PRL: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (2)
Another somewhat positive PRL from GUD (pronounced "good")
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Rejection Letter for The Goddess of Discord Lives on Mulberry Street Script 02/08/09
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Rejection Letter for The Goddess of Discord Lives on Mulberry Street Script 02/08/09
Dear Adam Callaway,
Thank you for sending us "The Goddess of Discord Lives on Mulberry
Street". Unfortunately, it's not what we're looking for at this time.
I can see this working nicely as an actual film, perhaps, but as a
script, it's not quite as engaging a read as I'd like -- or at least,
as the short-story version was. I think it loses a lot by losing the
narrative voice(s) of the story.
Best of luck with this piece in other markets.
Sincerely,
Julia de Caradeuc Bernd
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine
Contest: For the Love of the Mime
While perusing a local second hand store, I came across a curious item:
And I thought: "The Weirdinians are gonna love this!" So I picked it up and thought that a contest was in order.
Your mission: Write me the best three sentence story/poem you can that includes the word "mime." I don't care if it's a feghoot, post-Russian Absurdism, or contemporary ragged rhyme verse; just write me something interesting that includes the word "mime."
Deadline is February 22, 2010 (one month before what would've been Marceau Marcel's 87th birthday).
Post your entries in the comments section of this post. Good writing!
PRL: Beneath Ceaseless Skies
This was my first submission to the secondary-world magazine. Here's to more market research!
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Rejection Letter for "Cascade" - 02/04/10
It's hard to analyze this one, but it does provide at least one little nugget of use. Thank you very much for that BCS!
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Rejection Letter for "Cascade" - 02/04/10
Thanks very much for sending this story to _Beneath Ceaseless Skies_. Unfortunately, it's not quite right for us. The tone of the narrative felt more external than I prefer, as though an outside narrator were telling the story rather than the Man himself.
I appreciate your interest in our magazine. Please feel free to submit again.
Regards,
Scott H. Andrews
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
It's hard to analyze this one, but it does provide at least one little nugget of use. Thank you very much for that BCS!
January 2010 Writing Statistics
Number of Stories Worked On: 12
Number of Stories Completed: 2 (400 Words and 1774 Words Respectively)
Number of Stories Submitted: 14
Number of Stories Rejected: 10 (2 from 2009 Subs)
Number of Stories Accepted: 0
Total Word Count: 11,485*
*I'm aiming for 10k a month
Movie Review: The Book of Eli
I've been excited for this movie since the first time I saw Denzel do the slice and dice on one of the trailers. Denzel is a great actor and I thought he might be able to do a good job revitalizing the tired post-apocalyptic genre.
Ask and you shall receive.
The Book of Eli is the freshest, most creative, and most well-done post-apocalyptic story I've experienced in years, much less at the theaters.
Your Caveman Summary
Man needs to go west. Other man wants something first man has. Knives and guns.BoE is equal parts Road Warrior and The Road. It combines the killer action sequences from the former with the depth and character conflicts from the latter. Eli is a bad mofo with a heart of gold and a can of cat grease in his pack. He has a singular purpose and pursues it singularly.
Denzel and Gary Oldman do incredibly, incredibly good jobs as the protag/antag pair. Kunis is alright as Oldman's daughter (anyone could've been in that position with equal success). And for you HP fans out there, Michael Gambon makes a brief and very entertaining cameo.
The world of this movie is well-realized. The post-apocalypticism is tasteful, not gratuitous. The characters and the character motivations are also real and logical. Water is a precious commodity, and shampoo a luxury worth killing over.
The style of this movie would make Tarantino weep. From the first fight scene silhouetted under a bridge, to the shanty-towns, to the cobbled look of everything. In two words, junkyard gorgeous.
I've been reading reviews of The Book of Eli and people are split on it. You either like it or hate it. The people who like it like it for a myriad of reasons, but the one connecting thread through all of the haters is the Christian message of the film. First off, if you go to a movie called "The Book of --," you should expect something religious about it. Especially when using an important Biblical name like Eli. Secondly, the Christian message is very broad. It's not like "the Lord is your God; have no other gods but the Lord your God." It's more like "finish what you begin" or "have faith" or "you'll get yours in the end!" Maybe not that last one, but you get the gist. It doesn't beat you over the head with theology (which I hate, even as a practicing Catholic), and Eli's values are integral to the movie.
But the best part, the part that will make you watch this movie multiple times, is the completely-foreshadowed-how-in-the-holy-boondocks-did-I-miss-this twist ending. I mean, Shamalan needs to take note of this movie.
I have just a few small problems with this movie. It feels like a video game in spots (which should come as no surprise, since Gary Whitta came from the video game interesting). Some of the actions or pieces of dialog seem like you're selecting them from a list, Bioware-style. The second problem: it should have ended five minutes earlier. Lots of movies don't know when to end, and I don't mind it that much.
In the end, The Book of Eli is an early and strong contender for the 2010 Grand W award for Best Film. It's that good. A 4.5 out of 5.
Interview: Mark Leach, Author of "Marienbad, My Love"
(BTW, I will take my trophy as best interviewer in the known blogosphere now)
Q: “First, if you can give us a quick summary of the world’s longest novel.”
A: I can do it one sentence: A Christ-haunted journalist-turned-filmmaker attempts to bring about the end of the world by producing a science fiction-themed pastiche to the 1960s French New Wave classic, “Last Year at Marienbad.”
We should probably stop right there. That’s about as comprehensible as it gets. The deeper we go, the weirder it becomes. Consider this excerpt from i09.com’s July 2008 story about “Marienbad My Love” (titled “Thrill-Crazed Space Bugs Swarm Through World's Longest Novel”):
“The novel is peppered with David Lynch references as well as sections from a faux novel in the style of later Kurt Vonnegut. And ‘thrill-crazed space-bugs,’ the Cicadians … show up, probably to assist in the metafictional destruction of the universe. Plus there's a giant UFO hanging over Earth, Nazi/alien collaborators, mind control, alien abductions, and a mad scientist who's adding a substance called Fluoride9 to the water to create the world's first privately owned deity.”
I read that and I think “did I really write that? Am I really that weird?” And then I look again at the manuscript, noting that much of it deals with the ramifications of a failed attempt to create this artificial god:
“Perhaps – could it be? There is a possibility that Buckstop’s plan for world domination is already realized, and he’s now taken over the Exogrid and disseminated psychotropic compounds through the global water supply. After all, the dream-carrying ballistic missile did fragment. The world has gone completely mad. But for some reason, Mark is as yet unaffected – the last sane man. It is the only explanation for the insanity I see around us. Mark is the new Messiah, purified in the blue alcohol flames of the dream-carrying missile and called upon by the Deity to lead His people back from the edge of insanity and to the new promised land.”
This is the point where people tend to lose patience with me and start talking about the incoherent ramblings of an insane mind. (I don’t think they mean it as a compliment, either.) So I guess I really am that weird.
Q: “Was your plan from the start to write the longest novel ever?”
A: Lord no. I started the story in the 1980s as a conventional-length novel titled “Roman’s Holiday.” It was autobiographical, a novel based on my relationship with a childhood friend whose wife had an affair with his college roommate. The story then morphed to incorporate a singing cowboy, a character based on a couple of real-life people I met during my years as a newspaper reporter. One was Boxcar Willie (aka Marty Martin, a regular on the Grand Ole Opry who, incidentally, was an old work friend of my father) and the other was a life-long resident of Roanoke, Texas, a small town that was on the edge of being absorbed by suburban sprawl. I called the revised story “Requiem for a Singing Cowboy.” This was all written in a straightforward, traditional style, something like you might expect from Larry McMurtry. Except it didn’t read like McMurtry. It was awful – embarrassingly awful. It was so awful that I stopped writing fiction for a few years. Close to a decade, in fact. I might never have resurrected the old manuscript if not for something very personal that occurred in my late 30s. In the fall of 1999 I experienced what the medical establishment would call an acute depressive episode. I was able to function in my job and my everyday responsibilities, but on the inside I was completely shattered. I didn’t understand what was going on with me. I didn’t know what depression was, and even if I had I was too confused to recognize it as affecting me. I just knew I felt terrible. I needed to get out of this wretched situation. But how? Writing! I discovered Jung and his theories of the unconscious. They really resonated with me. I thought of dreams I’d had as a child. I hadn’t thought about them in years. Suddenly I started having new dreams, amazing dreams. I instantly recognized them as stories – stories that were much better than the terrible stuff I’d written for “Roman’s Holiday” and “Requiem for a Singing Cowboy.” So I started writing them down. Much of “Marienbad My Love” is based on my dreams. One of the main characters of the book is a doppelganger who emerges from the dream world and enters real life. I really did have that dream. I am the two-bodied man.
I also discovered William Burroughs. I’d never read his stuff. What an eye-opening experience. Here was a man who didn’t write anything until his late 30s, after he accidentally killed his wife. Now there’s a reason to have a depressive episode! I started reading his work and learning about his cut-up method, which involved appropriating the words of other writers and combining them with his own.
The cut-up method is very simple, especially the way I use it. I go to one of the online cut-up engines. You just plug your text into the tool and push the button. Sometimes I just paste in my own writing. Other times I use the work of others. And yet other times I do both. I do the same thing with online markov generators. Microsoft Word is useful too. I will use the thesaurus function to change the words. “Stealing” might become “pilfering.” (Parenthetical aside: In fact, “stealing” did become “pilfering” in one recent bit of writing by yours truly. I liked the results, though it did get me kicked out of the 2009 National Novel Writing Month competition. Warning to other would-be appropriators -- The overseers of NaNoWriMo don’t cotton to literary appropriation, even if you’re only appropriating the naughty messages that others wrote about you. They don’t care about fair use or parody. Doesn’t help to humorously call yourself a plagiarist, either. In short, it’s their contest and they don’t have a sense of humor about people goofing around with it.)
Finally, I found myself re-reading some of the more experimental/avant-garde writers I’d discovered in college, people like Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter for “Last Year at Marienbad”). That’s when my enthusiasm for fiction writing really took off.
Q: “What about the world’s longest sentence, title, and word? Were you actively trying to set records?”
A: Even after I started working with the cut-up method, the manuscript (the title had evolved into “Strangers Rest: Notes for a B-Movie About the End of the World”) was not particularly long – maybe 150,000 words. The idea of growing it into a vast narrative came to me when I read that the world’s longest novel was 1.5 million words. Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu.” That didn’t seem particularly long – I knew I could easily break that record. I had discovered that the online cut-up tool I was using allowed me to turn a few hundred words into thousands. And I knew it would be just as easy to write the world’s longest sentence, title and word, too. You just keep pressing the button like George Jetson.
This is the place in our interview where you should express extreme incredulity, perhaps saying something like “So this isn’t writing at all! You’re just a charlatan who used copy and paste to compile a bunch of random gibberish.” And I should reply with two seemingly contradictory responses, hoping somehow to have it both ways. I say that, in a sense, you are right. Much of my novel does not follow a linear narrative or even standard grammatical rules. It appears to be a heap of broken images. Sometimes it is “seemingly” nonsensical, BUT -- it can also be quite beautiful. With the right kinds of eyes you can see the surreal, dreamlike quality contained in the text. Yes, an online cut-up engine may deliver a piece of illogical text. As a reader I am compelled to deal with it, to attempt to make some sense of it. As a writer I start working through it. And a new story leaks out.
You should probably call me out. “Sounds like an excuse to me. Fess up. Did you write it or not?” And I should reply by asking you to allow me to quote the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith:
“At a reading I gave recently -- and I do do short readings occasionally -- the other reader came up to me after my reading and said incredulously, "You didn't write a word of what you read." I thought for a moment and, sure, in one sense -- the traditional sense -- he was right; but in the expanded field of appropriation, uncreativity, sampling, and language management in which we all habit today, he couldn't have been more wrong. Each and every word was "written" by me: sometimes mediated by a machine, sometimes transcribed, and sometimes copied; but without my intervention, slight as it may be, these works would never have found their way into the world. When retyping a book, I often stop and ask myself if what I am doing is really writing. As I sit there, in front of the computer screen, punching keys, the answer is invariably yes.”
After reading that, I decided I am actually a conceptual poet trapped in a novelist’s body. But I digress.
This idea of breaking records really appealed to me. I didn’t so much care about the records, but I thought it would generate public interest in my writing. It could be a way to rise above the crowd. And I cared very much about that. I’d been sending my manuscript around to publishers and agents, but without success. I recognized that the Internet offered the potential to build a readership on my own using nothing but my manuscript and my professional knowledge (I’m a PR guy by day) of how to get journalists to write your story. I just needed a newsworthy hook.
We are all fighting for “share of voice.” How can you stand out in an online world of millions of words? How can you make yourself heard in a publishing industry that is seemingly turning out more book titles than ever? If I tell someone I have written a novel about someone who is trying to make a sci-fi version of “Last Year at Marienbad,” I might get some mild interest. But if I tell people I have created a 4.4-million-letter word – well, that’s going to get their attention. For a moment, I am going to own the floor. I will have my 30 seconds to deliver my “elevator speech” and tell people what I am about and why they might want to read my work.
As I began to turn my thousands of words into millions, I realized I was doing more than creating a PR opportunity. I was crafting a vast narrative in which I had done away with linear plot and grammatical rules. I was creating something that you might find in one of the infinite hexagonal rooms of Borge’s “Library of Babel,” an almost infinite number of pages of barely comprehensible text. Yes, I have admittedly created a work that few will actually read. But I know that many people will talk about it – even if only to marvel at the amazing weirdness of the attempt. And if that grabs me a few readers who will at least dip their toes in for a few dozen pages, then I’ll be satisfied.
Q: “How did you go about structuring this novel? It seems like outlining the thing would be as monumental a task as writing it.”
A: You have to remember that it started out short and simple, then later became long and complex. “Roman’s Holiday” was conceived as a story that took place over a weekend. It grew a bit with its transmigration into “Requiem for a Singing Cowboy,” but the time period was still rather limited – two weeks. The rather traditional plot formed the crystalline structure for the story’s avant-garde rebirth as a multi-million-word novel. I took the traditional words I’d written years before and turned them on their head. I made a distinct effort to move blocks of text around into new, unlikely positions. The current beginning was the ending at one point. So in the end there was almost no traditional structure at all. Instead of an outline, I put my trust in the unconscious. Weirdness alert: I believe that there are two semi-autonomous entities that live inside each of us. Well, inside me anyway. I am two people – the logical conscious person and the creative unconscious person. The creative unconscious Mark is the smart one. He really should be running the show. But he’s trapped inside, compelled to play second fiddle to the conscious entity. The logical conscious Mark is running the show. He’s the one who knows how to make money and keep things rolling along so that when the creative unconscious Mark is ready to surface, he has a place to work. Without logical conscious Mark, I’d be living in a cardboard box under a bridge. So I think it is working out about right.
Q: “How many people, to your knowledge, have finished it all the way through?”
A: “Marienbad My Love” is impossible to read in the conventional sense. You’d have to be insane to read it from start to finish. (Or maybe you’d be insane once you were done.) It’s probably best to think of it like the Internet. You don’t try to read the whole world wide web, right? You just dip into it every now and then. My advice is to read the first 150,000 words of “Marienbad My Love,” then jump around a bit in the big, fat middle. Read a page here, a page there. I’m hoping to issue a print version of “Marienbad My Love” in 2010. I’m thinking about including a pair of scissors. I will encourage people to physically cut up my book and put it back together in new ways. And maybe urinate on it. Here’s something that one of the forum moderators for National Novel Writing Month recently blogged about my writing:
“What he does is the artistic equivalent of running newspaper ads, magazine articles, and tampon covers through a shredder, pouring glue on it, then taking a piss on it and calling that art. Simply because you added your own piss doesn't make it unique, or even particularly creative.”
By the way, she’s wrong. The addition of urine does in fact make my work unique and creative. I’m thinking I’ll sell my printed book with a pair of scissors AND a little cup to pee in. Shredding and peeing on “Marienbad My Love” is a lot more fun than actually reading it. Honestly, few of us are willing to read long books any more. I read an article recently in The Atlantic. “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” It’s about how many of us no longer read with any level of depth. We are about skimming, data aggregating, the employment of intelligent agents. I believe it is true, especially for me. I am becoming a reading robot. I don’t read the way I used to. I don’t actually read novels anymore; I skim them. In “Marienbad My Love,” I included a real dream I had in 2005 about becoming a robot. (Or perhaps you might say I had a dream about becoming “a machine in a search of a soul.” More about that in a moment.)
For my new year’s resolution I am compelling myself to read – not skim – Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago.” I picked this one novel not because it is incredibly long (although at 600 pages it’s not short, either), but I have watched the movie a dozen times. In the amount of time it took me to watch the movie a dozen times I could have actually read this amazing epic novel.
Q: “What influenced you as a kid? How about now?”
A: You know, with these biographical questions you really are playing into my narcissistic tendencies. Trust me, you don’t want to hear me gas on about the good old days when we wrote on typewriters or how I won the Dallas Times Herald’s 1979 Journalism Day award. Good lord, the Times Herald went out of business almost 20 years ago. I know because I was Sunday business editor at the time. That’s an interesting story in it’s own right and – see what I mean? You don’t want to hear about this stuff. But, uh – since you asked… (My warning to all readers is to skip the next few paragraphs and proceed to the next question.)
What influenced me as a kid? Writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer before I even knew how to write. I was a child of the ‘60s, before computers and word processors. Long distance phone calls involved a human operator and were very expensive. If you wanted to stay in touch with out-of-town friends and relatives, then you wrote a letter and sent it in an envelop (with a 6 cent stamp). I would watch my mother write letters in long hand – in exacting cursive, each loop perfectly formed and each tail ending at exactly the right spot. I thought it was magic. How could she just make scribbles on a piece of paper, then send it through the mail to someone else who could read it and know exactly what she meant? I wrote my first book when I was in grade school, probably first or second grade. I called it “My Favorite Presidents” or something like that. For research I used some pamphlets on Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. I wrote a couple of sentences on each of them, then bound it all together by stitching the pages together with string. I did another one just like it called “Cars of the Future.” You might say this was my first attempt at science fiction. I thought up three or four different futuristic cars. One could float, another one could fly. I can’t remember the others. I made drawings, too.
In junior high school, I came up with what I thought was a great concept for a science-fiction/action-adventure novel. Working titled “The Pushbutton Man.” I envisioned a protagonist who was a well-connected and powerful billionaire who could affect change on a global scale (start wars, manipulate financial markets, etc) “at the touch of a button.” He would have a special desk with electronic levers, knobs and a button-packed phone. This was before the days of PCs and the Internet, of course. With this special desk, he was instantly connected to the farthest reaches of the world. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I was so confident that I shared my idea with one of my trusted friends. As soon as I said the words “Pushbutton Man,” though, he started laughing. I never did anything with the idea after that, though a few years back I felt some small degree of satisfaction when I ran across these lyrics from a song by Powerrman 5000:
“…Is he a push button man, or a machine in search of a soul …”
Perhaps the concept for “The Pushbutton Man” did finally work its way into my writing via my previously-mentioned robot dream.
In seventh grade, we were allowed to take our first elective. I picked typing. My friends couldn’t believe it. What was I thinking? Was I going to be a secretary? But I knew I was going to write, and I wanted to be a touch typist. I wanted to be fast. We had state-of-the-art equipment (that is, state of the art for 1974). Electric typewriters. I took typing for two years.
In high school I worked on the student paper. My senior year I won a first place award in the annual journalism contest conducted by the Dallas Times Herald. That got me to thinking that maybe I could become a newspaper reporter. I didn’t really care about journalism, but I saw that newspapers might be the one place where I could make a living from writing. I could follow in the footsteps of all the great novelists who started out writing for newspapers. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1983. Soon thereafter I landed my first full-time job in journalism. I’ve been a professional writer ever since.
At age 48, I’m still all about writing. It’s been my career for the past 27 years. During the first part of my career I spent a number of years writing and editing at newspapers and magazines. For the past dozen years I’ve been in media relations. I’m a PR guy. I love it. I get up every day excited to go to the office. I make a comfortable living at it, too. I have no dreams of becoming a famous, fabulously wealthy novelist and quitting my job. The novel is a personal undertaking, the one place where I get to call all of the shots. I’m not interested in trying to make money off it. I only write for myself, for my own gratification. I am not writing for the readers of today; I am writing for the people of the year 2510. (More about that in a moment.) I’d like others to read and enjoy what I write, but it’s not necessary to my own satisfaction.
A follow-up question might be “what influences your writing?” I’d say (1) my dreams and (2) 1950s B-movie sci-fi. As a kid I spent a lot of time in front of our black and white TV set, watching the old sci-fi movies and reruns that appeared on the six broadcast channels we received through the set-top rabbit ear antennae. Those campy sci-fi story lines and themes are burned into my unconscious, fueling my dreams (yes, I dream in sci-fi) and inspiring my writing.
Q: “Will Marienbad ever be finished?”
A: I’ll spend the rest of my life writing “Marienbad My Love.” This book is really the story of myself, and that story won’t end until I die. As I look back at my earliest writing ambitions, I realize that all I ever really wanted to do was write a story about myself. Specifically, a story about what it is like to be me at the center of my self, with all of the outer skin peeled away. And I think in that process I am writing something that goes beyond the personal. Weirdness alert: I feel that somehow I am writing a story of what it is like to be a human at this point in our evolution. We are at a tipping point as a species. Intellectual technology is poised to make the jump from our eyes and fingertips right into our craniums. I really believe that. Five hundred years from now, our progeny will think of us the same way we might think of a Neanderthal. They won’t understand what we were like – except through our art. So you might say I’m writing for tomorrow.
The director Nicholas Roeg (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) selected a Voltaire quote as his personal motto: “I am not interested in the triumph of the immediate.” I feel the same way.
Q: “’Marienbad, My love’ is a great, enigmatic title. What’s your take on titles? Are they important or secondary? Do you prefer complex or simple titles?
Q: “’Marienbad, My love’ is a great, enigmatic title. What’s your take on titles? Are they important or secondary? Do you prefer complex or simple titles?
A: “Marienbad My Love” is a very carefully considered title. The first two words begin with the letter M, so you’ve got some alliteration. “Marienbad” alludes to the movie that forms a primary thematic element of the novel (i.e. Alain Resnais’ classic film “Last Year at Marienbad”). And “My Love” is the English translation of “Mon Amour.” The editors at filminfocus.com picked up on that last reference in their July 2008 story about my novel:
“And yes, film geeks, you do get extra points for spotting the reference to Resnais' other great film of the era, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’…”
They even referenced it in the title of their article: “That's One Long Book, My Love.”
“Marienbad My Love” also works as a reference to the movie that the protagonist is trying to create (the 168-hour “Next Year at Marienbad”) and the woman he is in lust with in the story.
So yes, I think titles are extremely important. Plenty of novels have succeeded despite being tethered to unfortunate titles, but I can’t help feeling that our world is filled with unknown books that failed to find a readership due in part to ill-conceived titles. Think of the movie “Field of Dreams.” Would it have been as successful under the title of the novel upon which it was based (W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”)? I don’t think so.
Q: “Recently, you’ve put the call out to have people remix your novel ‘Naked Lunch’ style. What was the inception for this idea? Any takers?”
A: My dream of awakening a new generation of writers to the vast possibilities of literary appropriation as a valid creative endeavor has yet to bear fruit. It’s a slow process. All I’ve done to date is plant a stake in the ground. Now begins the real work. Encouraging others to steal my writing is an act of collaboration, which requires communications, inspiration and motivation.
To date, no takers for my 17 million words. But I have received a scatological harangue via e-mail. Subject line: “Who the F#CK would want it?” That should count for something, right?
I predict the first appropriator will be an entrepreneur, not a fiction writer. We’ll see somebody who is trying to publish content on a web site in order to snag some advertising dollars. In fact, it’s already happened on a small scale. Shortly before I made “Marienbad My Love” available for remixing found an interesting piece at http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:4TwtApN0WqAJ:ak-clothes-trr.dyndns.org/dream-control-love-cap-in-shimmer-storm/+%22marienbad+my+love%22&cd=55&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us It is titled “Dream Control Love Cap in Shimmer Storm.” Here is an excerpt:
“… Life that we might have lived, love that we might have loved, Sorrow of all. Dream Control Love Cap in Shimmer Storm special sale: $29.70 MARIENBAD MY LOVE- PART 24 #.does not merely seize control of Manhattan Island in a brutal bloodbath and In the midst of a nightmare, a dream had come true and nothing was going to. …”
For the record, I did not write “Dream Control Love Cap in Shimmer Storm.” But I wish I had. It is so “true”…
A dream has come
TRUE
But nothing is going
TO
Compare with the sorrow of all.
How can I
Control our love when
I am lost in
A shimmer storm without
YOU?
But I digress. Sometime AFTER the appearance of “Dream Control Love Cap in Shimmer Storm” will come an appropriator who won’t care about the nature of my novel at all. He or she will just want to republish the free words. Weirdness alert: My most fervent wish is that some extreme sexual deviant will turn “Marienbad My Love” into amazingly illegal Internet pornography, something really disgusting and insulting that results in a national scandal that will land the perpetrator in prison and me as a guest on Larry King Live.
Times are changing. Phillip Roth recently got people all worked up by predicting that 25 years from now the novel will only have a cult following. The Kindle won’t rescue it, either. He says “The book can’t compete with the screen. … It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”
Most of the people who write and publish novels – and, I suppose, those who only dream of writing and publishing – have yet to recognize that a paradigm shift is under way. They just keep on cozying up to the same old drivel. Yes, I know they are just writing what sells. But for how much longer will it sell? I sense that so much of what is being published today is a disposable commercial product that dreams of being made into a movie or TV series. Novels should not simply be written versions of movies and TV shows. At its best, a novel is an art form for the ages. Novelists should be taking advantage of the unique elements of the written form to create works that have meaning beyond the immediate retail sale. There is little that is truly new and unique going on in novel writing. The vast majority of today’s novelists do not realize that their chosen form is dying. They don’t realize that they are helping to kill it. Writing another story about a sword-wielding elf does not advance the cause. It’s another nail in the coffin. Soon they’ll be performing CPR on a corpse. If we’re not careful, the novel as a form of Art (that’s Art with a capital “A” as opposed to the lowercase art of disposable entertainment products) will go the way of the epic poem.
If we want to restore the novel to health, then it’s time to try some dramatic and experimental treatments. We need to get out the electric paddles and send a few thousands volts into the heart of the novel. Maybe we could inject some radioactive isotopes. We could even try a little magic. Think about what we say when children are learning to write words. They are “spelling.” That is, they are casting a “spell” over the letters of the alphabet, causing them to come together in a magical way.
Again I point to Goldsmith. He is restoring life to poetry. The guy copied an entire edition of The New York Times, front to back, then called it done. He didn’t change a single word. You might complain that it doesn’t sound very engaging, but it is certainly dramatic. And it is really any less engaging than what is being churned out by the publishing industry every year? Do we really need any more stories about darkly romantic vampires? OK, maybe we do – but we need to tell those stories in a new and different way. Consider what Umberto Eco had to say about the difference in modern and postmodern writing:
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ''I love you madly,'' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ''As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.''”
Literary appropriation is actually a rather conservative course of treatment for the ailing novel. Visual artists have been doing this sort of thing for decades. Literature is about a century behind the visual arts. Pick up a random object, put a frame around it. You’ve got art. Marcel Duchamp created a scandal in 1917 with his “Fountain,” which was just a urinal that he entered in an art exhibition. It was hidden from view during the show, but today is regarded as a major landmark in 20th century art. Pop music is filled with examples of sampling. Music and the visual arts accepted sampling, appropriation and similar tactics years ago. But novelists and lovers of novels – they just keep dragging the old dead horse behind them and wringing their hands about copyright protection and “plagiarism.” Writing is stuck in the dark ages.
A blogger who was angry about some of my recent statements in favor of literary appropriation told me that I was wrong about William Burroughs. This person insisted that Burroughs did not appropriate the work of others. But that’s exactly what he did. He stole the work of other writers. He plagiarized. He admitted it. He said it right to Samuel Beckett’s face, told him he’d stolen his work and cut it up with his own. “Words don’t have brands on them the way cattle do,” Burroughs told him. “Ever heard of a word rustler?” He wrote about it extensively. How can we move the novel – any form of art, really – to the next stage of development if the people who say they want to do the heavy lifting don’t even have a basic grounding in the subject upon which they so confidently pontificate?
Q: “’Marienbad, My Love’ is approximately 12 times longer than Marcel Proust’s ‘A Rememberance of Things Past.’ Does this mean you are technically 12 times more awesome than Proust as others have stated?
A: I am thrilled to learn that someone – anyone – has said I am 12 times more awesome than Proust. You’ll have to send me a link to that one. Back in 2008 someone did remark that with the appearance of my book “’Finnegans Wake’ has finally been dethroned.” But I don’t think they meant it as a statement of awesomeness.
Honestly, I’m not the right person to judge “Marienbad My Love.” I leave that call to eternity.
Q: “Any other projects?
A: I’m scripting out a movie version of “Marienbad My Love.” It’ll be 168 hours (that’s a whole week) of a synthetic computer voice (aka “a machine in search of a soul”) reading excerpts from the novel over video shots of an antique pendulum clock. Occasionally I will “accidentally” make a cameo appearance in the form of my reflection caught in the clock dial, a pretentious film geek reference to Andy Warhol’s “Empire,” his ultra-long movie in which you can see his image briefly in a window. (And that in turn makes me think of one of Warhol’s more famous declarations: “"I want to be a machine".) For ironic counterpoint, I may throw in some public domain B-movie sci-fi footage.
Maybe I’ll do my own take on the popular mash-up, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Something like this:
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE MY LOVE
A mash-up of the classic Regency romance with the world’s longest novel
By Jane Austen and Mark Leach
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Christ-haunted filmmaker in possession of a 1920s movie camera with a brass spring and flesh-coated aperture and a good fortune of feeling-toned print stock must be in want of a leading lady.
My ultimate dream is to commission a computer program that writes novels, then another one that reads and blogs about those same novels. And these writing and reading programs will self replicate like computer viruses and hang out in various undetected corners of the Internet. I’ll be the deity who watches over it all. Maybe they’ll even write angst-filled works about the meaning of me, their god. Am I real or just a metaphor for the god that dwells inside all writing and reading programs?
Q: “And finally: paper or plastic (interpret that as you will)?”
A: Plastic. It lasts longer. I’ve heard it might take centuries for a plastic bag to fully break down in a landfill. I am writing for the people of tomorrow, the ones who are going to be unearthing our plastic bags and other artifacts in the 26th century. Imagine some literary archeologist using his plug-in cerebral implant to plow through the dusty Internet files of the early 21st century. He’s going to be looking for things that stand out. Odd things, different things. He’ll be using search terms like “longest” and “biggest,” and he’s going to find “Marienbad My Love.” He’ll plow through the 17 million words in a few seconds. “What is this?” he’ll wonder. He’s going to take a second look. And when he does, he’s not going to find a story about sword-wielding elves or darkly romantic vampires. He’s not going to find a novel that anyone ever bought or stocked in a bookstore or library. He’s going to find a story about a two-bodied man– the prototypical man in crisis from the last days of homo sapiens. And then he’s going to call his best friend, the pushbutton robot man who lives with his machine family down the street, and say “hey buddy, you gotta read this old novel I just found. As Barbara Cartland would put it, you’ll love it madly!”
Thanks Mark for one whopper of an interesting interview!
PRL: Greatest Uncommon Denominator
Check out this one for a positive PRL!
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Rejection for "The Goddess of Discord Lives on Mulberry Street" 01-15-10
GUD is one of the premiere places for unique spec fic with depth, and I will definitely submit something else to them.
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Rejection for "The Goddess of Discord Lives on Mulberry Street" 01-15-10
Sorry we've kept this so long! Some things about this really tickle
my fancy (the inventiveness of the shadow amuses, and the mantra's a
good touch), but at base, it's not quite enough a story and not quite
enough a non-story to work for me.
Best of luck with this piece in other markets.
Sincerely,
Julia de Caradeuc Bernd
Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine
GUD is one of the premiere places for unique spec fic with depth, and I will definitely submit something else to them.
Stories for Haiti: Reinforcing Chaos
Reinforcing Chaos
By Adam Callaway
Ω + I
Michael stubbed his toe.
II
The sounds waves from Michael’s surprised scream agitated some tranquil air molecules.
III
Michael wrenched his stubbed toe backward when putting on his business slacks.
IV
The air molecules transfered their kinetic energy to more air molecules, that in turn escaped from his highrise apartment.
V
Michael’s toe swelled, causing his loafers to be uncomfortable.
VI
The liberated molecules agitated more and more molecules, all the way until they gave just the smallest boost in energy to a high-atmospheric air current.
VII
Michael stepped in a deep, muddy puddle on his way to work. He hit the edge of the puddle and tripped, further injuring his toe.
VIII
The boosted current rose in the atmosphere the most miniscule amount, getting just that bit colder, and causing water molecules carried by the current to begin condensing.
IX
Michael got to his office, mildly dishelved, his foot alternatively squelching and throbbing.
X
As the air current flew over the Atlantic, it picked up more and more moisture, adding to the condensing liquid already within it.
XI
Michael sat in his cubicle, going over his proposal. He constantly flexed his foot, trying to get relaxed and comfortable.
XII
The clouds went over Spain, France, Germany.
XIII
Michael checked his watch. He should head to the boardroom now. He set his notecards down to massage his toe.
XIV
The clouds went over the Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus.
XV
Michael stood in front of the board. He checked his back pocket for the notecards and swallowed hard.
XVI
The clouds went over Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
XVII
Michael attempted his presentation. His toe felt like a steamed plum.
XVII
Tajikistan, China, Japan.
XVIII
The boardmembers were not impressed.
XIX
Pacific Ocean, Hawaii.
XX
Michael left the office, frowning. He checked his watch. He didn’t have time to go to the clinic before his date.
XXI
The clouds had dwindled over the Eurasian continent, but were doubley reinforced over the Pacific. California drowned. The storm got smaller.
XXII
Michael went to his date. She was saying something about her work as a dental hygenist. He couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting or his toe. She left before her duck ala orange arrived. He handed the waiter his Visa and ID.
XXIII
The storm devastated Nevada. The storm got smaller.
XXIV
Michael didn’t see the waiter snap pictures of his life with a smartphone.
XXV
The storm waited.
XXVI
Michael went home. The waiter went to a costume store.
XXVII
The storm waited.
XXVIII
Michael went to sleep. The Michael-waiter went to the casino.
XXIX
The storm waited.
XXX
Michael slept. The Michael-waiter got thrown out of the casino. He saw a woman hanging out by a streetlamp and took out a roll of twenties. Her badge was hidden in her handbag.
XXXI
Michael woke-up and hit the snooze. Michael-waiter saw the badge and made a run for it, plastic flying out of the back of his pants.
XXXII
The storm started moving again.
XXXIII
The cop stopped pursuing and picked up the ID and Visa and went for a pay phone.
XXXIV
Slowly, across the great plains, giving life.
XXXV
Five minutes. Buzz. Snooze.
XXXVI
The storm disipated. The water absorbed into the soil.
XXXVII
Two cruisers sped out of the station to the address on the ID.
XXXVIII
The water sunk and was absorbed by the bran.
XXXIX
Five minutes. Buzz. Stretch.
XL
The bran wicked the water into its interior. Conditions were perfected. Break.
XLI
Michael headed to the shower. The cops got out of their cars.
XLII
The shoot started to struggle through the soil, longing for sunlight.
XLIII
Michael lathered. Four cops ran up the stairs.
XLIV
The shoot broke the surface and got drunk on sun.
XLV
Michael rinsed. The cops positioned themselves outside Michael’s apartment door.
XLVI
The shoot grew and grew.
XLVII
Michael repeated. The cops busted in his front door.
XLVIII
The shoot grew and grew.
XLIX
Michael was dragged kicking and screaming from the shower.
L
The shoot matured.
LI
Michael sat in an interrogation room, dripping, pleading. The cop dropped Michael’s license in front of him.
LII
The shoot was harvested, along with millions of its kin. It was a glorious day for the shoot.
LIII
Michael was tried and found guilty of attempting to solicit a prostitue. He laughed manicly and threw his chair into the crowd. The baliff tried to drag him out of the court, and Michael bit his leg.
LIV
The shoots were processed.
LV
Michael was evaluated by a criminal psychologist and found to be unstable.
LVI
The shoots were milled.
LVII
Michael was sent to a place for the criminally insane.
LVIII
The grain were sent to various destinations.
LIX
Michael had had a nervous breakdown. The orderlies helped him.
LX
Some of the grain was sent to an artisan bread factory.
LXI
Michael healed.
LXII
A loaf of the bread was sent to a sandwich boutique.
LXIII
Michael served his time.
LXIX
The bread was cut, mayo was spread on the top half, and it was stuffed with olives, beef, sprouts, and herbs.
LXX
Michael got his possessions from the guard behind the desk.
LXXI
A CEO bought the sandwich with the olives.
LXXII
Michael stepped down the stairs.
LXXIII + LXXIV
The CEO bumped into Michael and dropped his sandwich. Michael apoligized and offered to buy the man a new sandwich. The CEO waved him off and walked away.
LXXV
Michael slipped on the top half of the sandwich and stubbed his toe on the concrete stairs of the asylum.
--------------------------------
I held up my half of the bargain, now it's your turn. Go donate to Haiti relief.
Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
By Adam Callaway
Ω + I
Michael stubbed his toe.
II
The sounds waves from Michael’s surprised scream agitated some tranquil air molecules.
III
Michael wrenched his stubbed toe backward when putting on his business slacks.
IV
The air molecules transfered their kinetic energy to more air molecules, that in turn escaped from his highrise apartment.
V
Michael’s toe swelled, causing his loafers to be uncomfortable.
VI
The liberated molecules agitated more and more molecules, all the way until they gave just the smallest boost in energy to a high-atmospheric air current.
VII
Michael stepped in a deep, muddy puddle on his way to work. He hit the edge of the puddle and tripped, further injuring his toe.
VIII
The boosted current rose in the atmosphere the most miniscule amount, getting just that bit colder, and causing water molecules carried by the current to begin condensing.
IX
Michael got to his office, mildly dishelved, his foot alternatively squelching and throbbing.
X
As the air current flew over the Atlantic, it picked up more and more moisture, adding to the condensing liquid already within it.
XI
Michael sat in his cubicle, going over his proposal. He constantly flexed his foot, trying to get relaxed and comfortable.
XII
The clouds went over Spain, France, Germany.
XIII
Michael checked his watch. He should head to the boardroom now. He set his notecards down to massage his toe.
XIV
The clouds went over the Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus.
XV
Michael stood in front of the board. He checked his back pocket for the notecards and swallowed hard.
XVI
The clouds went over Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
XVII
Michael attempted his presentation. His toe felt like a steamed plum.
XVII
Tajikistan, China, Japan.
XVIII
The boardmembers were not impressed.
XIX
Pacific Ocean, Hawaii.
XX
Michael left the office, frowning. He checked his watch. He didn’t have time to go to the clinic before his date.
XXI
The clouds had dwindled over the Eurasian continent, but were doubley reinforced over the Pacific. California drowned. The storm got smaller.
XXII
Michael went to his date. She was saying something about her work as a dental hygenist. He couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting or his toe. She left before her duck ala orange arrived. He handed the waiter his Visa and ID.
XXIII
The storm devastated Nevada. The storm got smaller.
XXIV
Michael didn’t see the waiter snap pictures of his life with a smartphone.
XXV
The storm waited.
XXVI
Michael went home. The waiter went to a costume store.
XXVII
The storm waited.
XXVIII
Michael went to sleep. The Michael-waiter went to the casino.
XXIX
The storm waited.
XXX
Michael slept. The Michael-waiter got thrown out of the casino. He saw a woman hanging out by a streetlamp and took out a roll of twenties. Her badge was hidden in her handbag.
XXXI
Michael woke-up and hit the snooze. Michael-waiter saw the badge and made a run for it, plastic flying out of the back of his pants.
XXXII
The storm started moving again.
XXXIII
The cop stopped pursuing and picked up the ID and Visa and went for a pay phone.
XXXIV
Slowly, across the great plains, giving life.
XXXV
Five minutes. Buzz. Snooze.
XXXVI
The storm disipated. The water absorbed into the soil.
XXXVII
Two cruisers sped out of the station to the address on the ID.
XXXVIII
The water sunk and was absorbed by the bran.
XXXIX
Five minutes. Buzz. Stretch.
XL
The bran wicked the water into its interior. Conditions were perfected. Break.
XLI
Michael headed to the shower. The cops got out of their cars.
XLII
The shoot started to struggle through the soil, longing for sunlight.
XLIII
Michael lathered. Four cops ran up the stairs.
XLIV
The shoot broke the surface and got drunk on sun.
XLV
Michael rinsed. The cops positioned themselves outside Michael’s apartment door.
XLVI
The shoot grew and grew.
XLVII
Michael repeated. The cops busted in his front door.
XLVIII
The shoot grew and grew.
XLIX
Michael was dragged kicking and screaming from the shower.
L
The shoot matured.
LI
Michael sat in an interrogation room, dripping, pleading. The cop dropped Michael’s license in front of him.
LII
The shoot was harvested, along with millions of its kin. It was a glorious day for the shoot.
LIII
Michael was tried and found guilty of attempting to solicit a prostitue. He laughed manicly and threw his chair into the crowd. The baliff tried to drag him out of the court, and Michael bit his leg.
LIV
The shoots were processed.
LV
Michael was evaluated by a criminal psychologist and found to be unstable.
LVI
The shoots were milled.
LVII
Michael was sent to a place for the criminally insane.
LVIII
The grain were sent to various destinations.
LIX
Michael had had a nervous breakdown. The orderlies helped him.
LX
Some of the grain was sent to an artisan bread factory.
LXI
Michael healed.
LXII
A loaf of the bread was sent to a sandwich boutique.
LXIII
Michael served his time.
LXIX
The bread was cut, mayo was spread on the top half, and it was stuffed with olives, beef, sprouts, and herbs.
LXX
Michael got his possessions from the guard behind the desk.
LXXI
A CEO bought the sandwich with the olives.
LXXII
Michael stepped down the stairs.
LXXIII + LXXIV
The CEO bumped into Michael and dropped his sandwich. Michael apoligized and offered to buy the man a new sandwich. The CEO waved him off and walked away.
LXXV
Michael slipped on the top half of the sandwich and stubbed his toe on the concrete stairs of the asylum.
--------------------------------
I held up my half of the bargain, now it's your turn. Go donate to Haiti relief.
Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
The James Kennedy Interview
 |  |
A couple weeks ago I posted an in-depth interview with a blogger who disliked my novel The Order of Odd-Fish.
Here's the opposite: an interview with a blogger who LOVED Odd-Fish!
It's Adam Callaway, absurdist-lit writer and master of the blog The Weirdside. The interview will be cross-posted there. (He's the one with the clock on his head. I'm the one with the merciless baby editor.)
We talk about comedy theory, what makes a good title, the upcoming Odd-Fish fan art gallery show, and Dig Dug. And more. Let's get cracking!
ADAM: The Order of Odd-Fish is many things, but one of the main things is humor. How do you write humor? Do you carefully plan out each joke or do they come more by happy accidents?
JAMES: For me, the best humor comes from character. If the characters are fresh and distinct, and their relationships with each other have a natural push-and-pull, then the jokes will flow almost without effort.
Screenwriter Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica) had a blog in which she explained various tricks of screenwriting, with particular emphasis on comedy. I came across it while I was in revisions, and I found it very helpful. Jane makes a distinction between "soft" jokes and "hard" jokes that’s worth exploring. A "hard" joke is like an equation, with every word precisely in place, a glittering nugget of funny. If well-written and delivered well, then joke for joke, hard jokes get the biggest laughs. The sharp, lethal put-down is often a hard joke. Here’s a chestnut from Dorothy Parker: "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised."
(Notice that the word that makes the whole line funny is the last word? I've found that if I'm working on a line that has humorous potential, but it just isn’t funny for some reason, often the way to fix it is to rearrange the words such that the last word is the one that unexpectedly changes and makes funny everything that came before.)
The danger of a hard joke is that it can feel canned, written, sitcommy—something too clever that no actual person would ever really say. A hard joke is often something that anyone could say and it still would be funny—but wait, that’s good, right?
Actually, no. In a novel, jokes can’t just be funny; they must also develop character. Otherwise you have a bunch of joke machines nattering at each other for 200 pages or more, and that's just wearying.
"Soft" jokes, on the other hand, are often not as immediately laugh-out-loud funny. They spring from the peculiarities of character, and are usually very context-specific. But the accumulation of many soft jokes, and the way they reveal character, makes them more powerful and ultimately funnier than a similar amount of "hard" jokes.
Here's an example from Napoleon Dynamite:
Deb is selling crappy handicrafts door to door. Napoleon answers the door; his boorish brother Kip is inside watching some haw-haw sitcom.
DEB. In here we have some boondoggle keychains. A must-have for this season’s fashion.
NAPOLEON. I already made like infinity of those at scout camp.
DEB. Well, is anyone else here? I’m trying to earn money for college.
KIP (off-camera): Your mom goes to college.
It would be a sin kill the effortless genius of this scene by overexplaining it, but in the interests of analysis, let’s sin.
None of these lines is funny on its own like the Dorothy Parker line above, but taken together, and especially in the context of the rest of the movie, they're funnier than the Dorothy Parker line. Why? Because with every line, each character unintentionally reveals their absurdity. We all unintentionally give ourselves away every time we open our mouths. The disconnect between what a character thinks they're saying, and what they're accidentally divulging about themselves, is fertile ground for comedy. (It has to be accidental, something we read into the line. Napoleon wouldn't be funny if he believed he was being funny.)
Napoleon’s combative dorkiness is out in full force with his line, which is perfectly worded ("like infinity," "scout camp"). Stilted, listless Deb starts out by robotically mumbling a sales pitch ("in here we have some," "a must-have"—nobody talks like this outside a sales context) and then breaks down into a plea. But the masterstroke is Kip’s "Your mom goes to college."
Outside of certain limited contexts, it's impossible to do a funny "mom joke"—that territory was strip-mined years ago. But there is such a thing as a funny joke-about-a-mom-joke, or a joke about a listless old white dude who makes mom jokes. The best thing about this mom joke, "Your mom goes to college," is that it doesn’t make sense even on its own terms as a joke. It's funny because it's poking fun at the reflexive, mechanical, self-satisfied humor of people like Kip.
Jane Espenson has three valuable posts on the topic of soft vs. hard jokes here, here, and here. Indeed, her whole blog is a generous cornucopia of wisdom. It’s a free master class in comedy writing by an experienced professional.
As a postscript, there is a particular kind of "hard" joke that I’m very fond of, although it never makes me laugh. I call this joke the "Zen koan" kind of joke, for it does not cause laughter so much as it brings the reasoning mind to a gentle halt. From The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
FORD. You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.
ARTHUR. What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?
FORD. You ask a glass of water.
I’ve never laughed at that joke. The first time I read it, I probably didn’t understand it, or even notice it. But it is now one of my favorite jokes in the Hitch-hiker’s series. It doesn’t make me laugh, but it does make my brain go “click” in a satisfying way, which is rarer.
I think a good comedic novel should have both hard and soft jokes, and if possible, the occasional Zen koan.
In this discussion, it would be a shame not to mention New Yorker literary critic James Wood’s brilliant preface to his book The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. In it Wood draws a distinction between "corrective" laughter, which he characterizes as satirical and bullying, and he claims has roots in religious writing, and "forgiving" laughter, which is more gently mocking, modern and secular. My tastes run towards "forgiving" comedy rather than "corrective" comedy. In any case, useful insights aplenty. You can read an abridged version of the essay here, but it's worth it to go out and buy the book to read it in its entirety.You’ve said that when you were shopping around Odd-Fish, you received over 100 rejections from agents. How did you stay chipper through all the negativity?
I didn’t stay chipper. It was completely demoralizing.
Do you feel like you’ve gained the right to humiliate those agents that said “nay” to you of/and or using costumes and pie?
Well, The Order of Odd-Fish hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, has it? Only if I’d written a bestseller would I have the standing to humiliate anyone.
Actually, I’m grateful for the rejections. They forced me to review my manuscript, again and again and again, each time with a more critical eye. For the three years I was trying to sell Odd-Fish, I was continually revising and rewriting and tightening. If I’d sold my first draft, it wouldn’t have been as good a book.
Do you put value in the trope that you need to live life before writing believable characters and plot?
Wait. In what situation do you not need to “live life”?
What’s your take on titles? Are they important or secondary? Do you prefer complex or simple titles?
Titles are important. I have a pet idea about titles that I might as well share.
Ideally, I believe a good title should feel like the DNA of the book—that all the conflict, structure, atmosphere, and sensibility of the story should somehow be there right in the title, writ small in a couple words. The telling of the story is simply the unpacking, the unspooling of what’s already crammed into the title.
Titles that manage this trick have a magnetic tension in them, a fertile busyness. You can feel the different words of the title pulling each other in different directions. Those titles are unforgettable. They intrigue you afresh every time you hear them, even if you’ve already read the book.
 |  |
For instance, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a fantastic title. We feel three distinct things pulling against each other—something noble, something evil, and something commonplace. Adding and the Wardrobe to the end is the masterstroke, because it deflates the epic-ness of the first two items, and brings the title back to earth. It assures us that even though there will be fierce animals and unnatural magic, there will also be a certain coziness. That coziness is essential; it throws the magical stuff into relief.
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is another great title. You can feel the unpretentiousness and raffishness of “hitch-hiker” rub up against the cosmic grandiosity of “galaxy.” Again, the last word turns everything around. “Galaxy” instantly recontextualizes all the preceding words, making the title buzz with tension. And the two words beginning with H, followed by the two words beginning with G, is a nice piece of alliteration, but not so much that it bonks you over the head.
A certain kind of good title posits something that at first sounds like an impossibility. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (Huh? How could an assassin worth their salt be blind? I’d better read it and find out!). G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (Wait, how can a man also be a day of the week? I'm intrigued, tell me more!). Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (But there are no home-grown American gods! Ah . . . )
 |  |  |  |
Some titles try too hard. Throw in too many conflicting concepts, and you just get a mess. I love Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, but the title itself is a mish-mash, almost impossible to remember. Even now I had to visit my bookshelf to make sure I was getting the title right.
So that’s what I tried to do with The Order of Odd-Fish. The words Order and Odd can’t bear to be in the same title together; they’re pushing and pulling, you can feel them fighting each other. Odd things don’t feel orderly; well-ordered things aren’t odd.
But throwing two opposing concepts together in a deadlock isn’t quite enough. We need the third thing (the third heat?), like Wardrobe, to liberate the energy pent-up between Order and Odd. And so Fish—something alive, something faintly disgusting, with religious overtones, but strangely alien to humans—comes along as the last word of the title, recontextualizes what came before, and releases the charged energy stored between Order and Odd. As a bonus, there are three words beginning with O in the title, giving us some pleasant alliteration.
At least, that’s my analysis after the fact. When the title first came to me, it was just out of the blue.
Odd-Fish is a cinderblock, but has a great flow. Do you see yourself as more a maximalist or a minimalist?
I just had to look up “maximalist.” After reading the Wikipedia page, I’m still at a loss as to what it means.
However, if I was asked whether I preferred a luxuriant, overflowing garden like Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., or a precise, formal Japanese garden like Ryoanji in Kyoto, I’d say I loved them both, but I’d probably spend more time at Dumbarton Oaks.
 |
And if you give me the choice between fake Gothic architecture and authentic modernist architecture, I'll take the fake Gothic.
 |  |
(These buildings are across the street from each other the University of Chicago. It's not quite fair—to my mind, the SSA building isn't the best modernism can offer—but if I never saw another Mies van der Rohe glass box in my life, I wouldn't miss it.)
The point is, I feel more at home with generous, baggy, forgiving art better than strict, clean, controlled art. I like when characters have a vitality that causes them to overflow their role in the plot, that allows them to be irresponsible in their duties to the story. I like it when stories can breathe, when they allow themselves to digress and evolve and surprise me, when the story momentarily forgets it’s merely a story, and for a little while feels like an authentic document from another world.
This liberating feeling of overflow can happen in both “minimalist” or “maximalist” writing. But I suppose the sentiment, on its face, sounds “maximalist.”
As evidenced by your amazing use of language and a little snooping, you are obviously well-versed in the classics. Do you read more for entertainment or a deeper meaning? What is your main priority when writing a story?
The only reason to read, or write, is for delight. To put yourself in the hands of an enchanter and allow them to astonish you—to be brash and obnoxious enough to try to be one of those enchanters—that’s the irreplaceable, exhilarating, non-negotiable thrill of stories. Everything else is secondary. Deeper meaning is something we construct for ourselves later, in our own idiosyncratic way, when we’re musing about what we read.
I’ve often found that if I think of a book, “Wow, this is deep, this is really good” as I’m reading it, then that depth is almost certainly fraudulent. Lasting depth is constructed in your head, after you’re done reading, and nourished by re-reading. Many of the books that are deepest and most meaningful to me seemed, on first reading, off-puttingly dry, arbitrarily silly, perversely turgid, superficially entertaining, etc. But that’s to be expected. Anything that’s truly original achieves that originality by doing something that, in the current scheme, is wrong. Not just “breaking the rules” but I mean wrong—it just doesn’t sit well with you the first time you read it.
But then it nags you. And you eventually come around. And then it seems like a brilliant innovation, and later, as an inevitable development. But when you first encounter something truly new, it seems incorrect, arbitrary, in bad taste. My goal is to think up stuff that shouldn’t work and make it work. If you think up ideas that sound like they would work right off the bat, then the excitement of creation just isn’t as electrifying.
You have a blog and a Twitter account and update them regularly. What do you think is the role of social media in the modern author’s professional life?
I usually blog once a week, maybe once every two weeks—that is, not very often. My twittering is pathetic. It does take time away from what I should be doing, which is writing stories. But the upside is that it’s given me a way to be in touch with my readers, and a showcase for the amazing fan art I’ve received that I’d like to share with the world—such as when a husband-and-wife team of brewers, Meg Rutledge and Matt Mayes, created a beer in honor of Odd-Fish's villain, the Belgian Prankster. (The label is by Gabe Patti.)
  |
Or when a Floridian named Elise Carlson surprised me by baking a cake that depicts the scene when the giant fish vomited the Odd-Fish lodge into Eldritch City.
 |
Or when Max Pitchkites, a high-school student, did mixed-media illustrations for all 28 chapters of the book. Some examples:
  |
  |
And other various other cool pictures, poetry, and costumes. Being in touch in this way gives me the chance to co-create the Odd-Fish universe with my readers. That’s a privilege, and an honor, and it’s worth giving up a little writing time for it.
Actually, I’m going to have a gallery show of this Odd-Fish fan art in Chicago in April 2010! More about that below.
Your blog reads more like a series of disjointed fevered dreams than personal entries. Why?
When I blog, I like to put a little effort into it. After all, I’m supposed to be a writer, so it’s a matter of professional pride to put out something nice. It didn’t seem worthwhile to write a blog that was simply ephemera; we've all read enough of those. You know the sort of blog: “I had a cheese sandwich today. Hey, how about that Tiger Woods? I’m almost done with the DVDs for this season of Dexter. Gosh, will it ever stop raining?” My day-to-day life is not interesting to those outside my friends and family, and so if I’m going to take the time to blog, I’m going to try to make each entry special. If it’s coming across as disjointed fever dreams, then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Has your writing style/schedule changed since your daughter was born?
Yes. I don’t get to write anymore.
You live in Illinois (which I may point out, is below Wisconsin; interpret that as you like) Do you prefer deep-dish or New York style pizza? Toppings?
I interpret that to mean that Illinois is south of Wisconsin.
Deep dish pizza is simply gross. It’s an evil brick of cheese that sits in your stomach and tells you that it hates you. I hope I’ve eaten my last piece of “Chicago-style” pizza. Thin crust all the way. My best friend growing up, Dave Mancini, has a thin-crust pizzeria in Detroit called Supino that is the bee’s knees.
Why did you choose to become a writer versus a painter, musician, Irish Step-dancer, etc?
I have no talent in those areas. I occasionally get lured into a band, but that doesn’t make me a musician. I have always been the least valuable player in every band I’ve been in. That includes my last band, Brilliant Pebbles, now sadly defunct.
 |
Now that Brilliant Pebbles looks like it might be over, what are you going to do to keep yourself busy in a non-writing related way?
To keep myself busy? I’m already too busy without trying to dream up new stuff to eat up my time! I’m actually relieved Brilliant Pebbles is finished; that means I will have more time to work on my next novel, which my editor expects to see in July 2010. I am horribly behind schedule. It's called The Magnificent Moots, and here you can find some preliminary illustrations, as well as a link to me reading its introduction.
 |
Between The Magnificent Moots, my family, and my job (I’m a computer programmer for the University of Chicago), there’s no time for anything else. It’s a pity, because such extracurricular activities inspire a lot of my writing. I wrote the majority of Odd-Fish while taking improv comedy classes at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. In terms of creativity and inspiration, improv and writing fed into and nourished each other.
How and why did the Brothers Delacorte come together? What do you make of the allegations that its sole purpose is to show off how dashing you all look in turtlenecks?
 |
Those allegations are sadly true. The Brothers Delacorte have done barely anything other than pose for those photographs. We've had two public readings, but getting us all in the same room at the same time is like herding radio waves. I’ve given up!
As for how we came together—fellow Delacorte author Daniel Kraus got in touch with me because he knew I was another YA author in Chicago who was on Random House’s Delacorte imprint. As it turned out, he worked right around the corner from me—as a reviewer at Booklist—and I worked at the American Medical Association at the time, a ten minute walk away. We started having occasional lunches, and are now cordial frenemies.
 |
Weirdest scene from any book you’ve ever read?
The Circe chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. Never seen it topped. Don’t expect to.
What can we expect from Mr. Kennedy in the future, and when can we expect it?
Glad you asked. As I mentioned in my remarks above, I've been getting a lot of wild, strange fan art for The Order of Odd-Fish since it's been published. I've been putting them up in a special gallery on my web site.
 |  |
Fan artists like this deserve broader recognition! So in April 2010 I’m planning a gallery show / extravaganza of Order of Odd-Fish art in Chicago. I've put out an open call for submissions.
 |
It'll be not only an art show, but also a costumed dance party and theatrical extravaganza. I'm working with Collaboraction, a Chicago theater group, to do this. They're going to decorate their cavernous space to portray scenes from the book (the fantastical tropical metropolis of Eldritch City, the digestive system of the All-Devouring Mother goddess, the Dome of Doom where knights fight duels on flying armored ostriches, etc.).
Opening night will be a dance party where people dress up as gods and do battle-dancing in the Dome of Doom. My wife and I used to throw costumed battle-dancing parties back in the day; you can see pictures and read about them here, to give you an idea of what I have in mind for April, but on a much larger scale.
In the weeks after the costume party opening, we'll bring in field trips from schools. They'll browse the fan art galleries (which some of them may have contributed to), be wowed by the elaborately decorated environment we've created, take in some performances from the book, and participate in a writing workshop.
Hey, you! Reader of this interview! If you've read and liked Odd-Fish, and you’d like to do art based on it, your art can be featured in this gallery show in Chicago in the spring. The whole shebang will open in April. The deadline for submissions is March 1. Hoo-hah!
Finally: favorite mythical creature?
The Pooka. Not the legendary Irish demon of chaos. I mean the tomato-red balloon with yellow goggles from Dig Dug:
 |
By the way, did you know they're making a Dig Dug movie?! Check it out. The Internet doesn't lie:
"So what's in this for me?" "What do you want?" "Oh, the usual. Pineapples. Mushrooms."
Thanks for the great interview James!
Twitter Updates
Posts
