Pillars of Atlantis

The names and geography of the adventure tales of my childhood are never that far away from me.

Fun Reading: Malazan!

This is the third book in a ten-book series.
Steven Erikson's Memories of Ice.
Erikson's heroic fantasy is real literature, invoking and breaking the stale cliches of the genre, enlivening character and plot with insight, wit, humor, and compassion, pulling and pushing his readers to the brink of expectation and trauma, again and again.

Very fine writing.





Whiskeyjack, man.  Really?

Bookish

Comfort Before Revising

Where's Jim Hawkins?

Marin Headlands:
just south of Rodeo Beach and north of Point Bonita.

Looks like part of Stevenson's Treasure Island to me.

(Some long time back now, I paddled in there.)

Literary Default: Heroic Fantasy

Sword & sorcery, heroic fantasy, classical epic -- my favorite genre (yes, singular) no matter the space-time continuum.  Last spring I was teaching Homer's Iliad, now I am reading Erikson's Reaper's Gale.  Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series fits somewhere in between, as does Byron's Don Juan.

Appreciating Erikson's Sword and Sorcery

Steven Erikson of the Malazan sword-and-sorcery novels is a damn fine novelist.  He can write character like nobody's-business.  I wonder how much genre-thinking obscures the true measure of his worth and contribution to that grand old ideal, the Commonwealth of Letters.

For those who know . . . Whiskeyjack--or Kalam-- that's all I have to say . . . right?

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Goofing with Clay: Mythomarine

Wet clay.

Transformation almost complete --from man to fish --

Merman: body-armored against the cold sea.

Bookend: A nod to Moby Dick.

Lindholm's "Wizard of the Pigeons"

Megan Lindholm's 1984 novel Wizard of the Pigeons is a novel that combines street grit and magical realism, urban fantasy and PTSD, with all the respect, wonder, and empathy in the world.

Introducing Fern Capel

I'll quote a lengthy paragraph from the first chapter of Jan Siegel's Prospero's Children.  I am tempted to quote something about the elemental mermaid from the rather gripping, rather fantastic prologue, but the novel really gets going with the introduction of our main character: so sensible, so grounded Fernanda Capel.

That was the beginning, she decided long afterward.  The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture.  The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound.  The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change.  She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it.  Her father's easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother.  She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex.  Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises.  University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage.  She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate facade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control.  That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone--the raw material of an adult.


--Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children, A Del Rey Book, Random House: New York, 2001.  Pages 16-17.

Now some will say that there's far too much telling and not enough showing in the above paragraph, and I can see the point of such an observation.  I can also see the point of laying out the larger trajectory of Fern's summer, her transformation, in one such paragraph and then devoting three hundred pages to the How of that summer, that transformation.  Desperation, fright, uncertainty, isolation: those are crucial ingredients of the stew of life, the factors without which we may never mature.

Fern Capel's career spans three books: Prospero's Children, The Dragon Charmer, and The Witch Queen.  I recall reading somewhere that Jan Siegel was interested in taking the child-hero of the classics of the fantasy field--the Narnia books, The Dark is Rising books, and so forth--from that special, fantastic, and haunted childhood into adulthood.  For as we all know, stories never really end, not even when the books are unwritten . . . .

Book Jacket Fantasy

Oskar Kokoschka's The Crab (1939-40)

The best cover for yet another one of those books I haven't written yet?

Now, it's not quite the best choice for what-will-be Kraken House or The Armour of Your Virtue or even Feet of Clay, but it could work for Isla Verde or possibly Cargo From Cumae. Titles are easy, projecting is so easy, but the discipline to write instead of swim, kayak, dive, sculpt, read, read, read, drink some coffee (or rum), think about teaching, or--hey--work is what's actually so hard. In other words, don't hold your breath waiting for any of those projects to appear in book-form. I'm behind on the swimming and the prepping for class, as it is.

Still, if you've looked into this blog at all, you can see the art's fitness here. I like that swimmer (struggling with the currents or simply stroking along?) just beyond the giant crab's rather sharky head. Is that swimmer aware of the crab? Is that crab aware of the swimmer? No matter what, the arms have to keep cycling, the legs pumping: swim, swim, swim!

What about the fishing boat in the distance? Or, are those smugglers, rather, making for a handier cove? What do you think?

Sometimes, I'm that swimmer out in those currents.

Other times, I'm that crab.

Aren't we all?