So Noted

I'll be working from home this week on some paid writing (backing into science writing, oddly enough), so there's not gonna be a lot of activity here at SoB, again. I don't know how I got so busy all of a sudden. It's both good and bad.  Anyway, here's a few things I'm noting in passing, which may be all I do in the next three weeks or so. I also got a subpoena to serve on a grand jury, starting on June 23rd, which will muck up my writing schedule and peeve my boss, probably. With any luck it'll be interesting though.

• William Gibson has posted a snippet of his new novel that sorta freaked me out: it's set in my old neighborhood, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, after 9/11.
• I keep forgetting about this on-line journal but was reminded today by a new blog I've subscribed to. Check out The Endicott Studio's Journal of Mythic Arts. It's a bit like Parabola (another magazine I like but don't read that often), but more oriented to myth and folklore than to religion. Essays, art, stories, poetry centered on a theme.
• A little review of acid-free inks, here. (Okay, it's geeky, but it's important when you're making book art with text or drawings that're meant to last.)
• Trash Fiction—UK site reviewing just what it says, genre fic across the board. Way too much fun. And just what I don't need: another book list. Far better than that stupid NYTimes list of best fiction. Please.
• The Chelsea Hotel blog—okay, so the Times profiled it. So what? It's one of the epicenters of NYC characters and a potentially endless source of stories.

And a really great conversation yesterday with Erica about melodrama in fiction (as opposed to life though neither of us is sure which is worse). We both write fanfic, which is liberally laced with purple prose and melodrama, as a rule—in fact, almost as a convention. Erica was complaining that in her group, coming out stories and angst are the usual fodder, that nobody writes slice-of-life stories. I told her this echoed the complaint of many of my gay friends that there's never a story where the couple lives happily ever after; in my fandom, stories like this are classified as The Boyz Buy Curtains. Erica's criterion for a truly capable writer is to be able to imbue slice-of-life stories with the same amount of meaning and power as high drama. Her example was Banana Yoshimoto (someone Rob likes too, co-incidentally, but whom I haven't read). Since one of the things I was trying to do in my novel was write a story where the conflict is strictly internal, and because I regularly write lots of purple prose, action, drama, and angst in my fanfic (mostly to get it out of my system before I work on my original fic, but in part because that's the universe I work in), I had to agree. Melodrama is easy. It's all big emotions, broad strokes, shouting, cliche, torment. The small moments of real life are far harder to convey with the same weight. And yet that's what life and conflict really are built on: those little everyday moments that turn pivotal without you realizing it until later.

Those small moments are also the most fascinating ones, in some ways, just because they're so small and yet pivotal. They're like the Archimedes quotation about having only a firm place to stand to be able to move the earth. A lever, a fulcrum point (a tipping point in the words of a recent book title) and everything changes. Amazing.

Comments

[Em]

Tipping Point was also the title of a decent book of poems by Fred Marchant, mostly about emotional tipping points, rather than marketing trends.

[Lee Kottner]

And obviously much more relevant. I'll have to look for this. I like Fred's poetry. Thanks, Em.