The Nameless Writing Project(s) (or, Throwing Out My Soul and Wondering What You Think)
Some of you might recall this post about my financial troubles (more like financial stupidity compounded by some very real financial problems). Recently, things have grown a little worse. I haven’t talked about it much on this blog, but one of my pet leopard geckos (Noodles) has had an ongoing eye problem for close to three years. This problem is not cheap. In the last few months, I have forked out several hundred dollars for lab tests, vet visits, medications, and so forth (in the last week, I’ve spent $200+). This makes things difficult for the summer: we generally do not work during the first part of summer at the University of Florida, I have no immediate income, and jobs are scarce or difficult to acquire in part because most of the students in the town have gone home, leaving an economic void. It’s not that I won’t have the money when I start receiving a paycheck again. My salary goes up starting at the end of June and I start teaching again at about the same time. The problem is that I won’t have that money in time to pay my rent in July and the recent health issues with Noodles have put me dangerously close to being bankrupt during most of June (when my Sister has decided it would be a lovely time to visit me — go Ashley). While I have no doubt my family would help me out, I would prefer avoiding asking them until I’ve exhausted other options, one of which I want to talk about here (after the fold): The Project I have two ideas that I’m considering to meet my financial demand for the summer — $1,000 (more or less; this number is somewhat random, to be honest). Both of them are writing related, and genre specific (which should please all of you). The World in the Satin Bag Ebook Release One of the things that has been sitting on this blog going to waste is the very thing that started the blog many years ago: my blog novel. It’s an interesting little work (violent, barely YA fantasy, full of myths and monsters and magic and other fun things). But the longer I’ve left it on my blog, the more I’ve realized that I have no intention of traditionally publishing WISB. It’s from a different point in my literary history and I have, for lack of a better phrase, moved on. But I do want to do something with it while it’s on my blog. That something is this: I want to edit it, including entire rewrites of sections of the novel, trimming it where it needs trimming, and so on; I want to put it in electronic format; I want to get something resembling a decent cover; And I want to release it as an ebook (or maybe even a real book) on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. I have no illusions about the novel becoming one of those super sellers on Amazon. But I know a number of you have ebook readers and might want to read the book in a format other than blog format. Doing an ebook release will also mean an updated, proper version will see the airwaves. Short Fiction Blog and Ebook Releases I quite enjoy writing short fiction, and there aren’t enough pro markets out there to warrant keeping good stories on the market. The reality is that not every good story gets published by the big guys; they don’t have the space. Something I’d like to do is release short fiction on my blog in numerous formats and ask for donations (via Paypal). I know some have had success doing this. I’ve even thought of a number of short fiction projects I’d like to tackle doing this: 1) Catnip Pete Stories Talking cat detective in a world of talking animals and humans. There are a lot of cat jokes and the stories are very rooted in the old Private Eye pulps with lingo adapted to cat language. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve considered doing a novella length serial here. If you’re not familiar with the Catnip Pete stories, see the Fiction section on the navigation bar. Two stories are already available (the first a flash fiction piece and the second an unfinished novelette). 2) Stories of Altern Some time back I did a project called Worldbuilding Month and wrote thirteen posts about a world I was working on called Altern. I’ve already written two stories within that world and would love to write more. Altern is partially rooted in European folklore and mythology, with many of its house spirits and critters appearing in exaggerated form. “The Gnomes of New Timberfax,” for example, is a story about, well, gnomes, but of the evil, razor-toothed variety; “The Beautiful Are Not Far Away” is less humorous, but equally as dark, involving the tales told about the holes in trees (and the bad things that come from looking through them). Many more stories can be told about this world. Tied into this project are a few more experimental works, such as a story I’ve been working on for some time called: “A Brief Account of the Aberwithy Minstrel Monks of New Timberfax During Her Majesty’s War Against the Reinark in 114.” It’s a collection of journals from a soldier which is annotated with historical corrections and explanations by an imaginary editor. It’s a fun way of playing around with world building and I find it immensely fun to write. I’m not sure how I’d release it on this blog, but that’s something to think about later on. 3) U-Pick Story Project One of the things I’ve thought about is having something where readers get to pick the next story to be released based on a synopsis. I’d begin with a story I particularly enjoy, see how it was received, and then give readers the power! I write science fiction, fantasy, and some things between. I’m not tied to any
Syllabus Update: A Little More Science Fiction, a Lot More Cohesion
Some of you might recall that I am hard at work on a syllabus for a survey in American literature for the summer. I expressed some concern over the lack of women in my selections and a number of you made suggestions, which I have taken to heart. I haven’t included all of your suggestions for what I hope are obvious reasons, but a few have appeared in my working list. Here’s the list as it currently stands: WWI and Aftermath “Sestina: Altaforte” by Ezra Pound (1909) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) War Brides by Marion Craig Wentworth (1915) “Gerontion” by T. S. Eliot (1920) “The End of the World” by Archibald Macleish (1926) WWII and Aftermath “In Distrust of Merits” by Marianne Moore (1944) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) “The Grave” by Katherine Anne Porter (1944) “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1948) “Lost in the Funhouse” by John Barth (1967) “The German Refugee” by Bernard Malamud (1964) Vietnam and Civil Rights The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) “The Lions Are Asleep This Night” by Howard Waldrop (1986) Under Consideration or Unplaced Works “The Displaced Person” by Flannery O’Connor (1955) “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor (1965) “The Artificial Nigger” by Flannery O’Connor (1955) (I’m using at least one of these) Dropped or Replaced Works “Bluegill” by Jayne Anne Phillips (1979) “A Way You’ll Never Be” by Ernest Hemingway (1933) “In Another Country” by Ernest Hemingway (1927) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) Urinetown (text) by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis (2001) “They’re Made of Meat” by Terry Bisson (1991) Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (1959) “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (1967) A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929) The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy (2006) One thing I’ve decided to do is skip contemporary literature. I wouldn’t do so if this were a standard semester, but because I’m working with a 6-week summer time limit, I have decided it would be best to examine the pinnacle of modernism and the dawn of postmodernism by focusing on works centered in three significant moments in U.S. history (WWI, WWII, and the Civil Rights and Vietnam era). I hope the themes make sense and that I can clearly show the development of American literature through authorial engagement with these events. Any thoughts, suggestions for changes, etc.? Let me know in the comments. (Note: the sections I’ve created above are not exact. They bleed into one another, as all historical periods in the 20th century do. I don’t envision them as wholly separate entities in terms of the themes being discussed in the works I’ve selected.)
A Science Fiction Thesis Fragment: Some Tobias Buckell Love
I have been inspired by a friend to post something from my academic work in hopes that it will bore you to tears. Then again, the fragment I plan to post is about science fiction; more particularly, it’s about the work of Tobias Buckell, who I spent half of my thesis talking about. Here you go: The cultural and racial fragmentation of the postcolony perhaps highlights the liberative potential of outer space precisely because cultural ownership has been a particularly problematic notion in the postcolony—the European fragment, as I‘ve already pointed out, continuously attempts to (re)formulate itself as the center of knowledge, which makes attempts to separate oneself difficult in the geographically limited Earth. In Ragamuffin, this is made possible by two spatial orientations: the first is the positing of Caribbean peoples as the last, real threat to the Satrapy, making them no longer the secondary figures they had been formerly in a world dominated by western politics. The second is in the flourishing of human ingenuity in Caribbean spaces, where they are able to not only break themselves from the hold of the Satrapy, but also from a wider postcolonial past. These ideas are interwoven throughout the novel, represented best by the character of Nashara. She is a prime example of human ingenuity at work, since her very biology has been rewritten as threat to the Satrapy and its allies. She has sacrificed her womb in order to become a digital bomb capable of self-replicating over the lamina (a kind of super information network that connects ships together). In so doing, she ceases to be fully human, quickly becoming a series of digital copies; but it also means that she is representative of what the opening of geographical space has achieved for her people (Buckell 105). They are no longer contained in small, resource dependent islands, but on worlds of their own. Chimson is one such world: “We took Chimson from them with our bare hands,”Nashara said. “And even though they shut us away from the rest of humanity, it was still a glorious thing….You should see what ideas and people flourished as we all jammed together. It must have been like Earth before the pacification, with all those billions of minds so close together.” (Buckell 30) The Satrapy‘s pension for cutting off its problematic group subjects like diseased limbs, however, proves to be their undoing; it is only through containment that the people of Chimson are able to grow. This process also mirrors the isolationist—or, perhaps, isolation-izing—policies of the old history, which colonialists used not only to limit the potential for aggression and resistance against colonial power—through aggression, imprisonment, and even abandonment—but also to enact economic warfare against indigenous and even former colonial powers—primarily through capitalist exploitation models. It also signals a wider deprivationary political process through which prison camps, serfdom, deportation, and other legal frames are used to deny access to the opening offered by greater access to geographic space (Gottmann 117). But much as galactic empires and even spaceships are defamiliarized spaces or objects, the notion of containment on a planetary scale within Ragamuffin signals the (post)colonial past through radical expansion amidst radical reduction, defamiliarizing our perceptions of the past and present while at the same time embedding their symbols and signals within an imaginary landscape. Because ―access to physical space is at the foundation of all [regulation] of human behavior,‖ the containment of that space determines an individual‘s freedom (Gottmann 117). For postcolonial peoples, space is undeniably central to interaction: ―location is causally significant; it shapes our experiences and our ways of knowing‖ and ―limits the possibilities available to us, since it helps frame our choices by organizing the habitual patterns through which we perceive ourselves and our world‖ (Mohanty 110). Buckell, however, presents a narrative which disentangles the problematics of ownership in a (post)colonialist world by changing the very dynamics under which such a system functions: the people of Chimson are not stripped of their land, but are instead subjugated or denied access to the enlarged (interstellar) colonial system (Satrapic space). The location, then, is one which has already begun severing the lines of an underlying colonialism which informs the social stratification of the novel. Don’t say I never gave you nothing. Feel free to lambaste me with your criticisms in the comments. P.S.: My thesis has been accepted and I should have one of those MA degrees shortly. I am quite excited to mount that sucker on my wall, after which I will bother you with pictures of my degrees. Why? Because I’m egotistical like that. Deal with it.
Mr. Library: What Have You Got Checked Out?
We all know that libraries are under attack these days, and I intend to do my part to show their importance by checking out books (because I have some delusion that using the library is somehow recorded and then sent to evil government people who are forced to reconsider cutting library funds because people actually use the library). Here’s what I currently have checked out: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (DVD) Ghostbusters (DVD)(it was awesome) Once Upon a Time in the West (DVD) Mythologies by Roland Barthes Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays edited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili The Search For Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 by J. Kerry Grant A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Alone Against Tomorrow: Stories of Alienation and Speculative Fiction by Harlan Ellison American War Poetry: An Anthology edited by Lorrie Goldensohn Carrying the Darkness: the Poetry of the Vietnam War edited by W. D. Ehrhart The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology edited by Paul Hoover The Postmoderns: the New American Poetry Revised edited by Donald Allen The Sunset Limited: a Novel in Dramatic Form by Cormac McCarthy The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway A History of Literary Criticism: from Plato to the Present by M. A. R. Habib Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific by Naoto Sudo Teaching Literature by Elaine Showalter That’s one hell of a list, don’t you think? I had others checked out a few weeks ago, but decided to return them. I’m hoping to work through most of these this month. You won’t hear anything about them, though, since most of them aren’t of interest to you all (postmodern poetry is hardly SF/F). In the interest of prying into your lives, though, I want to know what books you currently have checked out from the library. Family’s count (I’m looking at you, Jen)!
The Forgotten Pilot: My Foray Into Scriptwriting For Animated Shorts
Last night I posted something unusual on my Twitter account: the script for a pilot episode of an animated miniseries I wanted to do with some friends way back when I was still trying to write comics. The show was called “Cheese and Crackers” and featured exaggerated versions of myself and people I knew (mainly my friends). It was also a geeky show, with copious references to geek culture, from video games to science fiction movies. At least, that was the intention, since I only wrote one episode: “A Long Time Ago.” And guess what? I’m putting it up on my blog for everyone to read. If you’d like to see what kind of weirdness I was writing before this blog ever appeared in your Google searches, then all you have to do is click here. That will take you to the Google Doc with the script. Now lay it on me: what do you think?
Syllabus Woes: That American Lit Class I’m Teaching
If you don’t follow me on Twitter, then you don’t know that I’ve been putting together a syllabus for a Survey in American Literature course for Summer B (the second 6-week chunk of the University of Florida’s summer “semester”). Picking texts has been difficult because the course is so short; showing students some of the movements, forms, and styles of American literature without overloading the course with too much reading is a daunting task. The sad truth is that many books in the last thirty years that I would love to teach are simply too long to justify teaching them in a 6-week course. So far, I’m semi-firm on the following works: “Sestina: Altaforte” by Ezra Pound (1909) A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929) “Gerontion” by T. S. Eliot (1920) “The End of the World” by Archibald Macleish (1926) “In Distrust of Merits” by Marianne Moore (1944) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) I’m considering the following: Urinetown (text) by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis (2001) “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (1967) “They’re Made of Meat” by Terry Bisson (1991) Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (1959) Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) “Fates Worse Than Death” by Kurt Vonnegut (1982) “Dutchman” by Amirir Baraka (1960) “Almost Browne” by Gerald Vizenor (1991) “Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon (1984) “Neo HooDoo Manifesto” by Ishmael Reed (1972) “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard (1994) I’m trying for a mix of poetry, short stories, and novels (with a play). Long novels are basically out, though, since I can’t justify devoting time to anything significantly over 250 pages. There is also another problem here: while there are a few women writers in the poetry and short fiction genres, most of my selections are by men. To be fair, most of the works I’m interested in are from the 1920s to the 1960s, which means that a great deal of those works we might call “classic” are by men, but this still leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Who am I missing other than Toni Morrison (who I can’t stand)? I must admit that outside of the SF/F genres, I am ignorant of female writers of significant works of fiction in the U.S. So, that’s where I’m at right now. If you have suggestions of books you love, whether SF/F or not, feel free to leave a comment.