WIR #11: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Red Seas Under Red Skies is the sequel to Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. You'll recall that I said in this entry, . . .

Damned good book! Easily the best fantasy novel I've read in years! Now I want to buy and read the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, which I've heard is just as good, if not better, than the first.

I started reading this a couple of days ago. Although I've not been devoting time to reading it every day since I started it, I can tell you that this book is off to a fabulous start! I think I'm definitely going to enjoy this as much as the first. It's been ages and ages since I've been so interested in reading an actual series of novels. I'm hoping that when I finish this book that I'll still be interested in reading the third, which is already in stores (although I couldn't find it when I went looking for it yesterday—that's probably a good sign).

Saith the blurb:

After a brutal battle with the underworld, Locke and his sidekick, Jean, fled to the exotic shores of Tal Verrar to nurse their wounds. But they are soon back to what they do best—stealing from the rich and pocketing the proceeds. Now, however, they have targeted the grandest prize of all: the Sinspire, the world's most exclusive, most heavily guarded gambling house. But there is one cardinal rule: it is death to cheat at any game.

There is more to the blurb, but I'll end it there.

WIR #10: Mastering Online Research

Yeah, I'm doing it again. I don't know what it is about the new weird, but I'm currently having problems reading books that fall into that genré or books about it. Maybe I'm finding that it's just not my thing. That's possible.

This book here by Maura D. Shaw, however, is something I'd looked to get sometime ago. I use search engines quite often, but I'm positive that I'm not using them as efficiently or as effectively as I could, thus my interest in this book. Mastering Online Research: A Comprehensive Guide to Effective and Efficient Search Strategies covers search engines like Yahoo! or Google and a lot more.

Shaw takes you through the techniques and tools you need to find information ranging from historical data to medical information to images and videos. Screen shots of different pages enable you to follow along as Shaw explains the process of finding information. Simple explanations of technical terms and step-by-step instruction help you learn how to:

• Use bookmarks effectively
  
• Evaluate websites for relevancy, accuracy, and currency
  
• Use basic and advanced search features, such as Boolean operators
  
• Locate and access helpful reference websites
  
• Conduct market research to help with writing and publishing
  
• Know when you have enough information to stop researching
  
• Distinguish the differences between types of search engines

With the skills and knowledge found in this comprehensive guide, you'll be able to search the Internet with speed and accuracy in no time, so you spend less time digging for information and more time putting it to good use.

In researching this book before purchasing it, it became plainly obvious to me that although the most remedial search engine subjects are covered, Shaw goes much deeper. There's nothing I find more frustrating than a book for writers which purports to cover "technical" subjects such as the Internet, and then when I examine the book further, I find that it covers nothing more than what your average fifth-grader already knows.

Given the novel idea that's been bouncing around in my head for sometime now, and knowing that there is some research necessary for me to create the sort of story I want to create, I figure that this is a good place to start.

WIR #10: The New Weird

Sigh! I hate when this happens, but it happens from time to time, unfortunately. Now and again I will come across a book which I really want to read, but I can't. For whatever reason, I can't get into it. Whenever this has happened in the past, I've never really been able to pin down the reason for my inability to read certain books. Take the third book in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, for example. It's called That Hideous Strength and I've heard that Lewis made connections in this to the King Arthur mythology (one of my absolute favourite mythologies), and yet for years now I've not been able to finish Lewis's book. Whenever this has happened in the past and I've finally surmounted whatever obstacle was blocking my ability to read a certain book, it was always followed with a certain "why the hell did I ever have difficulty reading that?" And, more often than not, the book in question ended up being one of the best books I've ever read. Will that be the case with China Miéville's Perdido Street Station? I don't know. We shall see . . . eventually.

So, for the time being, I've put Miéville's book down and have moved on to read Ann & Jeff Vandermeer's The New Weird. This is an anthology, both of short stories, as well as of discussions (including online discussions) of a genre of fiction that came to be called the New Weird. I've already read the intro to this, and here are the opening paragraphs, which I think are very interesting, given the book I've just set aside . . .

ORIGINS
The "New Weird" existed long before 2003, when M. John Harrison started a message board thread with the words: "The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?" For this reason, and this reason only, it continues to exist even now, even after a number of critics, reviewers, and writers have distanced themselves from the term.

By 2003, readers and writers had become aware of a change in perception and a change in approach within genre. Crystallized by the popularity of China Miéville's Perdido Street Station†, this change had to do with finally acknowledging a shift in The Weird.

Weird fiction—typified by magazines like Weird Tales and writers like H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith back in the glory days of the pulps—eventually morphed into modern-day traditional Horror. "Weird" refers to the sometimes supernatural or fantastical element of unease in many of these stories—an element that could take a blunt, literal form or more subtle and symbolic form and which was, as in the best of Lovecraft's work, combined with a visionary sensibility. These types of stories also often rose above their pulp or self-taught origins through the strength of the writer's imagination. (There are definite parallels to be drawn between certain kinds of pulp fiction and so-called "Outsider Art.")

Two impulses or influences distinguish the New Weird from the "Old" Weird, and make the term more concrete than terms like "slipstream" and "interstitial," which have no distinct lineage. The New Wave of the 1960s was the first stimulus leading to the New Weird. Featuring authors such as M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, and J. G. Ballard, the New Wave deliriously mixed genres, high and low art, and engaged in formal experimentation, often typified by a distinctly political point of view. New Wave writers also often blurred the line between science fiction and fantasy, writing a kind of updated "scifantasy," first popularized by Jack Vance in his Dying Earth novels. This movement (backed by two of its own influences, Mervyn Peake and the Decadents of the late 1800s) provided what might be thought of as the brain of the New Weird.

The second stimulous came from the unsettling grotesquery of such seminal 1980s work as Clive Barker's Books of Blood. In this kind of fiction, body transformations and dislocations create a visceral, contemporary take on the kind of visionary horror best exemplified by the work of Lovecraft—while moving past Lovecraft's coyness in recounting events in which the monster or horror can never fully be revealed or explained. In many of Barker's best tales, the starting point is the acceptance of a monster or transformation and the story is what comes after. Transgressive horror, then, repurposed to focus on monsters and grotesquery but not the "scare," forms the beating heart of the New Weird.

In a sense, the simultaneous understanding of and rejection of Old Weird, hardwired to the stimuli of the New Wave and New Horror, gave many of the writers identified as New Weird the signs and symbols needed to both forge ahead into the unknown and create their own unique re-combinations of familiar elements.

—THE NEW WEIRD. Vandermeer, Ann & Jeff. Tachyon Publications: San Francisco (2008), pp. ix-x.

The connection between this book and Miéville's is undeniable. In fact, Miéville's short story, "Jack," which is also placed in the same world as Perdido Street Station, is one of the short stories anthologized in this book. The odd thing is, I didn't have this problem with Miéville's book King Rat, but that book was pretty much naught more than a strange and weird retelling of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (which version you accept, that of the Brothers Grimm or of the poem by Robert Browning, doesn't matter).

Going off-topic, I've been giving thought to further modifications to the appearance of this blog. The idea I have in mind involves a modification to the background 'paper' on which the text appears (not the background 'paper' that surrounds it). It'll take some work, so it may be sometime before you see it (assuming that I'm successful with the modification and that I like the result enough to use it). Nonetheless, I wanted to make my readers aware of the possibility of an upcoming change.
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† Perhaps it's because Perdido Street Station is the nexus of the acknowledgement of the paradigm shift to which the Vandermeers refer that I'm unable to read this book at the moment. ~shrugs~

WIR #10: Perdido Street Station

I've made much of the fact that I'm wanting to read more of the books that were given to me as gifts, and I've chosen this book for that very reason. This is not a gift, but a book I'd bought for myself some time ago. However, it is the second book published by China Miéville. The first book, which I read some time ago, was King Rat. I could be wrong, but I believe this is part of a series, so I'm wanting to read Perdido Street Station before I read the next book. (NOTE: Perdido could be either Spanish or Portuguese, but either way the word means the same thing: lost. The equivalent in English is perdition.)

The book that follows this, The Scar, was given to me as a gift by either my girlfriend or my mum. (I'm ashamed to say that I can't remember which. :/) But this is the reason why I'm now turning to read Perdido Street Station, because I want to read The Scar next.

Like The Lies of Locke Lamora, this book was heavily praised when it came out, and it also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as the British Fantasy Award (Miéville is a British author), so I'm hopeful that I'll enjoy this as much as I did The Lies of Locke Lamora.

As usual, here's the blurb from the back cover—

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one—not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before encountered. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. Soon an eerie metamorphosis will occur that will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it evokes.

WIR #9: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Finished this, um, yesterday? Either that or the day before. Pretty sure it was yesterday. Not too bad, but neither is it my favourite play by Shakespeare. He's got a couple of characters in this—one a Frenchman, the other a German—who sport accents. His rendition of the accents wasn't too overbearing, but, unfortunately, I tend to not like works in which much is made of accents.

Whenever a character has an accent, I prefer that the writer choose a word or two to render phonetically, something that is characteristic of that language, and then do the rest of the characterisation with that character's choice of words.

For me, phonetically rendered accents serve only the writer for the most part, and rarely serve the reader. The only way in which it serves the reader is that it serves to remind them that they're reading when what a reader really wants is to simply experience and enjoy a good story.

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once resorted to phonetically rendering an accent. He did this in his original Foundation series. Worse, the accent was a drawl like that found in the American south. That alone stretched my suspension of disbelief almost to the breaking point. While it's possible that that particular accent could still be in existence in 12,000 AD, it's also pretty unlikely, I think. There is a part of the second novel in the original Foundation series in which this character spouts some things that I simply cannot decipher. When I've told friends about this, some have suggested reading the speech aloud. I could and I have. Didn't work. Worse yet, novels aren't meant to be read aloud, so that, to me, says a lot against the idea of phonetically rendered accents.

I'll blog about the next book I'll be reading shortly.

WIR #9: The Merry Wives of Windsor

So, yeah, I'm back to reading some Shakespeare again. I've probably said this a thousand times, so I guess I'll make it a thousand-and-one now: I'm working on owning and reading all 36 of his plays, plus his sonnets and his narrative poems. Including the play I'm currently reading, I own 16 of the 36. Twenty to go! Several of these I read in high school, obviously, but I want to read all of them, including rereading those I've already read.

Okay, enough reiteration of what I've probably regurgitated before. (Except, perhaps, that it looks to me like I'm behind on my reading goal for the year. Ah well. I've no doubt that that shall get rectified soon.)

WIR #8: The Lies of Locke Lamora

I finished this earlier today. Damned good book! Easily the best fantasy novel I've read in years! Now I want to buy and read the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, which I've heard is just as good, if not better, than the first.

I'd love to have my novel be as successful as this one. The Lies of Locke Lamora, after all, was Scott Lynch's debut novel. (Mind, debut novels are very rarely the first novel a writer has written. They are simply that writer's debut into the world of being a published writer.) If my debut could be as successful as Lynch's, I think I might pass out from shock. So, yes, God, please, . . . allow me the singular pleasure of passing out.

Amen.

POSTSCRIPT: I'll post a new entry of what I'm reading now later.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Interesting. It would appear that Lynch has more books in this series planned, and that Amazon has already set things up so that eager readers can be notified when the next one, The Republic of Thieves, becomes available. You can be damned sure that I've signed myself up for this already!

Blog Update

Finally! Got off my lazy butt and uploaded the graphic for my annual writing goal. For those new to my blog, you can see it just to the left. Now, though, I need to figure out how much I've written thus far this year so that I can update the graphic to reflect where I'm at in achieving my goal. I know that I'm nowhere near where I'd like to be at this point. I got a good bit written today. Without doing a word count, I'd guess that I wrote about 1000 words today.

Probably 3-4 days ago a Belgian friend at Flickr provided with one of her photos a link to a lecture given by writer Elizabeth Gilbert this past February. If you've not seen this, please do. It's an amazing lecture, with a fascinating lesson to be learned. The lecture is about 20 minutes long, but it's absolutely worth your time.