Saturday, February 15, 2003
Sometimes stories, or, perhaps more precisely, characters, wriggle in beneath my skin and then refuse to wriggle back out again. It happened with Jimmy DeSade and Salmagundi Desvernine, Magwitch and friends, and so I wound up with Tales of Pain and Wonder, a little more than a short story collection, but not quite a novel. It happened with Chance and Deacon and Sadie, and so I wrote Low Red Moon. It happened with Spyder and Niki and Daria, and so I'm writing the novel that is no longer called Murder of Angels. And yesterday morning I awoke with the realization that Low Red Moon hadn't ended exactly the way I'd thought it had ended and now I think instead of these four interconnected novels, there may be five. I think this all arises from my belief that stories do not have genuine beginnings and endings, in the way that most of us traditionally accept that they do. A novel, or a short story, is a somewhat arbitrarily chosen portion of a continuum of a fictional timeline. I might have begun Threshold well before I did, and I might have ended it somewhere besides the place I chose to end it. Which is not to say that good writing doesn't require a recognition of structure and cycle, because it does. But, ultimately, fiction, like life, has no absolute beginnings and endings. Only the brackets that the author arbitrarily imposes upon her own imagination. Like the way we look at a history in decades or centuries or generations. A tool for our convenience that should never get in the way of understanding a deeper sense of the boundless fluidity of time.
I've been neglecting the words, which is Sloth, mostly, and a little Distraction and Despair.
And I begin to feel them pushing at me, wanting out.
Much of Thursday was spent searching for potential cover artists for the Subterranean Press editions of Low Red Moon and To Charles Fort, With Love (that's the title of the next short story collection, for now). Spooky and I spent about two hours browsing through the websites of various artists. We saw a little bit a very good stuff, and a fair amount of merely competent stuff, and a disheartening amount of crap. But I think what bothered me the most were the dozens, literally dozens, of people recycling H. R. Giger and calling it their own artwork. I'm not talking about people who've obviously been influenced by Giger. I'm talking about people who are simply parroting him. Copying. In writing, we call it plagiarism. The worst of the bunch even included illustrations of his biomechanoid monster from Alien. It's one thing to doodle such images for your own pleasure, or as an exercise to hone your drafting skills, but it's another thing entirely to do it and then present it in an online portfolio as your artwork. You might as well be using a scanner or a photocopier. It would have been a bit less disheatening, perhaps, if the plagiarists had at least presented me with a little variety, maybe some obvious rip-offs of Dore, Beardsley, Beksinski, Dali, or Bosch. Anyway, like I said, I did see some good stuff and I have a few leads on cover artists.
I hope that I've not become a nuisance regarding Farscape. I'm afraid of getting the way Lenny Bruce got towards the end, annoying the hell out of everyone with a personal crusade. I just haven't encountered a lot of television worth fighting for and I think it's thrown me a little off balance. Last night's episode, "A Constellation of Doubt," was another of those amazing hours that leaves me sadly bewildered, wondering how SciFi got its head so far up its own ass, wondering why more people aren't watching, wondering why doing a thing well is never enough. I think this whole silly mess with Farscape has struck too many chords with me as a writer. All along, my part on the campaign to save the show has been, in large measure, a defence of my own work. We're all in the same boat, really. The same leaky boat crowded to overflowing with unimaginative, soulless fuckers we should have left back there on the sinking ship. I know what it feels like to do a thing well, and know you've done a thing well, which is all that can be asked of any artist, and watch while the bottom line has its way with you. That knowledge that you might be damn good at what you do, but there are words like "salable" and phrases like "more accessible" always getting in the way. So, to everyone who I might have annoyed, or who might be wondering why I've lavished so much time and attention upon a television show, there you go. Sympathy. A prayer that art can triumph over marketing and Nielsen ratings and the fickle strategies of network executives.
I should write today, but I have that flat, listless feeling that says that I probably won't.
A confession may be necessary, if this keeps up.
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