Poison and Cigarette Butts

When I paint, I begin with a vision of a thing to be represented, but I find, as I really get down to business, that I take the picture as a plane surface covered with pigment. My task, as a painter, is to make as beautiful a carpet of color and form as my skill permits. Forms from the natural world are admitted and retained, just as colors are, but both, and the ideas that inspired the painting in the first place, are subordinate to the unity of the final product.

I have something of the same approach to writing stories. Whatever material elements may go into it, in the end I'm just trying to make an interesting pattern with the things I have at my disposal. Sometimes the things I have at my disposal are ugly, like Jackson Pollock's cigarette butts; sometimes they're poisonous, like the arsenic-containing emerald green used by Van Gogh. Well, you're not supposed to eat a painting, are you? Something similar might be said of a story.

I never set out to make a point in a story. That's not to say the things I think about and argue about don't find their way in there. It's just that they're like Jackson's cigarette butts. I do think the pursuit of truth important. I just don't care to do it in stories. Sometimes I even find it fun to seem to make a case for the opposite of what I believe to be the truth. That bugs people these days, because they want to know where you stand on all the important issues before they decide to like your work. I guess that's only natural, what with the Internet being overrun by pitchfork-waving mobs of one stripe or another. But it's also terribly boring.

Being an autistic Puerto Rican Greek mathematician in small-town borderland Texas, I have a skewed view of things. At least, I'm led to conclude so when I have conversations with other people. I'm like one of those strange side characters in Dostoevsky, like Ippolit in The Idiot, or Kirillov in The Possessed. My view comes out in weird and (to me) unpredictable ways.

*

For a few years I've thinking about how "magical multiracial" fantasy (with elves and dwarves or whatever) reflects, distorts, or falsifies race issues in the real world. I mean, that type of fiction is read mainly by white people in the anglosphere, right? At its most commercial-generic, it represents a society consisting of discrete categories of beings that coexist without mixing, which reminds me of those modern celebrations of "diversity" that often amount to a kind of segregation.

The magical multirace paradigm was set by Tolkien, although Tolkien, to be fair, got it at least partially from the Poetic Edda and such things. There are various human races in Tolkien, such as the Easterlings and the Haradrim. Aside from Sam's musings, though, they're painted in broad strokes as scarcely-human hordes. There's much talk, too, of greater men intermarrying with lesser men, to the detriment of the former. Does Tolkien, within his own universe, think it a bad thing for higher races to mix with lower races? Given what he says elsewhere about the "sin" of the elves and the role of the hobbits, I'd be inclined to say that his view was nuanced, at the very least. Still, there's a lot to be looked into there, such as the fact that Tolkien came originally from South Africa, and that The Lord of the Rings was conceived and written during the first half of the twentieth century, when a lot of ugly ideas about race were coming to a head all over the world, not just in Germany.

I've mused a bit about half-breeds in fantasy literature, and half-breeds certainly figure in Tolkien, to an extent not often approached by writers of the commercial-generic fantasy that capitalizes on his work. He has mixtures of human races, such as the men and hobbits of Bree, but also, more memorably, mixtures of human and non-human races, such as the progeny of Beren and Luthien. Philosophically, those are a little different, as Tolkien makes it clear in his letters that the elves are not a distinct biological species, differing from men only in their spiritual constitution. It's interesting that such half-breeds are allowed to choose which race they'll belong to, a choice sadly denied to human half-breeds, who must inhabit both worlds, and therefore neither. The ill-favored squint-eyed Southerner at Bree, who appears to be part human, part orc, is not treated so sympathetically, and we are not told that he got a choice like Elrond Halfelven's. Actually, the way he's described reminds me of the descriptions of mulattoes and "Asiatic" half-breeds in some of G. K. Chesterton's more offensively racist stories, and I think a case could be made that Tolkien and the writers who came after him were merely transplanting those old fears of half-breeds into less overtly racist soil.

That said, it's only by being great writers that Tolkien and Chesterton have the capacity to offend. The most your standard commercial-generic writer can aspire to is to be slightly irritating. And I do find discrete categorizations of races, magical or otherwise, to be slightly irritating. You don't just see it in fantasy. You see it whenever members of "other" races are given character traits stemming from race alone, offset, in cleverer works, by superficial differences.

Scene from John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which I think is a sly
reference to what I'm talking about. (Is that Cuervo Jones at the wheel???)

In reaction to one of my Carvajal stories, a psychologist friend of mine, whose professional interests include evolutionary psychology, explained that, according to theory, it's natural (in the evolutionary sense) to have a mistrust of half-breeds, because it's unknown to whose tribe their loyalties belong. To that my reply was: perhaps it's natural or justifiable, perhaps not, but, as far as my story is concerned, I don't really care, because I'm not trying to make a point. My friend was trying to understand what I was getting at, but the truth is that I wasn't getting at anything at all. I was just making a pattern with things I've picked up here and there.

Religion makes an appearance in those Carvajal stories, too, though I'm not certain that the faith of Hispania corresponds to real-world Catholicism. Carvajal is, at any rate, an archetypal Bad Catholic, praying on the fishbone rosary mentioned somewhere by St. John of the Cross while doing his best to be a conquistador. Because I am myself Catholic, a faith it's increasingly hard to be proud of these days, I like to render the religion of the various tribes he encounters sympathetically, while I render his religion as worthy of contempt, incomprehension, or terror. The red demon-god at the end of "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is based on the seraph that gave St. Francis of Assisi the stigmata, and the institutional church appears as a literary cigarette butt in one of my forthcoming stories. But, again, I'm not really making a point. I'm just letting things come in where they want to.

*

My professional and artistic and personal lives are beginning to converge in ways that I wouldn't have expected several years ago, and I feel the need to emphasize that my fiction really is art, that is, a set of patterns I've formed so as to make pleasing units, and not, say, a coded manifesto. That's not to say that my deeply-held beliefs and opinions wouldn't be offensive or incomprehensible to some of the people who might be interested in them. They're just not to be found in my stories or my rambling, contrarian blog posts.

That said, get ready for "Raft of Conquistadors," coming out in the November issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly!

The Neverending Story

You know, one fantasy novel I never hear much talked about these days is The Neverending Story. Published originally in German as Die Unendliche Geschichtein in 1979, it became popular here in the United States in the eighties thanks to that terrible, terrible kids' movie of the same (except for a capitalized E) name. Of course I loved that movie (which is terrible) at the time, and especially that sweet theme song. But just read the book (which I did when I was a teenager) and you'll see what a hatchet job the movie is. The author, Michael Ende, would seem to have agreed with that assessment. Let's not even discuss the sequel.

I recently read the book to my kids. I'd forgotten what a mind-bending piece of meta it is. We read it as originally published, with the page-size capital letters at the beginnings of the chapters (from A for Chapter 1 to Z for Chapter 26) and the dual colors of ink (red and green) to help you navigate between metafictional modes. I'm not exactly sure what Ende was getting at with all those layers of self-reference, so here's where you get to see me puzzle that out.

If you haven't read The Neverending Story, watch out, because I'm about to spoil it all, though I don't think it's really the kind of book that gets spoiled by your knowing the plot ahead of time.

Bastian, a doughy, wimpy schoolboy with a deceased mother and an emotionally frigid father, steals a strange book from an enigmatic dealer, and holes up with it in the schoolhouse attic. In it reads the adventures of Atreyu the Greenskin, the chosen savior of Fantastica, which is being devoured by the Nothing while the Childlike Empress languishes from a mysterious illness. (Unlike in the movie, the Nothing literally looks like nothing, as though you'd gone blind.) (The clouds in the movie look pretty cool, though.) The Empress, it seems, must be given a new name by a human, but humans have stopped coming to Fantastica. We gradually learn that the purpose of Atreyu's quest and all his sufferings are solely to get Bastian, the human reader, interested in the book. At the Magic Mirror Gate, it's revealed that Bastian and Atreyu are, in some sense, the same person.

Bastian, in his reluctance to say the (slightly goofy) name he's thought up, forces the Childlike Empress to go to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and have the story told again from the beginning, within the story itself. Here (and elsewhere) I catch just a hint of both Nietzsche (the eternal return) and – just maybe! – The Worm Ouroboros. AURYN, the talisman borne by Atreyu and the symbol of the book as a whole, consists of two snakes biting one another's tails…

Once Bastian says the name (I'll let you read the book to find out what it is), he finds himself in Fantastica. In 100% green ink now, he cuts an impetuous and increasingly disturbing swath across a succession of bizarre landscapes in an adventure that reminds me a bit of A Voyage to Arcturus. The one command laid upon him is DO WHAT YOU WISH, which seems great at first. But it turns out that each wish costs him a memory. He starts to become insufferable as he forgets what he once was.

What everyone tells him, though, is that he has to go right through Fantastica, making whatever wishes come to him and following wherever they lead. Whenever he stops wishing, he starts going in circles. He tries to make himself emperor (no one can see the Childlike Empress twice), which doesn't go too well, and almost results in his becoming the demented resident of a city of mad would-be emperors superintended by a creepy monkey. Eventually the wishes divest him of everything – his very last memories – and leave him an empty shell.

The strange thing about The Neverending Story is that, despite its having more layers than a premium nacho plate, it's enjoyable as a story in its own right. The world of Fantastica is convincingly portrayed, and Ende's powers of invention are seemingly inexhaustible. One of the main pleasures in reading the book is experiencing all the surprising and beautiful things he comes up with. The story ends with…well, with something heartwarming and sentimental. I won't knock it, but if that were the point of the novel then it wouldn't have the power it has.

To me a lot of it seems to be a parable about storytelling. Bastian is the one person in Fantastica who can tell stories. The stories he tells come true as the tells them, but there are always unintended consequences: dragons that cause suffering, clown-butterflies who vandalize. What's more, Bastian's path of wishes and growing lack of self-knowledge make him less and less capable of telling stories at all.

The Childlike Empress is portrayed as indifferent to good and evil, but her mandate, to go on wishing, while not exactly "good," is fitting, appropriate, right. It's what Bastian's got to do. Similarly, telling a story is a spiritually draining process, but the teller must go where it leads. If it's worth telling it's got a certain logic that has to be obeyed. In her indifference, I think the Empress is merely Story personified. Morality for the characters in a story is one thing; the "morality" of the storyteller (which is neither more nor less than the virtue of good craftsmanship) is another. Someone I follow online recently said something to the effect of, what kind of person takes pleasure in the misery inflected upon a character by a cruel author? I suppose it's possible to get a sadistic thrill in reading a novel, but for me it's really more the pleasure of seeing a pattern fall into place.

As I said, telling a story is a spiritually draining process. Literally, perhaps: it sucks something out of you. It's also fraught with peril. In setting yourself up as the emperor of your (invented) world, you  may find yourself doing violence to your own conceits and being relegated at last to the city of demented might-have-beens.

But maybe I'm just saying all that because I've been going in circles myself lately…

Strangling the Behemoth in Full Color

I've been tinkering with digital coloring, having enjoyed colorizing my Carvajal picture the other day. I had a pen-and-ink sketch of Keftu strangling the behemoth lying about, so, though it's really more of a doodle than a finished work of art, I decided to attempt coloring it.

Given what I started with, I think it came out rather well.

Here's the original line art:

The behemoth is based on several things: the estemmenosuchids of the Middle Permian, the Behemoth in Blake's illustrations to Job, these weird green dog/lion statuettes my Granny kept in her living room, and a vicious chihuahua named Paco who used to get into my backyard to terrorize my children. (Not that you wanted to know all that.)

I began by creating a layer of colored flats to provide the base color for the image.

Then came the fun part: adding tone and special effects. Here's the final image, sans line art:

I think it's pretty cool-looking like that, a bit like a Frazetta painting (if I do say so myself).

And now let's see that final image one more time:

This is only my second attempt at digital coloring, but I'm beginning to realize what I can do with it. It goes much faster than watercolor, and might turn out to be more marketable a skill in today's increasingly digitized blah blah blah. My next goal is to do a good line drawing with the express purpose of digital coloring.

Keftu Dissected

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

Being halfway completed, my Enoch novels are undergoing their midlife crisis. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Should they shave their head and get a sports car?

Since my blog is the place where I write about things I want to think about, my lucky readers get to glimpse some writerly musings in the next few posts. Today let's begin with Keftu, my protagonist.

Keftu is of a sanguine temperament. He would never write a post like this, unlike melancholic-phlegmatic me! He's also a bit of a fool, as my other characters remind him from time to time. He owes a lot to Percival, the bumpkin-turned-quest-knight whose innocence and stupidity allow him to be used by God. Whether Keftu is useful to the abscondent gods of Enoch remains to be seen, of course.

Like Daedalus, he makes his own wings, but he really has more in common with Icarus. My depiction of him with only one wing on the back cover of Dragonfly is meant to suggest Paul Klee's The Hero with the Wing, which depicts a tragicomic figure who has injured himself in his idiotic attempts to fly.

Quite a few other figures from fable, myth, history, and romance are present in Keftu's DNA, both positively and negatively. He is Gilgamesh (seeker after immortality), Cain (wanderer) and Abel (sacrifice-offerer), Noah (ark pilot), Nimrod (mighty hunter), Abraham (visionary) and Jacob (dream-traveler), Moses (seer of the burning bush), Tobias (vanquisher of demons), and Christ (harrower of hell). He is Prometheus (fire-giver), Hermes (argus-slayer), Theseus (maze-runner), Perseus (gorgon's head-bearer), Bellerophon (steed-tamer and chimera-slayer), Heracles (monster fighter), Orpheus (singer of the dead), and Odysseus (trickster). He is Solon the Lawgiver and Pompey the Great. He is Beowulf and Siegfried. He is the Continental Op and Gilbert Gosseyn. He is Batman, Superman, and Luke Skywalker.

In addition to all of this, I consider Keftu an ironic antitype of Frodo Baggins. Frodo's quest is more or less handed to him. You know where he's going from the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The drama lies in the spiritual cost of his continued adherence to this goal. But what if he'd been driven out of the Shire – driven into the arms of the quest, so to speak – without ever having heard of Gandalf, Sauron, or the One Ring? Gandalf is busy elsewhere, with no time to spare for Hobbits; Sauron himself couldn't care less about them; there never was a Ring to wrap incarnate evil up in a neat little package. Frodo has no high destiny but, cut off from his past, finds himself unable to live without one, and therefore invents it for himself. Nevertheless, not a day goes by in which he doesn't look into the abyss and think: what if I'm only deluding myself?

Who in our time hasn't experienced this anxiety? I've gone through phases when I imagined myself acting on a divine mandate. I'll bet that just about everyone, even thoroughgoing materialists, try to see some kind of pattern or logic in the events of their lives. It's part of being human. But, for me, it's always been undercut by a nagging doubt that I'm just talking to myself. After many colorful disappointments, I've come to decide that, if there is a divine agency guiding us to some appointed end, then its action is dark and mysterious, not a voice booming on a mountaintop. It's something that acts from outside time, and therefore in a way that's not really comprehensible to us, and is much less concerned with "geography" than we are.

I attempt to capture some of this in my description of Keftu's songlines, which I adapt from the worldview of the Indigenous Australians, combining it with the mnemonic palace of Sephaura inspired by the method of loci developed by Simonides of Ceos. Keftu's greatness, if he has any greatness, lies in that he knows that he does not know. But his world is littered with grand failures, with persons, human and otherwise, who think they know but do not.

One such is Vaustus, whose character is a composite of several pastors and missionaries I encountered back in my wild college days. The episode that lost him his leg actually happened to someone I knew, except that my friend was unsuccessful in his amputation, which he attempted, naked, with a handsaw in a stranger's open garage. (There, doesn't that make you want to read my book?) But we were all a bit like that.

You'd think that a person, when faced with the cosmic contradiction to the divine mandate they've claimed as a guide for their personal actions, would be forced to admit that they've been acting under a delusion. But you'd be wrong. Their entire ego and worldview are wrapped up in a particular vision of themselves. So, instead, they go a little bit crazy. They revise the past, reinterpret the prophecy, attempt to see what isn't there. Every time this happens, they go a little bit crazier. Deliberately short-circuiting your ability to see reality isn't good for your psychic integrity.

My point is, life is a frightening, painful, messed-up experience ending in death. We all desperately want it to have some kind of meaning. A quest fantasy is comforting because it seems to present life as a logical progression of events with a clear and definite end. But real life isn't like that. Attempts to live like it is only result in madness and despair, or else boundless fatuity and narcissism. Sword-and-sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy, seems to take what we might call the cynical view. At any rate, it's not particularly concerned with overarching narratives. That's what I like about it.

Still, we are all on a kind of journey, aren't we? It's just that we're making the quest up as we go along. We're more like Don Quixote than the Redcrosse Knight. The joke's on us. Perhaps there is a path, but, if so, it's not like the road to Rivendell. We go blindly, trustingly or not, choosing as seems best at each moment, never quite knowing whether we do well or ill. The climax of our journey is otherwise than we imagine it, and what we regard as most insignificant is possibly quite the contrary.

Come to think of it, though, that could be applied to Frodo's journey. At no point is he altogether certain of his means. The goal is never really in question, but all responsibility is laid on his shoulders. Even Gandalf and Elrond refuse to advise him. And, in the end, he fails! Or would have failed, had not Gollum intervened. In fact, you could argue that, far from being Winnie-the-Pooh for adults, The Lord of the Rings is way more cynical (or mature) than the Elric Saga. So I find that my characterization of Frodo's quest doesn't do justice to the text, though it does describe your cookie-cutter mass market quest fantasy.
 
Still, it's true that Keftu has no Gandalf, as is pointed out in the passage quoted at the top of Fletcher Vredenburgh's kind review of my most recent novel. He's on his own in a way that Frodo never was. He has no goal but what he sets himself.

Of Hippogriffs and Cocadrill-Serpents

The world didn't ask for it, but it's coming anyway: a new wrap-around book cover for The Worm Ouroboros. Here's the progress I've made so far:

It's a stylized landscape showing Koshtra Pivrarcha, Koshtra Belorn, and the Lake of Ravary. In the distance we glimpse the Bhavinan and Morna Moruna. The Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha stand before Sophonisba; poor Mivarsh Faz is about to become dinner for a cocadrill-serpent. I've purposefully incorporated images from Keith Henderson's illustrations, including this hippogriff:

The style is somewhat inspired by Persian miniatures. I don't do justice to the tradition, of course, but I'd like to try my hand at adapting it again in the near future. At any rate, the Iliad and Icelandic sagas are often mentioned in connection with The Worm Ouroboros, but I've always detected something distinctly Oriental in it as well.

Mivarsh's legs echo Brueghel's painting of the fall of Icarus, which I've always found humorous:

A giant landscape, with the purported subject represented by two tiny legs kicking in the corner. Poor Icarus! And poor Mivarsh! Who told us that he was destined to be devoured by a crocodile, and then was devoured by a crocodile.

West Texas, the USSR, and Reprehensible Reading

This is the kind of post I write when I have things floating around the pelagic zone of my head but no single topic to focus on. I seem to be emerging from one of the phases of isolation I pass through whenever I've been overstimulated or taxed by too much interaction. Ugh.

I have been keeping busy with my Texas stories, my next novel, and a painting for The Worm Ouroboros, however. That's the key to being productive. When you're tempted to look the gorgon in the eye, just keep working. The stuff you bring to light at the end of the tunnel will be about as strange as what you'd expect a blind painter to produce, but there just might be a certain aureole of beauty about it as well. You can't tell while you're still in the pit. You just have to keep going and hold on to all the shards until you're competent to judge them.

Still, I think anyone who produces in isolation is apt to go at least a little bit insane, and not necessarily in a good way. I'm a great admirer of William Blake, as readers of my blog know, chiefly for his early poetry and his lifetime output of paintings and prints. I have to admit that I find most of his "prophetic" books unreadable, as I think most people do. But he wrote what he felt he had to write, in utter isolation, in the face of decades of neglect and incomprehension, and he's my hero for that.

Nevertheless, when I consider how much he warmed up to even the smallest token of appreciation for his work (as, in the evening of his life, he became the center of a circle of young artists), I wonder how much his outrageous, elliptical style owed to the scorn and amused indifference his works tended to arouse. Perhaps, if he'd found himself placed in slightly more congenial surroundings, or his education or personality had been slightly other than what they were, then his life's work wouldn't have forced down such eccentric channels, and he would be a Universal Man like Goethe or somebody instead of a kind of "cult classic" of English letters. Then again, maybe he wouldn't have done anything memorable at all.

I went to that West Texas con a few weeks ago and gave a slideshow talk about the Ballantine series. Four people attended my talk. Ouch. This owed partly to personnel changes just prior to the con. But the room also cleared out before I got up, so I think it's more that the topic and speaker were too off-the-wall for common interest. That's too bad (for them), because I really put together a spanking good slideshow (festival of wrap-around covers and all) and gave a brilliant talk. (I'm better at speaking in public than you might suppose, despite my almost total inability to navigate small talk; after all, I make my living giving lectures on abstruse topics to persons of varied backgrounds.) Anyway, it was kind of a bummer. I don't take it personally, though I did write down who left the room before my talk. (Just kidding.) The episode just underscores how very isolated I am out here. Without the Internet, I could never survive as a writer-artist guy.

There was a bit of a silver lining to the whole experience, however. A local seller of vintage comic books saw my talk on the schedule and donated a stack of Ballantine paperbacks to hand out as visual aids. He even let me keep the leftovers for proselytization purposes. We chatted a bit, and he told me that he's collected (and sold) the entire series twice over. Now that's impressive. So, by going to the con, I discovered that there's at least one other person (and probably only one other person) between San Antonio and El Paso interested in what I'm interested in.

In other news, my intellectual life seems to be coming up against Soviet Russia for some reason. It began with my decision to begin reading John le Carré, most famous for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I've enjoyed what I've read immensely. It calls to mind both Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, two of my favorite authors.

Then I acquired the first part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago from the county library book shop for $0.25 and read it straight through. I'd read a couple of Solzhenitsyn's novels back in school, and had then perused the Archipelago, but without really delving into it. There's nothing I can say about it that won't sound trite, but it's a book that I think everyone should read at least once.

Last but not least in my encounters with the USSR, I recently attended a seminar by a now-nonagenarian friend of a friend of mine, a journalist who spent the bulk of his career (through the late 1970s, I think) as a war correspondent, covering such conflicts as Vietnam and visiting a total of 120 countries. Last fall when he was in town (our mutual friend brings him for a series of public talks every year at Veteran's Day), we all split a six pack of Spaten Optimator in a hotel lobby. His stories about intrigues and death on the Russian borders of Red China came immediately to mind when I read The Honourable Schoolboy, which centers on the community of foreign correspondents in 1970s Hong Kong.

But his entire life is almost unbelievably storied. He started out as a child actor, his parents being vaudeville performers in New York. He was a cast member in the original production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which went on to win a Pulitzer. During World War II, his family performed for troops around the country through the recently founded USO. He enlisted once he was old enough and fought in the Battle of Okinawa. After the war he went to college.

As a journalist, he became an enemy of communism, and he counts among his greatest achievements his having been labeled a "very dangerous man" by the KGB. He was actually escorted out of Russia by the KGB, and subsequently refused reentry until after the fall of the USSR. (In later years he managed to get a glimpse of his old case file through a contact in Moscow.) He lost none of his energy with retirement, and used to appear on CNN's Crossfire among other things. He still travels to France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, giving talks at universities and meeting with State Department officials. Did I mention that he's 90? A gentleman of the old school, a hell of a speaker with a biting sense of humor, and a principled professional. Quite a person to have had a beer with.

Getting back to John le Carré and Solzhenitsyn, I've started to realize that it's not very good for me to read fantasy while I'm engaged in writing fantasy. Reading Lord Foul's Bane over the summer made me pretty cranky, but I would probably have gobbled it up if I were writing spy novels. That's how I've always been. I can't do my job well as a math professor if I don't paint at night, and my painting suffers if there's no math or logic going on. I think it's just that I'm very immature, and most productive when I feel like I'm getting away with something by working on a project that the little voice in my head says is the opposite of what I should be doing.

So I recently read Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, another little item I picked up at the library bookstore. It was enjoyable enough, I suppose, but also quite moronic. It made me think of Raymond Chandler's soliloquy on lurid pulp stories and the apocalypse:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning how to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

I've always loved Robert Altman's incoherent noir apocalypse, Kiss Me Deadly, which skewers the Mike Hammer character, but I'm big enough to appreciate both satire and subject. So there are two more Spillane rocker-shockers in the hopper.

Speaking of reprehensible reading, I may venture into Gor in the not-so-distant future. I've never read (or been tempted to read) a single Gor novel, though it's been hinted that I work coded references to the series into my stories. People tell me that they start out okay, but get sicker and sicker as you go on. However, under a humorous post on the subject over at Black Gate last month, a commenter linked an interview with John Norman so straight-facedly bizarre that I kind of want to read a few now. After all, as authors, we have quite a bit in common, being otherwise-obscure academics who write pseudonymous sword-and-planet stories set in the counter-earth. Actually, given some of the things I've written about, it's not terribly surprising that someone would assume I'm a fan.

But I'm not, of course, and don't suppose I ever will be. It's kind of strange, though, that those who would normally speak out against censorship are perfectly okay with keeping people from reading stuff they think is really bad. And maybe the Gor books are really bad! But everyone who tries to ban something thinks that what they're banning is bad. Otherwise they wouldn't ban it. If you say you're against banning as a general principle, you have to be against the banning of any book, even "bad" ones; otherwise you're just a viewpoint advocate with a penchant for moral posturing.

You can argue, as a commenter at the Black Gate article does, that John Norman's excommunication from the mainstream publishing world isn't an example of censorship but of free-market capitalism. To be honest, that's what sounds most likely to me. But people like Michael Moorcock did advocate "strategies which marginalize" John Norman's output, and his output has in fact been marginalized. In my opinion, the specific action Moorcock suggested (placing the books on the top shelves to keep them out of the hands of young adults) is perfectly reasonable. But some books celebrated during Banned Books Week have faced far less opposition. So what's the difference?

I don't have much of an opinion either way. It's just something I've thought about.

Well, I guess that's about it for now. I may start a series of short reviews of my favorite films noir. I've got about a zillion titles on DVD that I like to watch and rewatch. It'll be a good thing to keep me posting on my blog while I devote the other parts of my brain to my ongoing writing projects and other things.

In the Year 1977

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For Tolkien fans, that is.

1977 saw the publication of The Silmarillion, which critics apparently hated, I guess because they wanted some happy novel about hobbits. But 1977 also saw the appearance of the two titans among Tolkien clones: The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, and Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson. Each might be described as The-Lord-of-the-Rings-with-a-twist: the first replaces the prehistoric past with a post-apocalyptic future, while the second replaces the merry band of doughty halflings with a cynical, s**t-head leper.

I read a stack of Terry Brooks novels back in the nineties, when I was a teenager, both his Shannara series (the first seven, I think) and his Magic Kingdom of Landover series (the first four?), checking them out one by one from the town library and devouring them. The Landover novels in particular I remember with fondness. But I recall going into Waldenbooks one day (this is when malls had bookstores) and seeing the next Landover installment on the shelf (Witch's Brew, I think), and suddenly realizing that the series was, in fact, an open-ended commercial venture. Shocked to the marrow, I turned my back on popular fantasy then and there, and began my Gollum-like transformation into the lurking curmudgeon I am today.

Anyway, it was the Shannara books I read first. Their shortcomings, which were obvious even to my tenth-grade-level literary acumen, have been pointed out many times, and I needn't dwell on them matter here. I genuinely enjoyed them. I don't know how I would feel upon rereading now. But there's no denying that the publication of The Sword of Shannara was a seminal event in the evolution of fantasy into the commercial genre we know today.

Now, I never encountered Stephen Donaldson back while I was still a happy Smeagol splashing by the banks of the Great River. But he's come to my attention a few times in recent years, and his darker take on Tolkienism interested the writer in me. So I picked up Lord Foul's Bane about five years ago...and promptly put it down when I encountered That One Part.

Let's get that out of the way before we move on.

The protagonist, toward the beginning of the novel, rapes a teenage girl, the daughter of his hosts. He's a leper. A moral leper, that is. Now, I defend the right of an author to write whatever accords with his or her artistic vision, and I'm not one of those people who think that everything a novelist writes about is some statement of their personal beliefs. Nevertheless, I put the book down at that point. It disturbed me. I didn't feel like reading a book where such things happen. Or rather, I didn't feel like reading such a book written by an author lacking the psychological profundity needed to write about such things without trivializing them. And I wasn't convinced that Donaldson had that profundity.

The strength of my disturbance, I think, owes to the identification I felt with Thomas Covenant, which was quite visceral due to the graphic depiction of his leprosy. (And this depiction is one of the novel's strengths, in my opinion.) I felt as though I were leering with him, first at a girl in the telephone company office, then at the sixteen-year-old Lena. The rape scene itself sent me down a well of vicarious guilt and horror.

[Aside: The cover of The Sword of Shannara sports a picture by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I like a lot of their work, despite the fact that it's dated and a bit goofy. The cover of Lord Foul's Bane features a lovely painting by one S. C. Wyeth, about whom I can't find any information. Is he related to N. C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth? The style recalls the elder.]

Maybe it's that I feel genre fiction to be too frivolous, written too much for pure entertainment, to justify the inclusion of such elements. Or maybe it's more a matter of style than anything else. I mean, if you're going to have your protagonist commit an unspeakable crime, then the plot sort of needs to be about that. It can't be one element among others. It's almost inconceivable that a mother would travel for weeks in the sole company of her daughter's rapist, however cogent the reasons, and the fictional depiction of such a journey should be a descent into an emotional hell. What we get, though, are descriptions of scenery.

I suspect, however, that we aren't meant to view Thomas Covenant in quite that light. The rape scene is presented as though we're supposed to imagine that he commits the act because he thinks he's in some kind of fever-dream or coma, and also because he's overwhelmed by the unexpected return of his lost virility. But if he's really the Unbeliever he always claims to be, why does he go through his VSE (visual surveillance of extremities) on every page? Why is he always reminding everyone that he's a leper? I mean, maybe I could accept the fever-dream excuse on a literary level if the presentation of the plot were consistent, if (say) he went on a febrile, Maskull-like odyssey of crime and depravity through the Land, but it's not. Covenant's supposed conviction that it's all a dream comes off more as an occasional pose. Which, I repeat, is a matter of style, not of morality.

And then there's the scene later on in the book when he lusts after another underage girl, and suddenly feels remorse for what he did to Lena, and basically decides to send her an annual present. Dude. That just makes you twice as creepy and despicable in my eyes. Which is fine if that's what the author intends, but here I don't think it is. Because it's presented as a climactic moment beginning Covenant's reconciliation with the Land and his opening up to friendship with his companions. So, ramifications continue to be felt, etc., but, to me, it all comes off as slightly phony.

Well, anyway, that's enough of that. It's a point reasonable people can disagree on. My own (purely stylistic) assessment is that the rape scene is presented so as to shock the reader's sensibilities, but that its inclusion isn't supported by the novel's subsequent meandering quest-plot. Still, there's something to be said for Covenant's moral numbness, the numbness of his leprosy, and his identification with Lord Foul, and I'll admit that there may be more to it all than I've seen at my first glance. On the moral side, I can see why it bothers people, but I'm going to suspend my judgment until I finish the trilogy.

As for the rest, well, I don't feel that it's worthwhile to comment much on the story until I've read the next installments. (Or maybe I'm afraid to throw rocks, having just published my own novel.) Instead, I'll talk about what struck me on every page of Lord Foul's Bane: the extent to which it draws from The Lord of the Rings. Just to name a few items, we have:

• Tolkienesque place-names like Mithil Stonedown, Kiril Threndor, Trothgard, and Glimmermere.
• People with sturdy, earthy, Anglo-Saxon names like Treeroot Branchtwig (okay, I made that one up). 
• A long journey to a big info-dump of a Council, which takes place midway through the book.
• Mysterious liqueurs that magically refresh you.
• Woodsy retreats and way stations.
• Slow, friendly giants who practically hoom-hom while they complain about the hastiness of their companions.
• Elvish-sounding exclamations like Melenkurion!
• A super-important gold ring that someone tries to bite off at the end.
• A city carved in a mountainside with a layout almost impossible to comprehend.
• Dark forests with angsty, anti-biped trees. 
• Geologically fanciful mountains.
• Horse People.
• A Dark Lord who returns after a long vacation but remains offstage.
• A volcanic climax. 

I could go on and on. It's got the potential of being a commentary on or deconstruction of The Lord of the Rings, what with its s**t-head leper of a protagonist and its opening in the Real World, which might be kind of cool in a way. And I say that as a Tolkien fan. But, in the thick of things, Lord Foul's Bane just becomes a somewhat shallow retread of something that had already been done, with a twist to make it seem original. For me, the Land remains mere artificial "scenery" (to quote a word from an ironic conversation in the novel); it doesn't come to life and make me long to enter it, like Middle-Earth.

It's no coincidence that books like The Sword of Shannara and Lord Foul's Bane were published the same year as The Silmarillion. For whatever reason, people were starving for more Tolkien, and there was simply no more to be had. So they had to settle with uneven compilations of his unpublished backstory material and new novels that mixed and matched his stylistic tics. It's taken a long time for the commercial genre to outgrow that. And maybe it never quite has. Certainly the fracking of Tolkien's unpublished works "goes ever on and on."

But I'm still struck by the narrowness of the adherence to Tolkien's vision. What, in fact, do we want when we want to read Tolkien? What is the real hunger that The Lord of the Rings whets without satisfying? I ask this as a writer who consciously (and probably unconsciously) adopts elements from Tolkien. What's really essential about his work? Is it something material, or something deeper, something hidden under the surface? When are you producing something truly new, and when are you just making a direct-to-DVD mockbuster?

There's not a simple answer to this, I suppose. While reserving my final judgment on Lord Foul's Bane until I finish at least the first trilogy, I'll just end with William Blake's pithy paradox:

The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is: the Bad Artist Seems to copy a Great deal. The Good one Really does Copy a Great deal.

The Words of Metal

I recently came across this interesting study at Degenerate State, a blog run by "an ex-physicist working as a data scientist".

The author reports on an informal analysis of word use in heavy metal lyrics as opposed to the "standard" American English represented by the Brown corpus, a collection of documents compiled by linguists in 1961. He defines a measure for the "metalness" of a word as the logarithm of the ratio of the frequencies of the word in the respective corpora. Basically, the more times a word appears in the metal corpus, and fewer times it appears in the Brown corpus, the greater its metalness will be. Each word has to appear at least five times in the respective corpora in order to be included in the study.

The most metal word is, apparently, burn, which has a metalness of 3.81; the least metal word is particularly, which has a metalness of -6.47. The top twenty most metal words are: burn, cries, veins, eternity, breathe, beast, gonna, demons, ashes, soul, sorrow, sword, goodbye, dreams, gods, pray, reign, tear, flames, and scream. The top twenty least metal words are: particularly, indicated, secretary, committee... Ugh, let's just stop there. This news story on the analysis puts it this way:

What you can infer from this is that the metal English is spoken from a timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space, while standard English is unremarkably deskbound. Perhaps this is why we hunger for metal in the first place.

Now, look at some of those metal words. Burn. Veins. Eternity. Beast. Demons. Ashes. Sword. Gods. Flames. Reads like a good old Robert E. Howard story. Which goes to show you what we already knew: metal loves sword-and-sorcery, weird horror, and even epic fantasy.

I'm not exactly what you'd call a metalhead. I'm not regular about listening to music of any sort, and rarely leave the mainstream. But I can say that I'd rather listen to certain brands of metal (the red part on the right of this cluster dendrogram, to be specific) than pretty much anything else, with Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam" at the dead center.

What I most like about Metallica is the way it sounds (duh), but I'm also drawn by the lyrics, which have a kind of dark, quasi-biblical, historical-mythological resonance, with occasional touches of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. Their best songs inhabit this dark desert landscape in my mind, imbued with a certain atmosphere that I can't quite describe but have tried introduce here and there in my writing.

Since I'm about to release my novel The King of Nightspore's Crown, it occurred to me to see how metal it is. Turns out it's pretty metal. In my highly unscientific count, I find that burn (or close variants, which, I know, is not quite fair) appears 28 times; cries (and variants), 98; beast, 67; demon (or daemon, rather), 22; sword, 90; dream, 51; scream, 25, etc. Each of the top twenty words appears at least several times, with the exception of gonna, which I don't use when translating from the nephelic tongue, for a total of 430 occurrences. By contrast, only five of the bottom twenty words appear, with 13 occurrences in all, and several of these in tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

This graph plots the metalness of all 10,000 words used in the study against their word length, with the horizontal axis representing metalness and the vertical representing length. I note that my stories (which tend to feature lone warriors pitted against primeval beasts, ancient aliens, and elder evil) are situated in the bottom right-hand corner, while my work e-mails (which deal with academic advising, faculty governance, and program assessment) inhabit the upper left-hand corner. And, certainly, my writing does take place in a "timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space," while my work life, it must be confessed, is "unremarkably deskbound".

Talk about your double lives. Sure, some might deride S&S (and metal) as puerile escapism. But who's to say which of these two lives is the real one, eh? Maybe I just keep my staid day job so that I can escape from the "timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space" of my burning dreams of gods and demons.

And Here's Another Wrap-Around Cover

At long last, I have more or less finished the cover painting for The King of Nightspore's Crown, and here it is:

It measures something like 12" x 9", painted on my trusty block of Arches hot-pressed, using a lot of Indian red. Other colors include burnt umber, cadmium red, gold ochre, Naples yellow, sap green, chrome green, cerulean blue, and French ultramarine. No black was used, as I find that it merely deadens the colors, but I have a lamentable weakness for Payne's gray (the only mixed color I use), and this contains some black pigment.

I started the picture in January and finished it today, working mostly late at night. There were about two months in there when I literally didn't have a single weekend to myself, due to various things that came up. A significant portion was painted while rocking a very light-sleeping baby with my foot, which takes a certain amount of coordination. What a life, what a life.

Anyway, on to other material elements. There's a bit of Henri Rousseau here, and also some Samuel Palmer. Like Palmer, I do love a good moon in a painting, especially a crescent moon.

I also looked at some book covers that I like, including one by Kinuko Craft for Perelandra and another by Leo and Diane Dillon for a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Another thing I really like are big murals of prehistoric life, like the ones at the Houston Museum of Natural History, or Zallinger's famous Age of Reptiles mural at Yale. My stories take place in a Paleozoic world, so this seems a fitting inspiration. Here we have a dimetrodon trying (and failing) to hide behind a stand of calamites.

Most of the plants are purely fantastic, however, in the sense that they have a place in neither geological antiquity nor my novel. I honestly just drew the shapes that pleased me, and colored them according to the same principles.

To paraphrase Winnie-the-Pooh, you just have to let things come in where they want. So the cover is more evocative than illustrative. I don't suppose any cover artist is in complete accord with the writer's ideas; I'm no different, even though I'm the same person.

As I've mentioned before, there are a lot of things to think about when making a wrap-around cover. In creating my festival of wrap-around cover art the other day, I began to surmise that much of it (the cover of Xiccarph, for instance) was trimmed down from pieces larger and more symmetrical. To produce a painting that will serve as a cover without serious cropping, you have to make sure that it falls naturally into three sections (front cover, spine, back cover) while remaining a unified whole (because you are a principled artiste who could do no less).

My spine, I think, is particularly successful:

There, wouldn't that look handsome on your bookshelf? Whether the other parts will come together remains to be seen. No doubt I'll have to tweak things a bit.

To get an idea of the truly glacial pace at which I paint, reflect that I worked through unabridged audiobooks of Titus Groan, The Bloody Crown of Conan, Dracula, King Solomon's Mines, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Imaro, Imaro 2, Nostromo, In a Glass Darkly, The Brothers Karamazov, and The House on the Borderland while in progress. That's not counting the time spent listening to Pink Floyd and the Doors.

I wanted very much to listen to Emma, which happens to be one of my favorite novels, but was afraid that Miss Woodhouse would make me lose my take-no-prisoners sword-and-sorcery mojo. I'm not joking about that. There's enough pink in the picture as it is.

Stay tuned for further developments in the publication of my upcoming novel.

Tower and Fish

Midnight painting madness continues apace. I am happy to report that I have almost one half of the cover (whether the front or the back I don't yet know) of The King of Nightspore's Crown more or less completed:

I say midnight painting, though of a truth much of this was produced on weekends, mostly while "napping" the baby by bouncing her little chair with my foot. She wakes up the instant I stop this motion, and it takes quite a bit of coordination to keep the bounces out of the picture. And yet somehow I've never been able to dribble a basketball.

At any rate, here we have an abstracted version of the pseudospherical Tower of Bel reaching up into the stratosphere against an Enochite skyline, with the Leviathan that symbolizes both primeval Chaos and the all-powerful State swimming into a brackish hemlath swamp. Some aspects remain to be touched up, but I like how it's going so far.

In case you've forgotten, here's the original sketch of the cover in toto:

The pigment is somehow mixed with the identical purple dresses of Cora and Clarice, the resurrection of the mummy Xaltotun, the beheading of the vampire Lucy Westenra, the squashing of the witch Gagool beneath a heavy door, the revelation of Pip's benefactor on a storm-tossed night, and the horrible spontaneous combustion of the rag-and-bottle merchant Krook. As you can see, I paint very, very slowly.

I am tentatively to have another art show this summer. My friend who runs the gallery, a forward-thinking MFA and art instructor at the local college, is always just a tiny bit disheartened by my staid attention to naturalism, my addiction to illustration, and my meticulous planning. So I hope to complete a few more abstract and spontaneous pictures before now and then to gladden his spirit. To that end, I'm working on the Chicken Man:

He was originally drawn to please my four-year-old daughter; the ghostly image of Margo, her orange dinosaurian crony, may be seen through the Chicken Man's right leg, on the next page of my sketch book. Why he's called the Chicken Man I don't know. Perhaps because it's a hard world for little things. His pathos fills me with sad tenderness.

His body is formed from turning a random squiggle into a surface by converting the crossings into shaded twists, forming (in topological terms) a punctured surface. This particular surface happens not to be orientable, as an examination of his right hip suffices to indicate. It follows that he's not a Seifert surface, though I wouldn't tell him this to his face. His genus is nine. Well, ten, if you count his little toe-loop.

Man, the obscure geometry and topology references just keep coming tonight. Maybe the pressure is starting to get to me.

Dark Valley Destiny, Part II

Well, it's time to wrap up my reflections on Dark Valley Destiny: A Biography of Robert E. Howard. The first part of this post can be found here; my crackpot theory that Howard was autistic can be found here. These reflections are, of course, quite self-centered, given that this is a blog; but Howard himself, the biography asserts, tended to see all the things he read only in relation to himself, so perhaps this is not inappropriate.

Howard's work space (but not his original desk (which
happens to be doing service as a coffee table in the town
where my sister-in-law lives)).

I had hoped to find more information in the second half of the book on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of Howard's professional writing career. The authors (L. Sprague de Camp & Co.) mention having failed to obtain permission to view certain correspondence, so perhaps this is not all their fault. What they do describe vis-à-vis Howard's daily writing activities I had gleaned for myself through a visit to the house and reading the notes to his collected works. To wit, Howard lived and wrote in a tiny walled-in porch behind his parents' bedroom, with no privacy and scarcely enough room for his bed and desk, pounding out story after story on a typewriter, usually working through about two drafts, sometimes with a preliminary synopsis and sometimes not.

Parenthetically, I must admit feelings of bemusement and chagrin at reading de Camp's estimation of Howard's various stories. He and his pal Lin Carter did the world – nay, the universe – inestimable service through their efforts to rescue various pulp writings from oblivion, but they were, I think, not the most perceptive of critics. Just my two cents.

The Howard family's living room.

Anyhow, the authors do provide a careful account of Howard's earnings. Here I was a bit surprised. Adjusting dollars for inflation, and taking the narrowness of the market into account, he didn't do half bad. Because he lived with his parents all his life, I had assumed he was unable to support himself through writing. On the contrary, although he probably couldn't have made a regular full-time job of it without some other means of support, he was a professional writer in a sense that no contemporary short-fiction fantasy author could ever be, the SFWA's six-cent-per-word threshold for "pro rates" notwithstanding.

Don't get me wrong. Living as I do from paycheck to paycheck, a story sold at six cents a word is nothing to sneeze at, and may even be the difference between (say) fixing a hot-water heater or going another month with cold showers. (Luckily I live in South Texas.) But I have a full-time job to pay the regular bills and expenses. Even if I sold stories every month to every available outlet, I wouldn't make enough money to support myself, let alone my family. Those were just different times. It was the era of the pulp magazine, before the rise of the mass-market paperback. I gather that a successful pulp writer of the thirties was something like what a moderately successful trade paperback author is now.

The Howard family's kitchen.

As I've mentioned before, one thing that makes Howard a sympathetic character to me is his utter isolation in rural Texas. He did have a number of friends with literary aspirations, and even contributed to a little circular among a clique of writerly acquaintances. But no one had an interest in anything like Weird Tales. His one literary confidant and love interest, Novalyne Price, found his work distasteful. Other Weird Tales authors were just as isolated, I suppose, but I would argue that a writer of weird fiction feels his isolation more keenly in rural Texas than in (say) Providence or California.

It's one thing to have magazine critics on the Internet say unpleasant things about your work, to which they have at least paid the compliment of reading it. It's quite another to have the people in your life despise you for your very devotion to a craft. Eventually you have to develop a thick skin, figure out – for yourself and no one else – what it is exactly that you're about, and learn to follow your own lights and not pay any heed to the hail of doubts and criticism. The danger in such a course is that you might end up going right off the deep end. It's never very safe to hardwire yourself to ignore warning signs.

Postcard from HPL to REH.

The end of Howard's life was dark. Despite my already being familiar with the circumstances of his death, I found this part of the book hard to read. There were some disturbing hints and details that I hadn't known before. Perhaps, instead of mourning his tragic end, we should be happy that it was no worse. I really do wonder what was passing through his mind during those last few days. But it's probably best to just let it lie.

This may be a disturbing admission, but reading about Howard's death called to mind a certain time of my own life, when I planned in all seriousness to commit suicide. I was in my late teens. Plenty of teens think about suicide as a way of feeling sorry for themselves, I suppose; but, then again, plenty of teens end up doing it, too. I think I would have done it. I had a lot of problems, due mainly (as I now know) to an undiagnosed developmental disorder. Things got worse the closer I got to graduating.

What tipped me over the edge was a single phone call from an adult scout leader. Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, I'd been elected to an office with duties in several counties. I was sixteen at the time. This leader, who was very enthusiastic, set himself up as my mentor. He came to my house with his ladyfriend and had big plans for me and my year-long term. But, you see, I'm this guy to whom making a telephone call to a stranger involves working myself up for hours or days ahead of time, only to collapse in a panic attack at the last moment; to whom participating in a conversation is like solving a Rubik's cube while riding a unicycle. That's how I am now, mind you – back then it was worse. So, long story short, I screwed up, and this leader let me have it (by telephone) at the end of my term. Even now I remember everything he said to me, about how I'd dashed his hopes, how disappointed he was in me, and how embarrassed he was in front of other adult leaders. I'm more than twice as old now, and it still bothers me. Damn.

But that episode was only the straw that broke the camel's back, of course. After I hung up I wrote a journal entry about knowing at long last what a despicable worm I was, and deciding that the best thing was to…well, you know. After considering all the possible methods, I settled on opening my wrists while taking a warm bath, an idea I'd gotten from The Godfather: Part II. I read about how to do this so as to ensure death, as I was quite intent on its being no mere "cry for help." At one point I painted a large picture of a teen in the act, a picture I later destroyed. I'd been in the habit for some years of secretly hurting or injuring myself in minor ways so as to alleviate pressure. Suicide seemed only a short step further.

More than self-hatred, I think the real driving force behind all this was my paralyzing fear of moving out on my own. In the back of my mind, I knew that that's precisely what I had to do: start a new life somewhere else. But I was terrified of such a change in my situation. Suicide was, to me, an honorable compromise. A compounding of various factors during my senior year only strengthened my resolve. I was, I recall, quite cold and rational about it, at the same time as being almost completely unhinged.

In the end, I made a deal with myself: I would go to college, and see if I could make some friends during the week before classes. If things didn't go well, I would kill myself. As it turned out, the first person I met was an older student, a kind young woman who ultimately became my wife. That probably saved my life. Things have never really gotten easier, though. To tell the truth, perhaps I'm not out of the woods yet even now. But I've gone a long way toward learning to live with my limitations. Knowing precisely what the limitations are helps a great deal, of course; otherwise, I'd just be shadowboxing my way down the road.

So, maybe Robert E. Howard shared my disorder. Maybe he had something else wrong with him. Maybe he was just a seriously messed-up guy whose life went bad. In the end, to quote one of my favorite films,

He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

Nightspore Update

We take a break from our series of rambling Robert E. Howard posts to bring you an update on my novel.

The working title is The King of Nightspore's Crown, though this may change for practical reasons. I do think it's cool-sounding. These days I'm working on revising the manuscript, which I completed in December. Here's a draft of the elevator pitch / back description:

The last scion of an extinct tribe, Keftu thought he had found a place among the misfits of Enoch's underworld. But the veiled warlock Zilla plots to revive the city's semi-divine oversoul, and all those who refuse assimilation will be destroyed. A homeless outcast, Keftu must single-handedly thwart Zilla's plans and wrest control of the sea-beast Gorgantiphon. With the aid of perilous alliances, he cuts a swath through a world of paleozoic darkness and daemonic splendor, from the dunes of the Fireglass to the decayed heart of Nightspore, in a desperate bid to steal the Star of Morning and confront the secrets of his own past.

I'm also at work on the book cover. As before, the finished product will feature a wrap-around cover in the style of mass-market paperbacks from the seventies. Here's my initial sketch:

The style owes to Samuel Palmer, Henri Rousseau, and certain book covers that I happen to like, among other things. I've transferred the image to my watercolor block and started painting. Here's what I've got so far:

I'm liking it pretty well at this point, so hopefully this doesn't jinx me! As far as fidelity to the text goes, it's more evocative than illustrative. But here at least is a case in which the cover artist has actually read the book all the way through. I'm still at work on the painted portion. I paint extremely slowly, with a size 0000 brush. On the whole, the painting is going to be quite dark, with the right-hand-side a glowing nocturnal scene. That's what I've got in my head, anyway.

I'm not certain yet which side would be best as the front of the cover. I could see it either way, depending on how the colors develop. For instance, something along the following seems rather nice to me:

 

 

The lettering's probably too light for the finished product but you get the idea. Then again, the marketing department would probably rather see a pair of guys hacking at each other on the front cover than a carnivorous placoderm fish. So we'll see how things develop.