Newbie Writes a Novel

Fucking Blogger!

Another week-long lockout. Apparently, the service has updated; it now looks like Fisher Price's My First Blogger or some damn thing. I'll have to explore before I praise or complain any further; I did at least manage to paste in and post something that's needed to go up for a while.

Nonetheless, these interruptions are intolerable and I'm actively looking into other blog options, including just setting up my own bloody website.

If access lasts longer than three hours this time, I'll have another excerpt for you, too.

In Which The Author Shoots His Big Mouth Off On A Promised Topic: "Consolatory Fantasy"

Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote:

"Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being "consolatory" and "reassuring". Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted - foolish, soft, silly, childish - sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we've come by honestly?

"I wrote the reviewer and told him what I thought, and that I thought I had Tolkien to back me up. He wrote back nicely enough saying that of course he hadn't been thinking of the book as being written for children. Apparently it is permissible to reassure or console children, but not adults.

"Such an attitude seems to me to be based on a strange notion that the Common Reader is so happy, so foolishly confident, so stupidly trustful, that the Common Writer's whole duty is to convince him that life is hard and full of grief and that there is no consolation. Most adults I know already know that life is hard and full of grief; and they look for both confirmation of this knowledge, and consolation for it, in art."

*****

Now watch me gild the lily as I try to further enumerate the weaknesses of a position I (inelegantly) tag as "anti-consolationist," though it should be noted that in no real sense are its proponents truly anti-consolation. They vouch distaste only for "consolatory" literature that isn't consolatory to their own values, and apply other labels (such as the ever-popular "subversive") to politically acceptable flavors of consolation. Yet it is context alone that determines the subversive value of a work of literature.

Fallacy The First: I'm Subversive, You're Consolatory

At a Marxist commune, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle would be quite consolatory, and The Chronicles of Narnia would be profoundly subversive. Even the most self-critical and broad-minded of us kindles a certain warm fuzziness in the breast when he is told that his philosophy and/or his politics are "correct." To this end, even pessimistic and dystopian literature can be intensely consolatory in that it affirms certain values and suspicions. And if consolation itself isn't really the enemy (which it isn't), we're back to simple upjumped snobbery again: The things anti-consolationists like are bold and challenging, the things other people like are insipid and infantile.

There's nothing wrong with the expression of distaste for books one finds philosophically objectionable; I have no use for the so-called writing of people like Ann Coulter, for example. What I object to is the attempt to cloak simple (and essentially leftist*, in this particular field) snobbery in the mantle of a literary value judgment; those who are consoled by one sort of fiction are supposedly better adults than those consoled by another. Indeed, those who are consoled by the first sort of fiction aren't actually consoled at all, they're inevitably "challenged," their "boundaries stretched." It's only those poor sad twits reading the second sort of fiction that require "consolation."

"Neener neener, we're the cool kids and you're not," remains a deeply childish pronouncement no matter how much polysyllabic invective is squeezed out in its defense.

It isn't enough for anti-consolationsts to merely decry flat prose, shallow characters, ridiculous situations, poor psychology, lax worldbuilding, and cliched thinking. It isn't enough to simply enumerate the literary crimes of "consolatory" works, though the enumeration of such could be a full-time job for an entire office of sleepless crack addicts. No, political reasons must be manufactured for the condemnation of literary vices. Human nature being what it is, it's more satisfying to imagine that one's distaste for certain works stems from the moral deficiencies of their authors, rather than from the plainer fact that said authors are piss-poor crafters of prose, character, and narrative.

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "There are no such things as moral or immoral books. Books are well written, or badly written, and that is all." His pithy bon mot neatly encapsulates this aspect of my argument; that anti-consolationism is less about genuine critical analysis than it is about self-aggrandizement.

Fallacy The Second: "Consolatory" Is a Binary Value

As you might suspect, I have become intensely suspicious of the notion that what is "consolatory" is somehow ubiquitous and universal. For example, the received wisdom of the anti-consolationists is that The Lord of the Rings is consolatory because it is morally black-and-white, genteel, and idyllically feudal; I find it consolatory rather because it is deeply pensive and tragic (and therefore reflective of the natural courses of our lives and history), and I am far from alone in this. Literature is by nature interactive; what we take from it is determined largely by what we bring to it. Certainly there are individuals who cherish The Lord of the Rings for its rank sentimentalism and Edenic landscapes; yet I cherish the same books for their pervasive atmosphere of autumnal melancholy.

The consolatory function of a given work is thus at least half-dependent upon the individual reader's emotional baggage. Another major problem with anti-consolationism is the very curious idea that "consolatory" is a binary value; that a novel either is or isn't consolatory. If this were true, it would require that each reader take the exact same experience away from a novel. Yet the real-world experience of everyone reading this should immediately confirm the impossibility of such a thing. Only the delusional truly believe that when a thousand people read the same literary work, they will have a thousand identical experiences and a thousand identical reactions. The label "consolatory" is therefore generally worthless as a descriptor of the final literary outcome, reader reaction.

Fallacy The Third: The Bloody Authors Themselves Claimed To Be Consolationists, So It Must Be True!

It is routinely recognized in literary analysis and criticism that authorial intent is, in fact, one of the least reliable and significant gauges of a work's power and symbolism. Countless authors are convinced that they've written unique, necessary, vigorous, and powerfully-conceived works of lingering genius; they frequently say so in memoirs and correspondence (nowadays, in chatrooms and messageboards as well). Justly, few of them are believed. Likewise numerous are those authors that would gladly degrade, take back, and obscure works that have acquired lasting fame and praise; Anthony Burgess (rest his soul) would gladly have unwritten A Clockwork Orange if he only could have. He considered the attention paid to it an insult to works that he thought of as grander; fortunately, nobody gives a shit as to what he thought of the novel, or what he would have chosen to elevate in its place.

Tolkien (to use the most-cited subject) did indeed claim that he wrote in a consolatory vein (though he used the term in a very specific fashion, the nuances of which are not always grasped by his detractors); why should we necessarily believe that he succeeded? Why are his statements on his own work somehow more trustworthy than those of Burgess, or Hemingway, whose statements on the symbolism (or lack thereof) of his work have been largely ignored for decades? Terry Goodkind is convinced that he's writing peerless works of genuine human drama, transcending genre, a genre unto themselves. Do you believe him?

A Necessary, Subversive, and Challenging Conclusion that Will Stretch Your Boundaries

Tolkien wrote: "... fairy stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things:  Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.” The implication is that children can supply those qualities for themselves through the unfettered exercise of their own imaginations;** it is adults who truly need (and labor to construct) the stimulation and consolation of what we now think of as "speculative fiction."

Regardless of the merit of this argument (though I think it at least partially truthful), I believe it's quite clear that anti-consolationists have constructed for themselves a meta-fictional version of a fairy story; a sophistry of false oppositions and semantic games used as a shroud for snobbery, well-intentioned or otherwise. I for one am intensely weary of the denigration of "consolatory fantasy;" I am much more interested in the denigration of poor writing itself; let politics and philosophy rest until the author makes them intrusive to the narrative. At that point, fetch the pitchforks and jab away. I'll even help; the feeling of justified criticism is a deeply consolatory one.

*****

*I say this as a serious liberal (in the contemporary American sense of the word), with quite a few rather leftist sympathies.

**Of course, another implication is that the cheerful little bastards simply haven't been around long enough to pick up the psychic baggage that this world imparts with its toil, tragedies, and disappointments. But there was only so much room in the paragraph, gentle reader. Now quit reading this and go elsewhere; you have loved ones that miss you.

Spring Has Sprung

I got my blog back.

I got my blog back.

I got my blog back.

But you knew that already, because there's an excerpt for you below.

Excerpt From Chapter 8: Out the Window

(Locke, now an adult, has a delicate deception to perform on behalf of the mysterious Gray King, but has to feign illness to back out of a prior commitment to Capa Barsavi, master of Camorr's underworld. He and Jean are visited by Anjais Barsavi, one of the Capa's sons; Locke has taken a drug to help him convincingly play sick. Anjais is apparently quite convinced.)

*****

Long minutes passed; Jean unshuttered the canal-side window and stared out into the sinking glimmer of Falselight, watching as Anjais and his men hurried across a Via Camorazza catbridge and into the Arsenal District. Anjais didn't look back even once, and soon enough he was swallowed up by darkness and distance.

"Damned if I don't think he really bought it," Jean said, turning away from the window. Locke was already out of bed and splashing water on the hearthstone, looking ten years older and twenty pounds thinner. That was alarming; Locke didn't have twenty pounds to spare.

"Lovely. The least complicated, least important job of the night is well done. Carry on, Gentlemen Bastards," said Locke. His face was alight in the reflected glow of the simmering stone as he set a glazed jug of water atop it. Ten years older? More like twenty.

Jean grimaced and grabbed the two vomit buckets, then moved back to the window. Falselight was truly dying now; the Hangman's Wind was blowing up warm and strong, bringing a low ceiling of dark clouds with it. No moons tonight, at least for a few hours. Pinpricks of firelight were appearing across the city as though an unseen jeweler was setting his wares out on a field of black cloth.

"Jessaline's little potion seems to have brought up every meal I've had in the past five years," said Locke. "Nothing left to spit up but my naked soul. Make sure it isn't floating around in one of those before you toss them, right?" His hands shook as he crumbled the dry Somnay Pine bark right into the jug of water; he didn't feel like taking the time for proper tea-brewing.

"I think I see it," Jean said. "Nasty, crooked little thing it is, too; you're better off with it floating out to sea."

Jean took a quick glance out the window to ensure that there were no canal boats drifting below in the path of a truly foul surprise, then simply flung the buckets, one after the other. They hit the gray water seventy feet below with loud splashes, but Jean was certain nobody noticed or cared. Camorri were always throwing disgusting things into the Via Camorazza.

Satisfied with his aim, Jean then slid the hidden closet open and pulled out the evening's first disguises-- cheap traveler's cloaks and a pair of broad-brimmed Tal Vararr caps fashioned from some ignoble leather with the greasy texture of sausage casings. He flung one brownish-gray cloak over Locke's shoulders; Locke clutched at it gratefully and shivered.

"You're got that motherly concern in your eyes, Jean. I must look like hammered shit."

"Actually, you look like you were executed last week. I hate to ask, but are you sure you're going to be up for this?"

"Whatever I am, it has to be sufficient." Locke wrapped one end of his cloak around his right hand and picked up the jug of half-boiled tea. He sipped and swallowed, bark and all, reasoning that the best place for the stuff would be his empty stomach. "Ugh. It tastes like a kick in the gut feels. Have I pissed Jessaline off recently? Suddenly I don't think I underpaid her after all."

His expression was picturesque, as though the skin of his face were trying to peel itself back and leap off his bones, but he continued to choke the near-tea down anyway, mustering his will against the urge to spit up the wet, gritty fragments of bark as they slid down his throat. Jean steadied him by placing both hands on his shoulders, privately afraid that another bout of vomiting might be more than Locke could handle.

After a few moments, Locke set the empty jug down and sighed deeply. The back of his mouth tasted like boiled wool.

"I might just have words with the Gray King when this shit is all finished," Locke whispered. "There's a few things I want to ask him. Philosophical questions. Like, 'How does it feel to be dangled out a window by a rope around your balls, motherfucker?' "

"Sounds more like physik than philosophy. And we'd have to take out the Bondsmage first," Jean said, his voice steady and totally empty of emotion; the voice he always used when discussing a plan only loosely tethered to prudence and sanity. "Couldn't give him a second to think, or we'd lose."

"But you and I both know," Locke replied slowly, "that we can't kill a Bondsmage. We wouldn't live out the week. Quarthain would make examples of us, and probably Calo, Galdo, and Bug as well. Not very clever at all, that way out."

Locke stared down at the fading glow of the hearthstone and rubbed his hands together.

"I wonder, Jean. I really wonder. Is this what other people feel like when we're through with them? After we get the goods and pull the vanish and there's nothing they can do about it?"

The light from the hearthstone sank several stages further before Jean answered.

"I thought we'd agreed that they get what they deserve, Locke. Nothing more. This is a fantastically silly moment to start giving a shit."

"Giving a shit?" Locke started, blinking as though he had just woken up. "No, don't get me wrong. It's just this feeling. No way out. Never had it before. Never recognized that those words fit together like that. 'No way out' is for other people, not for the Gentlemen Bastards."

At a sudden gesture from Locke, Jean pulled him to his feet. Jean wasn't sure if the tea was any more responsible than the cloak, but Locke was no longer shivering.

"Too right," Locke continued. "Too right it's not for the Gentlemen Bastards. Let's get this shit job over with; we can have a good ponder on the subject of our favorite gray rat-fucker and his pet mage after I've danced to his little tune."

Jean grinned and cracked his knuckles; then ran a hand down the small of his back. The old familiar gesture, making sure that the Wicked Sisters were ready for a night out.

"You sure you're ready for the Vine Highway?"

"Ready as I can be, Jean. Shit, I weigh considerably less than I did before I drank that potion. Climbing down'll be the easiest thing I do all night."

*****

The trellis ran up the full height of the Broken Tower, on the westward face of the structure, overlooking a narrow alley. The lattice of wood was threaded with tough old vines and built around the windows on each floor. Though something of a bitch to climb, it was the perfect way to avoid the few dozen familiar faces that were sure to be in the Last Mistake on any given night; Locke and Jean used it frequently. The Vine Highway.

The alley-side shutters banged open on the top floor of the Broken Tower; all the light inside Locke and Jean's suite of rooms had been extinguished. A large dark shape slid out into the mass of trellised vines, and was shortly followed by a smaller shape. Clinging with white-knuckled determination, Locke gently eased the shutters closed above him, then willed his queasy stomach to quit complaining for the duration of the climb. The Hangman's Wind, on its way out to the salty blackness of the Iron Sea, caught at his cap and cloak with invisible fingers that smelled of marshes and farmer's fields.

Jean kept himself two or three feet under Locke, and they descended steadily, one foot-hold or hand-hold at a time. The windows on the sixth floor were shuttered and dark.

Thin slivers of amber light could be seen around the shutters on the fifth floor; both climbers slowed without the need for words and willed themselves to be as quiet as possible; to be patches of gray invisible against deeper darkness, nothing more. They continued down.

The fifth-floor shutters flew outward as Jean was abreast with them on their left.

One hinged panel rebounded off his back, causing no pain but almost startling him out of his hold on the trellis. He curled his fingers tightly around wood and vine, and looked to his right. Locke stepped on his head in surprise, but quickly pulled himself back up.

"I know there's no other way out, you dizzy bitch!" hissed a man's voice.

There was a loud thump, and then a shudder ran up and down the trellis; someone else had gone out the window, and was scrabbling in the vines beside and just below them. A black-haired woman stuck her head out of the window, intent on yelling something in return, but when she caught sight of Jean through the cracks in her swinging shutter, she gasped. This in turn drew the attention of the man clinging just beneath her; a larger man even than Jean.

"What the fuck is this shit?" he sputtered. "What are you doing outside this window?"

"Amusing the Gods, asshole," Jean kicked out and tried to nudge the newcomer further down the trellis, to no avail. "Move your fat ass down!"

"Quit kicking my fucking head! What are you doing outside this window, huh? You like to sneak a peek? You can sneak a peek of my fist, cocksucker!"

Grunting with exertion, he began to climb back upward, grabbing at Jean's legs. Jean narrowly yanked himself out of the way, and the world reeled around him as he regained his balance. Black wall, black sky, wet black cobblestones fifty feet below. That was a bad fall, the kind that cracked men like eggs.

"All of you get off my Gods-damned window NOW! Ferenz, for Perelandro's sake, leave them be and get down!" the woman hollered.

"Shit," Locke muttered from a few feet above and to her left; his eloquence temporarily frightened into submission. "Look, you're complicating our night, so before we come in and complicate yours, shut up and close your fucking window!"

She looked up, aghast. "Two of you? All of you, get down, get down, get DOWN!"

"Close your fucking, fucking, fucking WINDOW!"

"I'll kill both you shitsuckers," huffed Ferenz, "drop you both off this fucking--"

There was a marrow-chillingly loud cracking noise, and the trellis shuddered beneath the hands of the three men clinging to it.

"Ah," said Locke, "Ah, that figures. Thanks ever so much, Ferenz."

There was a torrent of polysyllabic blasphemy from four mouths; exactly who said what would never be clearly recalled. Two careful men were apparently the trellis' limit; under the weight of three careless flailers, it began to tear free of the stone wall with a series of creaks and pops.

Ferenz surrendered to gravity and common sense and began sliding downward at prodigious speed, burning his hands as he went, all but peeling the trellis off the wall above him. It finally gave way when he was about twenty feet above the ground, flipping over and dashing him down into the darkened alley, where he was promptly covered in falling vines and wood. His descent had snapped off a section of trellis at least thirty feet long, starting just beneath Jean's dangling feet.

Wasting no time, Locke shimmied to his his right and dropped down onto the window ledge, shoving the screaming woman back with the tip of one boot. Jean scrambled upward, for the shutter still blocked his direct access to the window, and as the section of trellis under his hands began to pull out of the wall, he gracelessly swung himself over the shutter and in through the window, taking Locke with him.

They wound up in a heap on the hardwood floor, tangled in cloaks.

"Get back out the fucking window, now!" the woman screamed, punctuating each word with a swift kick to Jean's back and ribs. Fortunately, she wasn't wearing shoes.

"That would be really stupid," Locke said, from somewhere under his larger friend.

"Hey," Jean said, "Hey! Hey!" He caught the woman's foot and propelled her backward. She landed on her bed; it was the sort commonly called a "dangler," a two-person hammock of strong but lightweight demi-silk, anchored to the ceiling at four points. She went sprawling across it, and both Locke and Jean suddenly noticed that she wasn't wearing anything but her smallclothes. In the summer, a Camorri woman's smallclothes are small indeed.

"Out, you bastards! Out, OUT! I--"

As Locke and Jean stumbled to their feet, the door on the wall opposite the window slammed open, and in stepped a broad-shouldered man with the slablike muscles of a stevedore or a smith. Vengeful satisfaction gleamed in his eyes, and the smell of hard liquor rolled off him, sour and acute even from ten paces away.

Locke wasted half a second wondering how Ferenz had gotten back upstairs so quickly, and another half second realizing that the man in the doorway wasn't Ferenz.

He giggled, briefly but uncontrollably.

The night wind slammed the shutter against the open window behind him.

The woman made a noise somewhere in the back of her throat, a noise not unlike a cat falling down a deep, dark well.

"You filthy bitch," the man said, his speech a thick slow drawl. "Filthy, filthy bitch. I jus' knew it. Knew you were'n' alone." He spat, then shook his head at Locke and Jean. "Two guys at once, too. Damn. Go fuckin' figure."

"Hope you boys had y'rselves a fun time with 'nother man's woman," he continued, drawing nine inches of blackened-steel stiletto from his left boot, " 'cause now I'm gonna make you women."

Jean spread his feet and moved his left hand under his cloak, ready to draw the Sisters. With his right hand, he nudged Locke a pace behind him.

"Whoa!" Locke cried, waving both of his hands. "Whoa! I know what this looks like, but you've got the wrong idea, friend." He pointed at the petrified woman clinging to the hanging bed. "She came before we came!"

I have my Blog back! Huzzah!

But no real time to post just yet, kids. I have to go fetch a cat from a friend's house and help the amazing Jenny take care of about a zillion aquarium frogs at her school.

Happy birthday to the lovely and insightful Cora Buhlert, whose mastery of English makes me painfully aware of the pitiful remnants of my high school German education!

Wow.

Man, how times change. I was cruising the local used book store this afternoon, scrounging with a self-imposed limit of one solitary book (this month's budget is tight). First it was going to be Hemingway, then Nathanael West, then Conan Doyle... and then I found a trade paperback of K.W. Jeter's Dr. Adder, "FULLY ILLUSTRATED!" By Matt Howarth, of all people. I'd donate bone marrow for Howarth's least accomplished napkin doodles, so Dr. Adder it was.

The faded price tag on the cover clearly says TARGET. Nineteen years ago, fuckin' Dr. Adder was on sale at Target. My seven-year-old self might have wandered past it in the book aisles. Target. Imagine if Veniss Underground or The Luck of Madonna 13 were on the shelves at Wal-Mart, next to Chicken Soup For the Presbyterian Teenager's Soul, Vol. 6. Cats and dogs, living together. Mass hysteria!

For Gabe, Part One: The Practical Bit

I have heard the voice of Gabe Chouinard crying out in the wilderness of blogdom, and I've got two cents for him. Aren't I a nice guy? No? Shut up. Do read Gabe's last 2-3 posts before continuing, if you haven't already.

I'm working on the "How?", and with luck so are others. (I say "with luck" because I've *seen* nothing...)

I've come to believe that careful, targeted peer-to-peer networking is the only realistic "activist" means for expanding the readership of the more experimental, refined, and obscure spec fic authors we cherish so much. In my direct experience (and the anecdotal experience of others), readers invariably respond better to something tangible thrust into their hands with a solid recommendation from a friend than they do to any list, harrangue, or non peer-to-peer marketing push. Word of mouth is the power you're looking for, Gabe, and the most efficient means to your end. Everything else (viral marketing, mailing lists, websites, etc.) is inefficient for pushing literature onto a vaguely interested but uninformed demographic. This doesn't mean those things should not exist; merely that their utility is extremely finite for what you seem to be after.

Put another way-- this more a job for literary snipers, taking pot-shots at targets of opportunity close at hand, and less a job for literary saturation bombers putting out newsletters, websites, and such.

Rather than any wild "Operation Get 'Em on the Shelves" scheme, might I suggest the simpler "Buy One Book A Month For Somebody Else" plan? It's easy-- once a month, buy a new copy of a book by an author you enjoy that you deem to be under-appreciated. Give said book to a carefully targeted friend along with a warm and hearty recommendation; assure them they'll almost certainly like it. As an added bonus, this chalks up another sale for said author and makes future sales/print runs more likely. You know how (relatively) few people are needed to substantially affect an author's sales on a national basis, Gabe. Word-of-mouth is not a trivial economic force, although it does take time to build up to a payoff.

In the brief time that I've been reading Matt Stover's work, I've evangelized him (in the form of Heroes Die) to no fewer than a dozen people, including my own girlfriend and my little brother Kevin. From my girlfriend the bug spread to our mutual friends Jason and Amanda. I've sent two copies of Heroes Die to overseas military personnel through the Books For Soldiers program; I snap up every copy of HD that I come across so that I can use it for gift/loaner purposes. I've written a review of the novel for a gaming site that has netted at least one sale so far. In short, I've pushed the sucker, and I'm not the only one doing so. The relatively wider success of Blade of Tyshalle as compared with Heroes Die is solid evidence that Stover has benefitted from continual P2P networking on the part of many people who loved HD enough to pimp it to their friends and associates; true quality sells itself on a personal basis, customer by satisfied customer. Even a fanbase working without central guidance can effectively build a wider readership for a "niche" author.

Now, there are quite a few people I haven't targeted for Stover Evangelism, because I know their personal tastes well enough to foresee disinterest and non-comprehension. At present, they can't be made to enjoy Heroes Die any more than I could be forced to sit through a NASCAR race, though tastes change over time, and I'll be keeping my eyes on certain people in case their sensibilities shift enough to warrant a gamble with a copy of HD.

Why don't we try to set up a group "Buy a Book For a Friend" event through Dead Cities for May, and each month thereafter? Cost per month per participant, $10-20 tops. Let's either a) all pick one underappreciated author to focus on or b) individually select the underappreciated author of our choice, and drive up some sales figures, and try to hook some new readers from our pools of colleagues and friends.

Manifestos, policy statements, and highfalutin' foundations cannot accomplish the fundamental goal of putting books into the hands of potentially interested new readers. A distributed, enthusiastic campaign of chucking books at people on a personal level is, IMHO, what's called for, and what will work best, and what will waste the least possible amount of everyone's time.

Next: Part Two, the Opinionated Bit, AKA "Please, please drop the snobby fucking lie of "consolatory fantasy" and let its corpse sink back into the wet earth from whence it came, and also, if you really want to interest people in Spec Fic you need to hit 'em young, and also, the Twins are going to royally trounce the Tigers in the AL Central this year, and other fairy tales."

In Which I Seek to Master Blog Fu

Does anyone out there know how to create some sort of permalink for Blogger posts, so that I could put some links in my sidebar that would go directly to my excerpts, to appease my inner anal-retentive organization freak?

Or is that something only paying customers can do?

Second Excerpt

The "Brat Masterpieces" interlude below is now finished; the second excerpt is the much longer second part of said interlude. You'll find it after the "*****" in the text.

After conferring with a valued someone who knows what's he's talking about, I've decided to post a grand total of five excerpts from the novel here. I hope you all find the new stuff as pleasant as the previous excerpt; please give it to me straight and painful if you don't.

Yay! The Babylonian Captivity of my blog has ended! Just a night or to ago, I was talking to Darren (check my links), and he was complaining about a similar problem with his. I hope his works now, too. Do I get cool stuff every time I bitch Gabe out in my comment threads? Not that I need the reward, of course... anyhow...

My first novel excerpt is up below. I know I said I'd do three, but I'm now thinking I'll do seven or eight. One for every reader of this blog, perhaps.

In other news, this is the very last day of my twenty-fifth year on earth. And reading Gene Wolfe while working on a first novel is kinda like cyanide for the ol' self-esteem. But then I'm sure some of you already knew that.

Excelsior!

Interlude: Brat Masterpieces

The summer after Jean came to the Gentlemen Bastards, Father Chains took him and Locke up to the temple roof one night after dinner. The roof was walled on every side but open to the sky; Chains’ “blindness” gave him an excuse for not maintaining the garden it was meant to hold. Here he could sit, unobserved, and smoke a paper-wrapped sheaf of Jeremite tobacco while the sunlight sank beneath the horizon and the caught fire of the city’s Elderglass rose glimmering in its place.

That night, he wanted to talk about the eventual necessity of cutting throats.

“You boys are investments, in time and treasure both.” He exhaled ragged crescents of pale smoke, failing as usual to conjure full rings. “Big investments. My life’s work, maybe. A pair of brat masterpieces. So I want you to remember that you can’t always smile your way around a fight. If someone pulls steel on you, I expect you to survive. Sometimes that means giving back in kind. Sometimes it means running like your ass is on fire. Always it means knowing which is the right choice-- and that’s why we’ve got to talk about your inclinations.”

Chains fixed Locke with a stare while he took a long, deliberate drag on his sheaf; the final breath of a man treading in unpleasant water, preparing to go under the surface.

"You and I both know that you have multiple talents, Locke, genuine gifts for a great many things. So I have to give this to you straight-- if it comes down to hard talk with a real foe, you're nothing but a pair of pissed breeches and a bloodstain. I know you can kill, but you’re just not made for stand-up, face-to-face bruising. And you know it, right?"

Locke’s red-cheeked silence was an answer in itself. Suddenly unable to look Father Chains in the eyes, he tried to pretend that his feet were fascinating objects that he’d never seen before.

“Locke, Locke, we can’t all be mad dogs with a blade in our hands, and it’s nothing to sob about, so let’s not see that lip of yours quivering like an old whore’s tits, right? You will learn steel, and you’ll learn rope, and you’ll learn the alleypiece. But you’ll learn them sneak-style. In the back, from the side, from above, in the dark.” Chains grabbed an imaginary opponent from behind, left hand round the throat, right hand thrusting at kidney-level with his half-smoked sheaf for a dagger. “All the twists, because fighting wisely will keep you from getting cut to shit-mince.”

Chains pretended to wipe the blood from his ember-tipped “blade,” then took another drag. “That’s that. Take it and learn to work around it, Locke. Sulking is a game for boys; a man can’t flinch from his weaknesses. There’s little time left for you to be a boy around here, and that’s a shitty deal, but it’s the only one you get.” He forced twin streams of smoke from his nostrils, and cheered up visibly as the tails of gray vapor swirled around his head. “Now quit acting like there’s a fucking naked woman on your shoes, will you?”

Locke did grin at that, weakly, but he also looked up and nodded.

“Now, you,” Chains said, turning to regard Jean, “I think you’ve got the sort of temper that cracks skulls when it’s off the leash. I think you could be a lovely, vicious little bastard with steel in hand, a stand-up bruiser to keep your friend here out of trouble. Care to give it a try?”

Jean’s eyes were immediately drawn down to the fascinating spectacle of his own feet. “Um, well, if you think that would be good, I can try...”

“Jean, I’ve seen you angry. Give me some credit for being four times your fucking age, son. You don’t smolder and you don’t make threats; you just go cold, and then you make things happen. You’ve got something Locke doesn’t-- pith, vinegar, the curse of the fucking Gods, I don’t know.” He drew smoke from his sheaf once again, and flicked white ashes to the stones beneath his feet. “I think you have the knack for smacking brains out of heads. That’s neither good nor bad; it’s just something we can put to use.”

Jean seemed to think this over for a few moments, but Locke and Chains could both see the decision already made in his eyes. They had gone hard and hungry under his black tangle of hair, and his nod was just a formality.

“Good, good. Thought you’d like the idea, so I took the liberty of making arrangements.” He produced a black leather wallet from one of the pockets of his laze-coat and handed it over to Jean. “Half past noon tomorrow, you’re expected at the House of Glass Roses. “

Locke and Jean both widened their eyes at the mention of Camorr’s best-known but least-public school of fencing. Jean flipped the wallet open. Inside was a flat token, a stylized rose in frosted glass, fused directly onto the inner surface of one leather fold. With this, Jean could pass north over the Angevine and past the guardposts at the foot of the Alcegrante hills; it placed him under the direct protection of Don Tomsa Maranzalla, Master of the House of Glass Roses.

“That sigil will get you over the river and up among the swells, but don’t fuck around once you’re up there. Do what you’re told, go straight there and come straight back, and for all our sakes tame that mess on top of your head. Use fire and a poleaxe if you have to.” Chains took a final drag of evergreen-scented smoke from his rapidly disappearing sheaf, then flicked the butt up and over the roof wall. His last exhalation of the night sailed over the heads of the two boys, a wobbly but otherwise fully-formed ring.

“Fuck me! An omen!” Chains reached after the drifting ring as though he could pluck it back for examination. “Either this scheme is fated to work out, or the Gods are pleased with me for engineering your demise, Jean Tannen. I love a win-win proposition. Now don’t you two have work to do?”

*****

In the House of Glass Roses, there was a hungry garden.

The place was Camorr in microcosm; a thing of the Eldren, left behind for men to puzzle over, a dangerous treasure discarded like a toy. The Elderglass that mortared its stones rendered it proof against all the human arts, much like the Five Towers and a dozen other structures scattered over the islands of the city. The men and women who lived in these places were squatters in glory, and the House of Glass Roses was the most glorious, dangerous place on the Alcegrante slopes. That Don Maranzalla held it was a sign of high and lasting favor with the Duke.

Just before the midpoint of the noon hour the next day, Jean Tannen stood at the door of Don Maranzalla’s tower; five cylindrical stories of gray stone and silver glass, a hulking fastness that made the lovely villas around it look like an architect’s scale models. Great waves of white heat beat down from the cloudless sky, and the air was heavy with the slightly beery breath of a city river boiling under long hours of sun. A frosted glass window was set into the stone beside the tower’s huge lacquered oak doors, behind which the vague outline of a face could be discerned. Jean’s approach had been noted.

He’d gone north over the Angevine on a glass catbridge no wider than his hips, clinging to the guide ropes with sweaty hands for all six hundred feet of the crossing. Ferry rides were a copper half-baron; for those too poor to ride, there was the ecstatic terror of the catbridges. Jean had never been aloft on one before, and the sight of more experienced men and women ignoring the ropes as they crossed at speed turned his bowels to ice water. The feel of hard pavement beneath his shoes had been a blessed relief when it came again.

The sweat-soaked yellowjackets on duty at the Alcegrante gatehouse had let Jean pass far more quickly than he’d thought possible, and he’d seen the mirth drain from their ruddy faces the moment they recognized the sigil he carried in his little black wallet. Their directions after that had been terse; was it pity that tinged their voices, or fear?

“We’ll look for you, boy,” one of them suddenly called after him as he started up the clean white stones of the twisting avenue, “if you come back down the hill again!”

Pity and fear, then. Had Jean really been enthusiastic for this adventure as recently as the night before?

The creak and rattle of counterweights heralded the appearance of a dark crack between the twin doors before him. A second later, the portals swung wide with slow majesty, muscled outward by a pair of men in blood-red waistcoats and sashes, and Jean saw that each door was half a foot of solid wood backed with iron bands. A wave of scents washed out over him: humid stone and old sweat, roasting meat and cinnamon incense. Smells of prosperity and security, of life within walls.

Jean held his wallet up to the men who’d opened the door and one of them waved a hand impatiently. “You’re expected. Follow me and respect the house that has made you its guest.”

Against the left-hand wall of the opulent foyer, a pair of curlicue staircases in black iron wound upward; Jean followed the man around and up one set of narrow steps, self-consciously trying to keep his sweating and gasping under control. The tower doors were pulled shut beneath them with an echoing slam.

They wound their way up past three floors or glittering glass and ancient stone, decorated with thick red carpets and innumerable stained tapestries that Jean recognized as battle flags. Don Maranzalla had served as the Duke’s personal swordmaster and the commander of his Blackjackets for a quarter of a century; these bloody scraps of cloth were all that remained of countless companies of men fate had thrown against Nicovante and Maranzalla when they had torn Camorr’s trade rivals apart during the Iron Sea Wars.

At last, the winding stair brought them up into a small dim room, barely larger than a closet, lit by the gentle red glow of a paper lantern. The man placed one hand on a brass knob and turned to look down at Jean. “This is the Garden Without Fragrance,” he said, “Step with care, and touch nothing.” Then he pushed the door to the roof open, letting in a sight so bright and astounding that Jean rocked backward on his heels

The House of Glass Roses was more than twice as wide as it was tall, so the roof must have been at least one hundred feet in diameter, walled in on all sides. For a frightful moment, Jean thought he stood before a blazing, hundred-hued alchemical fire. All the stories and rumors had done nothing to prepare him for the sight of this place beneath the full light of a white summer sun; it seemed as though liquid diamond pulsed through a million delicate veins and scintillated on a million facets and edges. Here was an entire rose garden, wall after wall of perfect petals and stems and thorns, silent and scentless and alive with reflected fire, for it was all carved from Elderglass, a hundred thousand blossoms perfect down to the tiniest thorn. Dazzled, Jean stumbled forward and stretched out a hand to steady himself; when he forced his eyes closed the darkness was alive with after-images like flashes of heat lightning.

Don Maranzalla’s man caught him by the shoulders, gently but firmly.

“It can be overwhelming at first. Your eyes will adjust in a few moments, but mark my words well, touch nothing.”

As Jean’s eyes recovered from the initial shock of the garden, he began to see past the dazzling glare. Each wall of roses was actually transparent; the nearest was just two paces away. And it was flawless, as flawless as the rumors claimed, as though the Eldren had frozen every blossom and every bush in an instant of summer’s fullest perfection. Yet there were patches of genuine color here and there in the hearts of the sculptures; swirled masses of reddish-brown translucence, like clouds of rust-colored smoke frozen in ice.

These clouds of color were human blood.

Every petal, leaf, and thorn was sharper than any razor; the merest touch would open human skin like paper, and the roses would drink blood, just as the stories said, siphoning it deep inside the network of glass stems and vines. Presumably, if enough lives were fed to the Garden every blossom and every wall would someday turn a rich, rusty red. Some rumors had it that the Garden merely drank what was spilled upon it, others claimed that the roses would actually draw blood forth from a wound, and could drain a man white from any cut, no matter how small.

It would take intense concentration to walk through these garden paths; most were only two or three paces wide, and a moment of distraction could be deadly. It said much about Don Maranzalla that he thought of his garden as the ideal place to teach young men how to fight. For the first time, Jean felt a sense of dreadful awe at the creatures who’d vanished from Camorr a thousand years before his birth; how many other alien surprises had they left behind for men to stumble over? What could drive away beings powerful enough to craft something like this? The answer did not bear thinking of.

Maranzalla’s man released his grip on Jean’s shoulders and re-entered the dim room at the apex of the stairs; the room, as Jean now saw, jutted out of the tower’s wall like a gardener’s shack. “Proceed to the heart of the garden,” said the man, “and if you have any love of life, step slowly and mind your balance.” Then he pulled the door shut after him, and Jean seemed alone on the roof, with the naked sun overhead and the walls of thirsty glass before him.

Yet he wasn’t alone; there was noise coming from the heart of the glass garden, the whickering skirl of steel against steel, low grunts of exertion, a few terse commands in a deep voice rich with authority. Just a few minutes earlier, Jean would have sworn that the catbridge crossing was the most frightening thing he’d ever done, but now that he faced the Garden Without Fragrance, he would have gladly gone back to the midpoint of that slender arch fifty feet above the Angevine and walked it without guide ropes.

Still, the black wallet clutched in his right hand drew his mind to the fact that Father Chains had thought him right for whatever awaited him in this garden. Despite their scintillating danger, the roses were inanimate and unthinking; how could he have the heart of a killer if he feared to walk among them? Shame drove him forward, step by sliding step, and he threaded the twisting paths of the garden with exquisite care, sweat sliding down his face and stinging his eyes.

It was the longest thirty feet of his brief life, that passage between the cold and waiting walls of roses, but he didn't allow the garden a single taste of him.

At the center of the garden was a circular courtyard about thirty feet wide; here, two boys roughly Jean’s age were circling one another, rapiers darting and flicking between them. Another half-dozen boys watched uneasily, along with a tall man of late middle age. This man had shoulder-length hair and drooping mustaches the color of cold campfire ashes; his face was like sanded leather, and though he wore a gentleman’s doublet in the same vivid red as the attendants downstairs, he wore it over weather-stained soldier’s breeches and tattered field boots.

Not a boy at the lesson didn’t put his master’s clothes to shame. These were sons of the quality, in brocade jackets and tailored breeches, silk tunics and polished imitations of swordsman’s boots; each one also wore a white leather buff coat and silver-studded bracers of the same material; just the thing for warding off half-hearted training thrusts. Jean felt naked the instant he stepped into the clearing, and only the threat of the glass roses kept him from leaping back into concealment.

One of the duelists was surprised to see Jean emerge from the garden, and his opponent made good use of that split second of inattention; he deftly thrust his rapier into the meat of the first boy’s upper arm. The skewered boy let out an unbecoming squeal and dropped his own blade in shock. “Master, I was distracted by the boy who just came out of the garden! That was not a fair strike!”

Every boy in the clearing turned to regard Jean, and it was impossible to guess what soonest ignited their naked disdain: His laborer’s clothing, his pear-like physique, his lack of weapons and armor? Even the boy with a spreading circle of blood on his tunic sleeve continued staring with open loathing. The gray-haired man cleared his throat, then spoke in the deep voice Jean had heard earlier. He seemed amused.

“You were a fool to take your eyes from your opponent, so in a sense you earned that sting. But it is true, all things being equal, that a young gentleman should not exploit an outside distraction to score a touch. Let you both try to do better next time.” He pointed a hand toward Jean without looking at him, and his voice lost its warmth. “And you, boy-- lose yourself in the garden until we’ve finished here; I don’t want to see you again until these young gentlemen have left.”

Certain that the fire rising in his cheeks could outshine the sun itself, Jean rapidly scuttled out of sight; several seconds passed before he realized with horror that he had leapt back into the maze of sculpted glass walls without hesitation. Positioning himself a few bends back from the clearing, he stood in mingled fear and self-loathing, and tried to hold himself rigid as the sun’s heat cooked great rivers of sweat out of him.

Fortunately, he hadn’t much longer to wait; the sound of steel on steel faded, and Don Maranzalla dismissed his class. They filed past Jean on their way out of the garden, each boy seemingly at ease with the lethal labyrinth of transparent blossoms. Not one said anything to Jean, for this was Don Maranzalla’s house, and it would be presumptuous of them to chastise a commoner within his domain. The fact that each boy had sweated his silk tunic to near-translucency, and that several were red-faced and wobbly with sun-sickness, did little to leaven Jean’s misery.

“Boy,” called the Don after the troop of young gentlemen had passed out of the garden and down the stairs, “attend me now.”

Summoning as much dignity as he could, realizing that most of it existed only in his imagination, Jean sucked in his wobbling belly and went out into the courtyard once again. Don Maranzalla wasn’t facing him; the Don was looking at the undersized training rapier that had recently stung a careless boy’s bicep. In his hands, it looked like a toy, but the blood that glistened on its tip was quite real.

“I, uh, I’m sorry, sir, my lord Maranzalla, I must have come early, I, ah, didn’t mean to distract from the lesson...”

The Don turned on his heel, smooth as Tal Varrar clockwork, every muscle in his upper body ominously statue-still. He stared down at Jean now, and the cold scrutiny of those squinting black eyes gave Jean the third great scare of the young afternoon.

He suddenly remembered that he was alone on the roof with a man that had butchered his way into the position he currently held.

“Does it amuse you,” the Don asked in a serpentine whisper, “to speak before you are spoken to, in a place such as this, to a man such as myself? To a Don, such as myself?”

Jean’s blubbered apology died in his throat with an unmanly choke; the sort of wet noise a clam might make if squeezed out of cracks in a crushed shell.

“Because, if you’re merely being careless, I’ll beat that habit out of your butter-fat ass before you can blink.” The Don strode over to the nearest wall of glass roses, and with evident care he slid the tip of the bloodied rapier into one of the blossoms. Jean watched in horrified fascination as the red stain quickly vanished from the blade and was drawn into the glass, where it diffused into a mistlike pink tendril and was carried into the heart of the sculpture. The Don suddenly sounded amused again. “But if you’re being bold, little Jean Tannen, if you really have the balls to speak to me as you see fit, in my own garden, well... maybe I can do something with you after all. So which is it?”

At first the paralysis of Jean’s tongue refused to lift, then insight hit like a kick to the stomach: Further deference and apologies would be a mistake. Why would a veteran of a hundred battles, the most legendary killer in Camorr, feel the need to privately humiliate a single fat eleven-year-old?

“If I lied to your face and said it was boldness,” said Jean, licking his sweat-salted lips, “would that be bold enough to save me from a pounding?”

After a moment of weighted silence, Maranzalla laughed and cracked his knuckles with a sound like pine logs popping in a fire.

“I can see that the moral education of initiates at the Temple of Perelandro is getting curiouser every year! But don’t fret-- I know your master, Jean. Known him for quite a few years now, though we held very different stations when we first crossed ways, by the Gods. And so I already know there must be something worth kindling behind that blubber of yours; Chains has other boys at his temple, but you’re the only one who’s been sent here, right?”

Jean nodded. The Don’s casual warmth now seemed genuine, and it did more to calm Jean’s aching nerves than the still-rising heat of the sun overhead.

“Truth is, you didn’t come early. I let my previous lesson run long because I tend to indulge those wretched little shits when they want to cut each other up a bit. In future, come at the stroke of one, to make sure they’re long gone. They cannot be allowed to see me teaching you.”

Once, Jean had been the son of wealthy merchants, and he had worn clothes as fine as any just seen on this rooftop. What he felt now was the old sting of his loss, he told himself, and no mere shame for anything as damned stupid as his hair or his clothes or even his hanging belly. This thought was just self-importantly noble enough to keep his eyes dry and his face composed.

“I understand, my lord. I don’t wish to embarrass you again.”

“Embarrass me? Jean, you misunderstand.” Maranzalla swiped idly at the air with the toy rapier, the let it drop with a clatter to the stones of the courtyard. “Those prancing little pants-wetters come here to learn the colorful and gentlemanly art of fencing, with its many sporting limitations and its proscriptions against dishonorable means of engagement.

“You, on the other hand,” he said as he knelt and gave Jean a firm but friendly poke in the center of his chest, “you are going to learn how to kill men with a sword.”