A Fool’s Wager

Hey, kid. Why the long face?

Oh, the usual. I want to write a new story. Something quick, and fearless, and maybe a little ridiculous.

So what’s stopping you?

I've got too much else to do! Revising and finishing something from my drafts folder means getting myself back into that specific mindset, and I just can't muster the concentration for it. If I could write something new, something fast and short... but I can't even find the time for that now.

Are you yanking my chain right now? Look, you’re headed into the can right now for five, ten minutes of uninterrupted privacy. 

And how does that help me, exactly?

Tell you what, genius: Instead of taking a magazine in with you, just grab your little digital recorder from the pile of junk on top of the dresser there, and freestyle a dramatic monologue. Problem solved.

Yeah, but what's it about?

Oh, please. Aren't you a little too old for this "Where do you get your ideas" stuff? Look around you. Improvise.

What — in the can? Come on. I need something to work with.

You're overthinking this. Just pick up the recorder and then, I dunno, grab something else at random out of the pile, look it over, and start riffing.

…huh. 

Yeah, okay. Thanks. You have some good ideas, sometimes.

Yeah — when you're not busy being your own worst enemy.

He Puts His Scary Trousers On One Leg at A Time Like Anybody Else

This week’s story is a Neil Gaiman story, essentially, and self-consciously so.

Part of the point of this project is to expand my range a little, and one way to break out of my own formulas is to borrow someone else’s. Something that Neil does brilliantly is to reinterpret traditional stories and fairy tales—things like “Snow, Glass, Apples,” or The Sleeper and the Spindle. That’s something that I haven’t done much at all (not in fiction, anyway; I have written a bunch of songs that riff on folk themes), and I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to break down the formula and reverse-engineer it. I’d been browsing through Gabriel’s Palace, an anthology of Jewish mystical tales collected and retold by Howard Schwartz, and I came across “The Angel’s Daughter,” a folk story originally told in the Central Asian region of Bukhara (now part of Uzbekistan), which lent itself to the treatment. That it was deep-cut Judaica only made it more Gaimanesque, which amused me.

I’ve also been consciously trying for more gender parity in my writing, trying to write more women characters, and to do so with more empathy and imagination. Along with Gabriel’s Palace, I’d been reading a lot of feminist commentary about negotiating the impossible standards and demands that patriarchy imposes on women, and Shulem Deen’s funny, rueful essays about living—and leaving—his Hasidic faith. As all of these things filtered into the story, it became (I think) something more than a goof or a pastiche. It made me angry as I wrote it, and it made me sad.

I still haven’t found a title that I’m entirely happy with, but in this draft it’s called “Bride of Quiet.” It will be another long one, about 5,000 words, and it will run in this space at noon EDT tomorrow.

In So Many Words

“Science fiction … means what we point to when we say it.”
            —Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction (1956)

“Many years ago, the science-fiction critic Damon Knight, asked for a definition of SF, responded (I paraphrase): ‘You know what it is when you see it.’ This may be the best definition of film noir, too: You know what it is when you see it.”
            —John Grant, A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir: The Essential Reference (2013)

“In his famous soliloquy, Hamlet ponders the existential question (I paraphrase): ‘So should I kill myself, or what?’ That, indeed, is the question.”
            —L.M. Parsifal, Hold the Line: Memoirs of a Suicide Hotline Volunteer (2001)

“The cornerstone of the vast edifice of imagination which constitutes Tolkien’s signal achievement is but a single simple sentence, the unassuming declaration upon which all the rest  is founded (I paraphrase): ‘Hobbits live in holes underground.’”
            —Bardine Skop, ed. Readings in Bucolic Fantasy (2012)

“Dickens famously described the atmosphere of the 1780s in A Tale of Two Cities (I paraphrase): ‘It was a time of contradictions.’ Not unlike the Clinton years, in fact: A time of contradictions.”
            —Gregory Fiddlewood, What the Meaning of ‘Is’ Is: Semantics in an Age of Irony (2005)

“Novelist Thomas Pynchon evoked the terrors of the Blitz in the famous opening line of his modernist classic Gravity’s Rainbow (I paraphrase): ‘Ugh, the sound of rockets is just the WORST.’”
            W. Owens-Jingo, World War II in Literature: An Overview (1997)

“George Orwell’s iconic opening to Nineteen Eighty Four sets the action on (I paraphrase) ‘a cold April day, at 1:00 PM sharp.’ A day and a time not unlike the day in 1953 when CIA director Allen Dulles signed the order authorizing the MKUltra program.”
            —Ben Sharples, American Svengali: A History of Government Mind Control (2001)

“Amidst the tide of cynicism that followed the Kennedy assassination, Star Trek retained the idealism of the decade’s first half, as summed up in in the promise of its opening narration (I paraphrase): ‘We will travel to places otherwise never visited, with no fear.’”
            —Abby Grieves, ed. After the Fall of Camelot: Studies in Popular Culture, 1964-1972 (1993)

“Every sport entails its own traditions, deeply ingrained in our cultural character. A trip to the ballyard, for instance, carries with it all the sights, sounds and smells of our national pastime; the ritual count of balls and strikes, the aroma of grilled hot dogs, and the rising of the assembly for the seventh-inning stretch, accompanied by the famous melodic exhortation (I paraphrase): ‘Are you ready for some baseball?!?’ Much the same could be said for football.”
            —Headley Leathers, Pigskin Nation (2011)

“The Borscht Belt comedian Henny Youngman was noted for his one-liners, such as (I paraphrase): ‘Let me make an example of my wife, if you know what I mean.’ Let me plead of the reader the same indulgence.”
            —Richard Tarbuckle, Mrs. Richard Tarbuckle: A Life (2005)

Stop, Hey! What's That Sound?

Last year, as you may recall, I participated in writing jam facilitated by my esteemed Internet chum Andrew Weiss. And reader, I had a blast. Not only was it the sort of writing prompt or challenge that stimulates my brain (like the Bradbury Project, which is now... well, it’s complicated), it was a chance to work with the elder child. It was all of my favorite things in one: writing, games, the company of friends and family. The fact that the end result provided the seed for a future project — that was just gravy.

After a lengthy hiatus, the Ultimate Powers Jam recently returned, and of course I wanted in once more — only this time, I provided the art myself, in a crude combination of technical pen, colored pencil, crayon, a Photoshop tweaking. I stayed far more in the Marvel superhero tradition for the writing of this — it’s basically me doing a riff on 1970s Steve Englehart — and if the end result isn’t a classic for the ages, I reckon it’s still a fun little one-off.

Every vibration awakens all other vibrations of its particular frequency. And all frequencies are harmonics of a single tone — an eternal drone underpinning and sustaining all creation. Before all things were, it was. The ground note in the endless song of the Universe. It is the source, the sound, the secret of existence. It is the Om.

Jawali Ramavishnu is a cultural anthropologist conducting post-doctoral research among the Tibetan diaspora on the Indian frontier. Oppression, assimilation, and mortality conspire to erase the strange, rich folkways of these once-isolated people. Indigenous Tibetan culture is an endangered species; within two or three generations, it may cease to exist as a unique entity. Jawali Ramavishnu is racing against time to preserve what he can.

Jawali’s area of specialization is folk religion, and he works among the monks and lamas living in exile, trying to document the esoteric practices of shamanic Tibetan Buddhism. Many of these rites have been shrouded in secrecy over the centuries; but these holy men, fearing that their culture might otherwise disappear forever, have taken the Indian scientist into their confidence. For his part, Jawali — although agnostic by temperament — finds himself strangely drawn to the ancient rituals, and to the wise, kindly old men who have become his teachers. In particular, he is much taken with one elderly lama, named Kelsang, who tells him tales of a fantastical place called the Singing Cliffs.

Traditional Tibetan devotions, the old monk explains, have a curious mechanistic aspect. The mere repetition through chanting of a holy word is enough to birth holiness into the physical world. Even inanimate objects can be vehicles for propagating the dharma. Prayer flags inscribed with mantras of compassion spread beneficence into all pervading space with every flutter of the breeze; a clockwork striker taps a tiny bronze gong etched with the character for wisdom, and wisdom is thereby propagated. In ages past, Kelsang says, exalted sages — part mystic, part tinkerer — devised great engines of salvation, massive automated installations that would bring consciousness to the whole world.

The Singing Cliffs — a project, Kelsang says, that was begun in the 15th Century but never completed — was to have been the mightiest of these; a labyrinth carved into the living rock of a hillside, redirecting the flow of a mountain stream into a mazelike aqueduct where its current would turn a full ten thousand prayer wheels of ever-increasing size, flooding the mountains with the energy of the mantras within even as the rotations of the wheels themselves would set up vibrations evoking the base note of the eternal Om and its overtones, a fully-automatic prayer mill that would sound forth the universal drone in all its harmonic complexity. But there were those who feared the unleashing of such power, Kelsang says, and construction was abandoned. Now, he says, even the location of the Singing Cliffs is lost to memory.

Jawali is intrigued by these stories. They are the stuff of fairy tales, of course — parables, perhaps, with the Singing Cliffs as a Babel-like metaphor of human folly. Or so he believes. Until the day that old Kelsang dies, and Jawali discovers, folded in among his meager possessions, ancient scraps of silk that bear hand-painted diagrams — the very blueprints of the Singing Cliffs, and a map showing its location.

And deep within Jawali Ramavishnu, a vibration is awakened.

Read the rest at Armagideon Time!

Face Front, True Believers!

One of the things I miss about message-board culture, since my withdrawal from it, is the sense of play — the writing prompts and games that were such sterling triggers for creativity, or at least reliable distractions from what I was supposed to be writing, and which gave the scene (at its best) the aura of a genuine literary salon.

Esteemed Internet chum Andrew Weiss has been aiming to bring some of that spirit back, with the Ultimate Powers Jam feature on his blog Armagideon Time. Participating writers and artists receive from Andrew a set of statistics, generated at random from an old Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game rulebook, and use them to create a comic-book style character, complete with backstory.

The results — some of pro-quality, some amateurish, all imbued with an unhinged enthusiasm — have been glorious. The random element produces some weird combinations of abilities and weaknesses, and making all those aspects work together has a surreal aspect. It’s the superhero equivalent of the Comte de Lautréamont’s “chance meeting, on the dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” These are comic books I’d like to read — certainly moreso than anything that Marvel is actually publishing, these days. Naturally, I wanted in.

Now, I can draw, just a little, and if worse came to worst I figured I could dash off a sketch of my character myself; but I’d been casting about for a some collaborative project to do with my elder child — a fabulous artist whose natural habitat is Tumblr, and who has done enough round-robins and fan-community art challenges to know how this stuff works.

This is the prompt that Andrew gave us, in its entirety:

The character comes from a race of mutants whose powers manifest during childhood.

He/she has the ability to shape and control light across the spectrum as well as the power to make stuff blow up by obliterating its molecular bonds. These powers require quite of bit of energy to use, and overexertion could lead to a period of "mandatory cooldown."

The character is a poor combatant, despite being superhumanly strong and tough. He/she is also extremely intelligent, with intuitive thinking skills to match.

What’s been interesting about the Jam is how the participants use or do not use the existing Marvel Universe elements. The company’s cosmology, its roster of secret societies, alien species, and super-science think tanks, can be a great time-saver. And had I looked at that “race of mutants” line and thought, “Oh, right, the Inhumans or whatever,” my jam piece would have taken about ten minutes to write.

Instead, I disregarded the Marvel Universe elements entirely and started creating a world and a backstory from scratch. When I was done, I had something that looked like a pitch document for a series of Young Adult books, and to my delight Claire illustrated it in a style to match.

 

You think there is only one world, and you think you know your place in it.

You think your name is Judy Hatch, and that you’re a normal middle-school girl — quiet, a bit big for your age, not particularly athletic. You live with your family in a boring suburb. You like to read about science, you take piano lessons, you bicker with your brother. You’re smart; you suspect you may be a genius. You notice things that others don’t, and occasionally it gets you into trouble. But mostly you do not think of yourself as anything but ordinary.

Occasionally you daydream — as children do — that your parents are not your parents, and that you have a destiny Somewhere Else. Not that you are a princess, or anything (don’t be stupid, that stuff is for babies), but that you are in some way extraordinary, and that one day your real parents will take you away from the drab sameness of your little town and off to a new world of magic and danger and excitement, where you will be understood and appreciated, and where you will never, ever be bored.

You know that this is only a daydream, though. Until the day that it isn’t.

It’s summer — just before your eleventh birthday — and you’re camping with your family at the dumb state park, like always. It’s not like you’ve been fighting with them, really; but the weather is lousy and you’ve been cooped up in the tent with your brother, who is annoying as only a 14-year old boy can be. And it’s not like you’re running away when you leave camp and hide in one of the caves that dot the hillside just off the trail. You just want some time to yourself. And to let your family realize how much they’d miss you, if you were gone.

But of course your parents freak. You’re barely settled before they’re running around, calling your name, like it’s a rescue mission. Then your dad’s outside the cave, and it’s so unfair. You’re not ready to be found. Not just yet.

But when he looks into the cave, his eyes just ... look past you.
And when he shines his flashlight into the darkness, its beam sort of ... slides around you, somehow.

And he moves off to look elsewhere, calling your name again.


You reflect on the oddness of this, and you’re thinking it’s a good time to go back to camp. It’s getting late, and the cave is uncomfortably hot, and you think you may be coming down with something (and you never get sick). But before you can make your way out, something shifts in the slope above the cave entrance, and a half-ton of rocks slide down, blocking the exit. Suddenly you are very scared, trapped in darkness, wishing you had a light, even the spark of a match.

As you wish this, tiny dots of pure white light crackle from your body, coalescing into a luminous globe that lights up the cave. You would marvel at your newfound ability to manipulate light and darkness, but you are still trapped, and feeling feverish. You run your hand over the debris blocking your path. Solid. Too heavy to shift. 

You remember reading something about dark matter — how it makes up 85% of the mass of everything. If you could light up that darkness, you could clear away 85% of the rockpile in front of you. Impossible. And as you think this, the wall in front of you dissolves into atoms, its very substance disassembled on a molecular level.

You stumble out of the cave into the night, thirsty and burning with fever. And waiting for you is a stranger, elegant Edwardian-style suit somehow seeming not at all out-of-place in the forest twilight. His name, he tells you, is Alleyn Adargi, and he has something to tell you that will change your life forever.


The world you thought you knew, he tells you, is false. There is not one human species, but two, one hidden from the other. For living alongside Homo sapiens is the secret race Homo obscura. They call themselves Cryptothropes. Alleyn Adargi is one of them.

And so are you.

And he has come to restore you to your long-lost heritage.

Read the rest of the pitch at Armagideon Time.

The rest of the story — well, that’s the next next book.