NOTE: IF UNDER 18 OR EASILY OFFENDED, DON’T READ ANY OF THIS. REPEAT: GO. AWAY. NOW.

Might as well resign myself to the fact I’m going to be working on Finch 24-7 and taking little breaks, so I will be touching base here from time to time as warranted…

I’ve been thinking about sex scenes because Finch has two such scenes, both explicit. They’re important because they help define the relationship between two characters.

But the fact is, writing sex scenes is a little like writing about characters having lunch–not inherently dramatic. You could say that this is true of any kind of scene, but sex scenes have an additional danger: they have the potential to throw off the balance of the story or novel because the reader’s interest in and reaction to them is disproportionate to their importance in the context of the narrative.

Whether you’re writing an explicit or more subtle sex scene, you first need to make sure you have a reason for including it. Then it’s best to keep six things in mind:

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So here’s a page from Finch, a gun battle in progress. It’s a scene that I knew I’d have to edit and rewrite and be patient with. If you want to do an apocalyptic, gut-wrenching action scene that really sings, you’ve got to be patient. You’ve got to work on it draft after draft, making adjustments.

First, though, if going in no one gives a crap about the characters, who the heck cares that they’re in danger. That’s key. Then you have to think of it in terms of the craziest Hong Kong cinema mixed with your own personal mental unhingement: because you’ve got to imagine being in the middle of that. You’ve got to make some preliminary diagrams of the set-up so you can see it clearly, and then you’ve got to wed that to something visceral.

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Not sure if I give a fig or not about the book under discussion on Champion’s blog, but I sure thought Brian Francis Slattery’s author Eric Kraft’s diagram was interesting. Somehow it also evoked Dante’s levels of Hell for me. Don’t know why.

Jeff

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(Me right now, listening to Once and Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Pilgrim Road, feeling slightly strange.)

It’s been a weird ten days since I got back from Australia. As long as I was sleeping from about 11 p.m. to noon, I woke up refreshed and feeling stunningly good. Ever since I’ve tried to break myself of that cycle so I wake up at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m., my life has been a living hell of insomnia and failure and horrible nightmares. The last three days in particular I’ve felt invincible, invisible, deranged, like I was going to cry out all the water in my body, and like physical objects around me had some kind of secret life.

My dreams have included man-headed panthers, huge ravens with human feet, and the return of the manta ray from “Strange Case of X,” which entered my subconscious mind from an early Piers Anthony novel but had been gone for a long time. I’ve felt like every hideous, inexplicable image hiding inside my brain has been pushing out into the light. One nightmare was so vicious and insane I had to get it out onto paper immediately because no effing way was I going to go through that again. When I woke from it, I got up with my baseball bat and patrolled the house for a half-hour, just in case. And I was still convinced there was something in the walk-in closet.

Jonathan Vos Post says this about jetlag in a comment on my Facebook status:

Circadian rhythm in humans is a myth. Without 24 periodicity in noise, light, heat, you begin to drift away from the astronomical reality. People kept in deep caves for long time with no clocks have proven this. Keywords: “entrainment of oscillators”

Seriously, that’s why jet lag is disrupting. Different organs and tissues drift back to local periodicity differently, and you body/brain are in uncomfortable chaos, in literal mathematical sense. Top expert on jet lag explained this to me at International Conference on Complex Systems.

I think it’s made worse in this case because of coming off two deadlines and then going right into a teaching situation (not that I’m complaining–just observing): going right from long-term isolation to communication, and then back again. Or something. My thoughts aren’t really right in my head at the moment. Have cut back on emailing and making decisions because I feel like I’m in the middle of a storm.

Still, I’ve got it easy. I don’t know how people like my wife, who experiences periodic ongoing insomnia, deal with it. Because it’s only been three days of real hell (one of them enhanced by the retarded decision to have two large coffees with espresso shots) and I’m already toast.

Today I didn’t sleep until 5 a.m. and got up at 2 p.m. Expect inconsistency on Ecstatic Days for awhile. Yee-haw…

(Amanda, Steve, Tracy, and Su Lynn, Clarion 2009 students. Who’s more frazzled? Answer: the guy taking the photo.)

Update: Also check out student Aidan Doyle’s things he learned at Clarion. A classic.

They say the first Clarion you teach is the one that breaks your heart and determines whether you’re cut out to do workshops of that nature. If that’s true, then Clarion East in 2007 was the crucible. But Clarion South 2009 was different for a couple of reasons: I taught solo, without Ann (felt at times incapacitated by that, although she critiqued stories from home), and it was the sixth week, not the second. Typically, the sixth week is a time of total exhaustion, combined with the dawning realization, in a kind of rising panic and relief, that it’ll all soon be over. (It can also be a time of manic energy, depending on how the fifth week went; in this case, Trent Jamieson had done a great job of challenging them and yet chilling them out, so they had a good amount of energy for my week.)

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UPDATE: A thorough interview about Shriek posted on Clarkesworld, conducted by Neddal Ayad.

Shriek: An Afterword first came to me while working on the first chapbook edition of The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris. The chapbook included a note from Janice Shriek before what would eventually become the glossary in City of Saints & Madmen), explaining that this was just a fragment of a much longer work, to which she would be attempting an afterword. The glossary already held a secret: which was, if you read it carefully and followed the cross-references you would find that Duncan Shriek and Lacond were the same person, and that Duncan was hopelessly in love or lust with a woman named Mary Sabon.

Shortly after finishing the Hoegbotton Guide, I was in correspondence with Thomas Ligotti–at the time a somewhat terrifying experience, for a young author, and also because HE TYPED HIS ANSWERS ALL IN CAPS. Ligotti was generally supportive, but pointed out that Pale Fire had an emotional resonance that The Early History lacked. This point, I think, mistook The Early History for something else, but it got me thinking about Duncan and Janice and Mary Sabon, and how there was an emotionally resonant story hidden within The Early History.

I wasn’t quite sure what form the story would take, so I decided to do a draft as another Hoegbotton pamphlet–exactly as if Janice were writing a short afterword to The Early History.

At the time I had a manual typewriter I liked to use because of the pressure and sound of the keys. The first page was just a Hoegbotton Statement of Purpose with some later notes written on it.

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Here’s a partial TOC to Booklife, without revealing the next level of detail in the subsections and obscuring some additional subject matter I’m still moving around–titles to sections are often still non-parallel placeholders, too.

The book is about the struggle to find balance–how do you achieve a sustainable career and sustainable creativity in the current new media environment? It tackles all kinds of traditional topics, but each is infused with the context of the new paradigm even as it also addresses universal issues that have remain unchanged over the centuries.

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- Have the plotlines diverged much since you began writing the Black Company books, or did you have the entire plot more or less figured out from the very beginning? Were any characters added or further fleshed out beyond your original intentions? Have you made any changes to your initial plans during the course of the three series?
After thinking about it for several days I think I have figured out what you’re asking here….

There’s no permalink yet to Pat’s Fantasy Hotseat’s interview with Glen Cook, so you may have to scroll down, but check it out. Cook so doesn’t give a crap about pleasing the interviewer. He’s going to take each question and try to answer it as honestly as possible. I’ll tell you right now–a lot of authors are thinking what Cook’s saying here when they’re asked a crappily worded or insulting question.

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I’m still doing housekeeping–only thing I’m good for after working on Booklife, and will post a few things of possible interest before Victoria starts guest blogging on the first….

PURPOSE

• To tell the story of a dysfunctional family, especially a brother and sister who try to survive in the world, who want to escape death.
• Love is selfless.
• Death is just a blip.
• Obsession can be noble.
• “Family” can mean many different things.

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