Today I have been writing! Costa Rica is fabulous, and we’re enjoying Jaco. Walked out for breakfast this morning and later on to the super mercado for groceries. My high school Spanish is, luckily, coming back in leaps and bounds.
I’ve been working not on a story set here, though, but one in Vegas. Here’s the beginning of what is looking like it will hit novelette length at least, “Carpe Glitter.”
Carpe glitter, my grandmother always said. Seize the glitter.
And that was what I remembered best about her: the glitter. A dazzle of rhinestone, a waft of Patou Joy, lipstick like a red banner across her mouth. Underneath all that, a worry little old lay with silver hair and vampire-pale skin.
Not that she was one, of course. But grandmother hung with everyone during her days in the Vegas crowd. Celebrities, presidents, they all came to her show at the Sparkle Dome, watched her strut her stuff in a black top hat and fishnet stockings, conjuring flames and doves (never card tricks, which she hated), making ghosts speak to loved ones in the audience and when she stepped off the stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.
All that shine. And at home?
She hoarded.
I mopped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my t-shirt and attacked another pile of magazines. No cat pee – I’d been spared that in these back rooms, closed off for at least a couple of decades. Grandmother had bought the house when she was at the height of her first fortune, just burst onto the stage magician scene, a woman from Brooklyn who’d trained herself in sleight of hand and studied under the most famous female stage of her time.
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Teaser From Cathay of Chaos
If you're interested in finding out how to create effective, engaging characters, check out my "Building Characters" class or the Dialogue mini-class. Click "Take an online class with Cat" to find out more about the class. Lately a couple of stories have arrived in the form of characters. One is Laurel Finch, the little girl in this steampunk snippet, which is tentatively titled “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?”. The other is this one, Cathay the Chaos Mage, who is wandering through a city that’s been in my head for a while now, Serendib.
Cathay was a Chaos Mage and didn’t care who knew it. Fear and envy were fine emotions to set someone spinning into a roil, and Cathay could sip from that cup as easily as any other. She dressed sometimes in blue and other times in green or silver or any other color except black. Her sleeves were sewn with opals and moonstones and within their glitter here and there another precious stone, set in no particular order, random as the stars.
A love of gambling was part of Cathay’s definition, and so she often wandered through the doorways of Serendib’s gaming houses, whether they were the high-tech machines of the Southern Quarter or the games of chance and piskie magic played in the alleys across town, in one of the neighborhoods where magic reigned.
Cathay stumbled into Serendib through a one-time doorway, like so many others. She was walking in a wood one moment, and then her foot came down and she was in a city. It made her laugh with delight, the unpredictability of it all, and she soon learned that she had come to the best possible place for a Chaos mage, the city of Serendib, which was made up of odd pockets and uncomfortable niches from other dimensions, a collision of cultures and technologies and economies like no other anywhere.
When she arrived in the city, she had three seeds in her pocket, and so she found an empty lot, precisely between a street where water magic ruled, in constant collision with the road made of fire and iron, so daily fierce sheets of steam arose, driving the delicate indoors and hissing furiously so it sounded as though a swarm of serpents was battling. She dug a hole with her little finger, and then one with her thumb, and a third by staring at the dirt until it moved. Into each she dropped a seed, and covered it up, and sat down to wait.
It was not long till the first inquisitive sprout poked through the dirt, followed by a second. She waited for the third, but it was, by all appearances, uninterested in making an appearance. She shrugged; two were enough for now.
Will anything other than the words themselves survive?(Todd Vandemark passed this along in the hopes I’d have something to say about the book. I did.)
In The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, editors Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee have collected a number of new writers* talking about the future of books, and although the word has been interpreted quite differently by the different writers, there’s some insightful pieces included in the mix. Their introduction talks about the movement from printed page to the screen as a format change comparable to Gutenberg’s printing press. Like the printing press, the technology increases the accessibility of knowledge — though unfortunately that’s not a change tn which any of the essayists seem to be interested.
The truth about electronic publishing is that nobody is entirely sure what’s going on, and this book showcases that mix of cluelessness and well-educated guesses that seems to characterize these discussions. A phenomenon amplifying the scattershot approach of it all is that different essayists take the word “book” differently. In “A Book Is A Place,” Joe Meno talks about the book as an experience for the reader as he tries to define the word:
For me, a book, in whatever form it takes — hardbound copy, paperback, electronic version, online instrument, text downloaded on a cell phone, even a story read orally — a book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas.
When we’re talking about books in this form, the possibilities that electronic publishing offer to a text are exciting, and several of the essayists wax rhapsodic about those possibilities. Michael Paul Moore, in “The Future of Writing is in My Jacket,” points not to just the audio and visual possibilities but the interactivity afforded by the medium, via authors’ blogs and social networks.
Rudolph Delson also points towards interactivity of a sort, predicting in “The Best Books Will Be Written Long After You Are Dead”:
Pay attention in 2014; that year will witness the publication of the first non-linear e-novel. it will appear on the internet, and it will advance the technique of Edward Packard in the rarest way imaginable. I said: Edward Packard. You have not read Edward Packard? But he invented Choose Your Own Adventures!
Many of the writers are optimistic — or somewhat so. Benjamin Kunkel examines the overtaking of the graphosphere by the videosphere, saying that it will actually become a digitosphere: while the novel as a form will perish, writing will survive in news articles, snippets, blog posts, and other brief writings. Ander Monson observes:
I wouldn’t worry about the future of story. Story is inescapable. We can’t not perceive our lives as stories, even if we know that stories — even the ones we tell ourselves about who we are — are fiction. That’s how the brain works. In this dissolving, data-fragmented world, we all desrire narrative (as opposed to the actual lived experience of unsatisfying fragments, random encounters, and passing glances.) We will continue to consume it.
Kyle Beachy reminds us, though, in “The Extent of Our Decline,” that we’re not the first generation to panic about literature and change, pointing to a letter from Horace to Augustus lamenting the decline of literature. And that’s a hopeful note, because while the material aspects of novels (the printed page, the binding, etc) may not last, the idea of novels will survive, no matter what. There’s something about the way text and your brain interact that ensures that survival — in my opinion, which I, as with every individual weighing in on this debate, am basing on guesses and experience and gut instinct.
I wrote a while back about electronic publishing and the future and got some flack from people who thought I wasn’t sad enough about what I saw as the disappearance of books as printed objects except for those that survive as art or collector’s items. The friends who have helped me carry box after box of books can testify that on my dying day in the nursing home, there will be an armload of paperbacks on the windowsill as well as the fully-loaded library biochip in my skull. But seriously, if you think that the neighborhood used paperback store is going to survive more than a few more decades…c’mon. Factor in a wave of nostalgia similar to the current LP craze and maybe it’ll stretch up to a century, but after that…nuh uh and yes, I weep for the children who won’t know the joy of browsing among the stacks too, but I also know they’re coming.
But the core experience of reading will remain. Joshua Gaylord speaks to a very specific subset of the novel experience in “Enduring Literature,” when he talks about reading difficult books:
The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most — rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read” — it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed idealistic youth. It was a labor to carry it, it required innumerable accouterments to be read (not just the two other texts but also a notebook and a pen, a highlighter, slips of scrap paper to mark particular pages.) Even the page design was more an opponent than a partner: There were line numbers on each page. Line numbers! This book wasn’t kidding around. Reading it, you felt you were staring down the business end of Literature.
That’s exactly why I took a summer class one year in grad school that involved reading Finnegan’s Wake. I may not understand more than a scanty scanty number of those words but by god every single one of them passed under my eyes and I consider that as much an achievement as I do any publication or quitting smoking or the terrifying time I ziplined. And I enjoyed the heck out of the book. If I got a tattoo with words in it, it might well be this: A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…
But I digress. And it’s passion for books that makes me do so, which is one of the pleasures of these essays, because many of the writers share this passion. Some pieces are full of clever prose and little heart, but at the moments when an essayist admits their unabashed and honest love for text and page that they become moving and interesting. It’s both charming and touching, for example, how many writers wax rhapsodic about books as physical objects. In “Home Word Bound,” Nancy Jo Sales talks about books as a source of identity:
I can’t think of myself without them. …The older I get, the more boxes there are — on my last move, the grumbling moving men counted close to seventy cartons. My books have accumulated around me like a kind of history of my mind, of my experience and knowledge, however limited. Having them near me in a physical way serves as a reminder of who I am — like old photographs that you actually re-enter, reliving the moment captured in the images.
Katherine Taylor notes in “Survival Tips For Writers (And Books In General): A List”, “You’re not home until you unpack your books.” while in “Scribble,” Victor LaVelle touches on this theme as well:
If you pull down the books that are mine, meaning the ones that I brought with me from my single life, you can open more than half and find handwritten notes, sometimes whole paragraphs, scribbled on the end pages, or in the margins of the text. I’ve got a copy of Butterfly Stories, in hardcover, and when I opened the back cover while working on this essay I found one word written at the bottom of the very last page of the story. I wrote, “Yikes!”
But for many there’s a pragmatism about it all. Deb Olin Unferth sums it up in “The Book”:
With regard to the object itself, there does seem to be the danger that the bound book could go the way of other dated and diminished civil objects: matchbooks, hair culrler,s drive-in movies — things that still exist, but thinly. There’ll probably be fewer books in people’s houses, fewert in backpacks and briefcases, fewer bookstores. And, yes, that’s sad, because we like bookstores and backpacks full of books (even the drive-in movie still holds a place in our hearts), but you can’t hold onto something out of sheer sentimentality — or you can, but it won’t work. Besides, a lot of people never had any books in their briefcases to begin with. So in the long run I don’t think it will matter much.
Which seems on track to me, because there are things vanishing from this world that I will mourn as much as the book: blue whales, for one, and places for solitude in nature, and unsupervised trick-or-treating. Things come and go, which is what makes the world interesting, and I, like most of the writers in this book, believe that narrative itself will endure, much like gravity or our dependence on oxygen.
Towards the end of the book, we comes to an essay in the form of e-mails between David Gates and Jonathan Lethem, “A Kind Of Vast Fiction,” which originally appeared in PEN America 12: Correspondances, which sums up so much of the things touched upon by other essays, and in which Lethem asks what is, I think, the core question of this collection:
How is it, and how does it feel (if it’s true), that we happen to occupy the most completely postmodernism-resistant art form, after all? I mean, I’m no David Shields, but I’ve made my own passing gestures at appropriation, and yet fiction — the old transaction, the old transmission — just seems to springily retake the basic shape that it was put in by Austen and Dickens (a shape only mildly deformed, in the end, by your Becketts and Barthelmes), time and time again.
Regardless of any boundaries or distinctions between genre and “literary” fiction we choose to draw, what is happening to the book — to the novel” is the sort of thing that worries anyone who writes. Some crucial core will survive, most of us agree, but what strange sea changes will happen? We book-lovers are seeing our partners transform even as we daily make love to them. Who is that future stranger they’re becoming — and will we love them just as well?
*A couple of caveats — My take on this book may not be that of the average publishing professional, particularly since I used to edit an online magazine and prefer publishing online to in-print . Furthermore, as a spec-fic writer, any title with “Writers of the Future” takes on weird dimensions, because I always imagine Jay Lake and Ken Scholes speaking the words. (I’m also irritated by views of the future like Sonya Chung’s piece, “In The Corporeal Age, We Will Know the Names of Trees,” where gender-exclusive language is a given, but I know that’s just me.)
