Writing Updates: Craft Articles & My Submissions

 I spent most of yesterday trying not to overheat and working on “After Making Landfall”. I did a couple of posts for publishign later in the week.

(3) The 53rd Try Was the Charm - by Marcia Yudkin persistence.

(3) There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel  explains why I have been having trouble with POV as an idea because I have been focusing on who has the information and how it is conveyed. Five seems like my experience.

Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.   

(3) The Writing Advice I’ll Never Give You - by Kristen Weber: Just read it.

(3) Lit Theory 101 | Voice, Consciousness & Distance 

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

This ties into the POV essay above. 

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

 ***

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

So much for headhopping, sort of. Shifting without attribution seems to be headhopping.

 

Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” (Literary Hub). If you have not read Walter Mosely, you might overlook this. You're mistake twice over - not reading Mosely is the first.

All the readers of Dorn have interpretations that come from their histories, their particular intellects, and desires, and yearnings they might not be aware of. That’s the beauty of fiction; it is a continually mutating protoplasm in the minds of readers. This colorless, almost invisible ever transforming blob of reactions is the party. It is not a machine. It is not good or evil, bad or boring—it is a cry in the dark, a hope looking for a harbor, something that pretends to make sense but, in actuality, is much deeper than that.

And let’s not forget the original definition of the term, the word novel; it means that you’re about to encounter something original, different, unique. And so, when the critic in your newspaper, your classroom, when the editor in your mind, or of your book, tells you that your novel would make a poor coffee percolator (or potboiler) you tell them, thank you, because the novel you created (and that is recreated by each and every one of your readers) is an ever-transforming document that grants the power to evolve in the minds of the many. From Conan the Barbarian to Othello the written word has the potential for transformation no one can predict.

 

 6/28-29 submissions

Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, Mudroom, The /tƐmz/ Review got “After Making Landfall”.

 Going out soon. Still no phone, and the heat advisory continues.

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Loosey Goosey - The Poverty Of Our Imaginations, and of Our Ambitions

Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird (Reactor ) hits on some ideas that bothered me in other areas. I see it in politics, other writing genres, and in movies. 

Manifestly, purity is overrated.

The fewer ideas and perceptions and influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population.

For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom.

And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21^st-century S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic, was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely passing.

To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend something as S&S.

And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium, an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness.

What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities.

I saw Supergirl, thought it a good enough movie, and the reviews were generally puzzling. Some wanted a bigger more spectacular follow up to Superman. Some thought it was not clearly enough feminist. The comic book fans decried the divergences from the art. One review in The Guardian is the only one I saw that reviewed it on its own terms. 

Why have we become so needy for purity, for clearly defined content that reassures our prejudices against women, against the oddball? Why do we hug so closely to the past and cliches?

Reactor seems to be on a streak this week, hitting me with articles aggravating the bees in my bonnet: Strange New Worlds, Starfleet Academy, and Nostalgia for the Future.

As a term, nostalgia derives from the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning grief or distress. It is a yearning for something which no longer exists or perhaps which has never existed, and, crucially, this desire is less spatial than temporal, often closely linked to childhood memories. It is a feeling which Star Trek has often dramatized (think about Annorax in Voyager’s “Year of Hell” who longs to restore an erased timeline containing his wife and… <dramatic flash> …wait, what do you mean you don’t remember him?!). But understanding nostalgia is not just useful for writers. Knowing more about how it is expressed can also help viewers and critics when contemplating our situationships with popular culture. Indeed, when we analyze what I like to call the flavor profiles of nostalgia we begin to account for why different audiences vibe differently with different incarnations of contemporary Trek. 

 Nostalgia bothers me. I think it is the amber into which our world  and its cultures are being trapped. But I did learn there is more than only one nostalgia.

First, restorative nostalgia. For Boym, this involves a strong emphasis on so-called “truth and tradition,” a stance which Strange New Worlds emphasizes by positioning itself as the heir to classic Star Trek. Such an approach tends to be anchored in a particular historical moment (or, at least, in a recollection of that moment, for as Boym warns, there is always a risk of conflating “the actual home for the imaginary one”). Consider how Strange New Worlds treats the original Trek as a kind of sacred text, with the relationship between the old and new based not on evolution of the material but, instead, on Boym’s “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.” This is evidenced not just by SNW’s literal recreation of the original Enterprise (albeit much more spacious given Pike’s smaller crew complement) but by the recasting of franchise stalwarts such as Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Chapel. We further see it in the way the series retells classic stories, for instance how the first season finale, “A Quality of Mercy,” offers what is essentially a cover version of the TOS episode “Balance of Terror” by transporting Captain Pike forward in time from 2259 to 2266 while also sending the viewer nostalgically back in time from 2022 to 1966. Even the title Strange New Worlds is itself nostalgically (and restoratively) Trek, drawing as it does from the credits narration of the franchise heyday. 

Which is opposed by:

This kind of layered approach suggests a similar kind of “longing for continuity in a fragmented world” as that exhibited by genuinely reflective nostalgia. It is something that the post-Burn setting of our second example, Starfleet Academy, is designed to take narrative advantage of. Nine hundred years beyond Strange New Worlds, this period is a stage for “unrealized dreams of the past” (dovetailing neatly with the show’s use of hauntology as I have discussed on this site before). Starfleet Academy, so, is as undeniably nostalgic as Strange New Worlds, but while its reflective approach uses similar triggers to the restorative tendency, the series fashions these into very different results. Because reflective nostalgia thrives in the act of “longing itself.” It relishes ambiguities and contradictions (something we will sadly now not see in a mooted third or fourth season installment which would have had the holographic Doctor meet the copy of himself from Voyager’s “Living Witness”). Reflective nostalgia calls “truth” into question as several Academy episodes, notably “Series Acclimation Mil,” pointedly do. Most importantly, it acknowledges that remembrance is an “imperfect process” (which, as much as anything else, is the crux of Academy’s first season finale). Along the way it champions an open approach to history, one in which youth (personified by cadet Caleb) challenges authority while simultaneously being poised to create its own stories. This philosophy celebrates the past of Star Trek but still exhibits a strong longing to forge a new future—via a new ship, a new crew, and a transformed setting—all while honoring what has come before (most obviously in the USS Athena’s commemoration wall, something I hold to be an object lesson in imperfect recollection if only because I refuse to believe that Nog never advanced beyond lieutenant). 

Five Books That Make History Fantastic - Reactor 

The Death of Robin Hood Brings a Legend Low - Reactor I offer as an antidote to my own opinion that the movie works. The points against my opinion are accurate. It is grim, it does hint at other movies, and it does evade what the reviewer wants. The violence is horror level high. I think the changes in Robin Hood are subtle. I think it may be that he had no other means of escaping his past. His world was too circumscribed by place and rank for reinvention.

 sch 6/27

What Hasn't Changed In 400 Years?

 I was looking for something I thought I had read by Sir Francis Bacon when I was 18. I did not find exactly what I was looking for, but I want to offer you something that came close. 

Novum Organum by Lord Bacon (The Project Gutenberg eBook) is where British philosophy starts and is still worth reading. 

XLV. The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is. Hence the fiction, that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, thus rejecting entirely spiral and serpentine lines (except as explanatory terms).[12] Hence also the element[23] of fire is introduced with its peculiar orbit,[13] to keep square with those other three which are objects of our senses. The relative rarity of the elements (as they are called) is arbitrarily made to vary in tenfold progression, with many other dreams of the like nature.[14] Nor is this folly confined to theories, but it is to be met with even in simple notions.

XLVI. The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him[15] who was[24] shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows? All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common. But this evil insinuates itself still more craftily in philosophy and the sciences, in which a settled maxim vitiates and governs every other circumstance, though the latter be much more worthy of confidence. Besides, even in the absence of that eagerness and want of thought (which we have mentioned), it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than negatives, whereas it ought duly and regularly to be impartial; nay, in establishing any true axiom the negative instance is the most powerful.

XLVII. The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind, while it is very slow and unfit for the transition to the remote and heterogeneous instances by which axioms are tried as by fire, unless the office be imposed upon it by severe regulations and a powerful authority.

Having read that, can you really think human nature has changed in 400 years?

sch 6/25

Goodnight, 6/27

 Something happened this afternoon. I had this complete loss of energy, feeling like I was going to collapse. Only I did not. Sleep would not come. I ate a sandwich and swallowed some water. I went back to the first section of “After Making Landfall” and have gone no further this evening. I did get a post or two written. That is all.

 

The Sea Trout at the End of the World - Fulling Mill Blog I wish I felt well enough to go fishing.

How Did the English Arrive in Britain? | History Today  

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Fishballs, Group, Supergirl

 Thursday I worked on Agnes, so when I woke on Friday I finished her off. Ended the night by starting “Pretty Things” on Netflix. Go Alasdair Gray!

Like I said, the writing mania got me early in the morning. Problem is I needed to get in touch with the surgeon, and I missed out on that. Monday. It will have to be done on Monday.

The phone is still out.

I ate at The Dumpling House, as I usually do. This time I had fishball & rice noodle soup. Wonderful! 

I did group. Notes will be published over the weekend.

Then I went to see Supergirl.

Supergirl was much better than expected. I am not sure I am being original here, but it brought to mind Mad Max Fury Road. What is going to piss off the fanboys is that it is not a typical superhero movie with all the spectacle and spandex of a WWE fight. It is a coming of age story wrapped in a superhero story. It is very low key compared to what else is out there for superhero movies. Yes, there are some strange shots. I really do not know Milly Alcock's work, but she pulled off a character I never liked. Yeah, I was a terrible sexist when I was young and thought Supergirl was kind of stupid and for girls. It is not something you need to rush to see - that would've been Death of Robin Hood - but is better than the reviews. 

Additionally. Gunn has added a character I also hated as a kid and made the damn thing work: Krypto. Yes, I thought Krypto was stupid. Probably not having a cape and having awful behavior helps.

One last thing, there was a preview for Klara and the Sun. I did not know Natasha Lyonne is in it. I am in love with her. Badly. At one point in Supergirl I got thinking about what it would've been like with Natasha as Supergirl, 20 years ago, a cigarette dangling from her lip….

Anyway, I just got home. It may be a short night, this was supposed to be a vacation day, but I started revising "After Making Landfall”.

I listened to a couple of video reviews of Supergirl while I did the revising.

 

 

The comic book boys can't (won't?) judge a movie as a movie. Not that the movie critics were all that favorable, looking for a superhero movie and all that attendant spectacle. When it is more and less than a superhero movie. Others went on about whether it was a good feminist movie. I am in no position to say anything about that since the movie never spouted any manifesto, and the original writer who was a woman would probably have put one in if she thought it necessary. This morning while waiting for the bus to take me to Payless, I thought if there is a feminist message in the move then it fits the Annie Lennox model.

What I found to be the most accurate take on the movie I saw: Supergirl review – sprightly and sparkling superhero yarn without the usual baffling DC backstory ( Movies | The Guardian)

I have chipped away at the emails but not enough. I need to get back to my story, so this is all you get for now.

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Novels - Where Do We go From Here?

Here I am supposed to be working on my writing and getting distracted by ideas of other books. 

My excuse for why I am doing this: How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Overlooked Story Collection Helped Me Write My LA Novel (Literary Hub) made me realize how little I knew about Fitzgerald's short stories. And the vagraies of success. And that a writer has to write.

 And The Consensus Sublime ( Los Angeles Review of Books) sealed the deal. Just goofing off, giving myself a minute of time before I started working, and then I got lost. It is a critique of The Guardian's 100 Best Novels list, and I could dismiss it as just another of many. 

What distinguishes The Guardian’s list within this long and somewhat dismal tradition is not that it judges—all canons judge—but the specific character of its public-facing authority. Academic canons carry, at least formally, the caution of scholarly qualification. They present themselves as provisional disciplinary instruments. The Guardian list borrows the aura of institutional expertise—“authors, critics and academics worldwide” voted, the editors announce—while simultaneously billing itself as a broad, democratic, cultural event, open to all. It does not offer provisional aesthetic judgments. It offers monuments.

Monuments. That did me in. Yesterday, after the writer's meeting, we got talking about how sequels suck. They keep selling us the same thing with a new package until the life goes out of what is under the package. Monuments are dead things being worshipped. Of course, Gore Vidal got there before me (albeit I should have read the essay mentioned over 30 years ago):

Beneath any such exercise lies a problem almost never seriously engaged: the question of what it means to judge a novel in the first place. Aesthetic judgment, as Gore Vidal observed across a long career of elegant provocation, is neither private mood nor laboratory fact. In his essay “Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” Vidal argued that critics must proceed as though absolute standards for literary value exist, since without some orientation toward the absolute, relative judgments dissolve into mere preference. But to reify those standards into monuments is disastrous, as literary history repeatedly demonstrates that what one moment consecrates, the next dismantles with humiliating ease.

Here is where I became glad to have read the essay (and pretty much confirms I read the Vidal essay).

Consider what such machinery cannot easily process. There is no Honoré de Balzac on this list. The absence is not, in the first instance, an injustice to French literature. It is an exposure of the list’s narrowed theory of what the novel is.

***

Lost Illusions is a novel about the manufacture of literary value, and in this, it anticipates the very social machinery by which the Guardian list itself was assembled. Vidal, returning in several essays to what he called the missing “Balzacian concern,” lamented that the disappearance of economic motive from serious fiction represented a narrowing of the form itself, a retreat from the novel’s appetite for entangling human consciousness with narrative structure.

In Balzac, money is never merely money; it is the medium through which every other value—love, friendship, artistic integrity, political conviction—is tested and, usually, dissolved. A list that cannot accommodate this novel has quietly decided, without admitting it, that the novel’s proper business lies in moral illumination, perhaps, or psychological interiority, or the production of teachable social empathy. These are not unworthy concerns. But they are not the whole of what the novel, at its most exorbitant and alert, knows how to do.

And Balzac’s absence is not an omission. It is a theory.

***

The omissions that matter most in the Guardian list are not, then, a grievance catalog. They are, again, a theory. Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956–57) is absent; so are Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1936) and Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World (1916). These works do not deserve inclusion as diplomatic representatives of their traditions—not that every tradition warrants a seat. These works make formal, philosophical, and affective claims that exceed a significant portion of what the list includes.

Mahfouz’s absence, Hedayat’s absence, Tagore’s absence—these do not reflect regional bias or demographic oversight. They reflect the list’s operative theory of the novel, which turns out, on examination, to be a theory of Anglophone teachability and institutional processability, disguised as universal aesthetic judgment. The omitted novel is not merely absent. It exposes what the list, by its inclusions, silently presupposes. 

 I was reading Mahfouz, finally, then got sidetracked. More reason to get back to him. And for a call to arms that I cannot resist:

The novel’s actual history is older, stranger, more monstrous, more multilingual, and wilder than any professional consensus can accommodate. A counter-list of the institutionally neglected would only be parochialism reversed, the same divination performed with different auspices. The solution would require a different account attentive to what counts as true novelistic achievement, and that cannot be recovered by a better poll.

It can only be reopened by reading: by the willingness to let unfamiliar formal ambitions disturb the machinery through which recognition, in any given moment, decides what it is prepared to call great.

I have waited too long to be good at what I want to do.  But maybe I still have time to do something useful.

Previously, I had read Weekly Readings #228 (06/15/26-06/21/26) - by John Pistelli  (THE GREATEST BOOKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY). Which is almost the opposite of trying to make a canon.

What are you going to do?

What are Midwestern writers? When I started Central European writers, I thought I found people in the same position as I was. Reading Mitsuyoshi Numano's Is There Such a Thing as Central (Eastern) European Literature? An Attempt to Reconsider Central European Consciousness on the Basis of Contemporary Literature keeps that idea alive. Take away the difference in a monolingual culture. Indiana is small and torn up by identity issues. We are not Easterners, although much of our past comes from there, and we have our envy of New York. We are not Southerners; for all of those came from there to here, for all of us having some of the same values; and the West is too rough and tumble to be us, even as our own past was just as rough and tumble. 

sch 6/25

Misery and The Only Things That Have Excited Me The Past Few Days

 It has been a rough week, pain distracts and saps my energy; the simplest things take too long. I can do my research project, up to a point. I have been trying to find the stuff I need for revising “Agnes” and getting her out. That was two days ago. This post was started over 2 hours ago. Interrupted by the distraction of aches that should have been gone days ago but not (at least the bleeding stopped) and a computer crash. I thought to take in a movie today, but I am going nowhere except for smokes and caffeine.

Yesterday, I made it to Walmart for some meds. And down to the convenience store for smokes. There was also the writer's group. Then an afternoon of annoying, distracting agony followed where I got nothing more than a few articles read and watching “The Umbrella Academy.” It is easier to watch a tv show than a movie; I can get away from it quicker. The only problem is when the silly thing turns out to have some intriguing points. Like wrapping a dysfunctional family up into a superhero story that is also a satire of the superhero; a story where the heroes are the cause of the problem rather than its solution.

Tuesday was just about like Wednesday - only out briefly - but more miserable. 

I read The New ‘Odyssey’ Movie Is Sparking a Right-Wing Backlash. This Female Scholar Knows It Well (WIRED). Elon Musk is a silly person; so are these criticisms of Nolan's The Odyssey. Imaginations limited by their knowledge they are inadequate to the job. A black woman plays Helen? So what? Can she act? Yesterday I mentione I intended to see Supergirl to the bus driver, and he refused to consider it because of Milly Alcock's politics. What does politics have to do with how she can act? Nothing. It is the fear that they who do not share their politics can do the job. Anyone who fears their ideas cannot bear scrutiny knows their ideas are insubstantial.

A Rural Awakening? – Sheila Kennedy. Farmers seeing they've been conned by Trump? Well, they live pretty close to the bone, so they might be the first to feel reality creeping in from behind all the BS spewed by the President.

I had a great aunt who introduced me to politics. This September she will be dead 40 years. She liked betting on horse races; she was the only person in my family who has been to Churchill Downs. When Indiana was fighting over legalizing betting on horse racing, she condemned the Republicans controlling the General Assembly as being paid off by the surrounding states. The Republicans talked about the deletrious moral effects this would have on Indiana - that it might end in prostitution being legal. Well, that didn't happen - outside the Republican Party. Now, they're doing the same thing with marijuana: Using data to guide cannabis policy decisions ( Indiana Capital Chronicle).

By the way, my great aunt always voted straight ticket Republican.

Instead of morals, we've got bitterness and anger and hate and fear.

 Supreme Court allows immigration officials to turn away asylum seekers at the border (POLITICO)

'Nobody wants you here': Shakopee residents harass Somali family while house shopping (FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul)

Supreme Court sides with maker of Roundup weedkiller (AP News).

 America's great political implosion (Axios)

 Annoyed by the low-level rumbling of pain, I am done with posting for now. I'll use the time to get some things done here (the dishes do not wash themselves), go down to the convenience store), then deal with “Agnes”. Let's see if will matches desire.

Wishful thinking for me, considering age and the tolls paid: 

 

Remember the Rock Island Line!

 

 sch