Genre 2012: The Trouble With (no, not Tribbles) Pace
One should never read one’s own notices, as many a British actor, most of them knighted, have said. Does it then follow that a writer should never read reviews of his or her work? Or, for that matter, the fine print of incoming rejections?
Tangent Online was kind enough, just recently, to give my Black Gate story “The Trade” a really glowing review, but while that review made me very happy, it also gave me pause. It forced me to reflect both on my own writing and on writing in general. Why? Because of one line, short and sweet: “The pace is fast.”
And so it is, I suppose. But consider the email I got ten days after “The Trade” debuted, a note penned by David M. Armstrong, fiction editor for Witness, a literary magazine into which I’ve been trying to jam my work for about a decade. At last, a Witness acceptance, and for their upcoming spring 2013 issue! Can you guess what Mr. Armstrong said he appreciated in my story? The pace. “This,” he wrote, “was a layered and often impressively restrained narrative.”
Let’s translate, shall we, to the realm of fantasy adventure fiction. What Mr. Armstrong just said is that my Witness story, “The Last Horse in Skopje,” exhibits a pace so glacial and plodding that it would put a charging sabre-tooth to sleep at thirty paces.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about how I read what I read, and how I enjoy it. Or, what’s in it that I enjoy. It seems to me that much of the pleasure in my reading comes about from bad habits. Which is to say, habits that I can’t help but think ought to be bad, but which nevertheless feel central to the act of reading. Maybe that feeling’s an illusion; maybe it’s the secret why bad habits become habits. At any rate, I thought I’d be self-indulgent this week and throw out what I’ve come up with, as I’d love to hear if any of it resonates with anyone else’s experience of reading.
Today, with finally a free minute between holiday commitments and work deadlines, I took a minute to hop over to Patrick Rothfuss’s blog, because I had not yet donated to the Worldbuilders charity and, as you can see on the right, Rothfuss and I (and my wife) are all pretty tight … and contemplative.
Just as an older generation recalls with perfect clarity where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, I know precisely where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): perched on the floral-print sofa in my parent’s house, watching the film on a poor, weather-impacted PBS broadcast. I also remember falling right off that sub-par couch in paroxysms of laughter when the animator saved King Arthur’s band by conveniently suffering a heart attack.
Once upon a very suspect time, a human being by the name of Terry Pratchett conjured up a space-traveling sea turtle by the name of A’tuin, and proceeded to make a sizable fortune from the disc-shaped world he emplaced upon her. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, magic of the most unpredictable kind is the norm, and so it should come as no surprise that, eventually, somebody had to commit his unique brand of literary lunacy to celluloid.
‘His eyes were icy verdigris, but warm also, and piercing — in a kind way. He was dressed smartly in a long coat of an almost military cut and dark pants with gold piping.’ So writes the narrator of the 2012 story, “The Portobello Cetacean” as she first lays eyes on her host, Sgt. Roman Janus, late of Mount Airy, the man known as the ‘spirit-breaker’.
Arthur Machen first published a version of “The Great God Pan” in 1890, in a magazine called The Whirlwind; then revised and extended the tale for its republication as a book in 1894, when it was accompanied by a thematically-similar story called “The Inner Light.” It’s a fascinating work, creating a horrific mood mostly through suggestion and indirection. Nowadays, one looks at it and notes very Victorian attitudes toward women. At the time of its original publication, the story’s implied sexuality caused real scandal.
Titus Crow first appeared in Lumley’s 1971 story, “The Caller of the Black”. Crow’s credentials as a psychic sleuth and occult investigator are impressively vetted in the story, as he defeats both mortal and immortal enemies through the cunning application of the standard Lovecraftian eldritch lore, a shower faucet and a window pole. From the outset, it is clear that Crow inhabits the same deadly universe as 