Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.
Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.
Games can hit all the marks of story, even when it isn’t a storytelling game. The basic conflict between sporting teams can feel like a good story without the themes and only light characterizations. A good ball game can be more epic than the average thriller.
History-based board games can give you the feel of playing within a historic novel. I enjoyed putting several hours into Avalon Hill’s Kingmaker, an old game set in England during the War of Roses. The pathos you feel in a game like that could be a spark of humanity or megalomania.
I’m thinking about this because on Thursday I finished playing for the second time Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s a compelling, open world adventure that gets close to having an epic feel, but doesn’t have the depth of character for that. The gameplay is a ton of fun. The environment and main characters are marvelous. It’s comparable to your favorite light-weight fantasy novel with that immersive quality of moving the story forward by your own efforts.
But enough about me. What else do we have?
Translation: A plug for the English translation of a couple more authors.
Political Divide: “Stories are critical starting points for civility. If we understand one another, we are more likely to see each other as fellow human beings and fellow citizens rather than opponents or even worse, enemies. If we know each other’s stories we are more likely to trust one another.” (via RealClearBooks)
Happy Birthday: Charles Dickens (1812-1870) has a Toronto-based fan club that has been celebrating his birthday (February 7) since 1905. They also hold a Dickens-themed Christmas tea. “This is not a scholarly society.” (via ArtsJournal)
Video: How would each of the Southern states prepare a meal for you?
Editors: Do copy editors crush young words beneath plodding feet? “One man’s infelicity is another man’s favored choice of expression. And there’s neither romance nor adventure without some inconsistency.”
Image by Edwin Francisco from Pixabay
Our friend Dave Lull kindly shared this link, where the Lit Hub blog interviews him (about half an hour) about his latest novel, The House At the End of the World. Contrary to the title, he doesn’t actually explain how to sell 500 million books. I would have noticed.
I didn’t like the book as well as I hoped to, but I concur that the very important themes the author talks about here are highlighted in it.
This is cool. Turns out Gregg Hurwitz, of the Orphan X books, is a student, friend, and collaborator with the noted Norwegian-Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.
I did not know that.
Lots of talk about good writing too.
Last week, an independent bookstore in Chicago splashed up attention for many Twitter users with a tweet complaining about a customer who wanted to rent rather than buy some expensive books. Rebecca George, a co-owner of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago’s Wicker Park, wrote in Jan 9 tweet: “Turns out one of our biggest sales last month was for the person to stage their home for the holidays and now they want to return them all. Please don’t do this to a small business, people. That one sale was a third of our rent.”
The books were eye-catching art and cook book, no doubt published to show off the reader’s good taste. The most modest book in the set was entitled Authenticity: The Vain Attempt at Finding the Real You. (I’m sorry. I made that up.)
The tweet has been seen almost seven million times and picked up by news outlets, making January a very good month for sales by good-hearted book-buyers showing their sympathy.
What else is online?
Reading Good Books: An essential freedom that builds character more than we know. “American kids, more than ever, are stratified into those who read—those who have regular access to books—and those who don’t. I’m not talking here about basic literacy, but being open to the human good that is the enjoyment of literature.”
Kristin Lavransdatter at 100. Sigrid Undset wrote a “medieval romance in the twentieth century (published between 1920 and 1922), [and] she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life. . . . Kristin Lavransdatter is really just a love story—but one of the most savagely honest love stories ever written.”
Mystery: All About Agatha is a podcast that has read all of Agatha Christie’s novels, discussed them, and ranked them against each other. I look forward to looking up All Hallow’s Eve to see if they place it within the worst five.
Writing: Backstory brings characters to life, making them appear as real people, except when it floods the reader with irrelevant details. So it’s a very good, except when it isn’t.
Terry Teachout: The New York art critic died last year on Jan. 13. Patrick Kurp calls that fact “comparably difficult to believe. It’s like saying France no longer exists. Seldom in my experience was so prominent and successful a writer so generous with his success.”
And Titus Techera talks about the conversations he had with Terry about film noir and its relation to men in post-war America.
Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash
I was busy translating today, and then I was busy catching up on things I neglected so I could do the translating. So what to post tonight?
My latest default seems to be finding Andrew Klavan videos, because nobody does the writing job better in our time.
The clip above concerns his novel Another Kingdom, so it’s a few years old. I remember the period when he was writing it particularly, because at the time I was enjoying a brief period of personal contact with him. I’d written a glowing review of the Weiss-Bishop novels for The American Spectator, and he e-mailed me to thank me. About the same time he made a request, on the blog he was doing at the time, for recommendations on good Christian fantasies to read, saying he was writing his own first Christian fantasy and wanted to check the field out. I sent him a file of my e-book, Troll Valley.
I never heard another word from him. Ah, well. Maybe I should have sent him Death’s Doors. Or The Year of the Warrior. Or just kept silent. One never knows.
The DMR book blog has profiled me today. You can read it here. Thanks to D. M. Ritzlin for giving me the exposure.
In the wake of my fulsome review of Andrew Klavan’s A Strange Habit of Mind yesterday (it was so gushy it even embarrasses me a little, but I meant every word), I thought we could have some advice from the master on starting out as a writer. So here’s a video, which is apparently about a year old, since he plugs When Christmas Comes.
I should probably take this advice myself, though I wonder how many agents are interested in bright young authors in their seventh decades.
I have a vague idea that, in the happy long ago of this blog, I sometimes did journaling posts on the writing process. If that’s true (I could be wrong, and the early blog posts, on another host, are lost to history), this will be another of the same.
If not, this is an innovative new idea.
I’m in the throes of Early Novel Ecstasy just now. It’s a little like first love – your emotions run high; wonderful discoveries rush in; all around you, the world seems to organize itself to facilitate happiness and success. You know that down the road there will be disappointments, frustrations, despair and (possibly) failure. But right now it’s fun, and why waste the joy? Having a less good time today won’t buy me insurance against next month’s tailspin.
Last night I went to sleep thinking about a character in the book (Saint Olaf, if you must know). What made him tick? What kind of personality would account for his (sometimes bizarre) personal decisions?
This morning I woke up knowing a little more about him. As I floated into consciousness, I found myself constructing a couple snippets of dialogue that reveal part of the “real” man (as I imagine him).
Moments like that, in my experience, are one of the great pleasures of being a writer. It’s like grace; it’s a free gift and you can’t force it.
As I sat up to say my morning prayers, I looked up at the pictures hanging on the bedroom wall. There are three. I hung them years ago. Over the years, two fell down, and I was too lazy to re-hang them. This past weekend, I did re-hang them. Because my spirit was renewed.
On the left is a publicity still, in black and white, of Clint Eastwood as Josey Wales. Because, in its day, that movie spoke to me as no other ever had.
Next to it is another Western-themed photo taken around the same time, but it’s personal. It’s one of those studio photos that you used to be able to get at fairs and places like that – you dressed up in period garb and had your photo taken in front of a period backdrop. The camera was an antique, the picture a certified counterfeit. This was a picture of me and my college roommate, dressed up as desperadoes, displaying our Colt revolvers. We had it taken ceremonially, to mark the parting of our ways when we broke up the living arrangement .
I learned last week that this old friend is now institutionalized in another state, suffering from morbid depression. I won’t tell you his name, because he’d hate that. But you might pray for “Lars’s friend” if you think of it.
I realized, when I heard this, that somehow, at some time he’d dropped off the list of friends I pray for in the morning. Perhaps the fact that his picture had fallen down behind my dresser was a contributing cause. But the picture’s back up now, and I won’t forget again.
The third picture is a photo of C. S. Lewis, to remind me of my ambitions as a Mythopoeic writer.
Another small restoration in my life is that I mounted my Viking Ship mobile again yesterday. There’s a Danish company called Flensted that makes all kinds of lovely mobiles. I first saw their Viking ship mobile in my dentist’s office when I was a kid, and loved it. Years later, when I was in exile in Florida, I bought one to nourish my fantasies. I had it in my office in the library, but hadn’t put it up in my home since I retired. Wasn’t sure how to do it, as I didn’t want to put a hole in my ceiling. I finally bought a wall mount and got it set up yesterday. A lovely little thing, and very conducive to the writing state of mind.
Oh, that reminds me. I need to get back to the book.
I am excruciatingly aware that I’ve kept my fans waiting far too long for my next book. I just got a reminder on Basefook the other day, showing me a post I’d put up ONE YEAR AGO, saying I’d finished another draft of the new book (to be called King of Rogaland), and hoped I’d have it ready soon.
This is way too slow. I need to purge my life of some lazy writing habits.
In any case, I can now announce that King of Rogaland is finished. Wrapped up. In the can. It’s in the hands of my long-suffering publishing facilitator, who’ll be getting the e-book up on Amazon as soon as he can. However, he’s got stuff on his own plate right now (really important stuff, by the way), so I can’t promise when that will be.
Sorry. It’s coming. I promise.
In better news, King of Rogaland went off Saturday. On Monday I had a… revelation, or something.
I know now how the next book will go. It’s a stylistic departure for me, taking my work up a level (I hope).
The title will be The Baldur Game. It will be big. It will be epic. It will be the climax of the series.
Hope I can bring it off.
I’m working on it now.
