Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Pamela~you are so right; Adriana is a Goddess. I need to find a Topic
fully of fugly people so I'll look good...
And I'm with you on up front; not being rude, but honest. I'm most
honest with the people I care most about, and if they are all polite
and evasive and whatnot, I assume that they don't care enough about me
to be clear on things, so I tend to drift away. It's not real if you
aren't real, which is differant that spilling on every little thing.

My son is only barely four and he read his first word out of the blue
today.
This is very big news to me.
"Course, his *speaking* vocabulary is polysyllabic already, and has
been for a while; whenever he wants to do something, and we say no, he
tell us that we're not co-operating...
:D
  

    
In Defense of Social Contracts?! Cool beans! 

JaNell- Thanks. Bookmarked it last night so that I can go back tonight
(it's my day off) and read things....

Adriana- Cool site! You're a hottie!

Neil- Isn't Snow, Glass, Apples considered horror? I would think so.
Ellen Datlow thinks so....
But on the genre thing... I don't think it's always necessary to
catagorize things. Because then people get pigionholed. Like Stephen
King. He's written a lot of things that aren't horror, but he's known
as a horror writer. There are some stories, very good ones, that I
don't think one can catagorize. Well, sci-fi/fanasy covers most things,
I guess. But still. 
Another example: In music, there's Tori. What would you call her
music? It's not really rock...a lot of people say Adult Contemporary.
When I hear that I think of Celine Dion and Kenny G. Nah. Rock
alternative? I don't know. I think she's in a catagory all her own. As
with a lot of stories I read. Arbitrary Placement of Walls (the story)?
I guess it would be fantasy. But a friend of mine called it horror.  
One of my stories got turned down by a dark fantasy magazine. They
said the reason was that they couldn't tell whether there were really
supernatural things going on, or if the character was just crazy. So
what would it be if it's not fantasy? There were fairies in it. But it
was my intention to leave the rest up to the reader. Didn't work, I
guess. Genres can be suffocating. 
But I'm just rambling now...
On things that scare me: Everything as a kid scared me. But ever since
Junior High the only two things that have made me jumpy for a few days
are, The Shinning (the book) and The Blair Witch Project. 
The latter I saw on opening day, before there was a lot of hype. I was
weirded out for days. And that's the only movie that has ever done
that to me. They leave a lot up to the imagination and the imagination
is scarier than any monster Hollywood could come up with. After we got
home from seeing the movie, we were reading the little booklet thingy
on the lore, when our fuses blew and all the lights went out. That was
the only time I have ever run screaming out of a house. No other movie
has done that to me. It may leave me with an eerie feeling, but it
doesn't make me jumpy. But I'm always looking for something that can
scare me. 

Oh, I have a stupid question: which of these two are the correct
capitalizations? Long Island ice tea or Long Island Ice Tea? 
  

    
Erynn - Tori is Alterna-Chick.  ;-)

Neil - I think fables can be horror; can't a fairy tale be a fable?
And fairy tales were certainly meant to scare, originially. And they
were short, too, so Nicholas Was really isn't _too_ short, altho it
really is best as a nice, shivery sort of Christmas card. For me, it's
much more horror because of the way you read "Ho, ho, ho" at the CBLDF
function I went to at the Palace of Fine Arts one year. Snow, Glass,
Apples (amusingly enough picked up at that same show) is certainly a
retelling of a fairy tale that's rather horrific.

A favourite one of these "confusions" (for me) would be Fred
Saberhagens Dracula books. I read them, and I think they're fantasy -
nothing really horrifying about them, just nice fun vampire fantasy
(and, offhand, I think some of the most interesting Vlad stories).
Every bookstore ever shelves them under Horror, tho, which puzzles me
to no end. Horror is the book Ashes to Ashes, which left me unable to
sleep all night.

Just got back from Wenatchee; the motherinlaw came in on Tuesday and
we left that afternoon (Mars as well). His grandfather has been getting
steadily worse off the last year or so - several small strokes, a hip
replacement, and most recently a fracture in femur and kneecap. He was
hospitalised, and then developed a hematoma on his rear end, which
meant he couldn't lay flat or walk or anything other than stay on his
side, except that means his leg won't heal,... and yeah. He's been in a
convalescent home for a little over a month, and it's looked less and
less likely he'll be coming out of it. We (the entire family) convinced
Mars' mom to come up and say her goodbyes, and then we (Mars and I)
escorted her over there.

I've only met these grandparents twice before- once two days after our
wedding, when we were both miserably sick and it was generally just
bad, and once last summer, 5 weeks after leg surgery at their 50th
anniversary celebration - about 6 weeks before Mars and I broke up. So,
needless to say, it wasn't really the best thing then, either. 

I went up there with the intent to hold Mars' hand, and be there
because I knew his grandfather would be bad off, and a shock to see,
and because I knew his mother was going to need him to be strong. It
was rough, and unexpectedly harder on me than I thought it would be -
to actually be affected by the illness of a man I don't know, and the
effect it's taken on the family. I got to sit around a dinner table and
hear war stories, about building dams and freeways and tunnels, living
in Saudi, traveling across the US. I got to, as an adult. appreciate
so many things that grandparents bring, things I never had a chance for
in my own grandparents. To look thru fabulous old etiquette books,
play chess on a board assembled in 1935, and just all sorts of
wonderful things.

*shakes head* I think, more than anything, I regret not having that
with my own grandparents, and I cherish being allowed to share it (and
the experiance, new for Mars as well) with my "new" family. 

*sheepish smile* My turn to have the long post,
-Kelly
  

    
<aside>

Tree: have emailed you at Thingie address.  Please let me know if you
don't get it.  Thanks!

<we now return you to your regularly scheduled posting>
  

    
Neil--by my definition, Nicholas Was and Babycakes are both horror. It
has nothing to do with how you read them, either. I read them well
before I ever heard you read them out loud.

Nicholas Was has a shiver at the end as you realise what it's about
and the implications. It turns a popular idea on its head in a
seriously creepy way. It makes my skin crawl.

Babycakes on the other hand is horrific because of the tone of the
piece. The voice is so reasonable, so matter of fact. That voice was
the voice behind the Nazis. It sends shivers down my spine. It makes me
fearful. Yes, there is a lesson to be learned from it, but what a
horrible one it is.

I've been asked to tell you that one of the other thingies, Ghost,
thinks that The Price is a horror story too. He said to me, "The Price
always always always creeps me out to no end.  Not all of it,
but the middle bit, about seeing the devil coming up his drive way.
Eeek!" I have to disagree with Ghost. The Price just makes me cry,
every time I read it. Because I'm standing there with you, wondering
how much more the black cat has to give. (Dammit, now I have tears in
my eyes just typing that and one of my work mates just patted my
shoulder and told me to cheer up.)

But note that I did preface all of that with 'by my definition'. You
can disagree with me all you like. Feel free.

Pamela--[bewilderedly] Ummm, my pleasure? Whatever it is you are
thanking me for.

Kelly--I need to get off my arse and stay with my grandmother for a
couple of weeks with a dictaphone. The woman can tell these amazing
stories about family members so many times removed that it's not even
funny. We need it recorded. I just wish she didn't live three hours
flying time away and that life wasn't so busy that doing something that
important becomes a luxury. :(

Tree
Who is going off to have a cheer up bowl of Vietnamese soup.
  

    
Mmm... I'm not sure I'll disagree with anyone. I guess from my point
of view it's like being asked about writing humour, and pointing at two
thngs people say "but they're funny" and going, "well yes, but one of
them's a joke and the other's an anecdote. Now, writing humour is a
thing..." and then people go "Well yes, but we laughed at them. So
they're humour." I certainly didn't think I was writing horror when I
wrote Nicholas Was, for example, or The Price. But author's intent and
outcome aren't always coincident.

Beyond that.... I just find myself remembering talking to a Borders
Books employee who was in charge of closing down their horror section
some years ago in a store when they decided there was not enough
traffic to justify it. She had to decide which books would now be in
Mystery and Suspense and which books would go and live in Fantasy and
which ones in Literature...

I DO have a theory of what makes genre fiction genre fiction, which
was either outlined on one of these well thingies or on the blogger at
some point, which was inspired by Linda Williams' book HARDCORE. But it
only works for full length work.
  

    
"and pointing at two thngs people say" in lines 2 and 3 above should
read "and pointing at two things about which people say". Or something
like that. 
  

    
Erynn~If you go to the blogger, flip back a bit 'cause there are
incriminating MadCon pics...
Not of me, of course. I'm a very good girl. Really.
  

    
Incidentally, I looked at the Peanutpress ebook website this morning
and discovered that Smoke and Mirrors was a bestelling horror title for
them, while Stardust was a bestselling fantasy and Neverwhere was a
bestselling SF title. (American Gods, oddly enough, or not so
considering the price, wasn't a bestselling anything.)
  

    
See, and I asked Mr. Man a question somewhere way back there and had
something wonderful happen today, and do I get an answer or
acknowledgement? Nooooo...
  

    
Forgive all if this doesn't make sense, but I have a rotten, horrid
toothache and have taken a perc to keep myself from bashing myself in
the mouth repetedly until the morning and the dentist.

I have to saw that I don't think Babycakes is horror, but Nicholas Was
is. I get a wicked case of the giggles everytime I read Babycakes,
while Nicolas Was gives me the shivers. However both make me smile
after reading.

Jinxie who left this message and actually left the house and came back
to find it and sheepishly post it, getting slipped by everyone
  

    
>>She had to decide which books would now be in Mystery and Suspense
>>and which books would go and live in Fantasy and which ones in
>>Literature...

     "Oh, fine," grunted the weary, though unthumbed, copy of PAVANE. 
"Stanley Ellin's getting a limo ride to Mystery, and can spend his
days with Don Westlake.  Machen's going to live with High Lit, which
has already got Mrs. Shelley, and even bloody old Peckett Prest."
     "And Pooh and the Grinch," chimed in a Puffin of THE PRINCESS AND
CURDIE, his covers a bit tousled from his prior wanderings.
     "Don't get me started," PAVANE said almost gently.  "So who do
-we- get to brighten our evenings?  Harry Adam Knight.  There goes the
neighborhood."
  

    
I can't keep up with this topic (sometimes literally--sometimes the new
messages overflow my buffer!).

So if Erynn hadn't said the name of my story "Social Contracts" in her post
which I did catch, I would have entirely missed that I have another
adaptation going on at C.A.F.E.  Something I didn't know!

My family in Illinois said they'd've come to the earlier one if they'd known
about it, when I mentioned it at Thanksgiving, which is nuts, but maybe they
will.  Though my parents travel a lot so it depends on when the show is.

Also, stagewalker: "A Defense of the Social Contracts", not "In the Defense
of the Social Contracts".  (They got it wrong on the Nebula too.  It clearly
wasn't a well-considered title.)
  

    
Re: Headaches
I only have a headache from being at an Empowerment Board meeting,
which means that I sat with other dispirited people from Vestal (the
community I live in) and listened to the meeting notes from last
meeting, and heard horrifying ideas of what to do with the money that
the government is theoretically giving us to improve our area because
we're unempowered (read poor &/or old &/or black, with a Superfund Site
in the middle, and schools so bad that most of our family income goes
to private schools) and the best way that anyone can think of to *keep*
us unempowered is to waste our time on endless monthly meetings where
we can discuss how to spend an unknown amount of money, eventually; the
results of which decision-making can be overturned by City Council.

Get all that?
It took me a while, too.

So, we have outvoted Mr. Gaiman, and decided that "Baby Cakes" is
Horror, whatever that is, which we haven't decided; I'm still
interested in the question of length in regard to Genre. Does length
actually matter, when deciding what Genre something is? Are there
really rules about this: Horror must be at least ___ words long, but
less than ___?
  

    
Whoa..Neverwhere was SF? I had it in fantasy. Great, now I'll have to
move it over to the *other* bookcase. ;)

Jinx -  I had the opposite reaction.  Babycakes felt like horror,
while Nicholas Was make me think, "Oh, the horror!" but it didn't feel
like a horror story. I remember laughing at the end. Yeah, I'm sick. 

Ja'Nell - Fables are short cautionary tales and not all of them have
to do with horror. But the whole point of them would be lost under that
description don't you think?

Oh, and I was showing an apartment last weekend and noticed that my
seller had two copies of American Gods in his library. Can you tell I'm
really motivated to sell his apartment?  Hehe..

Slipped by Ja'Nell...
  

    
JaNell -- I thought I was replying to everyone in 1056 -- seeing
everyone had chipped in, I figured I could save time by doing a general
reply; and that it certainly covered your question in 1046. You could
read it again, and see if it does or not.

Mr Man would like to point out (again) that he is under no obligation
to respond to any particular post. It's not his topic. It belongs to
the mob. 

...

Rocky -- I like the idea of someone with two copies of American Gods.
(His 'n hers? Hmmm.)
  

    
"You see that cover, and think, "Oh!  a romance!" and no matter how
many vampires or dragons you throw into the plot, it's still going to
be a romance."
Which really just goes to show, it often all comes down to love
anyway.

*Neverwhere* is *SO* not Science Fiction.  Fantasy I could concede,
prolly.  'Course, I'd just call it a rockin' good book, but that's just
me.

People always ask me (after have you been published) what kind of
books I write.  And I just tell them good ones.  And they say no,
silly, like, if I was going to Barnes & Noble, and browsing, where
would I find them.
After careful consideration over a few years, I've decided the best
answer will be Best-Selling, and that's the one I'm sticking to.

I don't know if I'd call *Babycakes* horror, exactly.  I mean,
disturbing, yes.  Always gets a "man, that's pretty sick.  Cool, but
sick" reaction when I play it for people, but it's not *terrifying*. 
Eerie, I guess, and deeply unsettling in some kind of non-threatening
way.  So I'll vote that way (for or against?  I dunno).

JaNell- I've often wondered exactly the same thing, though not in
regard to genre (like I said, it's not something I consider.  I just
write stories).  Like, what exactly is novel-length?  And when does
something stop being a short story?  And what, exactly, is a novella? 
See, I grew up reading novels.  Didn't read a short story that really
impressed me until I was a junior in college.  So I was writing novels.
 And since I grew up on King and Koontz, they were generally pretty
long (125-135,000 words).  I've only recently begun writing what are,
to me, short stories.  But, the more I look for potential markets, the
more daunting it seems, because they all want something under five- or
ten-thousand words, and my stories are both almost twenty thousand (I
just wrote one, "Unkindness", that is about 7,000, and sent it to The
Atlantic Monthly.  So wish me luck, all.  Nice Christmas present,
that'd be).  So.  I don't know.  I just write.  It'll happen, long as I
keep at it, I figure, one way or another.

Erynn- yeah, Stephen King might be classified as a horror writer, but,
well, that's usually by people who don't know he wrote "Stand by Me
(well, "The Body" to his fans, but others sometimes don't know that)"
and "The Shawshank Redemption".  And *The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon". 
That was a good book.  He's been at high game these past couple of
years.  Loved *Bag of Bones*.

Kelly- <hug> and massive amounts of good vibes to you.

Mike- Darn you, you made me laugh so hard soda came up my nose.  That
*hurts*.
  

    
Slippage by Neil.
"Mr Man would like to point out (again) that he is under no obligation
to respond to any particular post. It's not his topic. It belongs to
the mob."

And cheers to ya for bein' one of us who won't go away. 
  

    
>>I've decided the best answer will be Best-Selling, and that's the
one I'm sticking to.<<

*applauds* Oh absolutely wonderful, Will - I approve! Bravo, and bravo
again! 

I didn't weigh in on the horror/scifi/etc thing, but I think I'll jump
in now. :-)

Horror seems like a difficult thing to specify, because what is creepy
and scary and "UGH!" is going to vary from person to person - look at
the discussion over Babycakes and Nicholas Was. There's the author,
saying neither are horror (or at least were intended to be), and then a
diverse mob politely defending a for/against/other opinion. Obviously
what gives me the creeps isn't going to give others the creeps.

In fact , Websters and WordNet both define horror as being an
individual thing - "something that inspires horror; something
horrible;" and " A painful emotion of fear, dread, and abhorrence; a
shuddering with terror and detestation; the feeling inspired by
something frightful and shocking." Perhaps this last one explains why
horror sections are fading in bookstores - it's hard to beat the daily
horrors on the news, even for a talented author.

Assuming a store has a horror shelf, how does one determine what goes
there? I think a lot of that is going to be the spin placed on it by
the publishing house and by the bookstore itself; I was quite amused to
go into two separate bookstores looking for ...TWO GOLDFISH and
finding it shelved in Childrens in one, and (adult) Fantasy in the
other. Books placed in the horror section all seem to have one of two
things in common - they're either trying to scare you out of your mind
(Koonz, King, etc) or they've a fantastic element to it that we've
societally cast as horror - vampires, werewolves, lumbering monsters
that really just want a little love.

Segueing a bit, in response to Neverwhere being placed as science
fiction and not fantasy, I can actually see this. Especially if you
take an almost puritan view of fantasy, having to contain unicorns and
elves and other Tolkien-esque influences. Neverwhere was dark, and
"traditionally" I think fantasy embraced the light and happy, where
science fiction was the realm of the darker and more sinister. Of
course, there's so much bleeding over between the two, they're almost
always mentioned together "sci/fi-fantasy" and the boundary
classifications are definitely blurred; but if you're thinking of
science fiction as dark and fantasy as light and happy, then yes
Neverwhere would be science fiction. 

Of course, I really think that as far as fiction is concerned, the
concept of "is it horror? is it fantasy?" is only one ever set up by
the marketing and sales people to begin with. It's a work of fiction,
that inspires a different reaction in the different people who read it.
Convinient categories only make it easier to file away new books, and
to market to people who are really going in for some authors new book,
but might be inspired to pick up another book that has similar theme,
cover art, or quote by said author on the cover.

Not that I'm cynical about things like that.  ;-)
-Kelly
  

    
Oh - Mars chimes in that science fiction is about the unlikely and
fantasy is about the impossible. Science fiction things are imaginary
but plausible, fantasy things are imaginary and strictly impossible. 

(Apparently this is a bad paraphrasing of some quote somewhere.)
-Kelly
  

    
Kelly - Science fiction is fantasy derived from hard science, and the
problem I see with placing Neverwhere in the SF aisle is that it
features lamias, an angel, a mythical beast and a resurrection.  It
seems those elements would take it out of the realm of speculative
science. 

Funny, but this is a topic I've come across regularly on Usenet
discussion groups where SF related shows or books are torn apart for
leaning more towards fantasy than speculative science.  I remember
having a discussion with someone about Neil's script for Day of the
Dead on Babyon 5. Although it was considered one of the best stories
written for the series, there was still that question,"Is it or isn't
it SF?"  

One more thing, did anyone else see Stardust on the Romance shelf in
one bookstore?  Very strange indeed.   
  

    
See, now *that* I could see.  *Stardust* is pretty much the most
romantic book I can imagine.  More than any other story I've read it
just *begs* to be read aloud to the one you love.  "Strawberry Spring,"
by Stephen King begs to be read aloud, yes, but not necessarily to the
one you love (when you read it, you'll understand what I mean.  *I'm*
not going to be the guy to ruin it).

I got so involved in horror and all I forgot what's been scarin' me
the past day and a half.  So.  I go to sign up to substitute teach. 
And everything's going fine (including the woman looking at my
transcript and saying, hey, you've got *two* degrees.  Oh, we're *so*
using you.  Which was a bonus, I thought).  I get fingerprinted, and
money orders, and various other things I needed.  And then, at the very
end, just a technicality, I get tested for exposure to tuberculosis.
And it comes out positive.  There's a welt on my arm about two inches
across and itchy as hell that means, somewhere along the line (they
said they can't tell where *exactly* along the line, just that the
line, in fact, exists) I was exposed to it.  So now I have to get chest
x-rays and perhaps take antibiotics, and substituting will be put off
for at least that while, which sucks, because what fundage I'd saved up
before the big move is dwindling, and, with the holidays fast
approaching, will dwindle farther.
So, yeah.  I'm healthy as can be, feel fine, but am a little unnerved.
Oh, and the cover of "Hit Me Baby One More Time," by Britney Spears,
as covered by Type-O Negative.  Not inspiring of horror, exactly, but
deeply unsettling in a really cool, chuckling, 'come here, my darling,
and be hypnotically seduced and shagged by evil' sort of way.  I highly
recommend it to all of you.
  

    
Will- I'm so sorry about tuberculosis. I don't know much about it, but
doesn't it kill you if you don't treat it right away? Scary. I hope
you feel better soon. 
Oh, The "Hit Me Baby One More Time" cover is not Type O Negative. It's
some people at Napster, who played with some machines and slowed
Britney's voice down to sound like Peter's. It's a fake. At least
that's what their official site said....
Although they do do a really cool cover of "Hey Joe" Only it's "Hey
Pete" and they changed some of the words. "Hey Peter, where you goin
with that axe in your hand?" I love it.

John/Mike- You are too much....Wine came out of my nose after reading
your post. Not a good burning sensation :P

JaNell- I read way too much of your journal. I couldn't stop. But I
can't see the pictures! They're just little red X's on my screen.
Dammit. 

Doesn't anyone know the proper capitalization of Long Island ice tea?
Or is it Long Island Ice Tea? 

ack. Neil. Suddenly I'm picturing you as a Mobster. I bet John/Mike
could write a funny little ditty about that.....   
  

    
        Okay, if it's all right with everyone, I'd like to use all of you to
gather information for a theory I'm developing.  I've always rather
liked Neil's work, but it seems clear that most of you _really_ like
it.  That being said, I'm curious as to what all of you various people
think of the works of the following four authors: Tim Powers, Anne
Rice, Iain M. Banks, and Poppy Z. Brite.  What of theirs, if anything,
have you read?  Did you like it?  Most importantly, what did you like
or dislike about their work?  This isn't any kind of official study,
just trying to gather some datapoints so as to reduce the amount of
talking out my ass I do.  Thanks muchly.
  

    
JaNell,  told Megan you said she was dangerous - she just laughed and
started dancing. Our minds being linked the way they are, I assume she
thought of "dangerous on the dance floor" and that is why she started
dancing. But I could be wrong.

Will,  you said "and besides, it makes me happy, and that's good
enough for Maure, so it's good enough for me." I really liked that,
but, again, as a reader, I have to say that I should be one of the very
last bits of the equation. If it makes you happy, and it's good enough
for you, then it will most likely be good enough for me. If you
satisfy (or at least temporarily placate) that thing inside you that
makes you write, and you don't go all wishy-washy with it and do it
half-assed (not you particularly, just in general), then the readers
will come.  And Will, I think real joy is incredibly sexy too. It's
almost hypnotic.

Pamela,  thank you for appreciating my mini-rant on the possibilities.
After I wrote it, I was thinking, "What have I done? Why did I write
that?" but I didn't scribble it because it was my honest reaction. I
think that examples of those reached ideals are extremely rare, so we
have to bolster our friends' belief in them when we can - it's easy to
forget that things are possible. Oh, I don't want to get all
after-school-special here, but it's true.

Ninave,  heehee, I needed that post too, actually. So thank you for
sparking it. Sometimes I think that unhappy people like to make people
who still believe in the possibility of real happiness feel like they
are naive. It gives them a way to enjoy their unhappiness, by
pretending to superior experience or knowledge. I don't know. I don't
worry too much about them though. 

Re: genres, unless someone is asking me how to find the book at a book
store, where they are all placed neatly on specific shelves (except at
Strand), if I really really like a book, or story, and someone asks me
what it is, I just say, "Excellent fiction." And that's that. I don't
have anything more pertinent to contribute, I'm afraid.