Myths for hire.

Steph returned from the City of Lost Angels Saturday evening, so we spent yesterday reveling, browsing bookstores, and wandering the frozen Common, and topped the evening off with a pleasant Chinese dinner where I got a chance to embarrass myself in rapidfire conversation with a gaggle of waitresses (I’m much less sure on my feet with Mandarin than I was in Anhui, though maybe I remember myself being more awesome than I really was).  Afterward, well-fed and happy, we staggered to the AMC for an evening inside Terry Gilliam’s head at the newly released Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Imaginarium massively improves with your acquaintance with its principals.  The more you know Tom Waits, for example, the more awesome his turn as a gambling addict Devil; the more familiar you are with Terry Gilliam’s particular brand of insanity, the more intuitive sense the surrealistic visuals within the Imaginarium will make.  A great deal of the draw to this movie will probably arise from Heath Ledger’s turn as Tony, The Mysterious Stranger, and that’s well-deserved; as Tony he devours the film a bit less than he did as the Joker in The Dark Knight, but he portrays a fiendishly complicated character nonetheless.

Gilliam’s awesome visuals catch the eye, but at its heart this is an actor’s film- the main plot revolves completely around the choices our imaginations allow us (or don’t), and this places an immense burden on the actors to become characters who make sense even after the audience has seen the inside of their minds.  Plummer, Waits, and Ledger own their screen time, and the other mains, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer, and the fascinatingly bow-mouthed Lily Cole all push their envelopes.

The ending leaves a good bit up to interpretation; I don’t expect anything less from a movie about art and decisions, and while I think I know what’s going on, I’d much rather leave you to decide for yourself.  Go prepared with a friend & have a pleasant place in mind to sit and chat afterwards.  Also, by way of warning, while this isn’t a funny movie per se, it probably helps to be in a Monty Python-ish mood for madness.

If you’re like me, one main concern will be how you can find a copy of the “We Are the Children of the World” ringtone Gilliam uses throughout the film; I haven’t found it yet, but I’ll let you know if I do.

Passing through Alyssa Rosenberg’s excellent pop culture blog, I found a link to Dylan Matthews’ unfriendly review of Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream.” I haven’t read Franzen’s article so can’t comment on Matthews’ analysis of it, but as a novelist I find Matthews’ stated position that “text is an inferior way of telling stories to video” worth a brief comment.

Matthews doesn’t provide any argument to support this position (that’s not the point of his article), nor could I find such in a quick due diligence search of his site.  However, this statement did get me thinking about my love of novels, and what they offer that video doesn’t.

There are a lot of answers to that question, but the difference that struck me the most was cost. An author can write one good book of moderate length in a year. Costs for publishing, distribution, and marketing can rack up pretty quickly, but one estimate I’ve heard puts the cost to publisher for an average mass market paperback at $150,000.

Avatar cost between $300 and $500 million depending on who you read; Firefly cost around $2 or $3 million per episode, and a $10 million investment for the pilot (for sets, costumes, developing initial special effects, etc.), and I’ve heard a price tag of $17 million attached to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

People invest money looking to make it back, and the more money they invest, if they’re reasonable people, the more they want that investment secured. If I’m sinking $300 million into a really fun movie about pseudo-Native American space smurfs, I want to be positive it will do well, so I become worried when the movie takes risks and breaks ground in its story. I become worried if the story is slow, or doesn’t have an up ending, or pisses off the pro-military crowd without appealing enough to the anti-military crowd. I become worried if the audience isn’t able to cheer with unalloyed joy for someone at the end of the film.

Please don’t think of this as an attack on Avatar; I watched that film and liked it a great deal. But a publisher can afford to put out individual books that take more risks and push more boundaries because there’s less money tied up with each story. In extremity, if you’re DH Lawrence and nobody wants to publish your Lady Chatterly’s Lover, you can self-publish out of pocket these days using sites like lulu.com or createspace.com; by comparison, even a very inexpensive feature film like Rian Johnson’s amazing Brick costs $450,000 and requires the dedication of maybe a hundred people to make it happen. Possible, but well outside many artists’ budget, especially if you’re writing something you feel certain will piss some people off.

Would Faulkner have been able to get a movie that would be an even remotely reasonable and faithful approximation of Absalom, Absalom financed in 1936? Could Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man have been made as a television series or film nearly as hard-hitting as the original in 1952? What about Willard Motley’s Knock On Any Door (1947), my father’s favorite book? That one was actually adapted into a film, and look what happened: the book was the life story of Nicky Romano, a young, innocent boy we follow through the shaping of a rough neighborhood and a rough economy into his life as a hoodlum, hustler, and gay prostitute, and ends with him on trial for murder; the film is a courtroom drama starring Humphrey Bogart as a good guy court defender who stands up for Nicky despite Nicky’s bad attitude, and excludes, to my knowledge, a lot of the true nastiness and social and moral import of the novel.

Okay, Max, you say: so it was hard to make good novels that highlight problems of race and society into equally hard-hitting movies back in the Bad Old Days. Surely we’re better now, right? And besides, you’re a science fiction writer—what does it matter to you?

That’s a fair point, though it’s worthy to note that even in 2003 they couldn’t make a version of A Wizard of Earthsea which accurately portrayed the main characters as people of color, and the forthcoming movie The Last Airbender, based on the other Avatar, has cast white folks in the lead roles of an adaptation of an animated series whose heroes are Aleutian islanders and Chinese analogues, while allowing the villain, who comes from a country that looks an awful lot like Japan, to be portrayed by a South Asian guy. So yeah.

You certainly can shoot an action scene more lovingly in video; blood is bloodier, sex sexier, and you need to be one hell of a writer to convince me that the Death Star is as big in a book as it appears on screen. But a lot of stories challenge too much for people to comfortably invest even half a million dollars in them, let alone $10 million or $100 million, when they are at their most relevant. For those tales, the best medium is probably the one where a small number of people can take a chance, stand up for what they believe, and make a difference.

Heck, that sounds like a cool story. Maybe someone should write a movie about it.

The wonderful people at Eposic Diversions, who published my short story “On Starlit Seas” in The Book of Exodi, will soon publish another story of mine, “Zach and the Thunderbird,” in their forthcoming anthology Out of Order, a collection of short stories about tomfoolery with time.

Andrew from Eposic Diversions interviewed me earlier this month about the two short stories; I talk a bit about inspiration, process, and time travel. Check it out!

Excuse the blatant A3 reference. Since finishing Three Parts Dead and starting the query process, I’ve felt a bit disconnected from the world. Fortunately, I’ve taken an old friend’s advice and decided to view the space between novels as a great opportunity for short story writing.

I just finished a 16,000 word not-so-short that I’ll be desperately cutting and polishing over the next couple weeks for Writers of the Future, one of the few markets for such beefy compositions. It’s got romance, dimensional travel, biplane duels with insect dragons, and a general overtone of bitterness and regret — everything you want this holiday season!

This story started off as a dream, but is also an elaboration on a comic project I’m really excited to be working on with Mel, Captain Brushpen over on Blogspot. She does awesome work and has two great illustrations of my work on her site right now, both from the first chapter of Three Parts Dead:

Ms. Kevarian was driving
Tara is Skeptical

Rock on.

I know, I may be the last person in fandom to read this book, and after winning the Arthur C. Clarke award, garnering rave reviews, and essentially founding the steampunk genre, it doesn’t need any help from me.

But I’m not here to talk about the characters, most of whom are just as honorable and twisted as real-life people, nor about the language, which is gorgeous and depraved, though my editor brain, honed from obsessive rereads of Three Parts Dead over the last few months, occasionally catches Mieville reusing words he really should not reuse (febrile, putrefying). I’m here to tell a story:

Yesterday as I walked to work I read a section of the book that features a horrible insect monster. This is not a spoiler, as within the first five or six pages it becomes clear that horrible monsters of some sort, probably insectile, are an inevitable consequence of Mieville’s world.

As I read, I think to myself: “You know, this would be really scary if I were reading it at night; as it is, it’s great, honest fun and not particularly scary at all.”

At that moment, the wind decided to blow a plastic candy wrapper over the pebbly sidewalk at my feet, producing a sound not unlike giant insect legs tickling over a wooden floor. I first saw the wrapper in question from an unusual vantage point, because upon hearing the strange sound I had jumped about a foot and a half straight up in the air out of abject monkey-brain terror.

So much for broad daylight, I suppose.

Recently I picked up Still Life with Crows, a thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, who also wrote the fun Relic and Cabinet of Curiosities and who, really, need no linkage from me. The writing is brisk and doesn’t get in your way unless you pay close attention to it (they could stand to rein in their use of semicolons a touch, for example), the characters are vivid, the mystery fast-paced, and the monster chilling. Good, clean fun (I’m uncomfortable with the word “escapist” for a variety of reasons, but that’s a post for another day). If you’re a thriller reader and you like glacier-cool protagonists, law enforcement politics, and a bit of the old ultra-violence, you’ll like these books — start with Relic if you really want the aggregate experience.

I was in an elevator the other day, and a coworker asked me what I was reading. I described the book and mentioned that I was reading it because it’s fun, and because I like writing books that have monsters in them and it’s always good to see what works. I got the considering “Are you sure you shouldn’t be reading Jane Austen” eye (I’ve read Austen, thank you, she’s great and does not require the addition of monsters in the slightest, however she’s not an author who fits all of my seasons) and shrugged it off.

A moment later, a squat, balding, older man sharing the elevator with us turned around to me and said, “Good for you. A lot of people out there like to read those kind of books better than ones without monsters in them.” The elevator dinged for his floor, and he left.

In Mahayana Buddhism we encounter the concept of the Bodhisattva: an enlightened being who has pledged not to enter Nirvana until she has enlightened all other sentient beings and brought them to Nirvana before her. (I like the image of a bunch of Boddhisattvas hanging around near the end of the kalpa, like the proverbial southern gentlemen at the narrow door: “You go first!” “No, I insist.”)

Bodhisattvas don’t go around announcing themselves: they appear, provide their momentary assistance, and leave. Anyone can be ridden by a Bodhisattva, any action or thing can be their tool. Every once in a while, I start wondering about the inherent virtue of the type of writing I do. When I fall into this kind of trap, it’s a true joy to have a bodhisattva drop in, give me a kick in the pants, and leave me to get back to work.

So, thank you Monster Bodhisattva! I’ll return the favor sometime.

I’ve been desperately editing Three Parts Dead for the last several weeks, so there hasn’t been much to report on the writing front, but I feel a need to give a shout-out to Boris Akunin’s Sister Pelagia mysteries (as if the internationally bestselling author needs my help).

I’ve read the first two books of the trilogy: Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, and Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk. In these books, Akunin deliberately leaves behind the globetrotting 19th century adventurism of his Fandorin series to focus on the rural Russian precinct of Zavolzhk (sp?), ruled over in name by a pleasant provincial governor, but in truth by the formidable and intelligent Bishop Mitrofanii. The ostensible main character is the young nun Pelagia, a “ginger haired beauty” and noble Moscow widow who took the cowl after an unspecified tragedy.

From that description, you’re probably expecting these books to be traditional clue-hunting mysteries after the Poirot model. That’s not quite accurate, though they use so many traditional mystery tropes that they draw frequent comparisons to Agatha Christie and Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. The biggest departure from mystery tradition is the degree to which Pelagia, the main “sleuth,” is a part of the world she inhabits: she has friends, firm allegiances, and a great deal of faith. Detectives frequently appear as outsiders in mystery fiction, because the detective’s place is similar to the writer’s: both investigate a chaotic tangle of motives, passion, and temptation, trying to order everything into a coherent story. The rationalist Holmes and the roughed-up paladin Sam Spade fit into this model, as does Akunin’s other main character Erast Fandorin. This basic tension between the detective/writer and the observed society is the force behind Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, though don’t take that as an endorsement of the New York Trilogy from me — but that’s a rant for another time.

Pelagia, by contrast, is tied to the Russian society she examines by the constraints that society places on her as a nun and as a woman. Her skillful navigation of that society, in addition to (and occasionally rather than) her analysis of it, is a key to solving the mysteries she confronts. In some ways, the entire second novel is about the contrast between the purely analytical approach and the societal approach… but I can’t say much more without transgressing on spoiler territory.

My point is, anyway, if you’re looking for an interesting spin on mysteries, try these. They’re really fascinating.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been working on a thorough edit of Three Parts Dead. This is part of August Editing Month; I’ve promised myself that in the month of August I’m not going to start work on another long project, and am instead going to polish the two novels I’ve finished in the last year until the Mass government can buy them for use as lighthouses.

This means slow passes through the story, re-writing of dialogue, and paying very close attention to language. A rule-of-thumb size for a novel manuscript is 100,000 words, and when writing that many words, as when running a marathon, you’re going to develop some distinctive tics in your style.

Good distance runners work the kinks out of their stride if they want to avoid hurting themselves; same with good writers. Taking this to heart, I’m assembling a list of words, phrases, and techniques I’m not allowed to play with any more (at least not until I play with some of my other toys more). Here’s what I have so far:

Immense
Just (the adverb)
for a moment
at last
vast
interrupted dialogue (”But Susan, haven’t you considered-” “There’s no time for that now!” It’s a fine effect but I use it too much.)

What about the rest of you out there? Anyone else have these in their writing?

This is not an entry about the Harry Potter movie, which was fun.  It’s an entry about the trailer for the new Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie beforehand.

To clarify: I’m a die-hard Holmes fan. I’ve read Holmes stories since I was a tiny kid; every time I pass a collection of Holmes in the bookstore I am overcome by deep, profound yearning.  I can recite many of the stories, turn-for-turn, from memory.  My first exposure to Japanese animation was Miyazaki’s Sherlock Hound, and one of the two episodes of The Real Ghostbusters I remember is the one where Sherlock Holmes and Watson get made real by the sheer force of belief.

Our culture embraces Holmes as the Victorian Batman.  Practically infallible (except for the Irene Adler affair), best at everything.  For which they’re hardly to be blamed; Doyle himself slowly drifted away from the first chapter of The Sign of the Four, in which he lays out very clearly the limits of Holmes’ knowledge.  It’s gotten to the point where Alan Moore, in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, makes a decided point of distancing the “Great Detective” from the action — he becomes a superhuman figure, and tacitly in the midst of every battle we can hear the beset members of the League thinking: this wouldn’t be a problem if only the Great Detective were still around.

So, set that against the Robert Downey Jr. version, which plays Holmes as, to judge from the trailer, a drug-addled, brilliant action detective pressing the bounds of Victorian society while prim, mannered Watson trundles grumpily alongside.

I love it.

The movie might be crap, but they’ve performed a brilliant trick by seizing one of the most subtle aspects of the books: we see everything through Watson’s perspective.  Watson clearly is a prim, proper Victorian army doctor; through him we see Holmes as a brilliant, mannered outsider.  But what do we *know* about Holmes?

He’s a workaholic, a cocaine addict, a  master of boxing, the singlestick (beating people up with a stick) and Bartitsu (a form of jujitsu taught in Victorian London), an occasional cross-dresser and sometime opium smoker, a man with a set of talents that verge on the criminal and a host of shady contacts throughout London, who is equally at home in an opium den as in the Belgian ambassador’s residence.  He’s possessed of immense physical strength (capable of bending a poker back into shape, which is a LOT harder than bending it out of shape in the first place) and speed (outrunning a bevy of younger men with apparent ease in Hound of the Baskervilles).  He plays something that can best be described as jazz fiddle, which Watson regards as incoherent noise.

Imagine, for a moment, that Watson, not Holmes, is the consummately prim one (as is, in fact, also supported by the stories - Watson wouldn’t be caught dead masquerading as a beggar or what have you).  He’s faced with a man who flies in the face of Victorian morals with alarming ferocity, yet whom he deeply respects for his brilliance.  What is poor James Watson do, then, when he tries to record his friend’s adventures?  He writes them faithfully, and skirts the truth in presenting Holmes as a Victorian paragon who just happens to possess a host of questionable skills.

Come to think of it, this also explains why Holmes is so derisive of Watson’s reporting of his accomplishments.

Anyway, I’m not saying that this is the truth of Holmes. It is, however, an interesting reading of Holmes, and a refreshing shift from classic portrayals of the infallible, unflappable Detective. I might need to play with this idea some more in the future.

In the meantime, go hunt down a copy of Young Sherlock Holmes and watch it. You’ve almost certainly earned it for something you’ve done today.

It’s a rainy day outside and my mind has been all over the place, but mostly in Alt Coulumb, the city setting for my novel Three Parts Dead.

In Three Parts Dead, we enter a fantastic world a hundred years after human magicians (called Craftsmen) first discovered how to manipulate the same powers as the immortal gods. An immense war ensued, many Gods and Craftsmen perished, and now, fifty years after the ensuing truce, the two halves of the world, faithful and godless, live in varying degrees of uneasy peace with one another.

That is, until a young monk in Alt Coulumb, the steam-powered city of one of the greatest remaining gods, begins his nightly devotions to discover something is horribly wrong. And Tara Abernathy, an associate Craftswoman in the nefarious firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, will be hired to put it right…

Three Parts Dead is a steampunk-urban fantasy-legal thriller with some religion thrown in; I’m very excited about it and I hope you loyal readers out there in the interland will enjoy it too.