It’s hideous that there’s a laundry list of verifiable shit that I’ve had to endure as a female—from saccharinely delivered condescension and objectification to sexual harassment in the workplace and rape—and what’s worse is that the shame of admitting it is almost greater than the need to name it and brand it for what it is: UNACCEPTABLE. Feminism is absolutely necessary, and while I hope that equality awaits us in the future, we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that there’s any rest until we get there. Keep on keeping on, ladies! (And men and transgenders who want an actually level playing field.)
Blog
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(cue elevator music) + Stippling
(I’m blogging out of Tumblr while I s l o o o o o o w l y sort out the mess with my webhost after this hacking nightmare. Thanks for hanging like a stalactite! Mwah!)
While walking my pooch this morning, I had a shoulder-tapping hankering for writing some poetry. I haven’t jotted down any in a while—definitely not since I made the decision to release Virtues & Occultations in serial form—and I remembered that while in redrafting/editing mode, I need regular doses of stimulus to keep the creative wheels greased. Therefore, I challenged myself to knock out a seven-by-seven in seventeen minutes about seventeen minutes ago. Here’s what I got:
Stippling
Distances are defined by
monochromatic shades: white
space, where light is not absorbed,
is where disconnects occur.
So I propose that we live
inside the darkest spots, where
all the colors congregate.I feel much better now! Thanks!
Book 2 of Ministers of Grace goes on here. Book 1 is still 99¢ on Amazon. And I will continue to blather here.
♥ EAB
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charismatic simulacra + #MoG1 Update
I’ve admittedly been a few different classifications of AWOL. Among current events, this site was hacked, and fortunately I’ve managed to get it back to about 95% running capacity. Nevertheless, I assure you that I have been popping various materials—mineral and vegetable—into my cauldron in preparation for an announcement about Book 2 that I will deliver next Tuesday, April the 8th.
Nevertheless, I’m pleased to impart to you fine folks that a price reduction has been applied to Book 1 in the Ministers of Grace series, Cherubim & Seraphim. All ebooks are now priced at a wallet-friendly 99¢, so there’s really no excuse for you not to partake. Further to this, physical copies of the book are now available for $9.99. Visit the page for Book 1 for details on where to purchase your copy today, if you haven’t already.
How can you say no to that?
In the meantime, have a wafer of a poem, something I threw together over the last couple of months that I’d forgotten about. ♥ EAB
charismatic simulacra
Under a microscope, small things
acquire enormity—
sometimes in both contexts—but if
you don’tbelieve me, I invite you to
examine the stern, coarse
expression of a flea, or a
fissurein steel—a perfect fractal of
the Grand Canyon—where you
might find stampedes of seahorses
(onlyhere, I might add, nowhere else would
promote surrealism
quite like this), or, if immersed in
a clearglass of water, a solution becomes
a snowstorm, where as it
is Above, so it is Below,
beneaththe horizons of our flattest
perceptions, where you find
the world’s reversions slip on slick
logic. -
Introits
A great while ago, I had the great honor of lecturing about the introit at an undergraduate fiction seminar. As I am presently distracting myself from what I ought to be doing, this is a quick summary of what I spoke about.
For those not in the know with one of the technical terms for it, the introit of a novel is the opening line or paragraph. It’s where an author presents his/her most outstanding programming code. We remember the good ones are because they contain everything you need to know about comes next in the narrative. Some are burned into cultural consciousness because they are so effective, like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael,” remains immortal, and still another golden oldie is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Let’s examine a few examples of an effective introit.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
What makes it work?
1. We know that this is going to be a first-person narrative, and, more importantly, that he (or she!) is an intelligent and articulate narrator. Expect gymnastic and playful prose.
2. We know that whoever Lolita is, he was obsessed with her, and therefore might not be a reliable narrator. When he says he loves her, watch out.
3. Further to this, when he refers to her as his sin, we know that there is something illicit about this relationship that the narrator has with Lolita. This is an invitation to read on in order to find out why.Virginia Woolf, Orlando
He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
1. Why would we doubt his sex, given the use of the masculine pronoun, unless we were told that there was something questionable about it? Stay tuned for an explanation about why gender roles can be mutable.
2. The rest of the sentence lends itself to the fantastic and an antiquated sense of the exotic, and the narrative ahead doesn’t disappoint.Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In later years, holding forth to an interview or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.
1. We know that Sam Clay created comic books, is respected and famous, is from Brooklyn and always had a taste for larger than life heroes.
2. The use of more elevated sentence structure, as well as the citation of Angoulême, can indicate that the narrator wants for the reader to take comic books and things like larger-than-life heroes seriously. You could also argue that the narrator is deliberately setting up a pastiche of elevated concepts and wants to bring them down to a more universally accessible level.What are some introits that could be better?
Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the bouncer said, folding his arms across his massive chest. He stared down at the boy in the red zip-up jacket and shook his shaved head. “You can’t bring that thing in here.”
The problem is that it lacks specificity. There’s no indication as to where the story is going to go, or even what kind of story it is. It could be set anywhere, and it could be any manner of story ahead of you. It’s just description of the characters, and it’s entirely superficial.
How could you revise this? Looking at the rest of the page, here’s something more effective.
“I’ve told you a thousand times, kid. No stakes allowed.” The bouncer turned away and distractedly minded the sparse stubble on his balding head. He spat and added, “I don’t give a damn if it’s part of your costume.”
Now you know 1. there’s a kid trying to get into a bar; 2. it might be Halloween; 3. the bouncer’s completely uninterested, even contemptuous of the kid; 4. the kid is always trying to get into this bar with wooden stakes; and 5. the kid is dressed like a vampire hunter. We know that some kind of paranormal creatures will be involved, so keep reading for that.
George P. Pelecanos, The Double
Tom Petersen sat tall behind his desk. He wore tailored jeans, zippered boots, an aquamarine Ben Sherman shirt, and an aquamarine tie bearing large white polka dots. His blond hair was carefully disheveled. His hands were folded in his lap.
While this one superficially seems specific, it really isn’t. There are a lot of adjectives — which, to be fair, is evocative of noir crime fiction — but there’s no indication as to why they’re necessary. It’s essentially ineffective because it lacks momentum and a distinct voice, and it doesn’t properly prepare the reader for what comes next. Perhaps if there were something in the last sentence to indicate why his hands were folded in his lap — such as “His hands were folded in his lap, waiting.” or “He struggled to keep his hands folded in his lap.” — then we’d have somewhere to go.
But isn’t that just noir? Here’s an effective counterexample.
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
The payoff in this one comes in the last line of the paragraph: He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. This provides narrative momentum because we know that, whoever Samuel Spade is, his semblance to the Prince of Darkness will be key. Perfect noir set up, where no one is innocent.
So — how do you construct one?
Every writer will develop his/her own process for finding the right introit, but usually it comes after the completion of a first draft. There are many reasons for this, but a couple would be that 1. you need to have a solid, consistent (or purposely inconsistent) voice ready to put to the page, and 2. you need to have the narrative assembled, so that you can encode clues within your introit.
The beginning is your hook, and regardless of how many wicked, quotable lines you throw into the meat of your text, the reader will never get to them if you don’t provide them with clues of what to expect. We live in a world in which there are more and more books published every year, and you can’t afford to let a lackluster introit put readers off your manuscript. I’ll admit that when I see a poorly constructed introit, I seldom continue reading on because I know that it’s highly unlikely that I’ll see any manner of skill in the pages that follow.
I struggle with introits. I still persecute myself regularly for every last opening I’ve created because I still feel they could be better and sharper. Should I ever get to the point in which I feel I’ve got a solid grasp it in my own work, I’ll let you know.
But how will you know when you have it? Because once you’ve written it, you probably won’t want to stop yourself from reading what comes next.
For further reading, Stephen King recently spoke with Joe Fassler about his favorites in an article that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s a highly recommended master class on the introit.
♥ EAB
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Chromatic Aberration
Sometimes I can really sink into the quiet that the road provides. This—four 4 x 10s with rhymes in lines 2 and 4—is the result of two flights across the US that I endured on Tuesday. ♥ EAB
Chromatic Aberration
Exposure: light slips beneath the surface
of everything, turning out the colors
inside the molecular code—red is
never secluded in the dark harborsof oxidized iron, except when it’s
punctuated with copper, or brilliant
points of silver, or the scaffolding that’s
carbon as an operating quotient.Sunlight bleeds only through smoky filters;
moonlight hemorrhages twice annually,
with annular eclipses as consorts
until the norm returns eventually.But as all things shift state, and as all things’
binding rings decay into lighter worth
and being, shades and hues source from the same
pulses of starlight that loom over the earth.