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!"