Tools of the Trade

Alas that we don’t have the means to pull stories directly from our head onto a published page (web or otherwise). We are stuck with some combination of time, tools, and work to get our creations to the world. Here are a few of the ones I’m working with these days.

Pen/cil and Paper

I do almost all of my writing at the keyboard (and mostly in Scrivener). I do a lot of my planning and problem solving longhand, though. Pencil and paper free us from word-processing’s tyranny of left-to-right and top-to-bottom. It’s easy to scrawl arrows and asides and orient the text however you please. You can leave space and go back to it without relying on keys or clicks.

Vitally, it also takes you several steps away from the kind of distractions that can be endemic to working on a computer. You can’t flip a legal pad over to Facebook “just for a second.” Pencils don’t come with solitaire or e-mail or flash games. For me, pencil and paper has the added advantage that I can take it to work to use in planning periods or lunch breaks. (Several of the schools I sub in are places One Doesn’t Take Valuables.)

Don’t underestimate pen and paper as a way to get around writer’s block, either. Sometimes changing medium cracks things loose. There are sections of most everything I’ve written in the last ten years that I drafted longhand.

I have some nice Moleskine notebooks, but I also like plain yellow legal pads (the legal size). I have a soft spot for fountain pens, and use them whenever I haven’t run them out of ink.

Scrivener
I remember a time before Scrivener, but I try not to think about it too much. I did my master’s thesis in a mess of MSWord documents. It was long enough ago that the vast majority of my sources were hard copy. (That I was writing about the relatively obscure Harry Partch and using mostly archival material  contributed to that.)

I adopted Scrivener late in the first year of my doctoral program. It became my go-to writing platform almost immediately. On the academic side, Scrivener made it easy to organize my materials for a class. I could keep all my articles in there, all of my writing assignments, as well as  my notes and brainstorming. I could look at .pdfs without having to hop over to Adobe Reader. Even better, I could split screen the .pdf and my notes on it, or my brainstorming and my draft. I could go full-screen when I needed to.

And my Scrivener folder for my dissertation…it’s about a gigabyte all by itself. It includes drafts of chapters, notes on articles, notes from books, notes from the very few meetings I had with my advisor, brainstorming files sorted by month (and year), a few pieces of me cursing myself into action… It was great. Scrivener, I mean. Not my dissertation (which was merely pretty good). It works just as well for long-form fiction and screenwriting projects.

That ability to manage many separate chunks of text and research is Scrivener’s major strength. You can tag files with things like character names or locations, link documents, and easily create hierarchies. It’s also worth noting that Scrivener will export in a variety of ebook formats as well as paperback-sized .pdfs. Importantly, though, Scrivener is not a document layout program. To do detailed formatting on a project, you’ll have to haul your text over to a different platform. Even so, Scrivener is my favorite piece of software. At one point, I stayed with Macintosh simply because a PC version of Scrivener didn’t exist. (It does now.)

Literature and Latte offers a free trial version of Scrivener.

Aeon Timeline
I’ve only just started using Aeon, and haven’t figured out how thoroughly I’ll integrate it. It’s an interesting tool, albeit a specialized one. Aeon is timeline software. It does timelines and only timelines. That sells the software short, though, because you can use Aeon to produce timelines with incredible depth.

At the macro level, Aeon allows the creation of custom calendars, especially useful for sci-fi and fantasy writers. You can establish multiple ages (comparable to our B.C./C.E.). You can determine the number of months in a year, days in a month, and hours in a day. If you need a world to have 27 hour days in months that alternate between 93 days and 11 days, you can do that. You can even incorporate leap years. Once you have a calendar built (or pick the default real world calendar) you can start building your history. Aeon’s timelines make great references if your work involves dynasties and lineages and Stuff that Necessitates Appendices.

At the micro level, Aeon’s timelines are pretty swell, too. One of the samples they provide with the software is a timeline of Murder on the Orient Express. It tracks all of the characters, their alibis, their conversations, and what they were actually doing. You can plot events to the minute. For me, this is particularly useful in keeping track of what my antagonists (who are often “off camera”) are up to. Although we’re fond of moving characters at the speed of plot, Aeon helps make sure we keep it in the realm of plausibility and aren’t putting characters in two spots simultaneously.

Aeon allows you to organize events by “arc” and by character, as well as noting which characters are participants or observers in a given event. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, but Aeon can synchronize with Scrivener (the Mac version), creating events for each of your documents. I tend to include multiple scenes in each chapter, so that’s not quite as useful for me, but it could be handy for folks who organize their Scrivener projects by the scene.

Scribblecode offers a free trial version of Aeon Timeline. The developer maintains an active and responsive forum, too.

Shoes
Being stuck is no fun. For me, one of the best ways to get unstuck is to take a walk. It does not have to be long. It does not have to be fast. Changing scenery helps. When I am deep into a project and the logistics permit it, I like to work for a block of time (usually 25 or 40 minutes), then take a ten-minute walk. Taking a walk can be an opportunity to work problems out in your head without the pressure of putting words on the page or screen. It’s not literally shaking things loose, but sometimes it has felt that way for me. It’s not always about figuring things out, though. Sometimes a walk clears your head so you can come back to the work with a fresh perspective…or just renewed enthusiasm. If outside isn’t an option, getting up and stretching is a worthy substitute.

Another useful benefit of movement breaks? They’re much less likely than “browser breaks” to pull you away from your work longer than you planned.

So, readers, what about you? What are your favorite tools? Anybody out there using typewriters? Favorite pens or notebooks?

New, Improved (?)

I started this blog in something of a hurry, intent on getting something up to establish my presence on the web. That meant grabbing a WordPress theme (Wu Wei) and slapping words into it. I enjoyed Wu Wei’s minimalist aesthetic, and didn’t tweak it beyond altering the color of the header text. It was time for that to change. Among other things, I wanted more information “above the fold.” (I am charmed that this newspaper term has transferred so smoothly over to the world of screens.) Wu Wei shuffled lots of things to the very bottom of the page; the new theme (customized Suits) gives me a proper sidebar. I also wanted some color and a stronger visual identity for the blog. As a bonus, the newer theme should also make Walking Ledges a little more friendly for those of you who follow it on phones or tablets.

Expect more (probably small) tweaks as I dig into the .css and make this a little more my own.

Too Much School, so…Back to School?

Some days come poorly off the mold. Their shape is not symmetrical. The joints don’t fit. They wobble. These are not the “worst” days—those seem to come off the line perfectly shaped to suck. These poorly-formed days just suck life out of you. Minor annoyances and substantive problems scrape against each other without quite coalescing into a proper crisis. You get through them, but that’s usually the best you can manage. They’re not quite bad enough to inspire any feeling of victory when you come out the other side. Today is one of those, grumbly nearly from the get-go.

If you’re keen on integrating the following thoughts into the course of my blog, they go with the loose sequence that begins with “Of Carrots…” and continues with “Get a Job, You Schlub.” It also includes the “Cut” series, though those are more tightly tied to the practice of scholarship. There’s not really anything about writing in it, unless you count wanting to write. (You can imagine that as a subtext through the whole post.) This isn’t a plea for sympathy, just a snapshot from the inside of trying to make a life as a post-academic.

I have been living in Austin for six months. I have been looking for a full-time job pretty much that entire time. I am still looking. I substitute teach three or four days each week, usually a 30-40 minute drive from our apartment. The other weekday is reserved for hunting full-time employment. Often, I don’t know where I’m going to be working until I get up at 5 a.m. to start stalking the district’s online substitute system. (During the day, good jobs are often gone in one or two minutes. That’s particularly tough when you’re actually at a school doing your job.)

It sucks, even without mentioning the conditions when I get to work.

Like adjunct faculty, substitute teachers are not eligible for benefits…nor are they eligible for unemployment insurance. Pay is low. I make more on a real per-hour basis than I did adjuncting (where my hourly rate was based solely on the time I spent in the classroom). Oh, and my PhD? It entitles me to exactly the same daily rate as any completed four-year degree. It’s still not a living wage, and I still don’t feel “employed.” It’s certainly not a career, and it’s more supplement than support for my family.

Long-term job searches are draining as hell. The last time I had a job that I “chose” was in September of 2012. I’ve been “on the market” since then, although I did not do any serious job-hunting between finishing my oh-fer on academic applications in April and moving to Texas in August. I’ve been lucky in that my partner eventually found work, and that we had some savings. Things have gotten tight, but never quite desperate.

The problem is that looking at job listings gets a little more like staring into the abyss every week. Human resources people and departments at the kind of companies that list jobs on-line are as indentured to formulae as university search committees. Miss a keyword or have the wrong job title and you go straight to the circular file, no matter how qualified you are. The more rejections I get, the harder it is for me to look at a listing and think “I can do that” rather than “there is no way in hell I could even get an interview.”

There have been studies on this stuff , and reports. They don’t offer much positive.

My doctorate is an unhappy limiting factor. I have the option of leaving a seven-year gap in my resume or owning up to my years in academe. Mostly, I just have to hope that the relevant people read my cover letter and that I can sell them there. For entry-level positions, I seem overqualified and likely to jump ship when some imaginary university comes calling. Jobs beyond entry-level tend to require specific work experience that graduate school failed to provide, even if I otherwise have sufficient knowledge and skills. HR filters are not set to account for these things. My post-relocation network is also thin—another obstacle to getting the all-important foot in the door.

The upshot of all this is that I have too much education to get a job…no matter how many times I’m in a school and an incredulous teacher says “You have a Ph.D. and you’re subbing?” I find it very reminiscent of a recent post and the ensuing discussion over at Pan Kisses Kafka. It’s a similar catch-22 in that you allegedly need experience to land a tenure-track job, but experience as an adjunct counts against you because if you were good enough, you would have gotten a tenure-track job right away.

For me, it is looking more and more like the solution to too much education is somehow more education. That might mean doing alternative teaching certification and going from “substitute” to “permanent” secondary teacher. It might involve getting third-party certificates in various software and programming platforms. One way or another, I need to gather up some keywords and documentation to cover up all the education I’ve already got.

Nothing seasons a wobbly no-good day quite like irony, naja?

The Blank Page

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode”

This morning was rough. One of my responsibilities as pater familias is to pull everybody out of bed in the morning. (I could never have imagined this as a kid. I was terrible at getting out of bed until I left home.) Nobody wanted to be awake this morning. Or get dressed. Or get out the door to the bus. While I was trying to coax my kids towards readiness for the school bus, I was also making their lunches and trading text messages with my sister-in-law. She watches the kids when I work, but couldn’t today because her son is sick. I had to cancel a job while shoving toast at my son and suppressing a wince at how tight my daughter’s shoes have gotten. By 7:15 I was grumbling about how bad the day was.

Then…then I got everybody out the door and some caffeine in my system and managed to wrangle my thinking around to “I get to write today. I have a blank page.” My days aren’t blank pages. Very few get that luxury. When I sit down to write, though, I get a blank page. I still think of them as pages even though I’ve done so much of my writing for so very long on a screen. It probably has something to do with composing, where I have always worked in hard copy first. It might also have something to do with poetry which, again, I just can’t manage to make without a pencil in my hand.

But the blank page. On the good days, it is freedom. It is, to borrow a recent pop culture example, the moment Elsa shakes herself free of Arandelle, singing and throwing ice everywhere. She’s flexing power she has had to hold in check for too long. She makes a world from her magic, a castle from thin, icy air:

Today hasn’t necessarily been a good day, but when I thought about the blank page waiting for me, that is the way my thoughts ran. Today (to steal a phrase from Steven Brust, who stole it from Gene Wolfe) I’m going to tell you something really cool. That’s the plan, anyway.

The O’Shaughnessy quoted above is careworn to the edge of being cliché. Clichés get that way, though, because they’re useful. They tell us something important, or true…or at least tell us what we want to hear. The “Ode” quotation is a tidy encapsulation of the Romantic image of the poet. In my interview with Cristian Mihai, I warned (twice!) about buying into such Romantic fantasies of the lone, supremely inspired artist, wandering through the wilderness with a pen in hand and mind feverish with art. I meant it. Whatever their stripe, artists need community at least as much as other people.

When we sit down with a blank page (or screen, or whatever), though, we are alone. That’s part of what makes it cool. We are alone with all this space to create, to conjure dreams. We might hope to concoct something that will connect with others, but that is part of the work, and we do our work with the blank page alone.

That’s why the blank page, on bad days, can be terrifying. We face it alone. It’s the “Here Be Dragons”  on an antique map, and we expect those dragons to devour us momentarily. You know, right after they finish picking their teeth with the bones of all our past, terrible work. On the bad days, we pick browsing the internet, doing housework, sleeping…anything that takes us from the blank page’s terra incognita back into familiar places.

We have to go out there, though. There are dragons to slay…or maybe befriend. I’m off to find mine. Best of luck with yours.

Interview with J.D.J. Plocher

An interview I did with writer Cristian Mihai of cristianmihai.net, in which I share some thoughts on writing (profound, not so profound, and hopefully only to the edge of cliché).

Interview with J.D.J. Plocher.

Success and the Persuasive Essay

I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Schuman’s recent Chronicle piece on teaching as a vocation, and her further rumination over at pan kisses kafka on the (temporary?) suspension of her pedagogy. I have also been trying to figure out what my life “should” look like as a PhD outside academia—what “success” might look like. I have also also been substitute teaching. Between bouts of riot control, today’s lesson was on the persuasive essay. The sixth graders had to read and break down two short articles on video games: one praising the potential virtues of video games, the other warning of their consequences. They had to suss out the author’s claim, then to note down the evidence the author used as support. They needed practice at both, but it’s the start of the unit and, like I said, riot control.

How do you convince somebody of something? We’re bombarded by competing notions of success in everything from car advertisements to religion to quote-images plastered all over social media. Especially in advertisements, success and happiness are elided by the smudge of money. When we get into more metaphysical notions of success, we lose some of that equation of success and happiness. We can even reverse the connection between success and happiness. (Think about the “inspirational” gym pictures that one friend of yours always puts up about pain and gain.)

All these success-mongers want to persuade us that their mode of success is the best. It’s the coolest. It’s the most ethical. It’s the one that will take you furthest in the world. Whatever. Digging down into the supporting evidence is too often a rabbit hole: claim follows claim follows claim. That’s rhetoric, but it can take ages to get down to evidence. My sixth-graders today were easy to catch with that hook, which was part of the point. Teaching people to really read means teaching them what kinds of evidence are important to which varieties of argument.

The persuasive power of success models is wholly contingent on what kinds of evidence we are willing to buy. Is success a new Lexus (something the TV told me everybody gets for Christmas), having a car younger than your kids, or living car-free in a place with viable public transport? Is success turning your every waking effort toward improving the world, volunteer tutoring on a Tuesday evening, or being a responsive partner in your relationship? Is it traveling first class? Is it traveling with all your worldly possessions in a single backpack? When we pick a model of success, we’re being persuaded not by the claim, but by the evidence. The claim comes afterward. It’s how we gather our favorite pieces of evidence together.*

When we write, our ideas about success are just a few of the many that creep onto the page. When we’re looking at our screen or our paper, we reflect in other ways on success. Is success making a reader feel something? Is it getting “enough” hits on your blog or sales of your self-published book? Is it making a living from your work? Is making Good Art enough by itself? Those are the questions I’ve been grappling with. They’re complicated, as they are for so many of us, by our competing roles in life. Where does success as a partner and father fit in? Who do I allow to persuade me?

More importantly, how do I persuade myself of something? The latter is what I am working on these days: convincing myself that some direction or other is worth pursuing. I need to move from “convince” to “conviction.” We measure success in a hell of a lot of ways, but which ones are the most persuasive? Thoughts?

(*As a contrasting example, contemporary U.S. politics put the claims first and the evidence much, much later.)

Six Years Later: In Memory of My Father

Six years ago (almost to the hour as I type this), I was sitting in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, about to get on a plane to Boise. I know that, but only because I know the date and remember when that last direct flight left. At the time, I was skimming the surface of everything, because getting past the surface meant hurting and confusion. It had only been a few hours since I’d been sitting at my computer, swapping virtual crafting items on WoW with my brother, when he abruptly typed “you need to call home.” That was weird, and I asked some question about it. My brother re-iterated that I needed to call home. I did.

My dad was dead.

Aside from hugging my infant son a little harder than he liked, I sort of managed to hold things together for forty minutes until my wife got home from work. I needed to get back to Idaho more urgently than I had ever needed to get anywhere. I made phone calls and booked tickets. I remembered to find somebody to cover my music history sections. We packed in a hurry, and left in such a hurry that we forgot our dress clothes for the funeral. (Our landlord was kind enough to go get them the next morning and overnight them to Idaho.) Surface things. We got to Boise and…went to a hotel right next to the airport. As much as I wanted to be home, it was nearly midnight and the roads were icy. Nobody was in shape to come pick us up. We went out to the house the next morning when my brother and aunt came in.

I won’t rehash the next few days. People filled up the house. I made it through the eulogy without dissolving wholly into tears. My son—a week short of his first birthday—charmed everybody and reminded us all that life goes on. It did. Soon enough I was back in Minnesota trying to catch up on Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Nattiez and teaching Renaissance polyphony. I cried. I worried about my mom. In the arbitrary way that songs get stuck to events in our heads, The Killers’ “Tranquilize” (featuring Lou Reed, who’s now dead too) stuck to me for the next few months.

We get good at the surface things. It is how we make it through our days—commutes, work, the dirty dishes in the sink. Looking past surfaces isn’t always the window to desolation it was that night six years ago, but I still miss my dad whenever I think of him. The first time I visited my mom’s house after she’d moved to Nebraska, I walked through it after everybody had gone to bed. And I cried and cried because there were pictures of my dad and some of his things, but there was nothing of him there. It was a house he had never set foot in, and he never would. The pictures were only there for the rest of us.

Both of my parents read to me, but it was my dad’s books that hooked me. I may have gotten the words from my mom, but my stories owe a lot to my dad. I tried his Louis Lamour westerns. The Hobbit really got me, though. He read it out loud over weeks of bedtimes when I was little. I read it myself around second grade and, the following summer, cajoled my grandmother to find me a copy of The Two Towers, since I had only brought The Fellowship of the Ring to California with me. From there it was off to the races bookstore, and soon after to the keyboard to try my hand at my own stories. My reading habits were more like my mom’s: I read fast and often skip around (habits that carry over to my writing). My dad didn’t read like that. He read slowly and meticulously. He always read the end last. He digested books.

Years later I’m still working on digesting his absence. I feel it a little every time I have to drag my family out of bed in the morning (I was just as hard to get out of bed when I was a kid). I feel it when I cook something I’ve never cooked before, or when I’m trying to explain something that I picked up in years of watching him at home and at the restaurant. Tonight I walked my sister-in-law through roasting pork loin and potatoes, and a pan of brussels sprouts. We tested the doneness with our fingers, and I had to dig for an explanation that was clearer than “it feels done.” I think he would have appreciated it.

I also think he would have liked to come visit us here. It’s easy for me to imagine taking my dad downtown and sampling food trucks before catching some live music. I can almost hear him in our living room, holding forth a little too loudly on something he’d seen on Food Network. I remember him reading Green Eggs and Ham to his infant grandson and know his granddaughter would have charmed him to pieces. I know how enthusiastic he’d be for the stories I’m working on.

Mostly, though, I just miss him. I just miss him.

Revisionary: Three Thoughts on Fixing What’s Broken

I’m not sure if it’s my favorite (favourite?) distinction between British English and American English, but I spent a good chunk of my first term at school in Wales being alternately charmed and confused by “review” and “revise.” Revising, there, is something you do to prepare for an exam. (At the end of the second year, my cohort and I concocted ornate revision schedules that we nearly managed to follow.) Review is used much more often in the context of “a formal review.” You know, the kind of thing you might revise for.

What’s important to either usage of either word is that they involve seeing again, looking intensely. When you look again, the goal is not to see the surface of the story (the writing you’ve already done), but the story underneath. See what the underlying principles are. See where the story has gotten away from its best self. Those are the spots you need to go back to, to make the story match the vision. (It’s just as true, incidentally, of nonfiction and academic writing, even if they don’t have “stories” in the same way.)

I posted about editing not too long ago. I described it as selection, keeping the best bits and weeding out the worst. Editing is also, though, a reaction. As writers or editors, when we go to edit a work, we are reacting to what’s on the page. Revising (in the American sense) is an active process, one in which we make the good better and the replace the bad. We push and pull and coax the story toward the vision we have for it.

That vision can change. We refine it when we share our writing with our favorite co-conspirators or hand it to an editor. When we look again, we might see things that were in our blind spots for the last go-round. Whatever changes, though, there are a few things that help (me) with the revision process:

1. Have a Plan

Even if you are an inveterate pantser when you write, having a plan makes revision smoother. Some fixes are simple enough to handle intuitively. Most, though, require a bit of forethought (which is not easy to do while you’re writing). What other parts of the story does a particular scene touch? More importantly, why are we changing what’s there? What do we have in our mind’s eye or ear that we’re pulling the story toward? How are you going to get there? Change in voice? Altering a character’s actions? If we’re replacing a bad section, how do we avoid making the new one bad? The more you have figured out about the problem before you go mucking around in your story’s guts, the more likely you are to have the right tools on hand. Plus, you’ll be less likely to leave a spanner in there that will necessitate more work later.

2. Keep Your Eyes Fresh

This is vital for editing, too, and one of the best reasons to have somebody who is not you look your work over. When I get into a story, it’s hard to hold on to the big picture and the small picture at the same time. It is also particularly hard to kill your darlings when they’re cozy at home. Work environments matter. Mess with them. If you’re sticking to soft copy, try opening your document in a different program. Print it to .pdf and read it without being able to change things. Personally, I love having hard copy to scribble on, even if it’s not always practical. Do what you can to disrupt the habits of your eyes. You’ll notice more—not just bad things, either.

3. Remember That it is Your Work
(in both senses of ‘work’)

The story you’re revising is yours. If it gets out into the world, it will have your name on it, no matter how awesome your editors or workshoppers were. If you’re self-publishing, you get to make the final decisions. Even if you’re not self-publishing, you don’t have to do everything your interlocutors suggest. I’ve mentioned before that I had an excellent advisor for my master’s thesis in music history. She taught me an enormous amount about making academic writing good writing. That didn’t stop us from disagreeing, though. I’d get drafts back marked to pieces in mechanical pencil. Some (many) of her suggestions or corrections were good ones. There were others that I didn’t agree with. I left them in the subsequent drafts. If they came back marked a second time, I’d think harder about changing things. That didn’t happen very often. It would have been a much worse document without my advisor’s input, but it was still my name on it.

Revising is also your work to do. Your editors point out problems. They might suggest fixes, but they won’t make them. As the writer, it’s your responsibility to fix what’s broken. Revision is work. It is often a grind that forces you to fight your own bad habits. Revision can be a painfully unfun slog. It’s just as much part of being a writer, though, as zooming through that ecstatic first draft or smiling at the fact you’ve changed nothing into something. When you get to the end and you’ve polished everything to gleaming? It’s worth it.

So go forth and work with fresh eyes. Know that I’ll be trying to do the same over here.

Pulp Fiction Redux: Swords, Sorcery and Fritz Leiber

“This is Book One of the Saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the greatest swordsmen ever to be in this or any other universe of fact or fiction, more skillful masters of the blade even than Cyrano de Bergerac, Scar Gordon, Conan, John Carter, D’Artagnan, Brandoch Daha, and Anra Devadoris. Two comrades to the end and black comedians for all eternity…”
—Fritz Leiber, preface to the 1973 printing of Swords and Deviltry

The towering barbarian Fafhrd and the nimble Gray Mouser are as iconic a duo as Batman and Robin. They ought to be more iconic, even, since neither exists alone. (Never mind that the small one hasn’t died any more often than the tall one.) The pair are the most enduring creation of Fritz Leiber (1910-1992). Leiber contributed short stories to Weird Tales and other pulp publications before the Second World War. He was influenced by Lovecraft’s mythos, and later by Jung and Campbell. He introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in 1939, in a story called “Two Sought Adventure,” but his first books were collections of horror and science fiction shorts. He won a Hugo for his sci-fi novel The Wanderer, and went on to collect other Hugos, Nebulas, and a host of lifetime achievement awards. He’s also one of the progenitors of urban horror. Influential dude.

Fafhrd and the Mouser were conceived as pulp heroes along the lines of a Conan or an Elric (though they predate the latter). Leiber co-created them with his friend Harry Fischer, though Leiber ended up doing the lion’s share of the work after. Fafhrd and the Mouser were, like so many other pulp fantasy heroes, creatures of short stories. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, when Leiber was sorting out early stories for book publication, that they had a proper timeline and the chance to operate in longer forms. The books started coming out in 1969, and kept coming at irregular intervals until 1989, a few years before Leiber’s death.

Aside from being a duo, what made Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser different? For one, they were funny. Leiber’s writing is tremendously clever. A publisher’s blurb calls it “dry wit,” which is apt enough. The stories are the kind of funny that leads consistently to grins and seldom to laughter. Compared to anything by Howard and most of Moorcock’s work, the F&GM stories might as well be stand-up comedy specials. The titular heroes drink too much, fall down, trick their enemies, trick each other…the swordplay and thefts and games with capital-D Death might be the story, but it’s hard to separate them from the fun the author—and often the characters—are having.

The stories are also profoundly strange. Moorcock sent his heroes traipsing across worlds, fighting extradimensional wizards they’d mistaken for towers, and wandering fantastic landscapes with a dose of psychedelia. Leiber keeps his locations mundane, if somewhat baroque. Even though Lankhmar, F&GM’s home city is an exceedingly odd place, its internal rules are straightforward. The strangeness in Leiber’s stories is typically internal. Rather than tripping through worlds, he sends his heroes tripping through their own heads. The two are repeatedly afflicted by spells that mess with their minds. They spend time underground and in the air. There’s a whole species of person with visible bones but invisible flesh. Lots of rats and magic potions, too.

I could go on for a while longer about the cool things in the Lankhmar stories, but I want to spend some time on the big one. Accept this list as a set of interesting curiosities: Lankhmar (the city) is important in that it’s one of the first urban fantasy settings, never mind that it’s a hive of scum and villainy to put Mos Eisely to shame. Leiber and Fischer helped develop a Lankhmar game that was published in 1976 by a fledgling company called TSR. There’s the usual squicky racial othering (Mingols?!), but it isn’t nearly as bad as the works of the earlier generation. Leiber also did more than just solidify the concept of “sword and sorcery” fantasy fiction—he probably coined the term himself.

Here’s the big thing, though…and it’s big enough to merit another quote:

“I confess I find it strange and somewhat distasteful to be forever sending other men on adventures, rather than setting forth on them myself.”
—Fafhrd, The Knight and Knave of Swords

That’s where Fritz Leiber has taken us by the late 1980s: his iconic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have grown up, become middle-aged. In their last (published) adventure, they discover their young adult children, make a kind of peace with their wives, and become, of all things, businessmen. This is, I think, one of the more extraordinary developments in fantasy fiction: Leiber lets his heroes grow up. Their adventures have consequences. Their dalliances have quite literal consequences that show up with identifying birthmarks.

This was a huge deal for pulp heroes, even though by the late 80s other authors were writing fantasy novels with developing heroes. For the heroes of sword and sorcery, time just didn’t happen. It might have passed, but seldom in a definite way. Stories could be logically sequenced. They existed, though, in something pretty closely resembling Bakhtin’s epic chronotope. Places and events were interchangeable. Characters did not interact with each other or their environment in ways that changed their being. Elric was always Hamlet with a demon sword. Conan was always a noble thug. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, though…they changed. We get origin stories. Origin stories that make sense, even. Those happened back in the 70s. The Gray Mouser and Fafhrd grow and develop, even though they’re tangled up in perfectly pulp-y schemes. Even in the sequence of short stories, we get something like a novelistic chronotope.

The bemused distaste with which they end their adventures is as cool and worth celebrating as the fact that they began them as “the greatest swordsmen ever to be.”

The works of Fritz Leiber are widely available. White Wolf published a four-volume set of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories were published in the mid-90s. That’s out of print, but there are many used copies of Leiber’s seven-volume set (the published order), as well as e-books (though I’ve heard that the e-books diverge from the published copies in places).

Where the Word Things Are

Way back when, roughly a thousand internet years ago (last September), I mentioned that I missed being asked about my research. Now, I get asked about my writing. It’s happened more than once, and sometimes happens even with relative strangers. It’s one of the dubious perks of being a writer. Theoretically, I’m always working on something. Sometimes I’m actually working pretty hard and I can answer with a smile. Other times it feels more like being buttonholed by my advisor in a hallway with questions about my dissertation progress.

With the exception of NaNo, when I was able to twist the contours of my life to make a bar graph go up, I’ve never been especially good at steady, smooth progress. I tend to keep plinking away at a project bit by bit, then claim a day or two for it and make substantial progress. Editing is more variable. Figuring out what’s broken and managing sentence or paragraph level fixes is fast work for me. (I credit my time with student papers for some of that.) Fixing large-scale problems is almost always slower, in part because I’m no better than most at killing my darlings. I also generally try and work my fixes out completely in my head rather than in intermediate, less-broken-but-not-fixed drafts.

At any rate, I haven’t written much lately about what I’m writing. Art is like a gas: it expands to spill the available space. Deadlines that don’t have a paycheck attached to them are easy to push back in favor of spending time with the partner, the kids, or, you know, sleeping. Here, though, are updates on my two current projects, with some brief excerpts.

The Dinadan Novellas

I wrote these over the course of several years for RetroMUD. I have a whole post about writing “inside” game worlds that will double as the prologue to an ebook collection of three novellas featuring Dinadan Whistler, a satyr bard. The first, Homecoming, is at its heart a father-son story, though it’s got its share of action and innuendo. The third, Dinadan Noir, is, as the title suggests, a detective story. It also involves shoes.

The second, Something Fishy, was originally written on a strict, self-imposed timetable. I produced two posts (of six hundred to a thousand words) each week until it was done. I managed that part of the goal. The problem was that I began without a solid outline, changed my mind about the plot several times while writing, and ended up with a lot of crap. It was, in miniature, an example of the kind of trainwreck NaNo can sometimes produce. I’ve blown up the middle third of the story, re-conceived the ending, and am slogging through the work of actually re-writing it all.

From Homecoming:

Dinadan finished replaying the fight in his head. “Nope. He couldn’t have been after me. In fact, I don’t think he even expected me to be here.” He looked hard at his father. “If I hadn’t been there, you’d probably be dead. I was sitting between you and the door, and he had to take a few swings at me before he even got to you. By then, I was able to hit him with some spells, and Lackhorn got his hammer out. Plus, the uruk didn’t follow when I ducked out of the way.

“So here’s the question, dad: why would the Unseelie be after you?”

Glim sighed. It was apparently contagious. “Honestly, Dina, I dunno. I was never more than a lady’s doorwarden, and I can’t on me life figure out why she’d send someone after me. Especially an Unseelie.”

The young bard did a double take. “Wait. You were a guard? For a Seelie lady?”

“Aye. Proud member of the Fighter’s Guild, too. Ye don’t think they just let Gifted ones in, do ye? No guild’d ever fill their ranks if they made queer souls a joining mark. Did ye think I’d been a woodcarver all my years?”

“Well,” Dinadan stammered, “yeah. I did. It’s not like you ever mentioned it.”

Glim shook his head and smiled proudly. “I didn’t get these muscles wielding a chisel, boyo.” The smile fell away. “But I retired near 80 years gone.”

From Dinadan Noir (where I’ve shifted to first person narration):

Playing the bravo is good fun. Bards don’t often get to throw their weight around—not that I’m heavy, mind. Whip-thin and resilient, that’s me. Anyway. There’s something entertaining about staring down bruisers who, if they stopped to think about it, could pound you flat in a fistfight, about making a hard line of your mouth and steel of your eyes when—inside—you’re laughing at the gulls. If push came to shove, of course, I’d be chucking spells, not knives. And part of the reason I could pull off the bluff was that it wasn’t really a bluff.

Digression is a professional hazard.

I put on my swagger suit and willed myself to Igneous. If you’ve never been there, keep it that way. The place is all twisted windows, crooked walls, and the muted stink of death. And chilly. I half-think that’s why so many undead call the place home. It’s always cool in Igneous, not quite cold, but cool enough to slow down rot. Never mind that the place is crawling with necromancers who’ll patch up your lifeless husk to your exact specifications. I drew plenty of stares just for being on the living side of the grave. I stared right back, a hairsbreadth grin letting them know I meant business.

Igneous is an easy place to get jumped, and a hard place to get found. It took me the better part of an hour just to pick the right bar, and I dropped two cutpurses and a gorgon mugger in that span. All, might I add, without recourse to a single blast of sound. I might not have been a brilliant swordsman, but I was good enough to take down gutter trash. The fellows in the Worm’s Abode were a step above gutter trash, though, and I made sure I picked out all the exits when I walked into the place.

The goal is to have the collection (which will also include some songs I wrote “as” Dinadan) available in early February.

Ghosts of the Old City

My NaNo project. I have fixed some of the continuity problems in the opening chapters, and cleaned up some speed-induced wordiness. There are more tweaks to make, and probably some more substantive problems that I’m in too close to see. I hope to have a six-chapter segment (about 22,000 words) out to my alpha readers in the next two or three weeks. To whet your appetite, here’s the first part of the prologue:

Maedoc was beginning to lose count of his new starts. The first ones had been his father’s, really: the grand tour of the Cliff States, the ill-fated attempt to buy a title in the merchant city of Mors, the ultimately futile effort to reconcile with Parukhi aristocracy after the Fairworth Treason. By then, Maedoc had begun to make his own new starts: the belated apprenticeship, the brief stint in politics, the gambling in Varna, the pitchforks in Dobrukh, the cattle herd in Ambhol, the second round of gambling in Varna…the terrible, terrible year he’d spent as a junior officer in the Three Rivers War…the third and presumably final round of gambling in Varna, in which he’d only just kept his hands attached at the wrists. And now Maedoc was on a train to Sakurdrilen for yet another attempt at pushing his life into some sort of recognizable shape.

The coach was noisy, but it was far better than steerage. Maedoc was grateful his accent and a few choice words had won him free of that smell. Here amongst the petit-bourgeois, he was instead intensely conscious of his jacket’s threadbare elbows and his boots’ eroded heels. The services of a barber would not have gone amiss either. Still, he put on his best smile, nodded politely at the few other passengers who made eye contact, and tried to get some sense of the place he might someday manage to call home.

Maedoc had never been this far north. He’d seen Shehru territory during the war, of course, but that had been in the hill country. Technically, this broken valley was part of the Republic now, but it still seemed…foreign. The farmsteads were low and stone-walled; the small villages the train sped by seemed too quiet and dark. The fields were small and, though green, did not sing lush songs. Aside from the painted doors, the buildings were as dark as the expanses of bare stone visible here and there. The Heron sometimes disappeared into crevasses, emerging a few furlongs away in angry waterfalls as it leapt and plunged toward the distant bay. Perhaps in the sun, Maedoc thought, it will look less dreary.

Here and there—and more often as the train approached Sakurdrilen—Maedoc spotted newer farmholds. Parukhi farmholds with wooden fences and long-haired sheep in the yards. Children in loose trousers and jackets watched the sheep. Their fathers watched from porches, unsmiling. How many are veterans given a piece of Shehru as a discharge payment? Land was a powerful incentive for soldiers, he knew, but he also guessed that ‘retirement’ was not always as pleasant as it sounded when the enemy was shooting at you. There would be more former soldiers in Sakurdilen. Active duty ones, too. Six years was not all that long for a war to be over.