Category: Literary Matters

IWSG, August 2022: Originality or Not?

John Winkelman

I don’t know how it’s been for you-all, but this past month was CRAZY busy here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. With most COVID restrictions lifted, the whole world is trying to make up for two years of lost time, and instead of having nothing to do on a given day it seems we have EVERYTHING to do. And, of course, not enough time in which to do it.

For me, this also this applied to my writing. All of my summer plans have fallen by the wayside, other than the ninety minutes, one Tuesday a month, where I attend an open mic night. And even that feels like something I have to squeeze in. And I am not always successful.

I thought I had mostly outgrown FOMO, but it seems to have metastasized in the zeitgeist.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2022 is: When you set out to write a story, do you try to be more original or do you try to give readers what they want?

This is an odd question to answer. Outside of this blog, I don’t have any readers to speak of. Therefore I don’t have anyone to whom to cater. And I don’t necessarily try to be original, though I don’t think I write quite like anyone I have read, so I suppose that is a form of originality, even if not entirely intentional. None of my manuscripts are similar to each other, either short or long form. Even the 2021 bio-punk sequel to my partially completed 2020 salvage-punk book is distinct enough that I now need to go back and re-write part 1.

So it goes.

 

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Another July In the Bag

John Winkelman

New arrivals for the week of July 24, 2022

The first part of 2022 seemed to drag, the days and weeks plodding by as if time itself were feeling an inescapable ennui. Then Memorial Day arrived and all the things which hadn’t happened since 2019 suddenly happened all at once, three years worth of events packed into a couple of months as everyone did everything everywhere. And suddenly July is over and in fifty days Autumn will arrive, suddenly and, given how hot the world is anymore, unnoticed except for the changing of the leaves. I felt no FOMO for two years because there was nothing to miss out on. Now so many things are happening that missing an event seems a luxury.

Thus I am exhausted in the midst of plenty and in desperate need for some quiet time and solitude.

Two new books arrived at the house this week.

First up is K.S. Villoso‘s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, which I picked up on a whim, as Villoso has been a speaker on several genre podcasts over the past couple of years.

On the right, from Two Lines Press, is Xu  Zechen‘s Running through Beijing, translated from the Chinese by Eric Abrahamsen.

In reading news I burned my way through The Last Emperox, the eminently satisfying conclusion to John Scalzi‘s Interdependency trilogy. I haven’t binged a series like this since last summer, and it felt pretty good.

I rounded out the month with a steady run of The Paris Review, and am slightly less than halfway through my backlog. I just finished the Spring 2018 issue, and expect to be caught up to present around the end of the year.

I still haven’t written anything, but I do have some ideas on how to expand a short story I wrote last fall into a full novel, including sufficient worldbuilding to possibly turn the novel, once completed, into a series. Time will tell. It always does.

Coincidences and Timing

John Winkelman

New arrival from the week of July 17, 2022, and Pepper

I have two information-dense personal projects going on right now – the “Bottom of the Top” posts, and my deep dive into all the back issues of literary journals which have been slowly accumulating in my house. This means that I am encountering, in a time-shifted way, many musical and literary works for the first time. The Bottom of the Top project starts in 1977 and runs through 1997 in five-year increments. My stack of old lit journals goes back at least five years, and many of the pieces therein were originally written one to a hundred years prior, though the older works tend to be outliers.

Only one new book arrived in the past week – Robin McLean‘s collection of short stories titled Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing, published by And Other Stories.

In reading news I am caught up through the end of 2017 in my stack of back issues of The Paris Review. This led me (with reference to the notes at the top of this post) to encounter New York artist Duncan Hannah, whose memoir 20th Century Boy was excerpted in issue #222 who was a contemporary of Andy Warhol and and active participant in the Scene in New York City from the 1970s on. I had not heard of Hannah before reading this excerpt, and immediately added his book to my list of upcoming purchases.

Then I did some more research and discovered that Duncan Hannah died a few weeks ago, on June 11. He was 69 years old, which doesn’t seem that old to me, from the vantage point of 53.

I also had a lot of fun reading Ana Simo’s Heartland, which I would happily put on the shelf next to Michelle Tea‘s Black Wave and Rita Indiana‘s Tentacle. With that complete, I have shifted gears back to more mainstream genre fiction and burned through John Scalzi‘s The Consuming Fire, the second book in the Interdependency trilogy, in two days. I am now reading the final book in the series, The Last Emperox. As with everything else I have read by Mr. Scalzi, these books are a lot of fun.

In writing news, a whole lotta nothing over the past week. That seems to be the state of things this summer.

No Down In My Down Time

John Winkelman

New books for the week of July 10, 2021

Today is the last day of my two-week break from work, the first break since ConFusion in January, and the first full-on vacation since the Christmas holidays. I enjoyed not having to work for two weeks, but the minutes, hours and days were so quickly filled with tasks, chores, and Things To Do that those two weeks included almost no rest at all. Last Tuesday I managed to get some time to myself, about three hours in which I walked around the neighborhoods, visited a cafe and a couple of bookstores, and wrote for a little while. And that was the only down-time, the only real relaxation, in the entire two weeks.

In other words, I need a vacation.

Earlier this week Zyra and I drove to Detroit, where we stayed in a moderately terrible hotel and ate fantastic food at a variety of excellent restaurants. We also, at the suggestion of one of our friends from the East Side, hit The Book Beat, a fantastic little bookstore in Oak Park, Michigan with an eclectic and surprisingly deep selection of books and magazines. Highly recommended, would visit again. While there, I picked up a couple of books:

First up is Nomadology: The War Machine by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, published by Semiotext(e). I think I owned a copy of this small book once upon a time, back in the 1990s. I am not sure what became of it. Probably lost in one of my many moves over the past quarter-century.

Next up is Black Mountain Poems, an anthology of work from the Black Mountain poets, edited by Jonathan C. Creasy. I picked this up because of my interest in the works of Paul Blackburn, specifically his beautiful “Matchbook Poem” which I return to again and again.

In reading and writing news, not much happening, because too much is happening EVERYWHERE ELSE. I did start Ana Simo‘s wonderfully strange Heartland, which arrived at the house from Restless Books a few years ago. And I’m still working my way slowly through my stack of The Paris Review, which is an absolutely wonderful experience.

I find it depressing to say that, since I head back to work tomorrow, I may finally have time to do some reading and writing. Selah!

So This is What Down Time Looks Like

John Winkelman

New arrivals for the week of July 3, 2022

It looks a lot like work, except without the work. All of the things I hoped to accomplish (reading and writing, mostly) have fallen by the wayside as the hundred other tasks and chores which I have put off for the past six months have reared their ugly, dirty, dusty heads.

I have added several new books to the library over the past week.

First up is volume 7 of The Long List Anthology, which collects the finalists for the Hugo Award for short fiction.

Next up is Ocean Vuong‘s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I picked up from the best bookstore in the city, Books and Mortar.

Next is Progeny of Air, Kwame Dawes‘ first book of poetry, which was published in 1994. I grabbed this from Argos Books, which I have not visited in about a year.

I also picked up Listening to the Fire: The Poetry of Fountain Street Church, which was published in 1998. I would have overlooked this one were it not edited by my old friend and co-worker from the bookstore days, Linda Rosenthal. I don’t remember when Linda left the bookstore but I was still there when this collection was published, and I am a little embarrassed that I had not heard of it until now.

In reading news, I finished Andrés Neuman’s brilliant How to Travel Without Seeing, which I first picked up back in 2016, and immediately stuck on a shelf and spent the next five years eyeballing uncomfortably, as if I had committed a small sin by not reading it immediately.

But I have read it now, and my life is much the richer for it. How to Travel Without Seeing is a travelogue of sorts, notes taken by the author on a book tour through nineteen (!) Latin American countries. Neuman is a brilliant writer and I will likely return to this book more than once over the coming years.

I am still working my way through back issues of The Paris Review, and have reached calendar year 2017, so I am only five years and change behind the present. This is another case where I regret not reading these journals as they came out, because much of the prose and poetry herein is simply remarkable. I have already added some books to my lists for later perusal, and will likely continue to do so throughout the rest of this exercise.

In writing news, I haven’t accomplished much, thanks to the specific mental/emotional hangover of having a break from work for the first time in six months.

IWSG, July 2022: Where Would I Live?

John Winkelman

A Curious Chipmunk

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. Life has been hectic and crazy, so I have not written a lot since the last IWSG back at the beginning of June.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2022 is:

If you could live in any book world, which one would you choose?

The easy answer, and therefore the answer I am going with here, is the world of Amber, from Roger Zelazny‘s Amber Chronicles. This is because by its very nature the world (or more accurately, multiverse) of Amber contains all possible other worlds. Were I of the royal blood of Amber (and really, how could I not be?) I would be able to, after certain trials and tests, travel to any world that I desired, simply by picturing that world in my head and then going for a walk.

With the easy answer out of the way, let’s look at some other possibilities.

I have read huge stacks of fiction over the past 40+ years. With few exceptions, none of the worlds therein are worlds I would like to live in, no matter how compelling the world-building.

For instance, Bas-Lag from China Mieville‘s books Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council. Beautifully rendered, exquisite worldbuilding, richly detailed, and full of horrors (slake moths, the Malarial Queendom, and the Remade, to name a few) like I have seldom encountered elsewhere.

Tolkein’s Middle Earth is a possibility, but the realities of living in a pre-industrial society just don’t appeal to me.

The world Susanna Clarke created in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has potential, but then I think of all of the horrors of the twentieth century (and also the 21st!) and add magic to the mix, and I don’t see it being anything other than unimaginably worse than what the mundane world has seen in the past hundred-plus years.

And I suppose that is a good reason for the ambiguity of the answers: a heroic story exists in a world where heroes are needed, and such worlds tend to be terrible for all but the most privileged, who themselves are usually the reason heroes are needed in the first place.

Even the world of Amber is not immune to these issues. The protagonist is a prince and potential heir to the throne, and is himself the cause of much suffering across the multiverse in his quest for revenge. That he is the hero of the story doesn’t mean he is a Good Guy, and as some of the revisionist super-hero comics of the last decade have demonstrated, when heroes and villains clash, the collateral damage can be massive.

Moving into mainstream and literary fiction would bring us into the present world perhaps at a single remove or enhanced in some subtle ways. Bruce Sterling coined the term “now-punk” to refer to any fiction written about the contemporary world, e.g. a story about the world in 2022 which is written in 2022. I would add a secondary definition to now-punk which is “reality, only moreso.” And an amped-up reality has been the base state of reality for about the past twenty years, and even more over the past five, so by any honest measure we are currently living in a cyberpunk dystopia.

So all that being said, I will stick with my original answer of living in the Amber universe, with the possibility of taking a walk to any other world I can conceive of, if only for a short vacation.

I understand Arrakis is beautiful this time of year.

(So with all that being said, where would you like to live, or visit, or avoid at all costs?)

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

The Anticipation of Down Time

John Winkelman

Reading material which arrived in the week of June 26, 2022

As of 17:00 on Friday, July 1, 2022, I am on vacation for two weeks. This is my first significant break from work since the Christmas holidays, and it is long overdue. I don’t have any particular plans beyond heading out of town with Zyra for a couple of days when her schedule allows. I hope to find time to read, write, and hang out at the lake until my head is clear of work stress and I am re-centered and ready to resume the daily grind. Then again, two weeks is likely nowhere near enough time for that.

This week’s only new arrival is the new issue of Poetry Magazine, the July/August issue, which was the last volume of words I read to completion in the month of June.

In reading news, I picked up Andrés Neuman‘s How to Travel Without Seeing, which arrived at the house at least six years ago from my old subscription to Restless Books. Ostensibly a collection of essays, this book reads more like a collection of journal entries focused on each of the many countries Neuman visits over the course of the books. And that could very well be what they are, though the cumulative effect is less travelogue and more lyric essay or prose poem. Neuman writes beautifully, and his translator Jeffrey Lawrence deserves serious props as well.

In writing news, not a lot going on. The past several weeks of work have been exhausting and what little free time I usually have has been put to use assisting Zyra with the many and varied events in which she and her company Gallafe have been participating. I have managed to transcribe a few more of my April poems, and even made some notes for a couple of new pieces, but I just haven’t had the mental and emotional space to do anything more than the occasional entry in my journal.

Shorter Days Are Also Long Days

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of June 19, 2022

With the summer solstice behind us the days are slowly getting shorter but the work never ends and so I have resigned myself to the sight of the late afternoon shadows lengthening ever so slightly earlier every day. And summer has just begun.

Two new bookish things arrived in the past week. First up, from Two Lines Press, is a special edition bilingual chapbook which contains the first part of Jazmina Barrera‘s Linea Nigra, printed by Impronta Casa Editora. This little book is gorgeous, and has reaffirmed my opinion that chapbooks are absolutely a viable mode of publishing, for prose as well as poetry. The full version of Linea Nigra arrived at the house back in April.

Next is the latest issue of The Paris Review, which will go on the bottom of the stack of my back issues, through which I am steadily reading.

In reading news I am on issue #217 of The Paris Review, with (does the math) [N] more to go until I am caught up to present. The most recent issue came with a note that the Winter 2022 issue will be the last issue of my subscription, and I admit I am conflicted about letting the subscription lapse, if only because, poetry and prose aside, the interviews in The Paris Review are AMAZING!

I am also reading Janelle Monáe’s remarkable The Memory Librarian, and may well have it finished by the time this post goes live. I can’t say enough good things about it. Beautiful queer cyberpunk with a strong helping of bio- and neuro-punk on the side. Highly recommended.

In writing news, nothing to report. Maybe next week.

It’s REALLY Hot Out

John Winkelman

Monarch Caterpillar on Milkweed

Like, seriously hot. The middle of the week hit the upper 90s by the thermometer, and over 100 by heat index. With that kind of heat any activity which requires any kind of energy is exceptionally difficult.

No new books arrived in the past week, so I have included a photo of one of the five (as of this past Monday) Monarch caterpillars currently munching their way through our small patch of milkweed. With the severe decline in the population of Monarchs overall, every one of these small beasts is precious.

In reading news, I have finished the first of the two dozen or so back issues of The Paris Review taking up space on my shelves. The past couple of weeks have been much busier than usual so I am not keeping up with my usual reading pace. Plus, much like the computers with which I have worked for well over half of my life, my brain doesn’t work so well when it is overheated.

I did manage to finish Githa Hariharan’s beautiful essay collection Almost Home. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the study and contemplation of cities and the experiences of immigrant, refugees, and those on the receiving end of colonialism.

With Almost Home complete, I have picked up Janelle Monáe‘s collection The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories From Dirty Computer. I have been looking forward to this one since I first heard of it at ConFusion 2022, back in January. The reviews are favorable so I have high hopes.

In writing news, other than journaling I haven’t done a lot. Too many other things going on in my life which are sapping my energy and competing for time. I don’t really expect the rest of the month to be any slower but I hope to make progress transcribing my poetry from two months ago.

So that’s it for this week. Work is crazy right now, as it always is in June as the next-to-last quarter of the fiscal year winds up and everyone heads to their own wherever for vacations. I have the first two weeks of July off, which I hope to use for more than recovery time. We will see how things shake out.

Longer Days Make For Some Long Days

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of June 5, 2022

As July approaches and everyone at work plans for vacation and holidays the entire industry moves into a brief crunch time made up of long days and tight deadlines, held together by the flimsiest of fraying nerves. This doesn’t leave a lot of time or mental energy for reading and writing, though the compulsion persists.

Only one new book-ish thing arrived at the house this week – the June 2022 issue of Poetry.

In reading news, I am finally caught up to present in my pile of unread Poetry issues. Thanks to an unexpected free evening, I read the remaining two issues, including the June issue which arrived earlier this week. So now, as noted previously, I am working my way through my back-log of unread issues of The Paris Review. I might get to the end by the end of the year.

On a side note, this is the first time since I started these weekly posts that I finished reading all of the books which arrived in a week before the end of that week.

In writing news, I am still transcribing my poems from April. With a little luck I will come across something worthy of reading at The Sparrows at the end of the month. If not, well, I am just as happy to sit and listen to other readers.