Hello friends! I continue to feel not-awful. My baby is the cutest baby, and life is great. My career is a nightmare, but over the last seven years I’ve grown to expect that. You know, so long as the writing is going okay, there’s no bad news that can affect me.
I’ve started working on a fantasy novel. This is something I’ve said on this blog numerous times. Almost always I abandon the fantasy novel. I’m sure this will be no different. The problem I always face with fantasy novels is that I don’t enjoy writing scenes where people hit each other with swords. And, moreover, I don’t enjoy writing protagonists whose main strength is that they’re great at hitting people with swords and/or shooting magic balls at people. It just doesn’t interest me, no matter how much the rest of the story does.
This time I’ve found a way of writing action scenes that I think is a little more robust and, to me, interesting, but we’ll see.
My reading has been so scattered lately. I’m still reading lots of intellectual magazines, been liking the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. I like when they summarize a book for me, so I don’t have to read it. Like there was a big article about Machiavelli’s life, and now I don’t have to read the eight hundred page biography that was the subject of the article!
I’ve been making my slow way through George Stewart’s Names on the Land, which is an account of how places in America got their names. It sounds like the most boring book on the Earth, but it’s not. You learn a lot! For instance, when the Spanish were exploring the Americas, there was a legend about an Amazonian kingdom in America that was ruled by women. There was also a romance, popular in Spain, about a queen named Caleyfia. An explorer reported to Hernan Cortes that he’d found a huge island to the West, and Cortes, disbelieving, said that must be the island of Caleyfornia (the joke being that it was imaginary, like the historical romance and like the Amazonian kingdom). And that’s where California comes from!
Most of the stories aren’t that great, but it’s still interesting to discover why so many things are named after some people and not others. But the book can also be pretty dry. Let’s see..I’m also reading Nicole Cushing’s A Sick Gray Laugh. I got the book on sale. I’ve been Twitter acquaintances with Nicole Cushing for years and have run into her in various online places where writer’s congregate. I had no idea she was such an incredible writer! This is a book that’s too bizarre to describe adequately. Also pretty dense, and I’m getting through it slowly.
Have been reading lots of comics on DC Universe, DC Comics’s subscription service. I don’t read the standard superhero comic stuff, but there’s a lot of bizarre and offbeat stuff in the DC universe. I’m attracted primarily to looser art styles, and I’ve started to look for artists instead of writers. Lately I’ve been reading Gotham City Garage, about a future where blah blah blah, the girls of the DC Universe blah blah blah rock out. I’ve also been reading Heroes in Crisis, which is uneven when it comes to storytelling and writing, but is still pretty fun intermittently: it’s about a safehouse for superheroes undergoing mental breakdowns. I’ve also been reading Seven Soldiers, which…I’m not exactly sure what it is. It’s a series of interlocking stories about some very bizarre sidecharacters in the DC Universe.
Outside the superhero world, my favorite comics imprint continues to be Europe comics! And my favorite writer / artist pair is Bruno and Fabien Nury. I first read their Tyler Cross series, which is a hardboiled series about a gangster who doesn’t talk much, has a huge jaw, and usually has no mouth. I just love the art style, honestly. Nury also wrote Death of Stalin, which I’ve never read, but which got turned into a great movie, and Bruno and Nury also collaborated on The Man Who Shot Chris Kyle, which is a graphic novel about the life and death of Chris Kyle, whose exploits were dramatized in the Bradley Cooper movie American Sniper. I highly recommend the graphic novel, which is a bit difficult to describe. It’s anti-war and anti-macho (after all, it was originally a French language comic). But there’s something in its dry, dusty setting and it’s spiraling tone that’s really captivating. Finally, I read Shelley, another set of French graphic novels about the life of Percy Shelley. The first, detailing his seduction, abandonment, and the subsequent suicide of his first wife, is very interesting. Shelley remains a captivating character despite his louche behavior. The second, of course, focuses on the weekend at Via Diodati, but it ends in a rather bizarre manner. I approve of and am impressed by the ending, but I doubt I’d have made the same decision, and I’m not entirely sure it was the best one.