Latest Click on the Ratchet

On Easter Sunday, I received word that I had been accepted into the Cthulhu 2012 anthology from Mythos books. This is a professional-level anthology which pays five cents a word.

Fame, fortune, and young nubile fanbase, here I come!

The Ladder is Not the Proper Tool, But Consider This Other One

I have repeatedly been told, by people I respect that there is no ladder. A new writer doesn't have to start down at the bottom of the pay heap and move upward. A story will go as far as it can, regardless of the author's previous credits. It's why $10 and $25 and even penny-a-word markets drive Brian (and Jack Haringa) insane.

I believe them. So while I reject the ladder, I resolved to metaphor a different tool; the ratchet. I resolved not to sell any story for less than I had sold a previous story. And it worked. I've sold stories for increasing amounts of money, and now I've actually sold something for "pro," five cents a word.

This leaves me with a small problem. Weird Tales only pays three cents a word, and I'd like to get in those pages. So, do I give up my dream of appearing in Weird Tales, or do I go against my self-imposed ratchet?

I'm currently dodging this decision by writing a novel. I hope I'll have an answer in four months.

People Out of Context

Something I like to do in my short fiction is place a stereotype or recognized cliche character in a radically different setting. Would you recognize Kurt Cobain if he was bagging your groceries? How would Conan the Barbarian feel if he was employed in a washing machine factory? What sort of presidential candidate would Odysseus have made? Would I vote for him? Would the rest of America? What if he was running against Hannibal Lecter?

Context can be very important to understanding a person. And yet, finding the keys to the locks that opens them up sometimes involves a change of scenery, to remove them from the setting that makes them so familiar. Give someone a haircut, clean up their speech, give them a new job, but have you really changed them? Would you even recognize them?

Is that a pulp hero who is taking your order? Could the woman ringing up your bill have been a Mata Hari or a Marlene Dietrich given half a chance? How do we know?

How Not to Write

Mood: Manic

There are a number of writers who can come up with a couple of characters and bang them together and make a story. Just start on their story with no clue as to how it's going to end, where the story is going to take them, just strike out for unknown territory with one or two people for company.

I am not one of them. This is the first time I have started a story without a clear ending in mind. It was, in process, a disaster. As it stands, the story is some six thousand words. The file is about nine thousand words, which includes two starts to the story that didn't pan out, several wads of research and ideas that make up the background for the story, but did not actually make it into the story itself. That's about three days' worth of work that are not in the story.

This is not a comfortable way for me to write a story, and I'm not sure it's producing good work. Because I obsessed over the story, to the exclusion of virtually everything else. I'm behind on my blog (I've got a month's worth of blog ideas), I'm way behind on my personal correspondence, because I've been afraid to devote energy to something else. And when I get that intensely focussed, I don't turn out my best work because I stop new ideas to the story.

But I got the first draft done last night. First revision today, and it goes to the Roundtable tonight. Then, I think, it'll sit for a few days while I start a new story. One that I'm not going to obsess about so much.

I Wasn’t Bitten by a Radioactive Novel When I Was a Kid

There are many ways to divide up heroes, just as there are many ways to divide up people. My most recent thought is to go back to the classics: the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Achillies (yes, I understand that he was nor invulnerable until Roman times–unfortunately, that spoils my analogy, therefore, I’m going to ignore it) had a skin that could not be hurt by any weapon. He was a real badass, one of the major players in the siege of Troy. The Iliad is primarily about him. Odysseus was known as the Sacker of Cities. He was eventually the man who won the city of Troy, not by force of arms, but by trickery. He later got his own poem, the Odyssey.

Now here’s the thing. Achillies is a hero with gifts. He didn’t arrange to be dipped in invulnerability serum; someone else did it for him. Thus people who are given special gifts are Achillean heroes. Whether Luke Skywalker, Neo, Gilgamesh, Anita Blake, Superman, Heracles, Hellboy, or Harry Potter, the Achillean hero got some cool mojo. They are set apart from other people by virtue of something they inherited, or were given as a child, or by happenstance. This gift allows them to perform feats beyond that of most individuals. Their stories are of individuals learning to use their specialness on order to right wrongs, or bringing order to the world, often in ways that they are uniquely suited to do. The task is appointed for them.

Odyssean heroes, on the other hand, are self-made. What sets them apart from other men is their drive, their intelligence, or their ability to endure. Examples include Batman, Frodo Baggins, Indiana Jones, Conan, Sam Spade, and Fallout’s Vault Dweller. The Odyessean hero is still special, but lacks a magical breastplate or special gift to distinguish them from the rest of humanity. They must rely on their own natural wit, intelligence, and whatever else they can come up with. Certainly Batman’s wealth as scion of Wayne Enterprises helps him out, but the Darknight Detective is best known as an investigator and a martial artist.

Now, I’m not going to say that one is bad and the other is good, although I tend to favor the Odyssean hero over the Achillean. Ultimately, it depends on how the hero is handled. Hellboy was born with abilities beyond that of ordinary mortals, but that’s not what his stories are about. Hellboy generally has fights with things, but that’s not how he triumphs. His major character arc has been his inner struggle, in which case, his supernatural gifts are actually against him. (See my next essay for more on this).

Gilgamesh, the original action hero, is another Achillean hero that I greatly love. For while half a god, Gilgamesh finds that being unchallenged in the world brings him no joy. It is only when the gods send Enkidu to be his near-equal and friend that Gilgamesh discovers the value of life. And that existential quest of love and loss is something that no amount of strength can help with.

However, I will say that there has been a lot of abuse of the Achillean hero in the past twenty years. I blame the countless imitators of Star Wars. From Neo to Anita Blake, people in stories have been given some pretty damn amazing things, just for being in the right place at the right time, being born of the correct parents, or boffing the correct combination of vampire, werewolf, and whatever other supernatural creature might be in the area. And sure, whatever, but what is the lesson there? That some people are better than others, and if you aren’t born special, then you never will be? What kind of message is that?

What really bothers me is that Achillean heroes don’t have to work for what they get. Batman had to bust his ass to become The Bat. He trained, he failed, he learned, he suffered, he overcame. Superman? He learned to fly one day. What does that teach us?

There seem to be a lot of people just waiting to hear that they are “The One”, secretly hoping that someday, someone will discover something special in them, that they are the last scion of Christ, or the King of Gondor and Arnor, lost all these years. That someone will come and sweep them away, and make their lives wonderful, rather than setting about doing so themselves.

The reason I like the Odyssean model better is that I don’t believe much comes to most people in this world without work. If I want opportunities, I’m going to have to make them. If I want to sell a novel, I’m going to have to sweat over the damn thing and produce it, and then sweat as I polish the shit out of it. Because if I wait for it to just happen, it’s just never going to.

Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that I had to stop about every paragraph and decide whether I agree with the conclusion presented. I’m currently on page 26 (out of the 200 page Semiotics: The Basics, by Daniel Chandler) , and it has been a long time since I’ve read any sort of literary theory. I am finding the intellectual challenge quite interesting, and although I haven’t discovered anything to directly influence my writing yet. Still, nothing learned is wasted.

I will admit that I picked up Semiotics for two reasons, one much more significant than the other. The first is Umberto Eco. Eco’s novels are interesting and different enough from the mainstream that I’m interested in his literary theories. The second is Mark Danielewski. House of Leaves was described as a semiotic ghost story in a review, and I love House of Leaves.

Anyway, it’s moderately thick going, and I seem to disagree with seminal semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s conclusion that signs and meaning are primarily negative in nature, that the concept of tree is composed of dozens of elements such as “Not a bush”. At least partially because defining by negative is a laborious process. To think of a tree as “not a bush, not grass, not a car, not a house, not a book, not a person, not an animal, not a rock, not a road, not a mountain, not a star, not darkness, not light, not water, not a sound, not an act” is simply too cumbersome a definition for any mental process to go through every time we think ‘tree’. Yes, there must be differentiation–a tree is not a bush because a bush is shorter than a tree–but a tree is still a tall, woody stem with branches and leaves that is neither a vine nor a bush. And imagine if we had to define both of the objects in that last definition in the negative. We’d be here all night just listing the things the vine isn’t, and the bush isn’t.

Of course, we don’t think of definitions when we think of trees. Most of us either think of a word or an abstract symbol of a tree, rather than a specific tree. Really. Picture a tree–what’s the first image that comes to your mind? Is it a tree you have known, or is it something like a child’s drawing, a conceptual tree? This is where semiotics comes from–the human mind seems to work better with symbols, possibly for ease of storage, rather than

We also react very well to signs. Think of any cartoon character: Do they really look human? With human-like proportions, a face like someone you know? Not really. I mean, they have two arms and a head, but if you ever saw someone with a head like a paper bag like Bart Simpson, they would appear to be strange and grotesque. But we understand Bart Simpson as not a person, but a symbol representing a person. And this, apparently, is what semiotics are about–how the human mind understands and interprets signs.

Language is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Few other species have developed something as finely detailed and versatile as language, ands yet all human cultures seem to have it. Now that there is a tribe of chimps that make and travel with spears, humanity cannot be distinguished as the unique tool-using animal. We are, however, the creature with the most complex communication. So what better way to understand humans than through the study of our greatest achievement (according to Madeline L’Engle)?