Little Known Author

[This is another thing I did for Facebook, but wanted I'd post here, too. I posted the thing recently about books that made a big impact on me over the years, starting from when I was a wee wittle sprog, but movies have been important, too, in different ways. And not all science fiction movies, either. Anyway, see what you think.]

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey. I first saw this at about age five or six, not long after it first came out, in the late 60s. I hardly remember. My grandparents took me to see it at a drive-in theatre one night. Was baffled. But grokked enough to know this was something for me. Finally saw it properly in 1978, a re-release, and was all "ZOMG!!!1!!!WTF!PHWOAR!!!"

First, a huge thank you to everyone who posted a comment here or on my Facebook page with wishes and thoughts for me while I was in hospital.

I plan to write a post about the whole thing, but for now I can report that I’m back home, my heart is fine (my lungs, too), and I got the biggest hug ever from my dad (who never hugs me). The thing is, we still don’t know what the hell happened last Saturday afternoon. Out of nowhere I suddenly felt a squeezing, dull ache in my chest, and it hurt when I breathed in, and had a lot of trouble taking deep breaths at all. We’ll be taking this up with my GP probably this next week. I also have to see my cardiologist (ye gods, I have a cardiologist now) in a month’s time.

Right now, I’m fine. No pain, nothing. It’s weird.

Adrian is having part two of the stress test today. We’re hoping that he’ll be allowed home today.

He’s in good spirits and looks forward to a good coffee.

Michelle

Hi everyone,

I just thought I’d let you know about Adrian’s visit to the hospital. Saturday he was taken to hospital with chest pain and spent most of the night in A&E.

He’s still in hospital, but all the tests, so far, have been negative. He has to wait until Wed for the final scan that will show whether it was his heart or something else. I’m sure that he’ll tell you all about it once he’s back home.

Michelle

There’s a lot to talk about today, so let’s get straight to it:

Item 1. Check this out:

Once written, it is the book that has the relationship with the reader, not the writer, and it is the minute that I see that actual book… the finished thing - I realize that if I’m holding it in my hands, that more copies of this book are being sent to real people right this minute (and some of them even pre-ordered, and how terrible is that going to be when it sucks) and that from this moment forward - for the rest of my life- this book has made it absolutely certain that some people are going to stand around in yarn shops talking about how I’m a complete moron, I don’t deserve to earn any money (even a fraction of a dollar per book), and that frankly they wish that I wasn’t so full of myself that I thought I was special enough to write books at all. When I hold this book in my hands, that’s what I know.. and since every person has a voice inside them, the voice of their supremely unsuccessful self (a 16 year old short- skinny-bad hair-braces low self-esteem self, in my case) saying that anyway, the fear catches, and coalesces into nausea and a certainty that this can’t end well.

It’s an extract from a phenomenal essay by "The Yarn Harlot", Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who writes books about her knitting experiences, her life and family, and everything. She’s funny, perceptive, truthful, always unfailingly honest, and someone whose blog Michelle and I have been reading now for years. We love her stuff. And I don’t knit. I’m honestly not that interested in knitting (though I’ve developed a fair understanding of it), but I love the way the Harlot writes about writing. She understands exactly what it’s like to be a writer, the good and the bad, the anxiety, the sheer terror, the bliss, the pain, everything. In this essay she’s writing about the publication of her latest book of essays, and it’s just exquisite, the way she opens herself up and tells the truth about this whole "published author" thing. Go and read the whole thing. Heck, read the whole blog.

Item 2:

American author David Foster Wallace , aged 46, died this week, apparently a suicide, possibly related to long-term depression. It was a stunning thing to hear about. I’ve loved his work for years, ever since reading his novel, INFINITE JEST , perhaps the most maddening, frustrating, elating, wonderful, overwritten novel I’ve ever encountered. At a whopping 1079 pages, plus 100+ pages of fine-print footnotes which are as fascinating as the main text, it was a tough thing to read, a marathon, sitting there day after day, letting this extraordinary story unspool itself through my head, following, one one hand, the intensely imagined lives of teenage tennis prodigies, and on the other hand, the equally intensely realised lives of drug addicts, and, for good measure, on the third hand, the bizarre French Canadian separatist terrorists who are searching for a videotape, a film, said to be so entertaining you die from the sheer pleasure of watching it. Rarely have I read a book that so cried out for serious cutting, but which also presented such a uniformly amazing/frustrating text that you couldn’t decide which parts to cut, even if you could bring yourself to do it.

In the wake of Wallace’s death, I’m now sorely tempted to go and re-read it. No amount of description or discussion about the book is ever going to do its extraordinary gonzo strangeness justice, but in the past couple of days plenty of other writers have been trying to do just that. It grieves me that there will be no further such volumes from this author. His work reminds me that fiction, and perhaps especially science fiction, can and perhaps even should be so much more than what it usually is. I know in my own work, I’m usually satisfied if I can manage an exciting sequence, a well-visualised image, conveying some degree of appropriate realism. Next to Wallace’s work (and certainly his work is something of an acquired taste), his towering ambition and evenly matched ability, I do feel like a damp squib.

Item 3:

Today work on my own new project, EVEN STARLIGHT BURNS, continues to accumulate. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a sense of the other characters in my protagonist’s life (unlife?), and what they might mean to him. There’s quite a crowd of these people, too, and that’s not even counting the assorted ghosts and ghost fragments who show up, wanting rides around the city in the middle of the night. I was very concerned that the lot of a taxi driver, particularly one who drives full-time, was such that he wouldn’t have much time for being the protagonist of a story, so to speak; since then Charlie Stuart suggested that this problem could in fact be a plus: yes, the protagonist doesn’t have time for adventuring or chasing down story-related stuff. He has to earn his living or he doesn’t have a place to stay, etc–and yet, stuff is still happening. He is drawn towards finding out about his past, about who made him a vampire, and maybe finding out about the strange war brewing out in the Red Centre. So good on ya, Charlie! You really helped me out.

It rocks mightily! Just now I thought I would have a crack at upgrading my WP installation. In the course of reading about how to do this, I learned of the existence of a Wordpress Upgrade Plugin, which you can download, install in the Plugins directory of your WP installation, and you’re ready to go. Activate the plugin from the Dashboard of your installation, and start it up.

And, lo, job done! Phwoar! Movable Type, take note!

Exactly one month from today, Michelle and I will be jetting off to Denver, CO, via Tokyo. The plan is to arrive in Denver on the Monday just before the Denvention 3 Worldcon begins–which gives us just two days to get over a lot of jetlag. When we went to Toronto for Torcon in 2003 (which meant four consecutive flights, 33 hours of flying, and 12 timezones crossed), we arrived two days before the event, and had a very strange, stressful and sleepy time of it. Just as we were starting to feel reasonably acclimatised to Toronto time, it was time to come home again. It looks like we have that same exciting experience before us again.

Not that I mind. As incredibly unpleasant as modern air travel can be these days, I still love it. I don’t know what it is. The aeroplane geek in me gets off on the minutia of the actual flying. I like to know just which kinds of plane we’ll be on. I always ask our travel agent if this time we get to go on the A380 and he always says no (though if we went via Singapore Airlines, and were prepared to start the trip in Sydney, we could get the great behemoth). This time we’ve got a succession of 747s and 737s ahead of us, with a sprinkling of A320s. Which tells me, hmm, squeezy seating!

I love airports, too, which I know is also weird. Always have. Many years ago, when I was 14-15, I actually had a part-time job at Perth Airport, in the car park. My dad worked there, too, in the booths where you had to pay for how long you’d been parked. I couldn’t figure out how to operate the ticket-checking machinery, so they had me out in the car park itself, often at odd hours of the night, directing the traffic pouring into the airport to available parking spots. It always seems like it was raining, and horribly cold, when I think about it these days. I had a bright yellow vinyl raincoat, and the rain was always good at getting inside the coat, trickling down my teenage back. Often had to wear sunglasses in the middle of the night, too, because of wankers flashing their high-beams at me. Such sport! Such hilarity!

The thing was, though, that when the flow of traffic was light or just not happening, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the Terminal, soaking up the vibes of the place, watching planes taking off and landing. I remember the strange yellowish light gleaming on the skins of planes from around the world, from the sodium vapour spotlights on the airside, the smell of burning kerosene, the whine of spinning engines powering up or down. It was magic. I longed to be on one of those planes, going somewhere exotic, but figured I never would. We were, if not exactly poor, then not exactly made of money, either.

These days, the airport is all different. The old Terminal was demolished years ago to make way for a shiny new Domestic Terminal, and an equally shiny International Terminal. Over the next 20 years these two buildings will be somehow amalgamated (or possibly simply demolished and rebuilt) into one sprawling facility. As it is now, the two Terminals are quite some distance apart, and considered to be woefully inadequate for the high levels of traffic currently pouring through them.

In any case, back to the forthcoming trip: 10 hours to Tokyo, a six hour layover, then another 10 hours to San Francisco, a few hours there, then two and a half hours to Denver. We stay in Denver for just that week, then it’s off to Calgary, CA, Canada, where the following weekend I’ll be a guest at Con-Version 24 , the big local convention. Even though I’ve known about the whole “you’ll be the author guest of honour!” thing for some time now, it still kind of freaks me out. Me? Really? Seriously? Apparently, yes. I’m dead chuffed–but also deeply humbled. I hope I do a good job. I worry a lot about somehow blowing it, or somehow offending people, or not being interesting enough. Then, the day after Con-Version wraps, we head home, more or less following the same path. Once we get here, I expect Michelle will go straight to bed (she always goes straight to bed once we get home), and I’ll go over to my parents’ place to tell them about it. They get concerned.

This time, though, I’m taking a laptop, and I’m hoping to write updates about the trip as we go. Previously on these trips I’ve relied on snaffling access to public computers in airports, etc, or computers available at the Worldcons–and have always been disappointed. Yes, there are public computers at the conventions, but you just can’t get near them for the queues. This time I’ll just need a wifi connection, so with a bit of luck I’ll be more able to do updates. Writing posts while fried out of my brain on jetlag and fatigue should be big fun! I’ll be sure to provide photos so you can judge for yourself.

In Other News:

The other exciting thing going on right now is this: as we speak my new book, TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT , is at the printers, being turned into an actual, for real, book that you will be able to buy. OMG! I cannot wait to see it, to smell the pages, to feel the heft of it. The Worldcon people have given me a public reading slot–now I just need to make sure there are people there to hear it! The folks in Calgary, I’m thinking, will probably also be keen to let me read from it.

I was working on the galley proofs of the book for three frantic weeks last month. At first it looked like I would have only a week, tops, to go through the manuscript, looking for problems, and that suggested I would only have time for one, maybe two, correction cycles. As it happens, I had a lot more time than that, and we managed five correction cycles. And by the fifth cycle I was still finding problems in the text that needed sorting out. I have no doubt that even when I’m doing readings, I’ll still be spotting new problems. Such things breed like cockroaches in the dark. You can never get rid of all of them. Still, that all said, I’m guardedly optimistic about the book. It turned out, I think, fairly well. Or at any rate, it closely resembles what I had in mind for the project when I first set out on it at the beginning of last year–which is something you can almost never say about a book, in my experience. You start out with Idea X in mind, but what you end up with, after all that time and work, is something else. With a bit of luck the thing you end up with is still worthwhile. I’ve had plenty of experience with books that started out with some great idea, and turned to crap by the time I was done. Ugh.

More soon…

This is me now trying to post photos. So far, so interesting. This, btw, is the upstairs bathroom window in a bed and breakfast in Toronto where Michelle and I stayed during our 2003 Worldcon trip. The breakfasts at that B&B were fantastic: just lashings of bacon, eggs, cereal, toast, fruit, juice, coffee, plus the day’s newspapers, all served up with great enthusiasm by the hostess. That B&B experience, while fabulous, spoiled us for all others. Other B&B’s we’ve stayed at have mostly suffered by comparison.

Hmm, so far, while this is making me hungry and nostalgic for Toronto, I have to say the process for posting photos seems a little cumbersome. Must have a closer look at how it all works. [later] Okay, I’ve been reading what looks like a helpful thread in the support forums. Here goes nothing.

Okay, now this is very interesting. I followed the two key pieces of advice about using the WordPress photo uploader: clear your browser’s cache, and make sure you only have ONE BROWSER WINDOW OPEN. I did those things, and the whole thing worked entirely as advertised. Intriguing, Captain. Let’s try another one…

By golly, I think we have something here!

I just had a bugger of a time trying to embed a YouTube video in the post I did about the Colossal Squid. For unfathomable reasons, it didn’t want to work. Here I’m trying again, in a fresh post, to see if that makes any difference.

<object width=”425″ height=”355″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5ddBRp6V064&hl=en”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed mce_tsrc=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5ddBRp6V064&hl=en” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”355″></embed></object>

So far, not so much. All I get is a bunch of code. I’ve been prowling through WordPress’ online support offerings, and so far I’m not seeing anything other than instructions to use YouTube’s “embed video” instructions, which is what I’m doing, as far as I know. If you’re reading this and you can think of something I’m not doing, please let me know. This is cheesing me off.

Today I knew things were looking up when Michelle phoned me before I left home for the hospital–and she sounded all bright and chirpy, more or less her usual sunny self. On arrival, it turned out that she’d been up and about, had a shower, had some food and kept it down, and other than being very sleepy (I got lots of reading done), she’s coming along marvellously well!

Which is a huge relief all round. She’s starting to get to grips with the idea that she might, really and truly, be finished with the damned fibroids once and for all.

If anyone’s interested, I was reading Charlie Stross’ THE JENNIFER MORGUE, and a collection of stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges, which repays a lot of repeat reading. The Stross book, I should add, is tremendous fun: Lovecraftian nasties, Bond-esque spy thrills, and high-end computer geekery–all with great, believable characters, vivid prose, and a sense of humour.

PS: if you’re trying to leave a comment, and the system won’t let you for some reason, please let me know so I can have a look under the bonnet.