Year: 2014
Farewell to 2014
Yet another year gone? Oh my!
I will keep the reading side of this brief, since the majority of my best reads for the year are going to appear on a guest post for The Book Smugglers. I did end up reading two major books after writing that particular list: the fantastically weird Lanark and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The second is gentle and dreamlike for the most part, making the flashbacks to Manchukuo in the 1930s all the more harrowing. I have more Murakami in the wings since my local used bookstore suddenly had, as far as I can tell, all his novels except IQ84, and I immediately snatched them up for my bookshelf. I’m looking forward to working through the rest.
“Mrs. Yaga” Anthologized
The first six stories published by The Book Smugglers are now available in a handy anthology format, including my story “Mrs. Yaga.” Retold: Six Fairytales Reimagined is available from Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords and direct from the publishers.
There’s also a giveaway running until December 31!
That’s not all: You can now obtain prints for the cover art of all six stories in the format of your choice. Yes, that includes wall clocks.
Lanark: An Appreciation
Lanark is a weird book.
Published in 1981 after 25 (!) years in the writing, Alasdair Gray seemed bent on creating the most unpublishable novel imaginable and still managed to capture interest from the Scottish artistic community—spurring many cryptic and whispered coffeehouse conversations about his sprawling mess of a thousand or more pages—and nabbing a publisher in the end after all. At least, William Boyd’s introduction to my edition gives this impression: Gray, the eccentric muralist, through the power of his wild beard, seemed to have radiated an air of plunging into madness while composing his lifetime masterpiece against the scoffing of those who thought his words would never see the light of day. I’m not sure if that introduction isn’t itself a metatextual device like just about everything in this book: there’s a significant section where one character works on a masterwork (a mural this time) that drags on and on in the process of creation only for the church he’s painting to get slated for destruction. Gray’s afterward does make it apparent that a good many publishers didn’t want to touch it before Canongate came along, but that also accounted for the length of writing and revision: the novel he shopped around first was much shorter and didn’t have most of the strangeness. While the final version wasn’t the rumoured thousand pages long, there is an entire world there that wasn’t initially part of Lanark.
Another rough draft done
Yesterday, I finished the novel I started writing for NaNoWriMo. It includes significant sections written without commas and employing quotation dashes.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
NaNoWriMo Wrap-up
NaNoWriMo is essentially over for 2014 except for those who are still scrabbling to make up their 50,000 words before midnight hits.
It’s certainly over for me. I made it to 40,410 words today, which is 10,000 more than I expected to write and 10,000 less than I was aiming for. This was my first time doing NaNoWriMo and I admit I wasn’t remotely prepared for it: I only decided to do it two days before the first of November hit and I had nothing prepared beyond a premise: no notes, no plot, no ending, and certainly no outline.
Yeah, I pantsed the hell out of this thing.
Episode 18 – The Long and Rambling Conversation of Dune
Frank Hebert’s Dune is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. Naturally, we have a lot to say about it.
Episode 17 – A Podcast for Leibowitz
Science! Religion! History! A far-ranging discussion of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s epic post-apocalyptic Catholic-monks-in-Utah novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Finally…”Mrs. Yaga” appears!
On Writing “Mrs. Yaga”
New post over on The Book Smugglers on the inspirations behind “Mrs. Yaga.” The story will be published tomorrow!
One Last Sketch 
