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Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

Teresa Frohock on Miserere, Religion, and “Woerld”-Building

Teresa Frohock’s first novel, Miserere, was released in late June, and to celebrate, she’s touring the blogosphere, answering questions about the novel, her process, and her world.  Miserere’s concept intrigued me because of the way it combines real religions with a fantastic environment–the garrison universe of Woerld, where chosen warriors from many faiths stand against the encroaching powers of darkness.

I come at religion in my work from a different angle, but as a lover of comparative myth and a child of two divinity school graduates, I couldn’t resist asking:

“How did Woerld, and your fantastical characters and creations, end up anchored in real traditions?  When writing, did you ever find yourself torn between the internal logic of your story world and that of the traditions and religions featured in it?”

Here’s Teresa’s answer:

Hey, Max, I’m really glad someone finally asked that.

It really didn’t start that way. It was a long, slow process based on logistics and the butterfly effect, I’m afraid.

Originally, I thought the Katharoi would be like time-traveling wardens to bring escaped demons back to Hell. Then I realized they wouldn’t just be running willy-nilly all over the place, there would have to be some sort of structure to the whole affair. So I created the bastions.

The bastions started out as universities, military academies, but then I realized the different groups would maintain the rites and ceremonies unique to each religion. There was no way to combine them all and have something recognizable.

And I had another reason: I think each religion has something very unique and beautiful to offer its adherents, and to merge them all into one giant religion would lose those distinctive qualities. So I chose to express their commonalities by showing their differences.

Writing Miserere made me realize how little I knew about Christianity. I mean, I knew the basics, but not the history of Christianity, the angelology, the demonology, or Gnostic Christianity and how it all fit together. It was like a whole new world had been opened up to me.

As I researched, I realized there was just a goldmine of legends that never made it into the Bible in addition to recently translated ancient texts on heaven and hell that rendered worlds beyond our imagining. This material was as vibrant as Celtic, Hindu, and Buddhist themes.

As to your second question, I did find myself torn many times. I want to emphasize that Woerld is not a utopian society at all. The Seraphs (or leaders) of the various bastions maintain a constant balancing act between the enduring interests of their doctrines and their need to hold back the Fallen. The bastions can (and will in future novels) experience some of the same frictions they experience in our society. It is inevitable.

No, they’re not all going to get along all the time. I want to keep it real.

However, how the Seraphs and members overcome those differences is what separates Woerld from Earth. Without fundamentalists screaming, they listen to one another. They debate, but they do not argue. There is a great difference between the two, because debate, genuine debate requires that you listen to the other person’s point of view.

The difference between Woerld and Earth is that in Woerld, there are times they must agree to disagree and move on.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, we’re bludgeoning one another to death with doctrine and words.

And so it goes …

Read a summary of and excerpt from Teresa’s novel Miserere, and check out her book trailer, after the jump!

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Reports of my Disappearance

Well, they haven’t been exaggerated, exactly, as you can see by looking through the blog archive.  The last month was intense.  First, I moved, and encountered in the process the wonderful Russian saying: “To move house once is to survive four fires.”  Nothing will make you less attached to your material possessions than the prospect of putting them in boxes, carrying the boxes to another house, and then removing them from boxes.  The Buddha should have just recommended his disciples move until moving liberated them from things.  However!  My wife and I are now comfortably ensconced in our new apartment, and enjoying ourselves quite well, thank you.

Second, there’s very exciting news on the writing & other strangeness front.  Most of it I’ll share with you as matters develop and clarify; for the moment suffice it to say that I’ve taken a well-deserved hiatus from editing to start writing again.  In the last couple weeks, I’ve finished the next short story for my Ring of the Niebelung project (folk opera-cum-short story cycle collaboration with my friend Dan Jordan – Wagner’s rolling over in his grave somewhere), and began to build a world bible for a comic project that’s been on simmer for months now.  Feels great to break out the ol’ AlphaSmart and make some magic happen.  Once the correct muscles are limber, it’ll be time for another book.

Watch this space for more news as it comes!

Baccano! – or, Yay! There’s no Main Character!

I don’t watch TV much.  Never had cable or TV reception in my house, so I never got in the habit.

Anime was the one exception for a while – Bastard! hooked me, Cowboy Bebop reeled me in, and Kenshin landed me.  And, of course, I watched Evangelion and felt like Anno had written me a personal letter.

(That last sentence gave you the wrong impression about me, so let me explain: that sense you get, watching Eva, like you want to shake Shinji until he feels better?  That’s the right sense.  He’s deeply depressed for most of the show, and the story tells of his, and everyone else’s, struggle against not only loneliness but the fear of loneliness, the desperate fight to be your own person without cutting yourself off from the universe.  Shinji’s a boy with serious problems, surrounded by people who want to help – but have serious problems of their own.  Eva is a realistic look at the dark, scary sides of adolescence, and both endings are brilliant in their own crazy way.   So there.)

Anyway, after college I fell a bit out of love with anime, largely because I was getting tired of the Main Character.  I watched a lot of shonen stuff – boy’s stories – and man, some days it seems like you can’t throw a shoe in anime without four plucky young protagonists running up to challenge you to a shoe throwing duel, to prove that they’re THE GREATEST SHOE THROWER IN THE WHOLE WOOORLD!

It gets old.

I stumbled into Baccano! via the wonderful time-sink that is TV Tropes – Gangsters? Anime? New York City? Broken chronology?  Intersecting narratives?  Yes please.  Six episodes in, I’m a bit infatuated.

Why?  Well, all of the above – plus, there’s no Main Character.  The plot’s shifting between 6 or 7 groups of characters, each with their own (sometimes weird) moral universe.  Even the best are pretty flawed (‘cept for maybe Firo), but, thank the Maker, nobody’s running around trying to be the Best Gangster in All History!!1one.

Except for Ladd Russo, and he’s a mass-murdering lunatic.

In fact, the first six or seven episodes are a sort of commentary on Generic Anime Plotting.  The series has a frame narrative in which an information broker and his junior assistant are chatting about how to tell the story of these connected events – and they spend half of the first episode arguing about who the main character might be without reaching a conclusion.  Everyone is going about their own story, and the stories intersect, sometimes chaotically – at one point three different people try to hijack the same train! – and the consequences are fascinating, weird, and exciting to watch.

Sort of like real life, only with gangsters, immortal alchemists, demons(?), death cultists, spy-reporters, and murdering lunatics.

So, if you’re at all like me and a bit tired of the nice kid trying to be the Best Sumo Sushi Master In The World, check out Baccano!

Just be ready for the blood, because there’s a lot of it.

Severe Tire Damage

I go through life with tunnel vision.  I focus on tasks, processes, steps.  Sometimes this helps: if I’m writing a story, or editing a chapter of a book, I keep pressing keys and fiddling with sentences until I’m done.  Sometimes it doesn’t help: if I’m walking to the coffee shop, I move with purpose.  I have a destination, after all.  I need to get where I am going.  Even if nothing’s waiting for me there but a queue and a cappucino.

One of the many reasons I love my wife is that she forces me to look outside the tunnel walls.  She points out flowers, trees, dogs, particular formations of light, flags hanging from third-floor windows.  She reminds me that the world exists, that it’s wonderful, and that my tasks (especially the silly ones like walking to the coffee shop) don’t make any sense if I can’t appreciate the universe which is their context.

A couple weeks ago I put on Severe Tire Damage by They Might Be Giants while editing.  Generally, I listen to Severe Tire Damage when I’m doing something else, because I want to hear Doctor Worm, Anna Ng, and Blue Canary and the rest of the album is okay, I suppose.  Halfway through one of the tracks to which I’d never paid much attention, the door to my writing closet opened, and she came in, singing:

“Why did they send her

Over anyone else

How should I react?

These things happen to other people-

They don’t happen at all, in fact.”

I’d listened to She’s an Angel before, but never heard it.  But as she sang the song, the walls fell, and I had this minor-league epiphany – no Siddhartha-under-the-Bodhi-tree moment, but a burst of plain, quotidian wonder.  And I fell in love a little – with my wife, of course, I’m always doing that, but with the song, too.  After the song ended, she returned to studying for her exams, and I to my work – but I heard that song, and then, I heard the rest of the album.  It’s been the soundtrack to my last couple weeks.

Happy Friday.  If you’re anything like me, try to look outside your walls today – or find someone who can help.

Zombie Language

From 9 to 6, I stand guard against zombie language.

I’m a writer, and I spend part of my day in an office.  My coworkers are great, and my job lets me study cool new technology and write about it.  However, some aspects of the business world are less pleasant – mostly, zombie language.

Some context – a “dead metaphor” is a metaphor used so often that all its original creative value has been squeezed away.  Our language is full of metaphors dead so long they might as well be fossilized: “windfall,” “branch of government,” and “run for office” are good examples courtesy of Wikipedia.  Nobody who says they’re running for president next year actually intends to spend the next year running.

Business loves dead metaphors.  Worse, it loves undead metaphors – metaphors that don’t quite work, word-patterns that aren’t dead yet, yet are used such disregard to their original meaning that they might as well be dead.

“I’m going to reach out to her, so we can be sure to loop her in on this issue.  Marketing is certainly in her wheelhouse.  She’ll be able to add a lot of value as we dialogue.”

Does this make you cringe?  It should.  If not, check yourself for infection!  This is the real danger of zombie language: once you’re exposed, you can find yourself speaking it without realizing what you’re doing.

As a guy who likes his technology and his nifty words, far be it from me to decry a good piece of jargon.  But when a lawyer talks about “easement” or “consideration,” she uses those words to describe concepts that cannot be expressed in less than a paragraph by a layman, to a layman.  By contrast, the example above can be rendered just as well in plain English:

“I’m going to call her, because we need to talk to her about this.  She’s good at marketing.  She’ll be able to add a lot to our conversation.”

Zombie language thrives in sales pitches and blog posts, on company websites, and in the mouths of all sorts of business folks.  It gets in the way of real communication, and if you don’t watch out, it might be coming for you next.

Of course, there are advantages to living under constant threat.  I’ve become more watchful of my own language, and my respect has grown for those who rise in the realms of business, politics, and academia without losing their ability to use a fresh image to present an idea, rather than building their arguments with the same tired metaphorical planks.

Still, the battle continues.

Interview Live at Operation Awesome

The wonderful folks at Operation Awesome interviewed me on Friday about agent-hunting, books, and the inspiration for them.  I actually had an answer for the “Where did you get the idea” question, which is a rarity for me as well as for the question at large.

Also, they asked me which god I thought my agent most closely resembled, which made me smile.

If you’re interested in the devious and weird way my mind works, check the interview out here: http://operationawesome6.blogspot.com/2011/04/amazing-max-gladstone-mystery-agent.html

Noir That Feels Like Noir

Urban fantasy as a genre has a lot of features I’ve loved throughout my reading life: a modern sensibility, elements of the fantastic and surreal, hidden worlds, magicians, and vampires.  The first book I remember writing, on a battered suitcase typewriter at age six, was an horror “novel” of about twenty pages that I later illustrated in colored pencil, about a detective named Charles Bulldog (yeah, I know – always me with the funny names) who discovers that his neighbor is Count Dracula.  Of course, Charles discovers in the process that he is a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing.  Triumphant showdowns occur.

I wrote a sequel.

Anyway, growing up, I remained in love with all the old Hammer Horror rogue’s gallery: Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster.  They were creepy, compelling, disgusting, charismatic, tragic, evil, redeemed.  At the same time, I developed an enduring respect for the signs and symbols of noir: the cigarette, the fedora, the smoking jacket, the exhausted man of morals in a world that’s forgotten them – or perhaps never cared in the first place.

There’s an often-overlooked element of the fantastic in Raymond Chandler’s world, or perhaps I should say an element of the imaginative: Philip Marlowe’s imagination is powerful enough not only to construct reality from a scattering of clues, but to construct over the top of this reality a moral vision, in which human actors present themselves to us as mortal, imperfect signs of something greater than themselves.

The image of the knight in The Big Sleep is an easy clue to this other, fantastical level of reality.  If Marlowe’s the knight, then the other people around him are queens, pawns, bishops, kings, rooks.  But Marlowe’s LA isn’t a chess board, not really, and its people are more, and less, than archetypes.  The archetypes press against the characters, distorting them or ennobling them as they move through the plot.  This provides another layer to reality, subtler but no less extant than the shadow world that overlays the mundane in UF settings.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, the symbols of good noir point to something, like the symbols of good fantasy.  (I don’t mean that there’s a 1-to-1 correspondence; in fact there probably shouldn’t be, but that’s a question for another time.)  The thing is, urban fantasy that embraces noir as a point of reference sometimes forgets that the symbols should point to something: the divide between rich and poor in society, sexual dynamics, subterfuge, criminality, order and the rebellion against order, whatever works.  A PI should be more than just a guy in a cool hat.

Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim hit me like a breath of fresh air for this reason.  The pieces are all there: the dirt, the crime, the conflicts with a ‘respectable’ society that really isn’t, the guns, the women, the magic.  Stark, the book’s main character, feels like John Constantine if John Constantine were based on a scarred, battle-hardened James Dean, rather than on Sting.  Magic, in this novel, stands as a referent for power, and like any other kind of power it’s fickle and demanding, possessing as often as it’s possessed.  Kadrey nails the real-life absurdities, the warped class consciousness, and the ugliness that make the genre work.

This isn’t a perfect book, and it might well be too bloody or gross or weird for some.  But it’s great to read a fantasy noir novel that takes both the fantasy and the noir bit seriously.

American Fantasy and The Half-Made World

I’m grooving on Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World – grooving is absolutely the correct word.  This is the closest thing I’ve found yet to my vision of authentic American high fantasy.  Gilman takes as his point of reference not 14th century hierarchical societies, but cowboys, Indians, and the railroad.  It’s not “Weird West,” because the world is not our own; the signs and signifiers bear as much relationship to those of the mid-19th century west as the Rohirrim and the Dunedain bear to actual medieval European forces, and as such, the book is both an excellent story and a crowbar for breaking open the shells of myth we’ve built around these signs.  Self-mythologizing, and self-deception, are all through this book, but at the same time, these aren’t uniformly negative forces.  Heroes can be evil; righteous men can be stultifying; enlightened psychologists can be drug addicts.  This doesn’t change the fact that they are, at least on occasion, heroic, righteous, and enlightened.

My favorite small touch here is the religion called the “Smilers,” a Quaker-ish faith with no content other than well-intentioned frontier optimism.  No mystical content, just the vague sense that if you keep smiling, and working hard, things will always come out all right for you.  The story drives home the extent to which, while these are all fine things to think, they aren’t quite enough.

I have no idea how things are going to end (there are 100 pages left), but for now, I’m loving this book.

Flying

Nothing convinces me that I live in a fantasy setting quite so much as the fact that I can wave a piece of plastic at a glowing pane of glass and then, a week later, be flown from one side of the country to the other in the belly of a great metal bird.

Layering Stories

I’m re-reading The Name of the Wind, by Pat Rothfuss, and having a good time.  Much of the stuff here I’ve seen before – the fantasy veteran, the hypercompetent protagonist, the ancient myths coming back to haunt the present, the [SPOILER Class=”minor”] young hero’s family slaughtered by the arch-villain at the end of Act I [/SPOILER] – but Rothfuss presents his story with skill, the writing’s good, the monomyth is a monomyth for a reason, and as tvtropes reminds us: Tropes are Tools.

On my last read-through, I was most impressed by the use of comparative mythology to drive the plot.  The seven villains who comprise the Chandrian, a menacing and sinister group that looms over the life of our young hero, Kvothe, are ancient and mysterious.  Nobody knows much about them: whether they are or ever were human, whether they work together or separately, what powers they command, what signs tell of their presence, and so forth.  Kvothe hears many stories about the nature of supernatural evil in his world, some of which seem more relevant to his situation, and some less.

However, unlike some epic fantasies I could name, all myths in Name of the Wind aren’t true.  They conflict, clash, and color one another.  By squinting, you can see how religious teachings in this world correspond with older  stories about the origins of the Chandrian.  By comparing the stories and identifying patterns, the reader can creep toward an understanding of the true back story.

It’s a clever technique, and close to something Michael Swanwick does in Iron Dragon’s Daughter (about which I owe you a post-mortem post).  Jane, the main character of that book, lives in strange mechanized fairyland, and in her travels many of the denizens of this land try to explain their view of the world to her – discussing topics as disparate as social justice, science, gender relations, the origin of the universe, and the existence of God (or the Goddess, as the case may be).  In that book, I got the impression that by reading successive chapters I was peeling layers from an onion: eventually, after many tears, you get to the center, which is empty, and therefore infinite.  In Name of the Wind, the effect is more that of a Magic Eye painting: by placing myths and tales over one another, and squinting, a deeper picture emerges than if we were ever told the truth straight out.