Lady Poetesses from Hell

I notice that I did not explain the LPFH, when I posted the volcano photo. This is a group -- mostly made up of people in a local poetry writing workshop -- that does readings at Twin Cities cons and Wiscon. I belong to the workshop, but have not performed with LPFH, as far as I can remember. One man belongs, because he channels the spirit of Grace Lord Stolkes, an early 20th century poet who tried to belong to the Lovecraft circle. Otherwise, it is indeed lady poetesses, who perform wearing very ladylike hats. Their poems are funny and good and often quite hellish.

Anyway, LPFH have been talking about doing an anthology for years, and now it seems to be happening. I will report on progress and how to get the book, once it is out.

Lilacs

The lilacs have begun to bloom.

Ideas

A friend of mine commented that he did not understand To the Resurrection Station until I told him what it was about. So my long conversation at the novel's end did not work for a guy who is a very intelligent, thoughtful reader. I guess the joke is on me.

As I mentioned below, I really like the stories I write that strike me as clever. But maybe the rest of the world does not share my interest in trickiness. Maybe my tricks are not as good as I think they are.

Well, almost everyone has some little area of vanity. Since my tricks appeal to me and do not bother other people too much, I guess I will keep on with them.

People Are Going To Be Walking On My Poetry

The city of St. Paul had a poetry contest, and I am one of the 20 winners. The prize is getting your poem installed on a city sidewalk for people to read. There is also going to be an anthology.

My fiction is always some kind of SF -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history. But most of my poetry is realistic. Don't ask me why.

I did write a 65 page epic poem many years ago. It's set in the world of Spenser's Faerie Queene, though I was not crazy enough to use Spenser's stanza. That was fantasy. I've never figured out what to do with it. There is not much call for epic poems these days, even short epic poems.

I'm happy about the sidewalk poem. I like popular art forms, and there isn't much more popular -- or more urban -- than a sidewalk.

P.S. I sent 3 poems to the contest. Today I found out which poem got picked: not the two sweet poems about flowers and the moon, but the poem about a homeless man bringing everything he owned onto a bus.

Volcano Pictures

These are from the USGS website, photos of eruptions on the Big Island of Hawaii. I have been hunting for images for the cover of the Lady Poetesses from Hell anthology.

A Possible Cover for the LPFH anthology

Even More on Ideas

I thought of another story which seems to me to be a classic neat idea tale: "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov. It's about an alien planet where night falls only rarely, due to a lot of suns. When night does fall, and people see the stars, they burn everything they can find out of terror -- and their civilization collapses. This happens over and over, each time night falls.

Asimov wrote the story is response to a line from Emerson on how people would marvel at the beauty of the stars, if they saw them only once in a thousand years.

The last time I reread it, I noticed it is not well written. But it will stay with me till my memory fails.

Asimov was not an especially good writer, but I remember the Foundation stories and the robot stories. Is there anyone reading this blog who cannot recite the three laws of robotics? How about psychohistory? Do we all remember how it works?

This kind of story is core to SF, as are ideas. I suspect ideas are not as important to fantasy, though there's a lot of fantasy written by science fiction writers that turns on ideas.

For example, a very simple story by Avram Davidson, about what happens when the U.S. government breaks a treaty with an Indian tribe, which is supposed to last -- per language in the treaty -- "as long as the sun shines and grass grows."

Davidson was a fine writer, but the story is mostly about its idea.

Implicit in Justine's remark (I think) is the idea that SF is about character and plot and style and mood.

Nope.

I'm not sure any kind of fiction is ultimately about character, plot, style and mood.

Jane Austen's novels are beautifully written and plotted and full of wonderful characters, but what they are about is the English upper classes' blood-chilling focus on money, in spite of all their talk about morality and sentiment.

And they are also about the fact that women in the upper and middle classes have to focus on money, because they have no reasonable way to make a living. If they don't marry well, they will be poor.

These are ideas.

I suspect that any fiction which does not have an interesting idea at its core is not worth reading, except as entertainment. Not that entertainment is bad.

I don't think there are any ideas in P.G. Wodehouse, though I keep looking for one. His writing really is about his amazing skill as a writer.

And one could argue that producing concept free art is itself a kind of idea about art. "Look," Wodehouse says. "Art need not be about anything except a dazzling performance. It can be utterly pointless and still be thoroughly satisfying."

Finally, a personal note. I grew up around avant garde artists, and their art really was about ideas. Although I write popular fiction, my basic values are the ones I learned as a kid. Art should do something new. It should ask questions and push limits.

Still More on Ideas

This is more about ideas. Maybe it tells you something silly about me, but I am very proud of places where I did something that strikes me as a bit new. I once ended a story with five morals -- five good and useful morals, albeit morals for an alien species -- because you are not supposed to have morals at the end of a SF story.

When I started sending out stories, editors kept telling me that they didn't see the point of the stories. What were they about? So my second novel ends with my characters spending fifty pages discussing the meaning of their adventure. It's been years since I read the novel, so I can't remember their conclusion.

The discussion struck me as neat and funny. It meant readers -- especially editors --had the explanation they wanted, and I was not in any way responsible for the explanation, since it came from my characters.

I had given readers the meaning requested, but since this meaning came from chracters within the novel, it was a meaning in the novel and not the meaning of the novel, the author's meaning.

No one has ever complained about the ending of the novel or told me that they couldn't figure out what the novel was about.

When I do things like this, it seems to me I'm dealing with ideas, not character or plot or mood. Can you end a story with a moral and still have it work? Well, yes, but why have only one moral? Can you end a story with a long explanation and not have the readers turn against you? Yes, I think so, though I can't remember any reviews of that novel. I am pretty sure I did not get any angry letters.

More on Ideas

The conversation about ideas continued for a bit on the Wurdsmiths blog. I have not posted other people's remarks, though maybe I should have. Anyway, here is my next post...

I keep feeling, without having much evidence, that ideas are not easy. I wrote a story titled "Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota," which was a time travel story. These are hard to write, because time travel is supposed to be impossible; and I felt -- if the story didn't have something new to say about time and time travel, it was going to be about nothing. I struggled with the story for months and years, collecting copies of Science News and New Scientist with articles about time travel and odd quantum effects. The problem with time travel is mostly one of causality. Physics says that effects cannot precede causes; or maybe it doesn't say this. There are theoretical physicists who think time travel is possible.

Anyway, in the end I did some hand waving. But the story actually does say something about time and history, though nothing based on physics theory.

Sometimes the ideas are less difficult than the working out of the ideas.

The idea that is the basis of my hwarhath stories is simple: what if there was a society where homosexuality was normal and heterosexuality was perverted? I then had to figure out in detail how this kind of society might come to be and what it would be like. In the end, I wrote two novels and ten + stories about the hwarhath and their society, mostly to explore the consequences of my original "what if."

Plot ideas come fairly easily for me. I never worry about my ability to work my way out of plot problem.

But saying something new and original is not easy; and I'm not claiming that I always manage to do this. But I do abandon stories, if they are becoming familiar -- hey, I've already said this, and I don't have to say it again; and I do stop and rethink stories, if I feel they are becoming ordinary or inevitable.

A Post About Ideas

What follows is a post from the Wyrdsmiths blog in response to a comment that what matters in fiction is not ideas, but what you do with them. The original comment came from Justine Larbalestier in her blog. It troubled me, and I replied...

I'm not sure ideas are the easy part. There's a whole tradition in SF of neat idea stories, where the writing is competent at best, and the characters don't really matter, but the ideas are wonderful. Think of the best Heinlein: "All You Zombies" and "The House That Jack Built."

These are the stories that C.S. Lewis talks about, when he talks about myth. What matters is not style or character or mood or whatever, it's the story itself. These stories retain power when you simply describe the plot.

I don't remember much about Fire on the Deep, the Vernor Vinge novel, except that the basic laws of physics varied by where you were in space, so fast interstellar travel was possible in some regions, but not others; and the entire galaxy had an Internet, so as the novel's action line developed, there was constant interstellar commentary on what was happening. Two nifty ideas. The plot is gone from my mind; I don't remember the characters; but I remember the ideas.

I need a reason to write a story, and a lot of times the reason is an idea, or several ideas. I don't usually finish or keep a story that doesn't have a point, which is also usually an idea.

Spring

I've seen tulips, daphodils, azalias, blossoming magnolias and fruit trees... We are one or two weeks off from the week in May when the lilacs bloom. That is amazing. The bushes are everywhere, along boulevards and the I-94 freeway, in parks and yards.

May

It snowed several times in April, but I think spring is really here now. I saw a magnolia in bloom this morning. Here is a poem.

What the May Sunlight Falls On

Two cops drinking coffee
on a terrace
under a Starbuck's sign;

A Powerball billboard,
down to fifteen million --
hardly worth buying a ticket;

An Indian woman -- hawk nose
and long, black hair --
wearing a Mille Lacs Grand Casino jacket;

Trees opening fresh green
and red leaves
by the fake-gothic Minneapolis Club;

Me with silver hair
hauling heavy bags home
on the 94;

All in the soft May sunlight
that makes almost
everything shine.

I notice that two of my little stanzas are about gambling, one is about law enforcement and one is about a club for rich people. What does this say?

Post script: I reread this. It's not a great poem. But I enjoyed the day when I wrote it, and I enjoyed the sights I describe.

Second post script: I found two more stanzas in my notebook and added them; and I tinkered with punctuation and line breaks.

Nightmares

I had bad dreams last night. The one I remember most clearly is -- Patrick and I were living in a large, rundown apartment building. Our bathroom was a disaster: paint peeling, broken plumbing, water on the floor, the kind of bathroom where you expect the tub to crash through to the floor below. The apartment itself had a very fragile lock on the door. Patrick piled up pans in front of the door. If someone forced their way during the night, the falling pans would wake us.

I know where this dream came from: a YouTube report on the barracks at Fort Bragg. The report was done by the father of one of the soldiers, just returned from a tour in Afghanistan.

The building that starred in the report had been built in the 1940s. Inside stair railings were rusted. Ceiling tiles were broken or missing. Lead paint was peeling and flaking. There were large, black areas of mildew on the walls. Sewage backed up into the toilets and basins. Broken pipes leaked sewer gas. And there were fragile locks on the bedroom doors.

The soldiers had been told twice, each time they left for a tour in scenic rural Afghanistan, that they'd have new barracks when they got back.

When I read stories like these -- and many other stories about the way this country treats ordinary people -- I am left with a deep sense of vulnerability and alienation. Living in the US is like living in a big, crowded, rundown, scary apartment building with bad plumbing and insecure locks. In my dream, I was complaining to the building manager, but I did not have a sense that anything was going to change.

I'm still recovering from the nightmare. I will probably feel better about making changes -- in the real world, not in my dream -- later in the day.

Weather Report

It snowed Saturday, though nothing stayed on the ground. The grass is mostly green. The trees are budding and flowering. Bird sounds are changing, which means new birds are arriving from the south, either summer residents or birds passing through on their way to Canada. I saw the Patrick Gannaway, the little blue and white towboat that moves gravel from St. Paul to Minneapolis this morning, pushing its two full barges up the Mississippi. I haven't seen it since winter set in.