I think it's easier sometimes to let other people describe
me, as opposed to doing the deed myself.
". . . your problem is that you're not very assertive
. . ."
He said.
". . . I can't stand you, why are you so weird
. . ."
". . . said you were the smartest person in the room
. . ."
They told me.
". . . I don't think I've ever heard you make a joke
. . ."
". . . not like the rest of them, you're nice . .
."
". . . I thought you were a more forgiving person
than that . . ."
". . . you really can be an asshole sometimes, you
know . . ."
And said. In light. In dark.
". . . he's a phenomenal human being . . ."
In various states of mind.
". . . they don't see you, even when they're staring
right at you . . ."
". . . funniest person I know . . ."
". . . I'm afraid you're going to become obsessed
. . ."
". . . think you're more than a little bit of a selfish
person . . ."
In various degrees of proximity.
". . . this guy, he doesn't know anything . . ."
". . . you have to stop being so jumpy and paranoid
all the time . . ."
". . . I couldn't read you, I didn't know what
you were thinking . . ."
". . . you really have a lot of patience . . ."
". . . people aren't going to feel sorry for you .
. ."
". . . never heard such self-deprecating humor . .
."
They say. Even if they've forgotten.
". . . you can babysit our kids one day . . ."
". . . don't talk to my friends, just stay away .
. ."
". . . what do you do when you're not here
. . ."
And sometimes I get confused.
". . . you're really kind of quiet . . ."
About who they're really talking about.
". . . didn't know you were like this, I had no idea
. . ."
But on some level I think they're all lying. They don't
mean to, but they are.
". . . write an awful lot, don't you . . ."
Of course, you can argue that an opinion isn't truthful
or a lie, it's just an opinion. But I can lie about whether
that dress makes you look fat. And you can lie about not
wanting to beat the living crap out of me. So it all evens
out in the end, so to speak.
I'm supposed to talk about myself but by the time we're
done I don't think I'll have really said anything at all.
Par for the course, some might say. If I had any brains
I would apply the rigorous critical standards that I shove
on everyone else to myself.
This would of course imply that I have standards.
So what approach to take? I could go the usual "personal
classified ad" approach and describe myself.
"Single pasty white male, so close to six feet tall
that it hurts, possessed of features so average that he's
been known to blend into furnishings, currently on the wrong
side of twenty five, seeks elusive critical acceptance with
a desperate treasure hunter's fervor, knowing in the back
of his head that he wouldn't know what to do with it even
if it walked up and take a crap in his lap. Hobbies include
irritating everyone around him, not making much sense, and
once in a while indulging in the writing thing. Clean and
housetrained, but not in that order."
Now isn't that appealing? But I don't think that really
tells you anything and to be perfectly honest . . . who
cares? If you're here to read someone's writing, does it
really matter what color their hair is or what their favorite
song is (currently Saturday Looks Good To Me, "Since
You Stole My Heart", because nobody asked). I could
talk about the mystical "process" but at the end
of the day it's just not interesting. I sit down, figure
out what I want to do and just start plugging away until
I finish. I generally only do first drafts and don't rewrite
(and boy does it show), I have a notebook's worth of backstory
material that I've lost all physical evidence of and subsequently
just carry in my head and if you've ever read anything of
me it's either by accident or because someone made you.
There's really nothing inspirational about it. No special
person fuels my stories, if anything most people I know
think it's rather oddball. And for some reason I think if
I dedicated all of this to someone, they might not be so
terribly flattered. Call it instinct. When you don't plan
on making any money off of something, people tend to look
at it rather strangely. Which makes sense, because why else
would you chain yourself to a computer for blankety blank
hours a day simply to file the finished work away and move
onto the next one? If I weren't me, I'd think I was crazy
and some days I'm not so sure.
But crazy or not, I still do it and I'll probably keep
doing it until I've either run out of ideas or the meteor
hits me, whichever comes first (at this point it's probably
even odds for both). What exactly is "it", though?
Some days I feel like I should be sitting in one of those
rooms with all the folding chairs set in a circle, spilling
out my guilt to anyone who wants to hear.
"Hello, my name is Michael and I write stories about
a man who doesn't exist."
Which is pretty much the definition of anyone who writes
fiction, but I like to make myself feel special. I suppose
I should come completely clean. For the last ten plus years
I've been writing stories about a man who wasn't there.
His name is Tristian and I probably have a friend out there
who thinks that I named the character after his brother,
even though it's not spelled the same and I got it from
a completely different place. In the beginning he started
out as a rather colorless hero type, weighed down by angst
simply so he'd have something to talk about. And he'd rocket
through odd SF adventures that always seemed to end in something
terrible, against a bizarre backdrop of the Universe that
was meant to mask the fact that I was making it all up as
I went along.
Over time I realized that all these stories actually started
to add up to something, as if by accident and little by
little the epic sprawl of the tales started to take the
shape of his life. And little by little Tristian started
to have some character. I started to infuse more of myself
into him, giving him some of my quirks and mannerisms, and
the tone of the stories changed, the mad SF adventure of
the early stories gradually giving way to more somber mediations
on other things. I gave him friends and a history with those
friends and all the tangled emotions that went along with
such things. I made him an emotionally numb, detached shell
of a human being and tried to bring him back, just to see
what would happen. The thing about writing a single character
is that it becomes like you're married to him after a while
and you start to play mind games and see if you can dig
into the exterior to try to evoke a response.
In the end, I wound up with an attempt to reconcile the
conflicting beliefs that nothing matters and everything
matters. In most Tristian stories he's very rarely in control
of the situation and it's not too often that he can maintain
control when he does get it. Things happen and he can't
stop them or affect them and anytime he does manage to accomplish
is ultimately meaningless in the long run. It's not as bleak
as I describe it, but it's not too far off either . . .
thing is, he keeps going because he can't do anything else,
because, as I said once when someone told me to never change,
he doesn't know how.
The beauty of all of this of course is that I can apply
it anywhere. A random perusal through my back catalog (if
you don't spoon your eyes out first) would lead you to such
discoveries as an epic fantasy story, a crime/vigilante
story, a mediation on predestination, a story that takes
entirely at a college party, and lots more, all mostly involving
the same core group at different points in their lives.
The ability to have that sort of unifying theme is rather
freeing, to be honest, since I don't have to discard any
idea that strikes my fancy and through some fancy shaping,
can fit just about anything into the framework I've created.
Tristian is just as comfortable going on a date in New York
City as he is chasing a bunch of Dark Riders through a snowy
forest. I, however, am good at neither of these things,
which is all for the best. Think of what my ego might be
like if I was actually decent at something. This planet
wouldn't be big enough to hold it. The horror.
That said, there are numerous problems inherent in such
a framework. And for once, I might as well turn the lens
on myself that I so eagerly unleash on other unsuspecting
people. First off, the stories are nearly inaccessible .
. . since I have everything already worked out in my head,
I don't bother with such petty things as introducing characters
and concepts that I've already gone over in previous stories.
Thus, unless you're mad enough to have read a decent chunk
of my work, most of the stories I write tend to be greeted
with a unanimous "huh?" as the reader is assaulted
with names and places in and out of context, sometimes overwhelming
the actual plot. This is probably the most serious hurdle
to any reader vainly trying to seek entrance into the story
and most people do the intelligent thing and just give up.
Even to people who actually want to read it, it generally
doesn't make a lick of sense, and that's when I'm staying
conventional and not doing goofy things like rearranging
the words in sentences or having ten things simultaneously.
And with that in mind, it was never a problem before, since
I didn't really have an audience. But Dan seems to like
my stuff enough to want to include it on his nifty website
and I think at the very least out of deference to him, I
should make some considerations toward audience accessibility,
just out of common courtesy. So one goal for the coming
year will be to work out some kind of introduction that
will make everyone happy and give people who are trying
to figure out what's going on at least a ledge to grasp
onto.
Strike two, while we're in full critique mode . . . sprawl.
I like to call it "epic sprawl" and while ambition
is always good, I don't know of any person who looked eagerly
forward to tearing through hundreds of thousands of words.
Even my shortest stories tend to be the longish side of
things and I have chapters longer than most people's short
stories. This unfortunately means that the stories are slooowww
moving, in comics we call it "decompressed storytelling"
and mine tends to be so decompressed that it's nearly flat.
If one were to be kind you might want to call it "deliberately
paced" but I'm not here to be kind. Part of the problem
is that I don't have an editor so any digression that pops
into my head tends to make it into the story and since I'm
not one for rewrites, the chances of portions being edited
later for (God forbid) clarity is actually fairly slim.
Which means that to get to the good passages you have to
wade through an awful lot of boring and often tedious sections
that are really only of interest to me. Alas, that's probably
not going to change because I tend to write in imitation
of what I like and while I enjoy the gripping thriller as
much as the next person, what I like are large hefty novels
that don't move very quickly and where a lot of attention
is paid to the prose (when I browse in the local bookstore,
my eye is always attracted to those books whose spines are
three or four inches wide . . . it's almost a fetish) .
. . so that's the kind of book I tend to write. Hey, if
nobody else is going to read it, I might as well go with
what I enjoy, eh?
But it asks a lot of the reader, to beg them to slog through
hundreds upon hundreds of pages, most involving people talking
about things that don't make any sense . . . that no one
has ever taken me up on the offer unless under severe duress
(and you know who you are) speaks louder than any mountain
of critical mail. Which is probably why you won't see many
of my stories on the site, they're just too damn long. At
a quarterly posting rate, and a chapter or two at a time,
we're talking years and years to post some stories and by
that time you'll have lost the plot completely. But a minor
goal for the new year is to sketch out some shorter works
that you can actually read in a calendar year, maybe even
(gasp!) in a day or so. So we'll see how that goes.
We'll combine strikes three and four simply because they
can be summed up fairly quickly. I can be accused of toeing
the line with making Tristian what folks involved in fanfic
like to call the "Mary Sue" type of character,
where the character is just an analogue for the author that
involves a hefty dose of wish fulfillment, so that the character
can move and dance and sing and do everything better than
everyone else, so that the author can feel better about
himself. I do invest a lot of myself in Tristian and I try
my best to keep him balanced . . . he has to be good at
what he does and I try to make him work for what few victories
I give him, but if you wanted to interpret the story as
me writing myself as a hero in a bunch of bizarre dream
sequences, I can't say you're absolutely right, but I really
can't say you're wrong either.
That said, I do kill him eventually, so you can draw whatever
conclusions you want from that.
Also, I do have a really strong penchant for the avant-garde
or what you might want to politely call "experimentation",
which can really turn people off. I hinted at this earlier,
and since I discovered the post-modern genre of fiction,
it's become more prominent, in the last seven years or so
. . . even the most normal story will tend to have oblique
storytelling, or sentences that don't run correctly, or
go up and down the page. I like to think it's for a good
cause but sometimes it's just me goofing around and trying
to keep myself interested and it really tends to try people's
patience. People tend to like it when things are kept straightforward
and if every other chapter I'm shifting tenses or telling
sequences completely comprised of dialogue or making up
nonsense syllables, it tends to wear thin very swiftly.
That, alas, probably won't change, although I will continue
to make fun of it whenever I can.
If it seems like my goal is to turn you off from reading
any of my work, it probably subconsciously is. Oh well.
This is why I don't talk about what I do too often. I like
what I do, for the most part, but that doesn't mean I think
you should like it, whether I overtly state that or not
(which I guess I just did). I typically do my level best
to submerge myself below the work, because in the end it's
the story that really matters. I used to drive teachers
nuts in school by never signing my name to any of my stories
and it's a habit I still continue . . . my name might be
there, but it's not because I put it there. Recently I sent
out a Christmas e-mail to various peoples and at the end
I put a tongue in cheek press release for a long novel I've
been slaving over for the past few years . . . the damn
thing runs like eleven pages and I think it's funny in parts,
but I hid it at the end of the e-mail, a bunch of spaces
down after I signoff, so that you have to keep scrolling
to find it. Our esteemed website founder, being of keen
eye, found it, and maybe one or two other people, but that
was it. And for whatever reason, that's how I tend to do
things, working on something and polishing it up over the
course of time, only to conceal the finished product, put
it on a high shelf where no one can reach it.
Now that I've said all that, don't my "nobody reads
my stuff" comments ring just a little bit hollow? Bit
of a hypocrite, ain't I? Yeah, I'm not proud. I never said
I was.
It's been a mundane and a crazy year at the same time.
Dan's "Year in Review" summed things up far better
than I could (and I should thank him yet again for extending
the opportunity to inflate my ego on his website . . . why
he lets me drag it down month in and month out I have no
idea but I'm grateful all the same). A year of life for
the site means a year of me babbling at everyone, to varying
degrees of success. My main work on the site was through
the critique column and that was everyone's main exposure
to me and I think it worked out good. The first batch of
reviews were decent, I was trying to find my voice and trying
to strike a balance between commenting on the story and
linking it to my personal feelings when reading the story
that was under the lens . . . sometimes I succeeded and
sometimes I failed miserably (and we all know which ones
those are) but I tried to make my failures entertaining
at the very least. For the latest set of critiques, of which
only one has appeared so far (for Dan's ghost story), I
changed the style a little bit and went for a more impressionistic
type of reviewing . . . I think it worked out better and
they read well on their own as just essays even when you
haven't read the stories in question (which you should do,
by the by) as I tried to touch upon issues that were raised
up by the stories and discuss a little bit about the actual
mechanics of storytelling and how the author relates to
the audience through the story.
I know, I know, it's all too exciting. Please try to stay
calm.
Due to my singleminded purpose, I'm probably the most represented
person on the site, just by wordcount alone (and this won't
help, ha!) but I should say that I wouldn't have the chance
to ramble like the village idiot that I am unless people
were submitting things that were worth talking about. So
as much as it's a cliché to say things like this,
I wouldn't be doing this without you fine people out there.
I've read a lot of interesting stuff over the past year,
some of which I enjoyed more than some books I read (*cough*Cryptonomicon*cough*)
and since at least one of those tales will be continuing
into the next year, it's just more to look forward to. The
other authors that Dan is bringing into the fold also look
very promising and I'm sure it will be an utter pleasure
to make fun of . . . I mean, look at their work with an
incisive critical eye. Heh.
I don't have too many comments for the individual reviews
I did, as I told Dan, commenting on my own comments probably
is a little too self referential . . . if someone has comments
to make, I'll respond of course, as always (often in tedious,
tedious detail) but otherwise, I'd prefer to let things
stand as they are. But I did like the progression from the
early ones to the current set and as the year winds up you'll
probably see more of them in that style, for better or worse.
Anything I do with writing has to be a challenge of some
kind and just sitting there and going, "I like this
and I didn't like this" and so on isn't really any
fun . . . if I can expand and discuss other things along
with the story and link it into the story itself, I think
it's far more challenging and interesting. Your mileage,
as always, may vary.
So if I had to take the last seven pages and sum them up
for the coming year, it would probably be "more of
the same." And I have now just pissed off all the people
who read this far down, only to see the last few pages summarized
in four words. Hey, I aim to please. Things went fairly
well over the last twelve months (even the arguments were
civil, which is better than I get at work) and I don't see
any reason why they can't continue to be so.
But what does "more of the same" actually mean?
Well you know by now, twelve more months of uninhibited
self loathing, rambling nonsensical stories held together
by frayed willpower, and a line of critiques that will vacillate
between off-topic ranting and tiresome diary excerpts and
maybe, just maybe, actually talk about someone's work when
there's room.
Yeah, sounds right to me.
God, I love it.
- MB
1.4.05
"Somebody told me that everyone's lonely . . ."
- Saturday Looks Good To Me, "Since You Stole My Heart"
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