Writing

Rugby Romance, Anyone?

~ Cheryl

According to The Guardian‘s Book Blog, the RFU and Mills & Boon are to team up to raise the profile of rugby by producing rugby-themed romance novels. It didn’t take Alison Flood long to work out that this was a pretty dumb idea for a sport where one of the players is known as the “hooker”. But really, why stop at romance? Who knows what goes on in the England scrum? And as for Stade Francais… Rugby slash, anyone? Butler/Moore?

(Actually, come to think about it, the slash thing might work better with the NFL. I mean, Troy & Buck? It is almost is if they were designed for it.)

On a rather more serious note, Nigel Owens talks to The Guardian about being the only openly gay top flight rugby referee.

Editing Needed

~ Cheryl

I’ve just done a first trial read-through of the ICFA paper. 28 minutes. Clearly I have to cut some of it, as the time limit is only 20 minutes. Fortunately I was expecting this, and already have some good ideas about what can go. I’ll make the full version available later.

On Genre and Literature

~ Cheryl ~ 14 Comments

I’m a little late on this due to having been very busy with paying work, but allow me to point you to a post on Crooked Timber in which Henry Farrell takes issue with this lengthy article by Benjamin Kunkel from Dissent magazine.

The paragraphs that Farrell quotes sound very much like the classic LitCrit dismissal of science fiction that we are all so familiar with from the “How Others See Us” section of Ansible. If you read the whole article, however, Kunkel’s argument is a lot more complex, and I’m going to go on at some length about it.
Continue reading →

Electronic Ghosts

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Here’s a free story idea for y’all, taken from real life.

There was a “bleep!” It was quite a loud bleep, and Kevin and I both turned our heads to see where it had come from. Neither of us recognized the tone. None of our computers had messages on them. None of our mobile phones are in the room. I even tried turning on the Asus to see if it was complaining about a low battery. Nothing.

Conclusion: somewhere in our office is a ghostly electronic device. It bleeps, but we can’t see it. It wants our attention. Why?

How Do They Know?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One of the memes that has been going around the blogosphere over the weekend is the one in which various professional writers give a map of their careers. I’ve seen a lot of this because even blogs I don’t follow turn up in my regular Google alerts for news about the Hugos and Nebulas. What surprises me most is how precise many of their memories are – in particular knowing that they decided to be a writer at the age of 5 or 6. Really? There are things I can remember about my childhood, but it is really hard to date them unless they are associated with something else that I can look up (e.g. the first Doctor Who episode, or the arrival of Marvel UK comics). I know I wrote a play when I was in what Americans would call middle school, but I have no idea exactly how old I was then. I’m only certain about the middle school thing because I cast all of my soft toys as actors. And I know that in high school I once wrote a proper short story for a homework assignment (20+ exercise book pages of it), which annoyed my English teacher so much I never did it again. But again I have no idea which year. Maybe other people have memories that are much more precise than mine.

Alternatively, if I’m being deeply cynical, there’s a certain amount of wannabe discouragement going on here, which might be a good thing in the wake of NaNoWriMo.

Bear on Brasyl

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Elizabeth Bear has an excellent technical explanation as to why many people have been saying that Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is “too difficult”.

I, of course, love “difficult” books. I’m a Gene Wolfe fan. But not everyone likes to have to work hard when they are reading, and each author has to make a decision as to what sort of books they want to write. Typically a “difficult” book will get you critical acclaim but lower sales. A “difficult” book is more likely to win a juried award than a popular vote award. And so on.

But you know, the world would be boring if everyone wrote like Gene Wolfe, or everyone wrote like Naomi Novik.

Proof That Books Work

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

On the face if it, watching a movie ought to be a lot more intense than reading a book. After all, in a movie you can actually see things happen to people. When reading a book you have to imagine it. But human brains are wonderful things, and a recent experiment has shown that reading a description of an event in a book has very much the same effect on your brain as watching it happen in a movie.

Now here’s a modest proposal. What if you ran the experiment with a number of different stories, all describing the same thing, but written by different people. Would that prove which writer was the best? Oh my, can of worms.

Time To Stop Editing

~ Cheryl

OK, so I promised you all a post on the gender balance question. I seem to have been writing it for ages (and pestering Kevin to read re-writes). I’m still not happy with it, but I’ve decided that I need to stop fiddling and get on and post it. If it means everyone is unhappy with me, well it won’t be the first time. You can find the post here.

Meanwhile back to writing about bathrooms, and maybe air travel, and the Rushdie review…

A New Word

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I am a regular reader of the Word A Day service. I’m not intending to develop a Clute-like vocabulary, but every so often I do discover a new word that seems very useful. Today’s word is such a gem:

misoneism (noun): A hatred or fear of change or innovation.

Oh yes. I know a lot of people to whom I can apply that epithet.

How to Write Obituaries

~ Cheryl

There are many obituaries for Tom Disch now appearing around the world, several of them in mainstream newspapers. The one that I have been waiting for is in The Independent. As an encyclopedist, John Clute is often called upon to write obituaries, but seldom are they quite as personal as this one. The various dramas that affected Tom’s life, and which eventually led him to end it, were partly known to me because, on my various visits to their house, John and Judith would occasionally talk about how worried they were about Tom. They had, of course, known him for many years, and John’s obituary elegantly illuminates both Tom’s life and his reasons for leaving us. It also gives a rare insight into a man who is known as a friend, not just as a writer:

During these years, he grew into himself physically, both in mass, as he became heavy, but also in gravitas, as his presence became formidable. Tall and bald, he would bear down, colossus-like, upon his visitor, and though his voice was flute-high, he spoke in passages of such pith and wry sapience that a seminar seemed in the offing. But almost always this would change into hilarity. To him everything that humans did about things that mattered – from God to sex, from the Pope to the sestina – was ultimately silly. The heart of Tom Disch in person, gossiping profoundly about the world and its makings, was glee.

It can’t be easy – writing an obituary for a friend. I guess I’ll have to do one sometime soon. I hope I can at least manage half as good a job as Clute has done for Tom.

Fan Space at the End of Books

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

This post was inspired by a conversation that I had with Gary K Wolfe and M John Harrison while I was in London earlier in the week. It revolves around the concept of “Fan Space”, and I’d better start by remind you what that is.

Fan Space is the space in a work of fiction into which fans find it easy to imagine their own stories. A tightly-plotted, stand-alone novel such as Guy Gavriel Kay’s Ysabel has very little Fan Space in it, but a rambling fantasy series such as George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has lots of it. Generally speaking, if you can set a role-playing game, or write lots of fanfic, in a world based on a book, then that book contains lots of Fan Space.

So, Gary and I were talking to Mike about his plans for a new novel. Mike mentioned that it would probably have a fairly ambiguous ending, because he liked reading books where he was given leeway to imagine for himself what happens at the end. Two things occurred to me.

Firstly, I could see the angry reviews from the more fannish side of the Internet. Many readers get really upset when a book doesn’t have a “proper ending,” by which they generally mean a neat (and often happy) conclusion to the plot.

But secondly I realized that what Mike was talking about was Fan Space at the end of the book.

And that’s interesting, because the people who generally complain about ambiguous endings are generally the same people who relish exploiting Fan Space when it occurs anywhere else in a book except at the end. Equally, the sort of folks who like ambiguous endings are generally the sot of people who prefer a self-contained novel to a long, rambling series.

This has left me wondering why this should be so. I can understand a dichotomy between just wanting to be told a complete story and wanting room to add to it yourself; but a dichotomy between wanting to be able to make up stories in the world, and being able to make up the ending of the source work, well, that’s harder to rationalize.

Thoughts, anyone?

The Dog Question

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over the weekend I got a new request in for a Challenge Cheryl article. This one was quite interesting in that it really was about something I’d never normally write about. It required research too. And it ended up being a very interesting question. If you want to find out what I think of Breed Specific Legislation (or even what that means), you can find the article here.

As usual, I remain open to further suggestions for Challenge Cheryl articles. Ask away.

Charlie at the Grauniad

~ Cheryl

Today’s Guardian includes an interview with Charlie Stross (conducted by Damien G Walter). It covers a variety of subjects including the Singularity and the nature of fiction:

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction – the study of the human condition – needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

That will put a few establishment noses out of joint, I suspect.

Update: link corrected – thanks to Juha Autero whose comment ought to be below but it got eaten by the spam trap.

Assumptions 101

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Over at Hay Marian Keyes is defending chick lit against accusations of being genre crap. For The Guardian Anita Sethi opens her report thus:

Marian Keyes never lets the darker side of her fiction take over. Doesn’t that make her chick-lit blockbusters just as realistic as literary fiction?

So let me see, that would mean that the very definition of “literary” is that it is “realistic”, right? And fiction that isn’t realistic cannot possibly be literary. Thank you for stating your prejudices so clearly.