Creative Writing

Up from slush

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I’ve made a careful survey, and I think I can say authoritatively that I’m now the only blogger in the world who’s never mentioned Susan Boyle.

Oops. Scratch that.

Over at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, there’s this amusing article about the (vain and counterproductive) lengths some writers go to, to get a magazine editor’s attention. It’s a fun read, and there’s much wisdom there. (Tip: Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall.)

I enjoyed reading this article in particular because there are a number of quotes there from George Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, who used to be my agents. Before they were my agents, they were my editors at Amazing Stories, which gives me a rare opportunity to feel smug, since I managed to please these discerning connoisseurs of slush, once upon a time.

I’ll tell you how I made my first sale to them, too, at no extra charge. Continue reading Up from slush →

Blogs, Socials, Writing

Blogging Gets You Writing

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Frank Wilson writes about blogging and creative writing. “If there is any benefit to be derived from blogging it starts with the doing of it. Writers write. Blogging is a good way of finding out if you have what it takes to sit down at regular intervals and write something. For someone like me, who already has deadlines to meet, it’s a good way to start the work day, like practicing scales.”

Still, I feel the need to write fiction or prose more, and blogging pulls me away from that. I want to pray more too. So I need to watch my time use.

Poetry

“Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun”

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I.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,

And do run still, though still I do deplore?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,

For I have more.

II.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin, and made my sin their door?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two, but wallowed in a score?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,

For I have more.

III.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;

But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son

Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;

And having done that, Thou hast done ;

I fear no more.

“A Hymn to God the Father,” by John Donne

The Press

How much untruth can you squeeze into a two-letter word?

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Theodore Dalrymple, the great English physician and social commentator, meditates on the question in this piece at FrontPage Magazine.

It is intrinsically unlikely that a man espouses a totalitarian doctrine of proved and indisputable viciousness and violence from a love of peace and a dislike of poverty.

Uncategorized

Saw Iowa, lived to tell the tale

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I should probably start by noting that I was wrong (again) about the price of the new book. It will be $12.95. A further saving for you, the valued consumer!

I rode down to Iowa with four other guys on Saturday. Not Viking stuff, but Sverdrup Society stuff. We had a meeting in Radcliffe, Iowa, which is where my paternal grandfather spent his childhood, and it’s a place I haven’t visited much, so I thought I’d go. (Travel report: it looks pretty much like the rest of Iowa.)

What surprised me was how much I enjoyed it. We talked all the way down and back (it’s about a three-hour trip), and I actually had a good time. Even now my subconscious is working in the background, reprocessing the memory, finding reasons to believe that I made a jerk of myself and spoiled everybody’s day, but—for the record—I had a good time.

I heard a couple memorable quotations. A pastor of Finnish ancestry told us something his father used to say—“I don’t know if I understand all these things I know.”

And someone quoted an old North Dakota farmer, what you’d call a “character,” known to a couple of the guys present, who used to say, “These modern times! When will they end?”

Tonight, more proofing.

When will it end?

Fiction, Publishing

Eco-Kiddy Lit

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Megan Cox Gurdon writes about eco-propoganda drowning our children.

Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it’s almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long. They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man’s highest virtue. They get it in peppy “go green” messages online, on television and in magazines. And increasingly, the eco-message is seeping into the pages of novels that don’t, on their face, necessarily seem to be about environmentalism at all. . . .

Thus we have the spectacle of a 12-year-old becoming distraught when her father orders seared tuna at a restaurant (this happened to a friend of mine), on account of over-fishing, or a 6-year-old (son of an acquaintance) panicking at the prospect of even a yogurt container going into the trash: “But I can use it as a toy!”

Oh my soul. For balance sake, I know a child who asked to have a pink pocket knife to go with her pink rifle, so that when she shoots a deer (or whatever animal) she can clean it. She’s a good, little reader too, so no snarking at her. (HT: Loren Eaton)

The Press

Journalism, American People in Crisis

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Tax Day

Rick Pearcey writes about CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s reaction to the tea parties, saying his vulgar snarking was not journalism at all.

Not only is what Cooper said deserving of ethical condemnation, but it also reveals a principial breakdown between journalism and urinalism, where there no longer is a line of demarcation between facts and propaganda, between reporting and demonization, between knowledge and Goebbels.

Pearcey points to the weakness of the liberal, secular worldview as the reason for mainstream journalism’s problems. If this seems a bit over-the-top, perhaps you’re with me in not understanding the vulgarity in the first place.

Kyle-Anne Shiver of American Thinker also decries our news agencies.

Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between, that’s NEWS. Continue reading Journalism, American People in Crisis →

Fiction, Reviews

Berlin Noir, by Philip Kerr

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I said a while back that Andrew Klavan had brought the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level in his Bishop/Weiss trilogy, by turning the mystery story into an epic of redemption (or words to that effect).

I have similar praise for Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther mysteries. But Kerr transposes the melody to a minor key. His sad, gritty stories achieve the level of cosmic tragedy.

As you may remember from my review of A Quiet Flame, Bernie Gunther is a private investigator (who could have been separated at birth from Philip Marlowe) in Berlin during the 1930s. He constantly attempts to do the same sort of things Marlowe does, but history keeps interfering. Berlin Noir is a one-volume compilation of the first three stories about him. Continue reading Berlin Noir, by Philip Kerr →

Book Reviews, Creative Culture