I’ve never interacted with in the past. In short, it’s a coming of age moment that taints every word I will write from then on, to whatever level that I allow. That, then, is the key.

It’s a matter of perspective, and if you want to write professionally and be happy doing it, you need to grasp it tightly and take it to heart. What you write has got to make you happy. Creating stories and novels has to be something you enjoy doing – that you are either driven to do, or at the very least not driven away from doing. You have to keep yourself in the equation, your sense of worth foremost, and apply this to everything you do. It doesn’t matter if you are writing for a media tie-in, a themed anthology, a stand-alone novel, ghost-writing, or doing articles for the local newspaper. They all need an investment from you, and they all need your personal backing to make the grade. Anything less than this will itch at you. It will chew at the back of your mind and irritate you, and when people bring it up you’ll be instantly defensive – not because they attack, but because you already feel as if the work NEEDS defending.

And in the end you won’t have a choice anyway. If writing is in your blood, then even if you write things that don’t make you happy and don’t make your personal grade, your mind will seek a balance. You will eventually not be able to do it any longer, and you’ll move on to something that matters. I have experienced this. Sometimes it’s like the shedding of an old skin. Sometimes it’s a natural transformation. Other times you have to drag yourself from the muck, dust off as best you can, and find a new “groove.”

And if any of you have a crisis of faith, or feel like it no longer has a point, remember that I’m here for you. The not-quite-right Reverend Dave has a very small congregation, but serves a greater world…you are all welcome in my house. And in my house, all the words are sacred…the quest is to find the proper order, the perfect pattern that will make them sing and prophesy and change the world. It’s likely a futile quest, but any quest that has an ending is not worthy of full attention. It will let you down and leave you without purpose.

I’ll pass the donation plate at my next signing…can I get an Amen?
Onward!

DNW
The Deep Blue Journal
Macabre Ink

R. C. Jones

The buzzing sound began as I started down a narrow set of stairs leading to a large basement room. I had never been there before, but I knew what the source of the buzzing must be. It was the sound of a small vibrating saw cutting off the top of someone’s skull.

READER ALERT! Anyone with an especially queasy stomach might wish to abandon ship here.

In my last essay, we got as far as what happens forensically to bullets, cartridge casings and primers when cartridges are fired in revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. But what happens forensically to bodies of victims who do not survive being caught in front of those weapons when they are fired? The following gives some details about that. The details are described as I observed them on a visit to a county morgue to observe autopsies performed on two such victims. Trainees at a local police academy were required to attend a post-mortem examination (autopsy), and a trainee-friend invited me to accompany him and four others.

For reader convenience, insider jargon and certain key terms are presented in uppercase letters.

A forensic autopsy, as contrasted with a clinical or academic autopsy, is performed when a death might be related to a crime. The word “autopsy” refers to a post-mortem examination performed on a human; “necropsy” refers to one performed on a nonhuman.

There was an expected chemical odor present in the basement room, but it was relatively mild - - what I would call a force-1 odor. There were no seriously decomposing bodies to be examined that morning so we were fortunately spared any full, force-10 odors. We six observers took up station in a small, slightly elevated, viewing area disposed at one end of the room. The room housed a number of autopsy tables. The tables were formed of stainless steel and were tilted a bit so that water and body fluids would run toward drains at their lower ends. Each table had raised edges to prevent fluids from running onto the floor. Above each table hung lights, a weight scale, a microphone for recording notes and a water hose for rinsing away fluids.

Upon the first table lay the body of a 28-year-old man who had been shot during a fight in a pool hall. A small, dissecting table was mounted above the body’s legs. A block had been placed under the head so that the scalp faced upwardly. A pathologist had made an incision that began behind one ear, passed across the top of the scalp, and ended behind the opposite ear. He had then pulled the front portion of the scalp over the face and the rear portion over the back of the neck to expose the top of the skull. Next, he had used the vibrating saw, which is usually referred to as a STRYKER SAW (no matter which manufacturer produced it), to cut through the skull. The saw had a semicircular, toothed blade that oscillated back and forth rapidly over an angular displacement of only about 20 degrees. It thus cut through bone but not soft tissue. If you have ever had a plaster cast cut off, you have
probably seen such a saw in action.

After having cut and removed the upper skull portion, called a calvarium, the pathologist extracted a .32 caliber bullet from the brain with forceps, usually referred to as PICK-UPS. He rinsed the bullet with water and dropped it into a small metal tray with a clink just like that heard in many CSI episodes. (Those readers who have seen the brain transplant scene in Robocop 2 would also have recognized the sucking-grating sounds created when the calvarium was removed.) The brain was then cut loose from the spinal cord and other attachments with a scalpel, weighed and suspended by a string in a jar filled with FORMALIN, which is a buffered-water solution of formaldehyde. A brain is very soft, and suspending it prevents it from becoming flattened as a result of resting upon the bottom of the jar. The formalin preserves the brain and, after a few weeks, also makes it sufficiently firm to resist falling apart during an examination.

The pathologist recorded descriptions of any abnormalities on exterior surfaces of the body and positioned a BODY BLOCK under the back of the body. The block forced the chest upwardly in preparation for an examination of interior organs. Using a large scalpel, the pathologist made a Y-shaped incision. Upper portions of the Y extended from each shoulder to the lower end of the sternum (breast bone). From that
point, the lower portion of the Y extended to the pubic bone. The lower incision detoured a bit around the umbilicus (navel). If the body had been that of a woman, the upper incisions would have detoured around and below the breasts.

Using a scalpel, the pathologist separated the skin and muscle from the chest wall and pulled the resulting flap up over the body’s face to expose the rib cage. The odor at this point had elevated to force-2, which was still relatively mild. If you can recall the odor of raw lamb meat, you are now as good as being in the autopsy room.

The pathologist used a large, curved bone cutter to snip ribs along each side of the rib cage. This, with the aid of a scalpel, separated the chest plate (the sternum and ribs connected to it) from the remainder of the skeleton and exposed the lungs and heart, the latter still being enclosed within a pericardial sac. Slicing the abdominal muscle away from the diaphragm and the bottom of the rib cage exposed the abdominal organs. The pathologist severed all the connections of remaining internal organs to the body with a scalpel and placed them on the dissecting table. Using a scalpel, scissors, forceps and a very long knife commonly referred to as a BREAD KNIFE, he separated the organs. He simply pulled several items apart, a technique referred to as BLUNT DISSECTION. He separated the lungs, weighed them and sliced them with the bread knife into bread-slice-thick portions. He removed and weighed the heart, opened it and examined it, and systematically removed, weighed and examined remaining organs and glands.

Although the man on the table had been only 28 years of age, he had been a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker. Both his lungs and his liver were already black. Two of the observers were smokers, and both mumbled something at this point about never smoking again. One of them later lit up before he even reached his car.

The pathologist took samples from many of the organs and placed them in plastic cassettes. The samples were later to be fixed, waxed, sliced into sections five microns thick, mounted on glass slides, stained, coverslipped and examined using a microscope. The slides must be kept at least twenty years and are often kept indefinitely. Additional small samples are preserved in formalin, in what is referred to as a SAVE JAR, at least until a final report has been prepared, and are later incinerated.

As one can imagine, as the autopsy had progressed, the odor intensity had been creeping ever higher. By this time, it resided at about a force-5 level. When the pathologist opened the stomach, an unforgettable odor of gastric (hydrochloric) acid drove it up to a force-7 level. When he opened the intestines over a sink to flush the contents down the drain with water, a procedure referred to as RUNNING THE GUT, we were assaulted by force-9 fragrances normally associated with diarrhea and vomit.

At this point, the pathologist replaced the calvarium upon the lower skull and sewed the separated scalp together using a baseball stitch. The incision would be covered by a pillow in a casket. He then put the organs, glands and such removed from the body in a transparent plastic bag. He placed the bag within the empty body, balanced the chest plate atop the bag, and sewed the Y-shaped incision together, again using a baseball stitch. After rinsing the body using the water hose and a sponge, he covered it with a sheet. A mortician would later pick up the body, inject embalming fluid into the carotid and subclavian arteries in the neck and upper chest and the femoral arteries in the thighs, insert filler into the chest cavity to restore an approximately faithful exterior configuration to the body, apply makeup and otherwise prepare the body for public viewing.

After an appropriate fixing time, the brain would have been examined in much the same manner as were the organs and glands. Sections would have been removed for microscopic examination, a few portions put into a save jar, and the rest incinerated.

A subsequent autopsy was performed on a young policeman who had lost a desperate struggle with a motorist he had just stopped. The policeman had been shot in the right side of his chest with his own gun, a .38 caliber revolver. The bullet had punctured his aorta. The autopsy proceeded in the same order as the first except that removing his brain was left until last. I add this description to include an additional detail.

Four of our initial group of six observers had left by this time, but I had stayed to ask the pathologist some questions. One was about how he could estimate the path of a bullet inside a body. He invited me to stand across the table from him so that he could show me one of the tricks of his trade. He first showed me the entry wound from the outside and pointed out a darkened area of skin around one edge of it. He explained that the area was a burn produced by the rapidly spinning bullet as it had pierced the skin. When a bullet passes through skin along a path that is at right angles to the body surface, it leaves a fairly symmetric-appearing hole. If the path is not at right angles, skin along the side of the entry hole at which the angle of the bullet relative to the skin surface is less than 90 degrees will often be scorched by thermal energy resulting from friction between the spinning bullet and the skin. Don’t bother rereading the previous sentence, just imagine inserting a pencil through such a hole and inclining it toward the darkened edge. The inclined pencil will point in the general direction taken by the bullet.

The chest plate had been removed from the body, and the pathologist had pushed aside some of the intestines to give me an inside view of the hole made by the penetrating bullet. From the shape and location of the scorched, outside area, he had estimated where the bullet had probably stopped and found it within a few seconds. Of interest but of no particular relevance was the fact that the pathologist also discovered and showed me that the policeman had three spleens, an anomaly he said was not particularly rare.

I had been a bit concerned about what my reaction might be to watching a human body being cut open, but the only thing that bothered me was the force-9 odors. As the pathologist pushed intestines away from the bullet hole, the slippery conduits kept oozing between and around his fingers to refill the cavity he had just excavated so that he had to keep repeating his actions to maintain a clear view. Fortunately, I remained absorbed only in what he was explaining.

During a radio call-in show, a doctor had responded to a question about how he had overcome revulsion when confronted by the sight of the inside of a human body. He said that, just as he had always thought that the exterior of a body was beautiful, he found the inside to be beautiful also. When I considered the functional complexity of a body’s parts, I felt much the same way. In a college biology class, we students had to dissect a Necturus maculosus (mudpuppy, or waterdog). It was interesting, and I had no revulsion problems with it; but, for weeks thereafter, whenever I looked at anyone, I could not help visualizing their insides. I thought I might again experience this interesting phenomenon after watching the autopsies, but I did not.

* * * * *

For the sake of brevity, I have referred to a single pathologist as being the one who performed the autopsies described. Often, there are a number of persons, having specific titles (e.g., dieners and prosectors), who perform different functions during an autopsy.

* * * * *

I should have mentioned one more detail. A pathologist also checks a toe tag to ensure he has the correct body. Ideally, he does this before making very many incisions.

Robert C. Jones

–Sarah Monette

1. The more fun you have, the more fun your audience will have.

World-building should be fun. That’s what it’s for. You don’t have to approach it like a history textbook with all the dates and the names and the dry tedious facts. You only have to talk about the good bits, and you get to decide what those good bits are. And you can be outrageous. Real history is.

2. Never world-build through infodump.¹

(N.b., there is a difference between an “infodump” and “exposition.” Robin McKinley world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Spindle’s End; Diana Wynne Jones world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle. These are both markedly different from the infodump world-building at the beginning of the book I’m reading right now, James White’s Ambulance Ship.)

Avoid giving your readers information in solid lumps. This causes skimming and skipping, and if there’s something important in there, odds are pretty good no one’s going to catch it because their eyes have glazed over. Also, it feels fake; the dream ceases to be continuous and the reader gets dumped out of the story on his or her ass.

3. You can work it all out in advance or make it up as you go along. The end result will look the same.

How do I know this is true? Because 80% of my world-building, I make up as I go along. I take copious notes so as not to contradict myself or invent the wheel twice, but I invent my worlds on the fly.

Writing is, thank goodness, not a performance art. The finished product does not have to tell you anything about the details of the process. Therefore, the only wrong way to world-build–as with everything else–is the way that doesn’t work.

4. Never tell your audience everything you know.

This goes back to both (1.) and (2.) You aren’t writing a textbook; there isn’t going to be a test. You don’t have to explain everything, and in fact you’re better off if you don’t.

Also, there should be a difference between everything you know and everything your viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing in omniscient (in which case you, sir or madam, are as mad as a fish²), you need to filter your information through the character. If she doesn’t know it, she can’t tell the reader about it. If she doesn’t think it’s important, she won’t tell the reader about it. If the version of the facts she’s been given is wrong …

5. You have to let some details be throwaways.

This is what gives the world-building the illusion of depth. Not every folksong can be the coded solution to a mystery, and if you only mention popular culture or history when you are pushing another piece of the plot into place, your audience is going to get wise to your tricks, and your world-building is reduced to two-dimensional stage scenery.

Include details that have nothing to do with your story. Let your characters make allusions to events or ballads or novels that aren’t clues, just things they’ve read or heard or seen. The way real people do.

My favorite example from my own work (to be vulgarly conceited for a moment) is in the first chapter of Mélusine, when one of the protagonists says disparagingly of his teenage ambitions as a knife-fighter, “I thought I was quite something back then, like I was another Charlett Redding and they were going to have my hands plated with gold when I died” (p. 22).

That’s the only time Charlett Redding is ever mentioned, and that’s all we ever know about her. (I know more–although not a lot more–but like I said, never tell your audience everything you know.) Nothing about this throwaway anecdote has any bearing on the story, but it tells you a lot about the character and a lot about the world, and a lot of what it tells you, it tells you precisely because it’s a throwaway detail. It matters because it doesn’t matter.

And now, before I start calling people Grasshopper, I’m going to end this post.

—
¹For a definition of “infodump,” plus any number of other useful concepts, please consult the Turkey City Lexicon.
²A statement which is not the same as saying you shouldn’t do it.

As I write this in longhand early on the 27th, the printing plant is silent, has been since a transformer was hit by lightning during last Thursday’s storm. I hadn’t heard an air raid siren in years and a moment later the sound from past the loading docks was that of a truck being flipped on its side.

PS This is the first time I am posting this myself, it is now 11:31 PM, so in the next few seconds, as I click PUBLISH POST, if the power grid goes out, I’ll be in hiding.

Let’s talk about the bad news.

And by bad news, I mean getting a negative response to something you’ve written. It may be a bad review. It may be a reader slagging the book on Amazon.com or on a message board. It may be a critique from a professional peer or agent or member of your writing group that leaves your manuscript bloodier than Caesar at the end of act IV. In the end, it’s someone responding to your writing with less than love and lollipops, and that can be hard to deal with. After all, by writing you’re exposing yourself. You’re putting part of yourself out there where you can’t defend and explain every little nuance, and inevitably someone’s not going to like it. And if they don’t like it, then they don’t like that part of you that’s out there, and, well, we can all see where that line of thinking goes.

Except, of course, that it is at least one part hogwash. Any writer who is actually going to write (as opposed to being one of those chowderheads who simply likes calling themselves a writer without bothering with the actual, you know, writing part of the equation) is going to have to be able to deal with negative feedback. If you can’t, then you’re simply not going to last as a writer. If you can’t take and use criticism, then either you won’t improve or you’ll be destroyed by it. Either way, you’re not doing yourself, your writing or your readers any good.

This is both more and less obvious than it sounds. On one hand, dealing with negative feedback is more than just being able to go on once someone says they don’t like your writing. It’s examining what they actually said and why they said it, and sifting through it with the intention of extracting useful tidbits that you can apply to the next iteration, taking it as information and not as a comment on your worth as a human being. Data is useful, an ad hominem is not, and being able to view even the most savage critique as the former is a vital survival technique in the bloodthirsty world of manuscript notes and online forums.

On the other hand, it seems only sensible, intellectually speaking, to be able to take a less-than-breathily-erotic commentary on your work and move on without having an aneurysm or swearing a thousand-year feud on the commenter in question. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of people who tend to lose their distanced savoir faire about other people staying cool with negative reviews as soon as its their own literary ox that gets the shish kebab treatment. The same reviewer who’s being incisive on your buddy’s book is suddenly a mouth-breathing, subliterate Reptoid when he points out what he thinks is lacking in yours. A fellow member of your critique group is just jealous because you didn’t give his manuscript a tongue bath at last week’s session, and is getting back by vindictively trashing your perfect prose. That writing professor whom last week you idolized is out to get you this week, and with a vengeance. You get the idea, or at least I hope you do. If you’re sitting there with your hair on fire, shouting “I’m not like that!”, then maybe you need to take a break before reading the rest of this.

There are, in my experience, a few standard responses to the negative. The first is simply to brazen it out and ignore whatever the feedback might say. This is the “What the @#$@## do they know?” response, and it usually comes with a lengthy vilification of the individual offering the less-than-positive response, their skills, talent, ancestry, and willingness to be caught on videotape nude with any number of nontraditional species of livestock. Then they keep on keeping on, doing the same things that got them the critique in the first place and improving only slowly, if at all.

The second is the complete inverse. Any negative feedback stops this individual in their tracks, momentarily and perhaps forever. Maybe the imperfect feedback – and make no mistake, sometimes anything less than “It’s brilliant. Don’t change a word” gets read as negative – is the excuse that individual has been looking for to lay down the burden of writing. Sometimes they’re so insecure in what they’re doing, or so gobsmacked by the idea that someone wouldn’t utterly love every letter they committed to paper that their entire creative process comes to a screeching halt. Maybe they just don’t know what to do with it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They stop writing, for a while or forever.

Reaction number three is the one I was prone to, at least in my younger years. It can be summed up as “Oh yeah, I’ll show you,” and generally results in a massive frenzy of writing directed entirely at proving the critiquer in question wrong, wrong, wrong. The writer will do pretty much everything but the commenter’s suggestions in an attempt to improve their writing. Sometimes this works; sometimes it produces a lot of wasted time and effort, and sometimes it just sort of sends you spiraling off into the outer darkness. While someone doing an “Oh, yeah?” isn’t reflecting the idea of critical feedback, they’re rejecting the specific feedback they’ve gotten out of hand. It’s a good thing that they’re willing to accept the notion of valuable critique, at least as a theoretical construct, but the living-breathing example in front of them gets rejected out of hand because, well, it was put down in front of them.

Ultimately, I think best response, and the place that you have to get to is to judge feedback as feedback, not as counters on an absolute scale of “He loves my writing/He loves my writing not”. Each one needs to be judged based on where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to say, and if it affords something useful for making the writing better. If it’s critique of a project in progress, you don’t automatically have to kow-tow to every suggestion every reader you have makes. You just have to weigh them dispassionately on their own merits, and with an eye as to whether following them up will make the project better. Maybe they won’t, but the idea they spark in you will, Maybe they will in fact do the trick. Or maybe they won’t help you get where you think the book needs to go, but you can at least appreciate the effort and thought that went into them. It’s entirely possible that the thought and effort might add up to zero, and you’re right in ultimately dismissing them – I’m reminded of one gent who complained in an Amazon review that it was confusing to read book 2 of my fantasy trilogy if you didn’t bother to read book 1 – but there’s also the possibility that there’s something in there that you can put to good use, now or down the road.

As you might have guessed, that’s the position I’ve come around to. At this point in my career, I love pointed feedback, because getting it early means I’m less likely to get it late. Reader response on a manuscript or story that can be summed up as “I liked it” may provide a minute of egoboo, but it doesn’t help me improve the story. It doesn’t help point out that one moment where a character’s motivation gets shaky, or the plot hole that I’ve subconsciously been tap dancing around for the last six drafts. I’m a big boy now, and I can take harsh language in the interest of getting other eyes on stuff that I know too well. That doesn’t mean that I want to deal with pointless ranting, or rudeness, or anything of that ilk, but mainly because that doesn’t make the writing better.

So my advice is to learn to love the bad news, or at least, to live with it. You never know. It might grow on you.

by Janet Berliner

As I began to write my memoir–which may or may not ever see the light of day–I tried to get a fix on what that meant. Is a memoir “Just the facts, Ma’am?” or is it, as Gore Vidal wrote in Point To Point Navigation, “…how one remembers one’s life.”

More than whether or not it was fact or interpretation, I realized that my memories were circular, joined together like a Slinky toy, and that I had to begin with how I became obsessed by words–

By the time I began to realize that I would have to leave South Africa, I was nineteen. Words were already my passion. I had been reading fluently since before I was four, a skill derived mainly from the upside-down-study of newspapers, flowing in place of a tablecloth over a card table in my father’s kitchen. Upside-down because I read them from the floor beneath the table, sharing my space with a cat whose very existence terrified me almost as much as I scared it when I grew hungry and ate from its bowl. That’s where I sat one day out of every week, fulfilling my father’s visitation rights. Only he was never there. Not with the track open and the horses at the starting gate.

While he played the ponies, I was left in the care of his demented red-haired wife, Iris. She took me straight from the front door to the card table, prepared with its newspaper cover beneath a lot of bottles of beer which I knew would be consumed by the time I was picked up at the end of the day. As she drank, she paced around the table, talking about my family and about me. Cursing us with words such as I had never heard. Each bottle she emptied was thrown into a mounting pile in the corner, accompanied by a loud belch and the crash of glass against glass.

I lasted six months before I told my mother. She applied for the visitation rights to be rescinded and, after I testified in court, there were no more visits.

By then I had realized that the words I’d learned to read had meaning. Quickly, books became my constant and often my only companions. My mother and I moved from place to place. I was transferred from one school to another. Making friends didn’t seem like a good idea under the circumstances. I read while walking to school, learning how to glance up and back fast to avoid losing my place. I read under my blankets with a flashlight, except on the nights The Creaking Door or Mandrake the Magician were on the radio I kept hidden under my pillow. I knew that they clapped together coconut shells to make the sound of horses’ hooves but it spoiled nothing because, for me, it was all about storytelling. Even at that early age, I wanted to be the person who wrote the stories. When something bad happened, I thought it’s okay because I can use this one day in a story. When something good happened, I thought, I have to remember this so that one day I will use it in a story.

When nothing happened, and I was between books, I went out looking for story material–and generally found it. At school, I did well academically but was constantly reprimanded for asking too many questions. One teacher had me write “Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles me” three hundred times.

Probably the only person who understood any of this was my grandmother who quickly turned whatever happened to me into a story, leaving spaces for me to fill in as we went along. Like old Sophia in The Golden Girls, she had a story to cover every eventuality. I never grew tired of her tales, nor did it occur to me that she might be embellishing the truth. She was the essential pragmatist who provided me with a tough core as I moved from father to father–four in all, not counting the “uncles”–school to school, thirteen of them before I matriculated, and house to flat to boarding house.

It was she who taught me to turn those experiences and the myriad that followed into stories as a tool to hold onto my sanity. Without her, I might have fallen apart before I found out not what but who I was.

A writer.

For that, I am extremely grateful, because it has allowed me to live my life to its fullest. I have run without fear toward gunshots in a marketplace in Jerusalem, stopped to tear up and throw away my Press credentials in East Berlin when a Russian soldier with a rifle bore down upon me, argued myself out of being shot by Algerian rebels at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

My life has been exciting and fun and horrific. But never, ever has it been dull.

I decided that I was a writer when I was eight and won a National writing competition with a poem called Brotherhood. I carried the congratulatory note in the pocket of my hand-me-down pants but didn’t mention it to anybody in my family. They were impressed by practical achievements, not airy-fairy stuff like that. I didn’t mind because I figured that, too, was the way it was in all families. My grandparents owned a small haberdashery in the Indian quarter of the Southern Suburbs. Next door there was a shop that sold fruits and vegetables and smelled of curry from the house behind it where the owners lived. My grandfather, an artist but not a linguist, made signs for their shop and for his: Poor Wool Suit. 7 Pounds. With the 7 struck through. I worked there on Sundays, covering hollow shells with fabric to turn them into buttons, something at which I had gained expertise at four or so, standing on a carton to reach the button machine.

My mother did not make buttons. She had been a film star and a singer and a model in Berlin and spoke seven languages. After I was born, she joined the South African army and worked at Cape Town Castle as a bookkeeper. I don’t remember much about that time, but I do recall the street photographers who wandered around Cape Town. They took Brownie snapshots, developed them, and pinned them up on the inside walls of little houses that looked like the forerunners of Photomat. I have one photograph that was taken of me at about three, cute as can be, holding the hands of my mother and grandmother. The photo was used for the cover of SNAPSHOTS, an anthology of mother-daughter fiction I edited with Joyce Carol Oates.

When I was older, my mother–Mutti, as I called her–became South Africa’s first travelling saleslady. Every day was a battle to make a living, to pay bills, to put a little aside just in case. I was afraid to ask just in case what. Already, I was being possessed by two muses, the writing muse, and the one that drove me to believe that while not all Men were born good, philosophically all people were born equal in the community of Man.

Born into Brotherhood and with the potential to communicate with words in a universe of infinite variety where the hand that rocks the cradle is also capable of rocking the world–the voice that sings lullabies can be a Janis Joplin, wailing for life and pleading for meaning; the hand that pounds porridge in a clay pot can pound a drum, remove a brain tumour . . ..

To me, music and words are inseparable. I was born a writer in my consciousness, a filmmaker in my head, a dancer in my pulse. I hear syncopation in the sound of words, rhythm in their meaning. I see scenes choreographed, my characters come fleshed and fully formed–breathing and hating, sweating and loving, the blood in their veins singing the music of words.

They are the blood in my veins, the stuff of my survival.

By Richard Steinberg

“The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture,” Raymond Chandler

It’s an interesting moment.

Dark and light seem completely balanced in my life right now. Not as if I have finally got a handle on life – far from it – but rather, as if a climactic change is about to take place. A thing whose scope and impact will resound for years.

It’s happened before.

Seven years ago.

Six years before that.

This is the artist’s life, if they’re honest with themselves. Periods of mournful depths beyond description; pain and despair so searing its recounting is a sin.

This is the artist’s life, if they’re honest with themselves. Periods of fairytale glory and Promethean reward that would make a Nereid blush; fulfillment and contentment (if not happiness) so spectacular its living seems a permissible sin.

This is the artist’s life.

But it is not their art.

And here we speak of art.

Let’s start by getting our terms clearly defined. I’m not talking about the high-brow, the elite, or some artificial exclusionary definition of art. Art is simply that which is created with the purpose of provoking a reaction. Art is beautiful or frightening or thought-provoking works produced through creative activity. Art is the channeling of creative visions to elicit a reaction.

This is the crisis I now face; that taunts me in the recesses of my soul.

I am beginning to despise my art.

My work continues to be of high quality; very entertaining, commercially strong, and with meaning. To this point I have been able to separate my crisis from my productivity; will continue to do so for some time to come if necessary. But a longing grows within me, a soul-kiss from a distant being that whispers quietly:

“It’s time for something more.”

I heard the voice for the first time thirteen years ago. I was writing, but for myself. I didn’t seek an audience; I didn’t want to be read. What I wrote, was private, secret, packed away. The benefit of this was simple and absolute: as the only reader, I was also the only critic.

It’s a cool place to live. Whatever you write only you read only you judge. Nice and safe. No matter how harshly you might judge your work – and although I publicly extolled my brilliance, I was often privately deeply critical – its all gold. But as long as I kept that criticism (and the work) to myself I could proclaim my greatness without public contradiction.

But within me burned the writer’s soul. A soul that demanded something more.

I completed my first solo novel – just me naked on the page. In an act of great personal pain I printed it, boxed it, and sent it out . . . to be roundly (and properly) rejected. It wasn’t that it was horrible, I’ve always been a pretty good writer, rather it wasn’t professionally written.

I seriously considered never submitting anything for rejection again. If the world didn’t understand me, their loss.

But some chemical reaction had begun in me, and I returned to the computer. As I wrote, I reread voraciously all of my favorite books. I carefully worked to understand why I liked some things, not others, why some things left me flat. That’s about all I did with any time I had. I read, I analyzed . . . I wrote.

And I set aside my desires or my protective ego as I judged what I wrote.

I wrote every day for at least an hour, often through the night. Literally, a million words in fifteen months. By the end, I was averaging close to three thousand words a day. Writing, reading, analyzing, rewriting, judging . . . growing.

Then, I stopped.

I don’t know why I stopped, it certainly wasn’t a conscious decision, and it wasn’t giving up or burning out. I pulled away for a couple of weeks, the only thing close to writing was rereading a first edition of Olaf Stapleton’s: Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest. For the first time, I understood what it was that Stapleton had done to make me react as I did.

The technique behind the art.

Sadly, I no longer have that book, but I have The Gemini Man, my novel that was its bastard child. It’s been published around the world, read from Spain to China. Critiqued by geniuses (they all loved it and me) and morons (they all disliked it and me) from all walks of life.

For the next six years, I rode that generous, beloved, blessed wave as far as it could take me, and that was far indeed! Novel after novel, I reached my dreams and beyond.

But then, seven years ago, I changed again.

I began to assume that my talent was a gift and not a loan whose payments needed to be kept up. I got lazy and began to us my technical skills to cover-up a lack of commitment to the creative magic. I coasted on my success and assumed my future.

We are NONE OF US guaranteed a future! Futures must be earned, must be entreated and seduced. They are so fragile that simply ignoring them can lead to their end.

The fall began slowly, gently and without notice; although I can look back now in shock that I didn’t see the signs. Gradually the writing lost meaning, lost pith, with excruciating but inevitable slowness I went one way as my gift went another.

I began a seven year existence in a place of dark gray and muffled dissonance. As the career faltered, as the writing became typing, as the assumptions of surety became pornographic jokes with me as the punch line I fell. Not of the body, but of the soul.

Then, somewhere around rock bottom I encountered my talent again.

It floated placidly beside me, not gloating at my destruction (as it had a right to do) but simply asking in nonjudgmental words: “are we learning yet?”

This wasn’t rock bottom – I had and have a few things left to burn away before I can begin the wholly uninsured climb again – but it began to arrest my hadean momentum. I began to heal before the final wounds were even struck. I regained my gift, now integrated with my technique like a couple long, divorced and grown apart, might rediscover each other and be married again until death.

Which now, after a fourteen year roller coaster (that Ilario the Magnificent warned me of many years ago) leaves me here, on uncertain ground.

It’s an interesting moment.

I stand uncertainly balanced on the fulcrum of past success, past failures, and the promise of an unknown future. But it is only unknown because it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t put it that way to be glib but from a sincere appreciation of the fragility of all futures. From a deep respect that I’ve never had for future before.

You see, I know now not to assume future. To never take it for granted or neglect the tender care and hard work it demands. We are, none of us, guaranteed a happy ending. We are all of us gifted with the most profound legacy there is.

Possibility.

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations,” Anais Nin

I now know that being read by strangers around the world that I will never meet is better, by far, than just me reading my work. That being commercial does not mean I have to abandon art. That taking risks can hurt, sometimes almost beyond measure . . . but its rewards are all the greater for it.

Layers.

Cells.

Constellations.

And it is when we ignore that multifaceted reality to be just one thing – be it bestseller or hermit – we have not been true to our art.

One more thing as well:

Rich or poor, wealthy or not, healthy or not, happy or not . . . I’m going to be okay.

So long as I have, and am true to, the writing.

Believe!

—Richard Steinberg

I just got back from Gen Con late Sunday night, and I’m still beat. It’s a long-standing tradition (at least for me) to hit any con I hit hard. If I’m going to be there, I go all-out. This year, my fourth in a row as a guest of honor, was no exception.

During any convention day, you can expect to find me in one of three places: on the exhibit show floor, checking out the merchandise and bumping into friends; taking part in a seminar in which I impart what knowledge I’ve earned in my narrow slice of “fun things to do to make a living”; or meeting with friends or clients (often one and the same) to catch up or chat about future projects.

Then, once the exhibit hall is officially closed, I hit the streets. I find people to grab a meal with—again friends, clients, or both—and then hunt down the unofficial watering holes where we can continue the process until the morning’s wee hours. Usually I’m up until 4 AM or later, then grab a precious few hours of sleep before starting all over again.

I do this for fun. Some may call it networking, and it’s been the source of many of my best gigs as both a writer and a game designer, but I don’t do it to network. I do it because I love it.

At Gen Con, I play host for the Diana Jones Award ceremony, a packed party in which I greet every attendee and hand out loads of free drink tickets. We’ve been doing this at Gen Con for seven years. It started out during a birthday party I held for myself in 2001, which was such a great success that we now line up corporate sponsorship for all the fun.

Sure, it’s a great networking mechanism, and it helps me get to know many of the professionals who attend Gen Con, but I don’t do it to gather names for my address book. I’ll never work for or with most of the people who show up, but they’re part of the tribe of people who love games and fiction—and whatever else Gen Con contains—as much as I do. I do all this to get to know them, to see old friends and make new ones.

That’s the real secret behind the best networkers. They don’t have to force themselves to do it to get jobs. They do it because they love to meet people.

If you force yourself to meet folks because they have something you want—like an editor who might have a plum assignment or could publish your magnum opus—you come across like the young man desperate for a prom date. Just like the girls can smell the need on him, the editors can sense it in you.

Nobody likes to feel like they’re being used. Meet people for fun. If you happen to work with them later, all the better, but enjoy the moment for what it is: a moment to enjoy.

by Justine Musk

This is not the essay I intended to write.

I write this in a lodge somewhere in Iceland where
I’ve been staying the past two days with my spouse,
assorted extremely-bright accomplished people, and a
famous actress. This gathering is meant to be a kind
of think tank retreat/salon concerning one issue in
particular. I won’t say what that issue is, because I
want to talk a bit about the famous actress without
giving away her identity, and, like any movie star,
which is why they become a movie star in the first
place, she has such a unique presence that it wouldn’t
take much to give her away.

It is going on Icelandic dawn. There is much drinking
of spirits and playing of music (electronic/dance
music, in case you’re thinking it’s something local,
which would strike me as rather humorous). Earlier I
was dancing with some of the others, and the actress
and I were comparing martial arts moves (I got my
black belt in taekwondo in my early twenties for no
real reason I can think of; she had to train for a
role).

Whenever you meet someone you already know through the
media, it is a strange feeling. It is strange because
you know stuff about this stranger you probably
shouldn’t know about any stranger; and they either
have to a) pretend they don’t know you know, even
though you know that they know that you know or b)
find some way of dealing with it gracefully. (Robert
Downey Jr, for example, throws out wry
self-deprecating comments about his past in a way that
is very charming, and takes a tense awkward thing and
puts it at ease).

There’s also the inevitable disconnect between your
sense of the person that’s come filtered through the
media, and the real person who turns out to be behind
all that. Who is usually shorter than you thought
(although not in the case of this actress) and not
quite as flawless-looking.

With this actress, though, the disconnect between the
media/public perception and the reality that I
experienced (and am experiencing right now, as she
sits on the floor four feet away from me and converses
with the others) is shocking to the point of seeming
downright unfair. Which is why I want to write about
it now, given the subject of my last Storytellers
essay (about working with the more subtle and unusual
angles of point-of-view).

Because when I mentioned that one of my
three-year-olds is a high-functioning autistic, she
said, “So am I.”

And I believe I said something like, “What?”

“I was diagnosed with that when I was a kid.” Thanks
to a loving determined supportive mother, she avoided
the fate of institutionalization, which would have
destroyed her. Of this she has no doubt.

I stared at her in a way I had managed not to do since
meeting her for the first time hours earlier in a
small private airport.

Because with this piece of information, and given what
I now know about mild autism, the rest of her suddenly
made sense. She is an elusive, quirky presence in the
media in a way actors and actresses are not supposed
to be, even as they complain about the burden of fame
(and then go for lunch at the Ivy and sit outside on
the patio while black-clad photographers gather along
the fence like crows along a telephone wire). She went
into acting because it seemed like a lovely way to be
in her own imaginary world. She was truly never in it
for the fame. That kind of attention came at her like
an attacking, invading thing. Because of the visual
way autistics acquire language — through linking it
with the visual images they collect in their mental
library — their first reaction to things is to take
them in a literal, concrete manner. Which is why,
when a well-known talk show host asked her, “So what
are you doing in New York?” and sat back and waited
for some entertaining banter, she could only look at
him blankly and say, “Press.”

“I don’t really care what people think of me,” she
told me, and I believe her. I believe her because
indifference to public opinion is one of the
characteristics of autism, part of the “being in their
own world” thing. It’s why someone with autistic
tendencies might neglect simple hygiene. It’s not like
they don’t understand how and why to take a shower,
wear clean clothes. They just need a better reason to
care — so what if someone doesn’t want to stand too
close to them?

I named another famous actor — someone I’ve been a
fan of for years — who demonstrates a lot of the same
traits that she does, and said, “Do you think he’s on
the spectrum?” (Autistic disorders fall along a
spectrum from very mild/high-functioning to Rain Man
severe).

“I’ve met him and I know people who know him,” she
said, “and you know, I’ve never thought of that
before, but given what my friends have told me about
him — I am one hundred percent certain that you’re
right.”

Here’s the thing. Talk to this actress, read an
interview with the actor I just mentioned, and it
becomes very clear that these are two intelligent,
interesting, articulate people who are better-informed
and better-read than most (her light plane reading was
a novella by Calvino, and she easily referenced a
short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). I won’t list
this actress’s accomplishments outside of acting,
because I don’t want to give her away — but they are
impressive, certainly more so than the average joe or
jill who dismisses her as some ditz.

Because they do. Because both this actor and actress
are regarded within pop culture as — well — as kind
of dumb, actually, and not all that talented. Who
just lucked into the kind of success and acclaim that
they surely don’t deserve, even if they do happen to
be extraordinarily hot.

High-functioning autism has nothing to do with IQ; it
has everything to do with a disordered sensory
perception. People like these actors — and my son –
process the world in ways that basically render them
aliens in a country that speaks a different language
than they do and is not set up to understand them.

One of these things has to do with the way they
acquire language. They think visually instead of
verbally, which means they learn to understand the
world through images and video clips they collect in
their memories, replaying whenever they need that
specific information — if a kid wants a cookie, for
example, he references the video clip that shows him
how to pull out the chair, stand on it, open the
cupboard door, etc. He doesn’t think of it in words.
Eventually they start linking language to those video
clips — literally laying down a soundtrack — and
over the years they assimilate those words in ways
that allow them to use language more spontaneously and
‘naturally’.

So they don’t speak with the same inflections that we
do (those of us not on the spectrum). My son, for
example, delivers much of his language in a sing-song
type of voice, or in a rather flat robot-like
monotone. He also has some words and phrases that he
delivers much more ‘naturally’ because he’s
assimilated their meanings and uses and is comfortable
with them. Because my son’s autism is mild, and
because he’s ‘quick’ in ways that indicate a good,
bright mind behind the autistic tendencies, I have no
doubt that one day he’ll use language as fluidly and
masterfully as, say, the famous actress who will soon
be flying back to LA with me.

But he’ll never sound quite ‘normal’; he won’t be
quite as expressive and animated with his spoken
language as we are.

And because of that, he might get taken for ‘dumb’ or
‘ditzy’, even if he’s anything but, even if he’s
actually smarter than most of the people he deals
with, even if the fact of everything he’s overcome in
order to be dealing with people at all as a ‘normal’
if quirky person, is, to put it mildly, a huge
accomplishment in and of itself.

He won’t care, of course. He honestly won’t care what
other people think.

But I probably will.

When I was an English major at university, it was one
thing to sit around in classrooms and discuss the
importance of literature, of reading. It illuminates
the human condition, shows you different ways of
living a life, enlarges human understanding, yadda
yadda yadda. I believed all of those things, but in a
vague and abstract kind of way.

This is changing for me. I am a proud writer of
popular, escapist fiction, and I want to be
entertaining and compelling and emotionally moving.

And I also want to do my bit to “enlarge human
understanding”. It’s not such an abstract thing to me
now. It’s not quite so vague. To take someone and put
them behind the eyes of someone like my son. To give
them empathy where before they had none — not because
they’re insensitive, they just didn’t know any better.
None of us did.

I once snapped at someone who put me in the stereotype
of a certain kind of Los Angeles woman and wife. It
wasn’t the stereotype itself that bothered me; I’m
used to it, and I take pleasure in dismantling it on a
regular basis through being my own quirky, atypical
self (scratch a high functioning autistic, find family
members who share some of their characteristics, if
not to the extent that actually lands them on the
spectrum). I snapped at this guy because he was a
writer — or an aspiring writer — and I expected more
and better from him. Something more closely observed
and original. Something that might actually show us
something new. Cliches and stereotypes certainly
don’t. Kneejerk reactions to people certainly don’t.
We all know this, of course; we know how this makes
for bad writing. But it makes for bad living as well.
We realize this, of course. We just tend not to
realize how much.

—- Justine Musk - Somewhere in Iceland