Mostly about Stephen King

I finished reading The Gunslinger today, and that was interesting.  It certainly felt more like the beginning of something (which it is) than a complete story in itself (which it isn't).  Throughout, I couldn't shake the unpleasant sense that I hadn't stopped reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.  Not that Covenant was bad, mind you--I will probably read the Second Chronicles in the foreseeable future.  But I'd been reading that trilogy since November, and what I really need right now is a story with a protagonist who isn't as cynical as an old strip mine.  Just for a little while.  I spent most of today's reading on Tolkein's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is another thing entirely.

As is increasingly my habit, when I got to the end of The Gunslinger, I read the afterword, in which Stephen King describes the process of writing that story.  I like reading about the processes of successful writers, and in this particular case King (of 20+ years ago, not of today) said a few things that got my attention.

The first thing was (of the Dark Tower series), "At the speed which the work entire has progressed so far, I would have to live approximately 300 years to complete the tale of the tower."  My initial reaction to that was a quiet, visceral, "I hear you brother."  Of course Stephen King is not remotely my brother, or if he is, he's the sort of older brother who goes ahead of you in life making sure that whatever you do afterward is disappointing by comparison.  In the 12 years it took him to finish The Gunslinger, he wrote Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand... so it's not really the same thing.  Hey, thanks Stephen King.  You couldn't have sucked a little more?

A minor facet of the changing nature of the writing life turned up when he talked about the reams and reams of blank paper that writers had to keep around their house.  This, I suppose, has been the case since before the typewriter, and I just never thought of it.  I was pretty little when I first encountered Microsoft Works, and writing to me has always been a rather abstracted activity, only occasionally producing anything physical.  I mean, here I am writing right now, and I actually don't know how much of a page I've written so far.  When you read this, there won't be any paper, because it's written on the Internet, which doesn't even make sense.

He made a comment about the hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers out there, compared to the hundreds who make it.  I imagine the math there has only gotten worse in the intervening two decades.  Whatever.  Screw math.  I was an English major.

He also said one thing that I remember hearing before, when a fellow student was sharing an excerpt from this afterword with my senior writing seminar.  "Outlines," he says, parenthetically, "are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."  I remember a dismayed, indignant groan rippling across the classroom at those words.  Hearing them again, I am certainly tempted to say that Mr. King was overgeneralizing.  At least 50% of my current readership (I can calculate these statistics with frightening precision, if not accuracy) consists of talented writers who outline extensively.  Yet I think I see where he's coming from.  I, at least, don't outline if I can help it, except in the broadest possible sense.  For me, a lot of the pleasure of writing comes from finding out what happens as I write it.  If I work that out in too much detail ahead of time, I put myself in danger of two things happening: first, I already know what's going to happen, and so all my forward impetus is spent; second, if I do get myself to write, what I work out in the actual writing will probably diverge from what I worked out in the abstract.  With so many more words, you never know what might happen.  And that's how it is for me.

I was inconvenienced by Comcast today, because their billing department is still sending me emails (although not billing me, as it turns out) even though I've canceled my service with them.  I spent some time this morning feeling indignant that they could waste my time so easily--with such petty magics as incompetence, or middling malfeasance, or just poor communication (as it turns out), could make time in my day disappear.  And on a day, no less, when I had more drive to write than I have in a long time.  Someday, I thought to myself, someday I'll be able to get up in the morning and write until I feel like stopping, instead of trying to get to work the first thing after work.  Luckily, today I actually did get some writing done, and not just the writing you're reading right now.  Hengist is progressing again, after a long time in the post NaNoWriMo sand trap.

It just occurred to me that today is Martin Luther King Day, and I just spent almost this whole post talking about Stephen King.  That's unintentional, and weird.

Post-Christmast Post

Still winding down from a long, eventful Christmas vacation.  The blizzard which hit the east coast was impressive, and nixed plans for Broadway.  My own little neighborhood was plowed out fairly promptly, which made me glad I wasn't still in Seattle (assuming the same snow, of course).

There has been plenty of Christmas media, even if Phantom of the Opera wasn't in the cards.  From Girlfriend, I acquired Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Of this I have read a bit, but not gotten into the meat of it.  It's on the stack.  As are several books by Connie Willis, author of the amazing Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I actually got for my birthday.  But all this goes on the same docket.

Also received Machine of Death, a collection of short stories with several interesting things about it.  First is that it is largely the product of the webcomic community, specifically the axis of Ryan North-David Malki! et al.  Driven to vanity-publishing by the collective obscurity of their contributors, they decided to ask as many people as possible to buy the book the same day, to see how high they could get on Amazon's bestseller list.  It turned out that they hit #1, and stayed there for more than a day.  After that, naturally, publishers took notice.

The names I recognize from this endeavor are all very clever people, and I expect to enjoy what they've written.  Moreover, stories of obscure authors suddenly selling large numbers of books warm the gelid cockles of my heart.

Speaking of "gelid" (and also, "lambent" and "incondign"), I finished The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever the other day.  While I enjoyed it, I'm left with the odd sense that I have very little to compare it to, other than The Lord of the Rings, which isn't really fair.  Apparently I just haven't read much epic fantasy.  This dismays me somewhat, but I don't know how or how vigorously I should set about rectifying it.  Lately I began to wonder if there is a convenient place to jump into The Wheel of Time rather than starting at the very beginning.

My general exposure to the world of speculative fiction should be improved by my new subscription to the appropriately-named Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Other media includes Halo: Reach.  I haven't played very far into it but I've always appreciated Bungie's approach to storytelling, getting interesting stories told without losing sight of the peculiarities of their medium.  If anything I'm a little disappointed by what looks like a shift in this game toward longer cut scenes and more breaks in the action to focus on characterization.  But at this early point I will give them props for one thing: Reach is the only game I can think of that makes dramatic irony a cornerstone of its feel.  Specifically, in the first 15 seconds or so of the game its established that your character dies at the end.  Surely this has been done before, but I can't remember it.