Blog

Time for some medical stuff!

I’ve been…weird lately. I’ve been having some over-reactive crying jags to daily events, and some feelings of despondency. Many of you writers think, well, you’re trying to publish! What else is new?

Except, you might remember, I’m the OPTIMISTIC writer on your friends list. 😛 Because I’m proactive, I toodled off to the doctor to see why I was feeling trapped in my own emotions. AND we’ve decided one of two possible things are going on:

1. Thyroid issues.
2. Situational depression.

I’m putting the rest of this under a cut for those of you who don’t want to hear this stuff.

Continue reading “My Current Health Scenario”

Hmm. I think I may need to revise my GrapeMo goal. I had a very productive afternoon plotting my novel. I think this one is going to be a beach comber–instead of words flowing, I’m going to have to rake the sand several times and find the shells.

At any rate, I feel a little more comfortable. I’ve been having depression issues because of this and that, and this feels like the first writing thing that fits in a while. I guess I’ll let the novel direct me, rather than try to direct the novel.

How about you? Do your creative processes do what you say, or do you do what they say?

Catherine

First of all, to remind my fellow Wiscon readers that I will continue to watch in February for reading sign up, but we all have to sign up separately as part of our group.

Next, here’s this week’s installment of ribald Victorianism.

***

I promised a piece on Magical Realism and LA Story. Without further adieu…

I watched LA story when it came out in 1991. My reaction was a classic meh. I understood it a parody level, but I had yet to undergo my awakening as a magical realist. The things that happen to you as you get older…

I caught the last half of it on television very recently, and I was amazed at the simple uses of the every day as fantasy. The exaggerated extensions of LA life I appreciated the first time around, such as open season on the LA freeway, and the unavailable restaurant, but this time I was captivated by parking sign as savior, which is planted all the way through the film, from the first time our hero sees another man pulled over, bowed almost in prayer in front of one of the signs.

The kernel of magic that occurs in the movie is very credible. That certain things in life matter, that if you are in love, you can stop engines, make fog roll in, cause the forces of nature to give you a second chance. That there are forces in the universe that want you to succeed, to love, and to be loved, and counsel you in that direction.

To me, the extraordinary in the ordinary is what makes writing tick. That’s what I want to capture, and I gotta keep working toward that. I remember reading Little Women. Jo wrote adventure stories full of pirates and swooning heroes, but at a certain point her professor suggests she write about the ordinary. It is the best thing he could have said, as she integrates her love of the fantastic into the world around her. What is more magical than love and how humans love each other?

Steve Martin understands this in LA Story. The movie has the trappings of a farce, a parody, but underneath, if you look closely, you will find a mythic love story.

It goes without saying that I’m putting this on my favorites list, and I hope you will revisit it.

Herm… I didn’t write last night. I taught a seminar about English Language Acquisition for new instructors, and I went home to check student revisions. My life is REALLY glamorous sometimes. 🙂 I am going to go in search of hot beverages, and then I am coming back to try to get things right with Grape Mo, after I look at another student rough draft.

Catherine

And that’s the Amazon entry. Go, brave little novel, into the world.

Catherine

2,139 / 100,000 (2.1%)

The Knight’s Story then. Jut trying to lay some pipe.

I’d like to welcome John B. Rosenman at this stop on his blog tour. Welcome to the Tamago, John! Without further adieu, John’s piece on What and Why I Write.

***

WHAT AND WHY I WRITE . . . by John B. Rosenman

Greetings to the readers of this blog, and my warmest thanks to Catherine for hosting this post. I’m John Rosenman, and I’d like to tell you a little about myself as a writer.

Altogether, I’ve published about 350 short stories in places like Weird Tales, Whitley Strieber’s Aliens, Starshore, and the Hot Blood erotic horror series. I’ve also published eight books, six of which are novels, and one of which is a short story collection. Some of the novels, like Drollerie Press’s Alien Dreams, share a basic plot: a man travels to a distant world and has amazing adventures. Why do I keep returning to this story? Well, I grew up during the Golden Age of Science Fiction which stressed the mind-boggling, mind-stretching wonders of the universe and the extraterrestrial marvels of outer space. I read The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, saw SF thrillers like War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, and The Thing, and had my mind splendidly warped forever by their influence. (For more information, check my web site.)

A sense of wonder and infinite, even frightening possibilities—that’s important to me. I’ve always felt free to let my imagination soar as high as it can go, even if it means taking foolish chances and proposing ideas that some people might laugh at. So in Alien Dreams, my most cosmic novel, Captain Eric Latimore actually changes his species in order to save his crew and the woman he loves. He transforms into a giant, winged, angelic-looking creature and makes love for 10,000 subjective years to the aliens’ beautiful but deadly queen to seal the deal. Then he tearfully says goodbye to his Apache lover and leads the “Angels” across the galaxy—no, across the universe—to do battle with god, or the Gatekeeper who rules this universe. What happens if he wins? What happens if he loses? Well, if he loses, two people die, because he is actually not one person but two. Fact is, a brother shares his brain with him, and they directly experience each other’s thoughts. What happens if the brother disagrees with Latimore and wants to seize control? Ah, that’s another development, another terrible complication for our complex and courageous hero.

I like to think that I write “Wow,” post-Golden Age SF that takes risks and involves high, high concepts. But characters and characterization are important too, perhaps even more important, because the soul of life consists of people, people we know and people we can imagine, even if they sometimes happen to be horrifying aliens who look completely different from us.

I’d like to thank not only Deena Fisher of Drollerie Press for taking a chance on an experimental novel like Alien Dreams, but all the adventurous publishers and editors online that have opened their creative doors to authors like me and others who don’t write to a rigid, successful formula. So thanks go to the editors of Mundania Press who purchased Speaker of the Shakk and Beyond Those Distant Stars, with their frightening and beguiling aliens and their shape-changing, transformative heroes; to Abby Carmichael of Blade Publishing who accepted my most ambitious and experimental novel, A Senseless Act of Beauty, with its neo-African alien world and standalone stories within the larger framework; to Emma Porter of Lyrical Press, who gave the young hero in Dax Rigby, War Correspondent, a chance to live in several electronic formats despite explicit sexuality and unconventional religious concepts. Last, I’d like to express my appreciation to Lauren Gilbert and the folks of Eternal Press, who recently accepted my SF horror thriller, Here Be Dragons, which will be launched next week.

What am I working on now? Hey, I’m glad you asked. Dark Wizard is a novel of alien invasion that actually occurs right here on Earth, because I finally found a terrestrial city that in some ways is just as otherworldly as anything you can find on Altair-4. San Luis Obispo, CA offers Bubblegum Alley, whose walls are encrusted with decades of gum, and a hotel/restaurant which is a deliberate monument to kitsch and outlandish bad taste. And that’s just for starters.

You know, when I was a kid, I used to lie in bed in the dark and listen to the radio. The Shadow. Lights Out. Inner Sanctum. In some ways I’m still a kid lying there, listening to the words in the teeming dark and letting them take me wherever we both want to go.

Before I haul my cold-inflicted self off to be tortured by Russian grammar…

This weekend, look for Who I Am and Why I Write by fellow Drollerie author John B. Rosenman.

I will send off Substance to Amazon Breakthrough contest early Monday. If 10,000 entries are met before then, so be it.

There will be a piece on Magical Realism and L.A. Story very shortly.

I will be writing 1800 words a day on the Knights story of Gossamer and Veridian starting Sunday, with the express goal of having 100K at the end of March, so we can start chipping away everything that doesn’t look like Michelangelo’s David.

And that’s what’s up and coming. Now, that Russian…

Whacky writer research trip to do very soon: Decorah, Ia because it has the Vesterheim Museum, and I need loads more information on Norwegian culture and Decorah, since it’s the first scene of the new version of Gossamer and Veridian

Also lots of reading about trolls. I took some Germanic myth back in my undergraduate days, and all that time with the Aesir and the Jaetta just came in handy.

Gotta give those old Norwegians some cultural habits, and something to see.

Catherine

Meanwhile, on Earth 2…

Catherine Shaffer.

Kinda cool really…

Cath

ps I’m doing Grape Mo. I needed something goal driven to get me back on task, and to stop thinking about the Duster, which, by the way, was green.

The world of the author has many tightropes to walk, and a rope I’ve been seeing twinging and quivering above my safety net recently has been the idea of hyping yourself and your story. I am an intense, but low key kind of overachiever, and I’ve never been one for too much self-pimpage. Rather, I kind of tell you what’s going on, and then you know. I don’t decorate with too many exclamation marks or adjectives of incredulosity. I consider myself a student of the Kastensmidt, Hines, or Andrews school of promotion. Tell the people what’s going on. Once. Talk about your work if it’s relevant. Don’t look for opportunities to promote or schmooze needlessly. If you’re doing your job steadily, these opportunities will come to you.

And that seems to be the folks on my list. If you seem too over the top with hype, I sort of let you fade away.

***

That said, I’m also a writer who likes to meet new people, so occasionally I’ll take a gamble. I’ll friend someone I don’t know, or buy a book that is lesser known. Recently, I received a link from one of my new connections about how critics were raving about her website, and how I should check it out. Hmmmm….my information on this writer is that she is an unpublished and fairly unknown writer. Hypology has hit my email box.

Interesting also are books that are published by folks that have interesting recommendations from strange places. Often friends review the books. That’s cricket, using your connections, but you wonder about authenticity of feeling, quality, and such. And then, my favorite, the quote from a big author that is on a new author’s book. There is probably some genuineness of recommendation in that scenario, but you often wonder if that isn’t part of the job the big author does for the publisher, helping get the word out about the newbs.

***

With no reference to anyone, I began to think about what honest hype might look like. If you were to boil down the hype for new writers, both their own, and that blessed upon them by their contacts, of course, it wouldn’t create desire, but the world would be a very different place.

Instead of
“See what the critics are saying about my website!”
try
“I’ve had two people and some syncophants stop by. You should too.”

Continue reading “Hypology”