The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

Cons

If you want to be a writer, you need to network. There's no two ways about it. You need to see and be seen. You've gotta press the flesh and schmooze. And that means going to cons and other writerly events.

Cons, as the name suggests, are a great way of spending lots and lots of money. They are gatherings of the great and good where, forthree or four days at a stretch, you get the chance to pester publishers and editors, agents and fellow writers, with the small but tantalising possibility that you will meet someone who can do your 'career' some good. Yeah, you get to listen to people standing at podiums and going on about stuff - how they got their big break, how they organise their time, how to market in the digital age, and so on - but the real reason everyone is there is to get their face known.

Or so I'm told.

Other people tell me its all about meeting fellow writers and discussing one's art with people who will understand, or who will at least be clever, interesting people who like to drink and have a laugh.

Whatever it's all about, it's expensive. I've just done the sums for the two cons I'd like to go to this year. Travelling by coach and the very cheapest flights, staying in the cheapest possible hotels, and not eating much, each con comes to a little over a twelve hundred dollars. Even the book launch I want to go to, travelling by pack mule and eating only tree bark, will set me back about six hundred dollars. So, a total of three thousand dollars for three marketing events.

If I got an agent out of it, and she got me a book deal, it would cover the cost (although I'd have to wait maybe two years to get it all back.) If I didn't, I'd have to sell a barrow-load of short stories this year to pay for it - my quick calculation puts it at about a tenth of all those printed in the paying mags this year.

As a marketing proposition then, going to a couple of cons and a book launch is probably a non-starter. In fact, if I self-published my book and spent the money on online advertising, I'd stand a much better chance of breaking even (I'd only need to sell about 600 copies).

Of course, if I did that, I'd miss all the fun of sitting in bars with half-drunken writers for seven evenings - which is not to be sniffed at - but I'd also miss the six days of travelling by JetStar and Crisps Coaches, and the ten nights of staying in cheap hotels miles from the convention centre.

What I can't understand is why I still want to go.

HOPE

If you'd like a really great way to help the victims of the Victorian bushfires, you should order your copies of Hope. This is a four-issue spec. fic. fanzine created by enthusiasts in Western Australia, with all proceeds going to support fire victims. Issue One should be out this weekend (Valentine's Day). The other three should follow at weekly intervals.

It's being put together at incredible speed. All the material is donated by the Australian spec. fic. community. The latest update shows the state of play. Keep an eye on angriest for news of how to order your copies.

Apart from a story by me :-) there will be a previously unpublished piece by Sean Williams, another 135,000 words of fiction, loads of Dr Who fan-fiction, and enough cartoons and images to fill a whole edition of their own!

This is a fantastic effort by Australian writers to help people who have lost almost everything it is possible to imagine losing. Please buy your copies of Hope, and spread the word.

'Skyball' now online in Bewildering Stories Issue 324

Why waste your time reading blogs when you could rush over to Bewildering Stories Issue 324 and read my newly-published short story 'Skyball'?

Yes, I'm in print again! And this particular achievement is always going to hold a special place in my heart. It was the first of my sci-fi stories ever to be accepted for publication. It will also be fondly remembered for the process I went through with the editor Don Webb.

Don is a very exacting editor and I had a tough time working the story into a state where he would accept it. He's also an intelligent editor and easy to get along with. I had never been through such an exercise before (although I've been through similar with other editors since) so it was a hugely important and valuable lesson for me which, I hope, will have lasting benefits for my writing.

But the experience didn't stop there. Bewildering Stories includes a set of 'challenge' questions that Don asks as a way of exploring the stories he publishes. These reflect deep and thoughtful insights, and show how intently Don considers the work he publishes. In the case of 'Skyball' the questions reference one of Don's own essays “Space Aliens as Metaphor” which sparked me to draw an analogy between alien invasions in fiction and the Iraq war, which in turn prompted Don to write a commentary on my analogy.

It really doesn't get any better than that.

Writers wishing to have their own 'Don Web experience' are urged to submit their work to Bewildering Stories. This is not a paying market but the value I got from it went way beyond getting a few extra bucks in my PayPal account. Readers looking for good fiction should just go along and read the magazine. Here is an editor working hard to make a serious contribution to the genre.

P.S. Don't mention this to any of my Australian compatriots, but I was telling someone about Don's challenge questions and his other comments and I could see they were impressed. "Is this an Australian magazine?" they asked, sounding confused. "No," I replied. "It's Canadian." "Oh well," they said. "That explains it!"

Is sci-fi the new black?

I've spent many hours now trawling through listings of literary agents, trying to find ones that are sci-fi friendly, and there are very, very few of them. In fact, agents who say they handle sci-fi are outnumbered at least ten-to-one (maybe twenty-to-one) by the ones who go out of their way to say 'No science fiction.'

Now, I know that sci-fi isn't the most popular genre on the block - fantasy out-sells it by ten-to-one, and crime and 'general' fiction are 30 and 40 times more popular, respectively, than sci-fi, and, let's face it, fiction as a whole is less than a third of the total book market - but must sci-fi writers really be treated like pariahs? Must we be singled out and shunned by agents as if we were poets for heaven's sake?

I can only think of a single reason. My guess would be that, although sci-fi books in print represent less than a third of one percent of the books published each year, sci-fi writers represent a large proportion of all writers submitting manuscripts to agents. If only a third of one percent of the MSS they received were sci-fi, agents wouldn't need to mention it. So agents are trying to maximise their chance of finding a publishable book per thousand metres of slush by excluding all the 'noise' sci-fi (and poetry) introduces.

The worst offenders in the 'No peddlers, hawkers and sci-fi writers' stakes are the agencies who say they handle 'literary fiction' or 'quality fiction'. I suppose they're willing to miss out on the chance of a Bradbury, a Vonnegut, or a Ballard, in order not to have to wade through all the space operas and steampunk epics.

Well, there's no harm in asking, I suppose, so, would all the other sci-fi writers out there just stop writing for a few years, please? Then the agents won't need to hold back the floodwaters with such paranoiac fervour and I might actually get one of them to take on my books.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Why I like one and not the other

I write science fiction. I read science fiction. I love science fiction.

But why?

Today I read two highly-aclaimed short stories by fantasy writers. Both recently won awards. Both were well-written. Both were well-constructed stories. Both were really, really boring.

Which is a puzzle. Why shouldn't I like fantasy when I like sci-fi so much? Both genres take the reader on journeys into worlds invented and strange, fabulous and wonderful. Just because some worlds contain soul-stealing demons, why should they be less interesting than ones containing mind-stealing aliens? Both genres utilise inventiveness and novelty, and both explore the consequences for their characters of the new ideas they introduce. So why does fantasy leave me cold?

Well, I think I know the answer. The ennui that crept over me as I read these two stories today (rushed over me in one case) showed me just where the fault lay with each piece.

Firstly, they were not real. The novelty, the ideas, the situations, were all just completely made up. Souls, demons, dragons, magic, witches, gods, and all the other paraphernalia of fantasy worlds, are completely and utterly fictional. They bear no relation to the real world whatsoever - except as issues in the psychology of people who actually believe in such things. If you put characters - however realistic - in worlds of magic swords and dreaming gods, my reaction is 'So what?' because such worlds do not and never could exist. It's irrelevant what people would do when confronted by a binding spell because such a situation will never, ever arise.

Secondly, the characters weren't real either. Yes, alright, some of the characters were real enough - ordinary people with ordinary personalities, but there were also purely evil creatures - or creatures inhabited by pure evil, evil spirits, etc.. Sometimes (sadly, not infrequently) you find purely good ones as well. Even if such characters have only minor roles, it spoils the whole story. Like gods and goblins, such creatures do not happen in the world, or in any conceivable real world.

OK. I can hear you clamouring to come back at me on that. Lots of people believe in fairies and angels and such. What's so awful about having them in a story? Nothing, I say, as long as you don't mind me not reading it.

Alright, you ask, why are aliens and cosmic minds and transhumans so much better than elves and magicians? What makes faster-than-light travel and phasers and teleports better than bracelets of power and ley lines and magic pyramids? Well, on the one hand you have things which could exist, are extrapolations of what we already know, or are justifiable leaps of imagination based on actual reality, on the other hand you have things for which there is no plausible way for them ever to exist and which often, quite explicitly, exclude themselves from possibility by being ostentatiously supernatural (as in 'not natural').

Of course, some science fiction (some of the most famous and most popular) also relies on magic. Dune, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 (to name the tiniest few) use ideas like telepathy and telekinesis, Star Wars has The Force - ideas that are clearly in the realms of the supernatural rather than the scientific. For me, such lapses into fantasy spoil a good sci-fi story. By all means confront your characters with superhuman robots and hand-held beam weapons, uploaded brains and wars in space - these are things we might all have to deal with one day soon. But don't make them have to worry about telepathic aliens because (uless they're using wireless networks to connect their brain implants) that just aint gonna happen.

That's why I consider science fiction a completely different genre to fantasy: it is reality-based, fantasy is not. That's why I only like sci-fi and not fantasy: I like to imagine and play with what really could happen, not with absurd impossibilities. That's why I had to force myself to get to the end of these two award-winning stories rather than dump them after the first mention of dark forces: because it seems childish to read stories about things that cannot ever possibly exist.

Giving It All Away

I just had an email from Jeff Vandermeer - which is kinda cool. I don't know the guy but I know his books and I read his blog and he is one hell of a writer. So it's nice to be tenuously associated with him. It makes me feel more writerly just being in the same cyberspace.

It also reminded me of how I came to read him for the first time: I foud City of Saints and Madmen remaindered in a big bin of books in a mall in Brisbane. The book had a quirky cover, so I picked it up and scanned the blurb. It all seemed a bit weird but, hell, it was only a few dollars, so I bought it anyway. And, boy, am I glad I did! It blew me away. It was a fantastic read, the writing was excellent, and the 'world' of Ambegris was the richest, most sumptuous and compeling that I had come across in many years.

And this, in turn, reminded me of other authors I've discovered through their remaindered books. (Like the amazing The Limits of Vision by Robert Irwin - a book I re-read often and which I found in a remaindered book shop in Toronto, Canada.) Maybe I'm just tight-fisted (well, alright, I admit it, I am tight-fisted) but I hate paying out $25 to $35 for a paperback and then finding I don't like it. It gives rise to what novelist Dave Freer recently called 'the resentment factor' (and he's in the same writers group as me - another cool thing) - that feeling of antagonism one feels towards an author for making you shell out so much for something you didn't like. Dave actually gives his books away (as well as selling them) and says it helps him win new readers - and paying customers - something I've heard from several different writers.

For me, being able to buy remaindered books for a couple of dollars is an even better way of getting a sample of an author's work than downloading the text for free. It comes as a real book. I hate reading long works on screen and it's well worth a few dollars to avoid having to do that. (Libraries are pretty good too - that's where I first found Dave Freer's work.)

I would encourage every bookshop, everywhere, to carry a large stock of remaindered books - and then be sure to have the same authors represented on the full-price shelves.

Praising 'Praise Song for the Day'

Did anyone enjoy Elizabeth Alexander's poem "Praise Song for the Day" at Obama's inauguration? Well, I did. What I enjoyed even more was the fact that a whole poem was read out from beginning to end on prime-time television (I watched it on the news, not in the middle of the night). Has that ever happened in Australia before?

In many ways I wish Kay Ryan (the "American Poet Laureate") had been asked - I just love that woman's work! - but Alexander did such a great job it's hard to imagine anyone doing better. She didn't write a great poem, but she wrote the right poem for that moment and for the tens - maybe hundreds - of millions who were listening.

For a Yale Professor (Dept. of African American Studies) she did a great job of writing plainly and without condescension. Best of all, she did it without any nationalist or religious triumphalism. "Poetry is not meant to cheer," she says on her website, "rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation." Well, maybe 'transformation' is going a bit too far, but there is no doubt that "Praise Song for the Day" caught the mood and spoke soberly of a new beginning ('A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."') and of 'repairing the things in need of repair.'

Alexander definitely earned the right to have the last word here, so let me leave you with the final couplet:

'In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.'

Tales of Long Ago

A post today at Emma Newman's blog got me remembering stuff. (Since she says her post was inspired by a post of my own, this is becoming strange and incestuous. Either that or it's what people used to call a 'conversation'.)

Emma recounts the amazing tale of the two times she nearly stopped writing. My own tale is rather different. I have never nearly stopped writing. (I've completely given up all hope of publication a couple of times.) I can't imagine a life where I don't write. It would be torture.

Since I was as young as I can remember, I have written stories. By the time I was ten, I'd focused down on sci-fi. Apart from reading, writing stories was all I did with my spare time as a child - and all I do with it now.

So when, at the age of 11 or 12, climbing my way up the slippery pole in my local scout troop... (All right, for those who know me, this might seem an unlikely thing for me to have done. In fact, I was in the scouts for a couple of years and became a troop leader. It was great and I really enjoyed it.) Where was I? Ah yes. Getting on in the scouts meant earning badges. Badges were great and I had an armful of them. For one such badge, I had to provide evidence of a hobby I had pursued diligently for at least a year. The only thing I did that fit the bill was writing. So I brought in a (very) thick sheaf of sci-fi stories I had written and handed them to 'Skip'. He looked at them in dismay and said he'd have to think about it.

Next time I saw him, he was very concerned. He wanted to know if I had really written the stories and not some grown up I knew. I was hurt and flattered at the same time. I discussed the stories with him at length until he was completely convinced they were my own work. It didn't seem to cheer him up though. Writing stories, I eventually concluded from his tactful reticence to accept them, wasn't really a scout-like thing to do. It wasn't really in the spirit of it. In the end, when I had promised I had no other hobby and it was this or nothing, he decided he must send the stories up the chain of command to get a ruling from his superiors.

It took weeks but, finally, the word came back down the line that I could have my badge. As far as Skip knew, I was the only scout ever to get the badge on the basis of this particular hobby (although it seems unlikely to me). If so, I may be the only sci-fi writer who has won a scouting badge for his work. (Who needs a Nebula or a Hugo with an achievement like that?)

At the time, I was merely relieved I'd got through ordeal and earned the badge. Now I tend to think how well this reflects on the scouting movement. Yes, they tend to emphasise a lot of healthy, outdoorsy, quasi-military activities but, when it came to it, they were flexible enough to allow the definition of a scout also to include more intellectual pursuits.

Maybe someone else will be inspired by this recollection to add their own childhood writing story. We could get a chain going.

Happy New Year!

Well, it was nice that the year went out on a high (see below).

As I sit here eating assorted rice crackers and drinking sump oil port, it's hard to credit that at the beginning of 2008 I was finishing off my previous novel (Time and Tyde) and wondering if I could be bothered to waste my time sending it out to publishers. Then I heard about the Orbit/QWC manuscript development retreat and thought, What the hell? I'll give it a go.

Since then I've had four stories accepted for publication, been shortlisted in one short story competition and was the winner in another. I've also finished and polished up a whole new novel (TimeSplash! - many thanks to Terry Hornby, Rod Rivers and Wifie for help with the polishing) and have it out with three agents already.

It may not sound like much, but after a lifetime of failing to get anywhere with my fiction, I'm suddenly having some real success. I blame it to a large extent on Orbit and the Queensland Writers Centre. That retreat last May really opened my eyes and got me focused on what I needed to do. Specifically, Marianne de Pierres, Kate Eltham and Bernadette Foley, put together a package of concentrated enlightenment that changed my whole approach to getting published - with incredibly good results.

I should also mention the other writers who were at the retreat with me. We refer to ourselves collectively as the Orbiteers. These guys have been a constant source of support and encouragement. It is so good to be teamed with such a group of talented writers - who just happen to be terrific human beings too. The whole experience of that retreat and the subsequent months (which also included joining the Vision Writers Group - another amazing collection of talent and wit) has changed the equation for me. I am no longer the lonely, isolated outsider I used to be. I have made inroads, I'm networking, I actually have friends who are also writers. The publishing world doesn't seem so cold and hostile as it did at the beginning of the year. I have found islands of warmth and fuzziness in that great ocean. I even have hope again that I might succeed as a writer!

Of course that might just be the sump oil port talking (or the rice crackers - hard to tell). Being an anal, scientific type, I did my accounts for the year, to see just what my success amounted to. On the one hand, I got paid for a couple of things. On the other I forked out money for retreats, conferences, memberships, books, etc.. The balance was a loss of nearly $600 for the year. Not as bad as it could be but definitely a reminder (as if one were needed!) that I still have a very long way to go.

Well, come on 2009! I've got a lot to do and I'm counting on you for support.

Happy New Year everybody!

Merry Christmas Everybody

OK, last post before Christmas. My daughter turns up in an hour - she passed her driving test just a few days ago and is driving herself down from Brisbane for the first time, so we're sitting here with crossed fingers and baited breath - then the festivities begin. It's also my 19th wedding anniversary today! N-n-n-nineteen, can you believe that?

So I'm going to be busy with loved ones - much, much loved ones - for the next few days.

I hope you will all have as great a time as I'm going to have.

See you on the flip-side.

Merry Christmas.