Spot on

Two quotes from China Miéville, in an interview on BoingBoing:

"When I am reading books that have things I don't understand in them, though, sometimes that mystery is completely part of the point. It's the desideratum, you know. And that disinclination to explain can, if done well, be part of what makes a book feel fucking great for me."

"If the reader is having to work a bit, so is the writer. All books are a collaboration between reader and writer — and, as a reader, I don't mind having to work if I feel it's worth it. It's exciting."

The Write Anywhere Project

For the first time, my writing is portable: I'm the proud owner of an iPad 3, which my dad got me for my birthday. In the past, I've done well taking notes with a pencil in my little quad-ruled Moleskines, and I've filled three and a half of them over the course of these two novels, but I've never really gotten the hang of composing with one. I know, I know — Nabokov wrote on index cards at a lectern in his socks, &c. &c., so what's my excuse? All I can say is that I've tried it, and produced the odd workable paragraph, but after a page or so I begin feeling cramped and crabbed.

Enter the iPad (which I have named Hhml Haml, after the angel of what I can only assume is preparatory throat-clearing). My wife got me a keyboard case (a ZaggFolio), which connects Bluetoothily to the iPad and permits me to use command-C and option-delete and various other shortcuts I've grown dependent on. iPad-specific keys replace the function keys — I can control my music, head to the Home screen, and so on. I find it a great pleasure to type on. (For a week or so, it wasn't — the space bar tended to stick, because one of the tiny pegs on one of the tiny scissor mechanisms under the space bar was broken. But the good people at Zagg sent me a replacement that fixed it right up. Now the keys are springy and responsive, and make a charming chickering noise.)

At the moment, I'm sitting in the back of Diesel, watching hipsters post flyers on the bulletin board and writing this post in a very nice blogging app called Blogsy ($4.99). My formatting options are arranged unobtrusively in a gray-on-black bar at the top of the screen, and a column of buttons along the right side lets me quickly drop in media from Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, &c. At the lower right, I can touch a pair of angle brackets to flip my post from preview mode to HTML, in case I need to poke around under the hood.

For prose, I am using iA Writer ($0.99), which sports the endorsement of Stephen Fry. It is as stripped-down as it is possible for a word processor to get — there are no italics or other formatting, no font choices, no justification options, just lines of black text on a white background. In "focus mode," only three lines are clearly visible; the rest of the text is grayed out, and there are no buttons or icons or other fripperies to be seen. I was deeply grudging of this minimalist mode; on my iMac, I have my templates in Pages set up to mimic the look of a mass-market paperback, and I like things to look Just So. But iA Writer is liberating. The text I produce on it has the look of a draft — and nothing more than a draft. It's easier to silence my inner critic and follow Kerouac's advice: "Just imagine it better and keep going." (I wish I had a way to mark italics, but it's not a deal-breaker.) When I'm done, I can email the text to myself or drop it in my DropBox. It turns my first drafts into zippered-together Frankensteins of scene fragments, but I'm learning to stop worrying and love the draft.

On the road that led to The Slow Palace, I walked with a lot of crutches. I had to be sitting at my computer, with a mug of cocoa close to hand and my special green lightbulb lit, and it had to be quiet, and I had to have checked a particular roster of websites, and, and, and. There's nothing particularly wrong with that — if you need crutches to help you walk, then crutches are the thing to have, and, after all, The Slow Palace did get written. But I've reached a point where I'd like to learn to walk without them, and with this 2.75-pound self-contained typing machine I can write in coffee shops, on the train, in fields of wildflowers, on the tops of mountains.

Lord, it is a miracle! I am healed.

 

“Why don't you just self-publish?”

Helen Keeble writes about the value of traditional publishers.

There are no synonyms in English

It is a line item in my manifesto that there are no synonyms in English. (J.L. Austin said there were no synonyms in English except "furze" and "gorse", but I'm not sure I believe him.) When writing, there is always something to recommend one word over another, even if only allusively (because one recalls author X and the other recalls work Y). Usually, there is a real connotative or evocative difference. (You've probably seen the Twain quote: "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.") These shades and echoes of meaning lend depth and power to writing, and when we lose the distinctions between words we lose depth and power. We lose tools.

(An aside: My wife complains when I use archaic or uncommon words, like "caprine" or "desman", because she feels they snag the reader's attention where there is no real significance to the snagging. I reply that those words are the right words, and "goatlike" and "muskrat" would not be the right words, and that is that. She is right, of course, that a word that is marked as unusual affects a reader differently than a word that is not, and I cannot wish that away, so I must be aware of it. But I have no compunction about sending a reader scurrying for a dictionary. I was encouraged to hear China Miéville express a similar sentiment at a reading. When I thanked him for it he inscribed this in my copy of Embassytown: "Words ought to be a little wild." —Keynes)

I was thinking earlier today about "cleanness" and "cleanliness", and how wonderful it is that they both exist. While their meanings overlap in some contexts, they differ in that cleanness is a state, and cleanliness is a habit. Something is either clean or it isn't; it can only be cleanly if someone has gone to the trouble of regularly cleaning it. An unbroken plain of snow in Antarctica may be a fine example of cleanness, but not cleanliness, unless someone has been tending it. Cleanliness comes with a history; it speaks to character. This is why cleanliness, not cleanness, is next to Godliness — it is often beyond our control whether we are clean or not, but we can always aim to be cleanly.

Of course, most readers call that idiom to mind when they hear the word "cleanliness", so it brings with it all the complicated baggage of religion — sanctimony, charity, piety, punishment. (Curiously, the first English appearance of the sentiment is in Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning, and there it is cleanness that signals the divine: "Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.") Cleanness doesn't have this baggage. It does have the awkwardness of a double "n", which might trip you up during a reading, but compared to cleanliness it is...well, clean.

The Lies of Chuck Lamora

25 Lies Writers Tell from Chuck Wendig. In case you needed a kick in the pants and/or teeth today. "Why? BECAUSE MULTIPLE PIES, DUMMY. Yay, pie!"

Houses of the Mouses of the Mountains of the Muses

The current project has a working title: Houses of the Muses.

It came to me while biking home from Diesel tonight, and the more I roll it around in my head the more connections it seems to pick up, like a Katamari ball. That's a good sign. When I got home, I did the googles, and found that there exist Houses of the Muses in the modernist Villa Lante gardens in Viterbo, which gives me another layer of depth to play with. That's another good sign.

Rejected!

The Mayor's Skin came back on Friday, with an unsigned, half-sheet rejection letter.

This was what I call an "expected rejection" — I submitted it where I did not because I thought it would suit them particularly, but because they pay well and respond quickly, and my first choice is currently closed to submissions. Even so, it stung, in part because the editor said the story "couldn't hold [his] interest." It's a form letter, one that's been sent to thousands of writers this year alone, and it intends nothing personal; but that phrase clutches at the roots of a writer's self-worth. If I can't hold your interest, I have no back-up strategy. I'm a crank, a poser, a dabbler, a machine for killing time.

To defuse this line of thought, I list off the writers who inspire me — Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, China Miéville — and remind myself that there are millions of people in the world whose interest they can't hold, who set their books and stories down after two pages and move on without looking back. Not everybody has to catch what I'm pitching. To quote Joel Hodgson (another personal hero), "We never ask, 'Who’s gonna get this?' We always say, 'The right people will get this'."

Now I just gotta find the right people.