Gore Vidal, The Golden Age

Dan Brown, Deception Point

Pat Conroy, South of Broad

Jay Parini, Passages of HM

Orson Scott Card, Empire

John Grisham, The Appeal

John Casey, Compass Rose

Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars

This is an article in Rattle about online and offline poets and poetry that just rings true to me. Read it twice.

Click here then go to page 20. 

Reading The Great Gatsby again, twice this week. Once as a reader and once as a writer.

By pure coincidence, went to the movie Midnight in Paris to see the film footage of Paris not knowing that old sport, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Cole Porter, and others would appear. This is a Woody Allen production and the writer/protagonist ends up with a woman who looks like a young Mia Farrow. What a hoot.

Coming soon to a hard Science Fiction story near you. Wait, but it’s too late, Hurricane Electric Quantum Tunnel Brokers may already be here.

Following on comments he made in our chat, this is an interesting comment of his from another interview given to, Story In Literary Fiction’s, William Coles. Click here.

Michael Ray:

“Something I talk to writers about during the editorial process is reserving room in the story for the reader to participate in its understanding. As a writer, if you immerse yourself too much in the story, you risk standing between your story and your reader. The best stories stand outside their authorship, becoming interesting and powerful to people who don’t know the author, or really care about the author—or the fact that the author wrote this.

With the present educational system for writers—workshops, M.F.A.s—stories can get too worked over. In that environment, writers can become disproportionately focused on one particular impact they intend for a story to have upon a reader; they work the story to have that impact. They workshop it; other people give them advice; and they work it over and over and over.

These stories can be really polished but ultimately unsatisfying, as they lack any true sense of discovery. As a reader, you can watch the story’s various mechanisms working toward one end; and I think you then instinctively resist that end, or that feeling the writer is working so hard to create. And you know you can read the story again and its only potential is to affect you in exactly the same way. It’s been so sharpened to a single point, and that’s not the way life happens.

Think about great music. You can listen to something over and over and discover something new every time. Part of creating that [as a writer] is not working so hard to have one impact . . . not leading somebody to one specific understanding. It’s like putting blinders on somebody in trying to get them to see this one purpose, and in the process you’ve blinded, or blunted, that person’s capability to see all the other impacts the story might have.

This is something I talk a lot about with writers; especially if you’re publishing in a magazine like ours, you can rely on a sophisticated readership—people who really want to engage in stories; and if you can write the whole story to the point there is only one way of understanding it, [you may need] to strip back that exposition to a point where the does become a little bit of a risk [of understanding]. The more that process of understanding can happen off the page, in the reader’s head, the more the reader internalizes the story, imbuing it with emotions beyond anything you could fully describe.”

This morning I read, The Serrambi Case, by Francis de Pontes Peebles noted as a favorite by Zoetrope’s Managing Editor, Michael Ray.

One event, apparently a homicide involving two young girls, as told by fourteen POV first person characters including birds and sugar cane, each in their own conversational tone and titled scene. For me the final narrative by the sugar cane POV sums up the theme. Similar in concept to my story, The Obélisque, in some ways, but so much more sophisticated. A serendipitous lesson for me, when the student is ready the master will appear, perhaps.

Unknown to sailors of that time was the concept of windsurfing. With the mast able to pivot or lean in any direction the sailor has options a fixed mast cannot duplicate. As a sailboat moves through the air it almost always leans away from the wind, the apparent wind speed the sail feels increases as the boats speed increases. A windsurfer can lean the mast into the wind while sailing into the wind or across the wind. This is usually done in relatively high winds. As the sail is brought more parallel to the surface of the water the lift from the sail will cause the sail to act like an aircraft’s horizontal wing. This reduces the drag of the hull in the water and again allows an increase in speed. Windsurfers can fly briefly off waves and with two sails maybe they could soar.

The short speculative, historical fiction story, Matuu and The Sail(click here), fills in a gap in events of the Magellan Voyage during the year 1521. The tale appears  April 25, 2011, in issue 428 of Bewildering Stories.

Harvey Martinez O’Rourke swings the twenty-ounce hammer, missing for the fifth time. Each time his reading glasses slide down his sweating nose. He and Bubba, his best friend since grade school, are in his workshop where, at 6’ 10”, Harvey is kneeling in order to refasten a top to a nightstand he’s rebuilding. Bubba puts down his can of Bud Light while Harvey, the wood around the nail cratered, finally hits the finish nail. “Bubba I’m out of finish nails. Give me one of those sixteen penny nails.” He takes the large nail from Bubba and drives it in with one stroke. Bubba winces as the oak top splits across its entire length.

“Harvey you’re a writer. Why would you give it up to be a carpenter? You want to trade, show don’t tell, for, square and level?”

“I’ve wanted to be a carpenter for forty years. You know that.” He starts another nail and misses his thumb by a hair. ”Remember thirty years ago I started building my summer lake cottage in Vermont. I want to finish it and sell it before I die. I knocked together a birdhouse for cub scouts when I was six and since then I’ve never stopped building things in my spare time. Writing just pays the bills but I could stop tomorrow and never think twice about it. If I have to resolve the conflicts in a boy meets misunderstood girl trope one more time I could go insane. You ever try to complete the story arc involving a postmodernistic pastiche of characters? I never thought I’d be doing it for my whole life. You know what I mean?”

“I do. It’s the way I feel about sanitation engineering, believe me, but I thought you told me in the past that you hate to rebuild furniture.” He takes another swig of beer. “You don’t even like to use sandpaper.”

“Yeah, that’s true about the sanding. Once it’s build it’s built, sanding just makes me sneeze, but the rebuilding, that’s not my fault. It’s impossible to satisfy the public working part-time. I have no cred; the stain’s never the right color exactly, the seams are never perfect, and chairs are bad even if they wobble just a minute amount. No one wants to rock anymore. These people would criticize their mother on her deathbed, and what do they know, they’ve never built a piece of furniture they could sell. So, regardless, I keep reworking the piece until it’s right for them. If I was an established master carpenter I could build a reproduction 19^th century French antique Louis XVI fake walnut armoire out of driftwood and barn board and they’d think it was a masterpiece. There are so many things I want to build. I want to build things that I would want to use.”

“I hear you.” Pausing to take another sip, “I’ve got to tell you something as a friend. Remember the kitchen cabinets you put in for my wife last year?”

Harvey glues the last of the nightstand legs in place. It’s a quarter inch short and glue is dripping on his wingtips. “Yeah, those were beautiful. That idea came to me one morning as I was taking a shower. Bamboo shoot shelves and matching split cane door handles. Nobody’s ever done that before.”

“You’re right about that, Harv.”

“You told me your wife was delighted, your words in my blog. Later she told me they were beyond anything she could have imagined.”

Harvey cuts the other three legs to match the length of the fourth. One is short by an eighth inch. “True, but I never had the heart to tell you two of the cabinet doors were nailed shut and one of the drawers opened up through the counter top. Man, it took me a month to square that away. My wife was pissed.”

“Sorry about that, you should have said something. I would have fixed it no charge.”

“I know you would have. It’s just that there were some ‘square and level’ issues and a couple of other things she didn’t like. Didn’t want to embarrass you, you know.”

“Yeah, I understand, and thanks. Y’know, fortunately, I’ve learned a lot since then. Just finished another little hutch for that family in the Quonset hut across town. It’s a perfect match to this nightstand. They loved it and have friends that want one like it. ‘Course those jobs are for free. Gives me a chance to practice my tradecraft until I can nail down a big paying job.”

“What about an internship at a cabinet shop?”

“Thought about that but I think what I might do is build on spec and sell through consignment shops. I see online every now and then a carpenter makes it big that way. At least I have things to give to folks at Christmas and on birthdays. My wife tell you she loves the armoire I built for her for our twenty-fifth anniversary?

“Yeah we did talk about that. That’s the one at the back of your walk-in closet, right?”

“Yeah, I love that piece. Spent a lot of time on that one. Regardless, just a matter of time, then I can quit writing for good.” Looks at the clock on the wall, “Wow, 8:00 already. Got to go upstairs. We always watch Idol. They’re doing the auditions. I love to watch those tone-deaf clowns who think they can sing. Grab another Bud.”

Getting up and adjusting his camo hat, “Nah, I better head out. I got a test tomorrow in my hydraulics class at the college.”