Authors, Writing

P.D. James on Detective Fiction

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Author P.D. James has a book about detective fiction with an excerpt here. She writes:

And why murder? The central mystery of a detective story need not indeed involve a violent death, but murder remains the unique crime and it carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear. Readers are likely to remain more interested in which of Aunt Ellie’s heirs laced her nightly cocoa with arsenic than in who stole her diamond necklace while she was safely holidaying in Bournemouth. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night doesn’t contain a murder, although there is an attempt at one, and the death at the heart of Frances Fyfield’s Blood from Stone is a spectacular and mysterious suicide. But, except in those novels of espionage which are primarily concerned with treachery, it remains rare for the central crime in an orthodox mystery to be other than the ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made.

Religion

One size does not fit all

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Had a thought today, about something I discussed the other day, in my post on “How monsters are made.”
In that post I pondered a story of child abuse on the foreign mission field, and wondered how people who serve Christ sacrificially, far from home and comforts, could be so totally self-absorbed as to abuse children (child abusers, in my opinion and experience, are by definition people whose hearts are centered on their own needs and desires. They are profoundly selfish people).
I’ve figured out a way to think about it now.
I hasten to add that this is just my own way of wrapping my brain around the problem, and probably tells you more about the workings of my mind than anything in the real world.
But here’s my hypothesis. It starts with a story. Continue reading One size does not fit all →

Publishing, Writing

To make a long story short, takes work

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Young woman flicking through book

Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall links to an interesting piece by jazz musician Eric Felton over at the Wall Street Journal. I don’t think Felton will make a whole lot of enemies with his complaint about the unnecessary length of much current entertainment, such as movies, music and books.

It will be objected that any number of canonic masterpieces are gargantuan. Yes, of course. But even many of those could stand a trim. Did “Moby Dick” really need the chapter called “Cetology,” Melville’s rambling effort to prove that whales weren’t mammals?

One of the constant occasions for worry in my novel-writing career has been that, once I write the story I want to tell, I generally find it’s only about 60- to 80,000 words long. Jim Baen liked novels to come in around 100,000 words. I believe he felt (and many publishers today are of the same view) that when a consumer plunks down $7.99 for a paperback novel, he wants to feel he can take a short vacation in that book’s world.

The idea of publishing shorter books, and charging less, is not up for discussion, it would appear. Continue reading To make a long story short, takes work →

Religion

Smashing Idols

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“If I can’t stand up and show you how the gospel is smashing my idols, you’re never going to believe this stuff is real.” Tullian Tchividjian of Coral Ridge PCA is preaching on Jesus’ sufficiency, claiming the hard truths of the gospel for himself. He says, “I never realize how reliant I had become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away from me.” This is real Christianity.

Jesus + Nothing = Everything (Part 5) from Coral Ridge on Vimeo.

Publishing

Frank Frazetta, 1928-2010

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Cover of Conan the Phenomenon, by Sammon and Frazetta.

He was an artist, not an author, but I suspect he was responsible for more fantasy book sales than any single person except J.R.R. Tolkien.

Frank Frazetta died today, after an extended illness. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928, he attended the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts and went on to work in comics and commercial art. He was an assistant to Al Capp on the classic Li’l Abner comic strip for several years, specializing in voluptuous female figures. In the late ’60s, he began doing the classic book covers for collections of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, which is where guys like me first became wonderingly aware of him. He did lots of book covers, some for good books, some for garbage, but in my opinion there was a synergy between Howard’s lean, evocative prose and Frazetta’s original combination of textures and a limited palette that worked reading magic. Especially for adolescent boys, which was what I was at the time. Still am, for all practical purposes. Continue reading Frank Frazetta, 1928-2010 →

Authors, Publishing

Kindle: Not worth the candle?

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Amazon Begins Shipping New Kindle-DX

Joseph Bottum at First Things doesn’t like the Kindle.

Why is the text on Kindle so awful—hundreds of years of lessons about typesetting, lost in an instant? Bad line breaks, bad hyphens, bad page composition, bad times.

Much of the column is devoted to his affection for Terry Pratchett.

I’ve never gotten Terry Pratchett. I suppose I didn’t give him enough chance. People told me how great he was, so I picked up the first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, to start at the beginning. Didn’t get very far. I couldn’t see what everybody was so enthusiastic about.

I don’t even get the point of most of the citations Bottum includes. I can only assume there’s something very wrong with me.

Besides the passive-aggressive fishing for reassurance, I mean.

Photo credit: Getty Images.

Religion

How monsters are made

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The new Christianity Today came to the library today, and I had to stop and read the cover story, by Wess Stafford of the Christian charity Compassion International.

Stafford tells a harrowing story of years of abuse in an African boarding school for the children of missionaries (if you’re not aware, the standard practice for most Western missionaries in “the bush” has traditionally been to send the children to boarding schools for months of the year). The people who ran the school, as he remembers them, were people who’d wanted to be “real” missionaries, but didn’t make the grade for one reason or another, and were dumped into the “unimportant” work of loco parentis. Stafford’s analysis was that they were embittered, and took their frustrations out on the kids. Continue reading How monsters are made →