Literary taste

Every so often a document comes past my inbox listing responses by famous people to the question: Why did the chicken cross the road? You've probably seen it. (The list, not my inbox.)

For example, in response to, Why did the chicken cross the road?

Ernest Hemmingway says: To die. In the rain.

There is no response (that I've found) for the author Saul Bellow. If there were, I imagine it might go something like:

I am a Leghorn, Worcester born--Worcester, that somber city--and go at things, such as this tar-stain black of tarmac, as I have taught myself, free-style, one leg after the other, high on drumstick, and will make the record my own way: first to scratch, first to worm; sometimes an innocent scratch, sometimes a not so innocent. But a chicken's character is her fate, says old man Sanders… etc. etc.

You couldn't find a starker contrast of language use. Words for Hemmingway are pebbles in his hand, the smaller the better; words for Bellow are liquid, and each novel an ocean.

Very different. But you know what? Both authors are represented in Time's Best 100 Novels (1923-2005).

PS: Hemmingway worked hard to achieve his pared down style. In this he was helped by his wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, who, upon the request of her husband, packed all of his papers--everything she could find, including carbon copies--into a suitcase, which promptly disappeared from the station platform while Hadley was purchasing a bottle of Evian for the trip.

And this was before any of Hemmingway's fiction had been published.

I have a theory that it was Mrs. Bellow that mistakenly took the Hemmingway suitcase.

What I wanted to name this blog

Dweoming Well was not the first choice for my book imprint or blog name. My first choice was some version of Green Sun. But that was nixed by an Israeli one-man band that does “relaxing chillout music”. (If I were a superhero, I would make my arch nemesis an Israeli one-man band, and my sole weakness relaxing chillout music.)

Why Green Sun? If you're a Tolkien fan, you may already know.

The term “green sun” represents a very powerful idea. An idea expressed by a term Tolkien coined: sub-creation. The rest of us know it simply as fiction. But big fiction. Universe-conjuring fiction.

Here is Tolkien in his essay On Fairy Stories defending fantasy from the charge of childish escapism:

“The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things ..., but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. … We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”

Then the idea that captured me:

“Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun.”

Green is a concept drawn from the real world. So too is Sun. But put them together and you have the seed of an entire universe distinct from ours--a universe where the laws of physics (if there be any) cause star-fire to flame green, and… Cool, huh?

He goes on to say that fantasy renews us, as it tends to look again with fresh eyes at the real. That we should “meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.”

So what on earth is a Dweoming Well? I'll get to that.

Free Matter

Dark Matter is free today and tomorrow.

We're off to see The Hobbit in the morning. If we can find the tickets.

Merry Christmas :-)

Hard-boiled Beta

I'm halfway through editing the Beta draft of my next novel, (tentatively) titled: Strawman Made Steel.

It is hard-boiled detective fiction, with a twist. My wife tells me "hard-boiled" puts her in mind of Daffy Duck―needless to say, not the image I was going for. It does concern me that, for many of us, our strongest exposure to the hard-boiled genre is through spoof. It's a pity, because the genre's founding works are marvellous―just pick up and read anything by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.

In his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler takes his English contemporaries to task for dull writing, unrealistic characters and plot. For Chandler, the world of the hard-boiled detective―the world, in fact―is messy and mean, and down its streets "a man must go who himself is not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." He also defends the hard-boiled genre against Dorothy Sayer's charge that it could never "attain the loftiest level of literary achievement," but he could just as well have pointed to his novels. Do yourself a favour and buy a collection, e.g., "The Big Sleep and Other Novels"

But here's the question: when you hear the term hard-boiled, what springs to mind? Humphrey Bogart, Daffy Duck ... or breakfast?

The making of a Grammar Proctologist

We didn't do grammar in school. Or rather, in my Australian school years--and no, kids, they weren't 'the olden days' (HT: Jeff Bilman)--we learnt grammar by osmosis. We were exposed to texts, and expected to absorb the rules underlying their construction.

Not that my teachers didn't define some parts of speech. They did. For example, we learnt:

• A noun is a thing. (To which I thought, Great. That narrows it down.)
• A verb is a doing word. (What exactly is must doing?)
• An adjective is a describing word. (And all the other words aren't?)

Beyond that we were expected to intuit grammar. Phrases either sounded right or wrong-ish. Which is not very helpful when it comes to writing. It's very hard to interrogate an intuition about a passage you've written, locate the problem, and find a solution.

We've all heard of Grammar Nazis. The Grammar Nazi wants to own your text. Possibly to kill it. We need Grammar Proctologists. The Grammar Proctologist is interested in exploration, diagnosis, and longevity.

GP posts will chart my journey to better understand--and so better wield--the tools in the workshed of writing.

So next time a Grammar Nazi tells you your modal verb has illegally conjugated with a gerund, call the Grammar Proctologist.

Dark Matter

My debut novel, Dark Matter, is now available in the Kindle store here.

Picking two genres from the eStore's list was not easy. If you do give it a read, let me know where you think it sits in genre-space.

So what's the book about? I'll leave you with a discarded―and somewhat cheeky―blurb:

All Rasputin T. Lowdermilk wants is a beautiful suicide. What he gets is a head injury and a mission to save the world. 

Salvation hinges on the answer to a simple question: what links a dead girl, an awakened Nazi, and an ancient sect? Rasputin knows the answer. It lies in his mind. But his mind is no longer his alone. 

And then there is the small problem of the gifted killer who wants him dead. To the killer, Rasputin is one loose end among many dating from the death throes of World War II, and to tie him off he'll travel half-way round the world. Oh, and this killer wants to save the world, too, but let's not argue about semantics. 

Dark Matter is a cerebral mystery that plays fair--and dares you to solve it.

1.5 Billion

That's about the number of heart beats an average mammal gets. And if you're wondering why I'm offering you this pithy factoid instead of something writing-related, it's because I'm playing catch-up on my social media.

BTW ― how's your heart rate?