Teaching Visions

The Werepig Show

2010-07-26T05:53:00.000-07:00

07.26.10

Just wrapped up a busy convention weekend (Confluence 23) with a 90 minute interview at Greg Hall's The Funky Werepig Show, where we talked about great teachers, influential editors, worthwhile causes, the craft of writing, and (of course) the books -- Visions, Veins, Vipers (Fantasist Enterprises) and This Way to Egress (Ash-Tree Press). It's all available for download at Blog Talk Radio and iTunes. Check it out . . . and share the vision!

Kicking Forward

2010-07-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

07.21.10

These are busy times. I'm in the process of gearing up for Confluence 23, where I'm scheduled for a string of readings, panels, and book-related sessions all day Saturday. Then, on Sunday, you'll find me on Blog Talk Radio's The Funky Werepig Show, hosted by the always entertaining Greg Hall. If you've got time, I hope you'll drop by, give a listen.

This weekend's events are the first in a string of appearances that I'll be doing in support of the new book, which has just received a terrific review from Publishers Weekly.

Things are definitely popping.

But today's topic is Kickstarter and the campaign that William Horner is running to help underwrite the production of his next volume of Fantastical Visions. The previous four volumes of the FV series featured strong stories by a host of up-and-coming writers, and the current volume looks to be the best yet.

Here's how Horner describes it on his website:

Fantastical Visions V will feature 16 fantasy short stories (each accompanied by one or two illustrations), including Sarah Totton’s “Ride,” in which a boy of mixed race attempts to earn acceptance in his community by riding through a haunted forest. In E.J. Alexander’s “The Most Daunting Task of All,” a warrior trapped in a perilous land must overcome his prejudices to survive. A woman discovers her seemingly innocuous magical talent may be the key to toppling a dictatorship and saving her people from oppression in Stephen Couch’s “Threads,” and in Nancy Fulda’s “A Song of Blackness,” a man obsessed with restoring his children to their rightful heritage finds that victory may come at the cost of horrendous sins.

It sounds like a terrific lineup, and as a reader and someone interested in supporting markets for emerging talent, I'm eager to see Horner's fundraising campaign succeed.

A few days ago, the campaign passed its 1/3 mark, but with only ten days to go, it's going to take more support from people who care about good books to make this fundraiser a success. If you like to read, the incentives alone make this a project worth supporting . . . and it's a terrific way of paying forward.

Here's the link. Check it out. And pass it on!

Paying Forward

2010-07-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

07.20.10

A few month's ago, on Greg Hall's The Funky Werepig, author Thomas F. Monteleone told of how sf editor Damon Knight once line edited a story for him. The edits put the young writer on a path that eventually led to a string of bestselling books, but when Monteleone asked how he might return such generosity, Knight suggested that, instead of paying back, the young writer might one day consider "paying forward."

Paying forward is a long-standing tradition among writers, a tacit understanding that the student will become the new master who will, in turn, guide the next generation of students.

Last month, during my summer residency at Seton Hill University, I heard David Morrell tell a story about his teacher Phil Klass. It's a story that I had heard many times, from both Morrell and Klass, but it's one I never tire of hearing. Basically, it's about how a young man in search of a writing voice and a father figure found both while attending Penn State University in the 1960s. At that time, Phil Klass (better known to sf readers as William Tenn) was the resident writer at Penn State. Working with Klass, Morrell created a thesis project titled First Blood (which he dedicated "to Philip Klass and William Tenn: each in his own way").

Last month, when I saw Morrell in a Seton Hill lecture hall talking to an assembly of young writers about the process of becoming a novelist, he was practicing the art of paying forward.

In a way, I was also one of Phil Klass's mentees. For a while, I lived down the street from him in Pittsburgh's South Hills, and once a month we got together for dinner at a local restaurant. It was never just the two of us. Other writers attended, so many that at times we talked of calling ourselves "Tenn's Nine" or "Tenn's Dozen." But regardless of how many of us there were, we all learned from the master.

Phil passed away last winter, in the thick of a week-long snowstorm that blanketed the Pittsburgh area with 3-4 feet of snow. Travel was treacherous, making a suitable memorial impossible. But now the roads are clear, and this coming weekend a Phil Klass memorial is being held at Confluence 23. I'll be there.

But teaching isn't the only way to pay forward. Tomorrow, I'd like to share an update on W. H. Horner's Kickstarter campaign and talk once again about how you can get involved with helping provide a showcase for a new generation of writers. I'll also have a few announcements and surprises, so be sure to check back.

In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, check out Horner's video . . . and share the vision!

Guest Blog at "Tattooed Head"

2010-07-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

07.19.10

While you're sitting around waiting for the next installment of TV (Teaching Visions, of course), why not drop over to one of my favorite blog sites, "Ramblings of a Tattooed Head" (by Simon Marshall-Jones ), where my guest blog attempts to answer the timeless question: How long does it take to write a novel?

As much as possible, TV postings occur every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday . . . with occasional specials and more than a few long hiatuses.

I'll be back tomorrow with a Kickstarter update and a Confluence preview. See you then!

Approaching the Finish Line: Part 2

2010-07-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

07.14.10

It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction.”

The quotation is from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. It’s about Francis Cugat’s cover for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and it contains one of the more enduring typographical errors in American literature.

We’ll get to the error in a moment, but first let’s talk about book covers.

As the story goes, when Fitzgerald saw Cugat’s preliminary sketches, he was so intrigued by the image of eyes in the sky that he added a new sequence in the novel. Here’s a slice of it:

[…] above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their retinas are one yard high.

Incidentally, that passage contains another one of American literature’s most enduring errors, but for the moment we’re considering the benefits of artistic collaboration. The topic of editing will come later.

As I mentioned yesterday, the illustrations that artist Gerasimos Kolokas did for my forthcoming novel Vipers helped me clarify elements of the book while I was doing my final revisions. In one instance, an illustration of a character sitting in an antique chair inspired a revealing bit of description that had not been in the novel’s first draft. I added the following after seeing the illustration:

[…] it was a heavy antique, an heirloom taken from his father’s study. He eased into it, feeling the slow wisdom of its weight, the purity of its construction. He set his hands on the armrests. The wood and leather spoke to him. We are brothers and sisters, plant and animal, children of the earth. And beneath those whispers, the deeper voice of brass accents and iron nails. We are the fathers and mothers. Iron and alloy. Ancient as the stars. Eternal.

The details are perfect for a book about temporary existence in the face of eternal forces, and yet that antique chair was not mentioned in the book’s first draft. It took an artist’s reinterpretation of the scene to show me the way.

And writers do occasionally need to be shown the way.

Vipers is being released by FE Books, a relatively new publisher headed by W. H. Horner, a young and gifted editor who would like to become known as the Maxwell Perkins of fantasy and horror. He talks about his ambitions in a recent video he made for Kickstarter, and as I work with him on the final edits of Vipers, I am more convinced than ever that he is on his way to realizing that goal. I’ve been writing for a while, and I’ve worked with some of the top editors in the business. W. H. Horner certainly ranks with the best of them.

We started this week’s series of postings by considering the element of time in the novel-writing process, but writing a novel takes more than time. It takes planning, visualizing, and careful editing. As pointed out in Monday’s post, I started work on Vipers with a detailed plan (synopsis) and a collection of rough visualizations (maps and timelines). But as I near the finish line, I’m benefitting by working with people who are helping me hone my vision. It makes the job a bit more demanding, but the results are richer for it.

The errors in the above passages? You saw them, right?

In the Hemingway quotation, the second sentence is missing the word like.

In the Fitzgerald passage, the word retinas really should be irises.

In the passage from Vipers . . . there isn’t one. It’s gone. W. H. Horner flagged it during final editing.

Back next week! See you here.

Approaching the Finish Line

2010-07-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

07.13.10

Finishing a novel is a lot like running a race against Achilles’ tortoise. You know the story, the one in which a tortoise convinces Achilles that a finish line can’t be reached. You can find a summary here.

Of course, as anyone who has faced a deadline knows, finish lines are real. Thesis projects have due dates, and books have scheduled launches. The trick is making sure the work itself is truly finished, and doing that requires planning, daily effort, and demanding editors.

I had all those things on Vipers.

The book started as a detailed synopsis assembled back in May 2009. Since Vipers is a sequel, I needed to take care to build on the details laid out in the first book (Veins 2008). Such building requires attention to the placement of landmarks and roads as well as the relationships of the primary characters. Moreover, since both Vipers and Veins employ scenes that overlap and backtrack in complex ways, I needed to make sure I had the sequence of events clearly established before I started writing.

To that end, I augmented my synopsis with detailed maps and timelines that I could consult (and modify as needed) during the writing process.

Some writers feel that detailed outlining and planning
diminish the joys of discovery. They want to write their books as the action plays out. They want to be surprised in the same ways that the book’s readers will be surprised when chains of events lead to unexpected twists. I want the same things. I love that moment when details that I’ve put in motion lead down unplanned paths, and I experienced many such moments while working on the synopsis for Vipers. Timelines, maps, and synopses don’t diminish such possibilities, they enhance them.

The actual writing of the book took four months, with the preliminary manuscript being submitted right around the time of World Fantasy in October 2009. After submitting the book, I got straight to work on This Way To Egress, the story collection that Ash-Tree Press released at World Horror in March 2010. I also wrote some new short fiction in that period, endeavoring to clear my plate in time for the rewriting and editing of Vipers, which began this past April.

The final steps toward the finish line involved working with the editing and design teams at FE Books. Part of this final process involved collaborating with FE artist Gerasimos Kolokas on the book’s illustrations, which further helped me visualize the book’s characters and scenes. There’s a story about how the artist Francis Cugat helped F. Scott Fitzgerald visualize one of the key symbolic element of The Great Gatsby, and I found myself thinking about that relationship as I worked with Gerasimos on his illustrations for Vipers.

More about that tomorrow. Until then, remember . . . they’re coming!

Writing and the World at Large

2010-07-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

07.12.10

A few months back, we were talking about time: where to find it, how to use it, where it goes.

Time is certainly one of the most precious commodities in a writer’s life, and apparently one of the scarcest.

I’ve recently returned from my summer residency at Seton Hill University, and, although it pulled me away from some writing projects, I must admit I had a terrific time.

One of the highlights of the residency was a reading forum organized by the students. The point of the event wasn’t so much to share work (since the graduate writing program offers plenty of formal activities for doing that), but rather to give students experience reading work aloud at public venues. To that end, each reader was given five minutes to read, with the timekeeper starting the clock after the work was introduced and calling time with stopwatch precision when the five-minutes were up. The time limits gave everyone a chance to read and still get to bed at a decent hour (classes resumed early the following morning).

One of the highpoints of the evening was a reading by WPF faculty member Scott A. Johnson, who read “The Night Before Christmas,” a flash pastiche from his Dreadtime Stories podcast series. It was a terrific performance from a seasoned writer who, not coincidentally, would be giving a three-hour module titled “Reading Your Own Work” later in the residency.

The students were also kind enough to give me a couple of reading slots. Like Scott, I read selections that fit easily into the five-minute time limit: “Step on a Crack” (Vision) and “Shooting Evil” (This Way to Egress). You can hear studio recordings of the stories by clicking on the titles.

If you’ve been following this blog, you already know my views on the art of live presentation, and I’m glad I got the chance to sit in on the student-sponsored reading . Yes, it took me away from some projects I was anxious about completing, but sometimes the best writing-related activities take place in the world at large with people you really enjoy being with.

Tomorrow I’d like to talk about the elephant in my room, the biggest thing going on in my life right now, and the main reason why I wasn’t sure I had time to take part in this summer’s SHU residency. The project is called Vipers. It’s a followup to my previous novel Veins, and I’ve just finished what I trust will be my final batch of edits and revisions. The book comes out September 7 from the good people at Fantasist Enterprises, who are planning a big preview at GenCon in Indianapolis in early August.

I’m really excited about this one, and I’d like to give you a little preview. So check back soon, big things are happening, and I want to make sure you hear about them first.

Until then, share the vision . . . and watch out for flying snakes!

Kickstarting

2010-07-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

07.07.10

We believe in supporting the good guys, right?

I’d like to tell you about one of them.

A little over a decade ago, W. H. Horner launched Fantasist Enterprises with a plan to publish quality paperback anthologies that were as well designed as the stories they showcased.

Over the years Horner has succeeded with a line of beautifully illustrated, carefully edited, and wonderfully readable books, the flagship of which is the Fantastical Visions series.

From the beginning, Horner established Fantastical Visions as a place where new writers could get feedback from professional editors and, if their work was strong enough, have their words appear alongside those of established professionals. But Fantastical Visions isn’t only about writers. Most of all, it’s about the reading experience. As Horner puts it:

We are dedicated to reawakening the sense of wonder that our modern society can so easily suppress and disregard. We want our readers to recapture the wide-eyed glee they had as children, thinking that old trees contained spirits and clouds hid floating castles. We want them to study the shadows, trying to catch that strange movement they thought they saw, and experience visions that linger on the edges of their waking minds.

The hardworking people at FE are currently assembling Fantastical Visions V, an anthology that looks to be their strongest collection ever. The book will feature 16 tales, each accompanied by one or more full-page illustrations commissioned specifically for the work.

To help underwrite production, FE has teamed with Kickstarter.com to help cover some of the printing and payment to contributors. (FE has always endeavored to pay competitive rates for art and fiction.) Through Kickstarter, people who wish to support FE can pledge support in exchange for gift incentives that in most cases match or even exceed the value of the pledge. In other words, every one wins.

If you enjoy reading fantasy anthologies that are as expertly crafted and edited as the stories they contain, or if you are a writer or artist interested in supporting a series of books that continues to serve as a showcase for new work, consider making a Kickstarter pledge. More information about the campaign can be found here.

For more about FE’s titles, please visit their website.

You can also drop by a special display at my own website, which I plan to update as I follow the progress of FE’s campaign.

Take a look, make a pledge, and share the vision!

Writing Genre Fiction: Finding Time

2010-01-27T13:43:00.000-08:00

01.27.10

Time for one more question, and here it is:

How do you find the time to write?

That's a good one. Fortunately, finding time isn't really the issue. There's plenty of time. It's all around us, flying by every second. The trick is setting some of it aside for writing, something that can be pretty daunting for a new writer, especially if he or she is a graduate student with a job, family, or anything resembling a social life. Sometimes my students talk about taking leaves of absences from school or work. Other times they might consider locking themselves away from family and friends for a few weeks, long enough to get a good start on a project or meet a deadline. But I've never been a fan of those approaches. Walking away from or shutting out the stuff of life for weeks at a time isn't the answer. Working smart and prioritizing is.

Suppose you can set aside two hours a day for writing. That two hours needs to be productive, and it's during that block that you shut out the world's other demands. If your writing space has a door, close it. If it doesn't, put on some earphones and hit play. I favor electronica, jazz, and classical -- stuff without words. While I'm writing, the only words I want in my head are my own.

In my experience, it's also vital to tune out the telephone, email, instant messenger, and tweets. That stuff will all still be there when you finish your writing session. Remember, you're not abandoning those things, only asking them to retire back awhile, suffice at what they are, but never forgotten. (Thank you Uncle Walt.)

Then, for two hours, you write. Nothing else. Multitasking is a myth. The world of fiction demands concentration.

I have a colleague who, using this approach, has written a string of novels on his lunch hours at work. For me, I find the evening is best. Find a time that works for you, set it aside, and use it productively.

Naturally, there is a limit to what you can accomplish in two hours, and sometime you will find you have various writing projects competing for your attention. When deadlines loom, you may be faced with the prospect of setting one project aside in favor of another.

At the moment, I'm facing a number of looming project -- each growing ever closer as I sit typing these words. One is the final rewrite on my next novel. The other is a string of spoken word performances that begin in early February in anticipation of my forthcoming collection This Way to Egress (due out in March). And then there are two new short stories that I have promised to deliver before leaving for World Horror. That's a lot. Clearly, if I'm going to get those things done, something has got to go.

Can you guess what that is?

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to shut the door for awhile, take another break from Teaching Visions, and hope to be back just as soon as I've got a handle on those other projects.

In the meantime, if you have any comments, please post one or drop me an email.

I'll be back as soon as I can. Until then, keep prioritizing . . . and share the vision.

Writing Genre Fiction: Taglines - Part 2

2010-01-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

01.26.10

Here are a couple of good taglines I've seen recently, ones strong enough to make me pick up the book:

The city is alive tonight . . . and it's her job to keep it that way.
The Better Part of Darkness by Kelly Gay

In the fight to save humanity, she's the weapon of choice.
Bitter Night by Diana Pharoah Francis

As for ones I've seen that didn't work, how about these:

Can the hidden colony of Marseguro survive rediscovery?
Marseguro by Edward Willett

Beneath Boston's historic streets, and ancient power stirs...
Spiral Hunt by Margaret Ronald

The two that work both end with clever twists, something that the tag for Spiral Hunt tries to do as well. But "an ancient power stirs" seems tepid, needlessly vague, not particularly ... well ... stirring.

To be fair, the tags that didn't work for me are hardly the worst I've seen. For some truly dreadful ones, let's go to the movies:

When all else fails, they don't.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra

The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.
Suspiria

He was dead, but he got better.
Crank: High Voltage

Of course, in all fairness, I'm sure that the Crank tag is supposed to be goofy.

Coming up with one of these little verbal trailers is far from easy, something I found out when I decided to try my hand at coming up with one for Veins. I started by looking at models, hanging out in Barnes & Nobel, pulling books off the shelf, making lists of tags that grabbed me. Then, using those as models, I set about making lists of my own tags.

Since Veins is set in an abandoned surface mine, I tried coming up with phrases that dealt with scars, wounds, blood (always a good word to use when tagging a horror novel), and coal. The worst one on my list? I suppose that would have to be this one:

In coal blood.

The list was long. Two pages. More than fifty tries, but gradually something started to emerge. Near the end of the list, I came up with these:

If you abandon a wound, it will never heal.
Abandoned wounds never heal.
Some wounds never heal.

That last one made it to the cover, and I'm pleased with it. Those four words represent the essence of the book: setting, theme, and conflict. After writing them, I knew that the book would hold together. Better yet, I knew that it was marketable.

For me, that kind of confirmation is why I think coming up with your own tags is worth the effort. Doing so enables you to better understand the book by capturing the essence of your project in a kind of verbal snapshot.

I don't have a formula for writing tags. Only a process: study models, make lists.

And since the first part of the process involves looking at book covers, please let me know what you find -- the best as well as the worst.

We'll round out the week tomorrow with one more question. Until then, remember this: the only thing better than tomorrow's question are the ones I've already answered.

Writing Genre Fiction: Taglines

2010-01-25T14:57:00.000-08:00

01.25.010

That's Adrian Rawlings and Lee Blakemore in a scene from Charly Cantor's Blood (1999), a film that Fantasia Magazine called "one of the most intriguing films ever made on the subject of addiction." It was Cantor's second film, and would have marked the beginning of an impressive career had he not fallen ill shortly after its completion. He died a few years later, leaving the world with two films, a few unproduced screenplays, and a sense of what might have been.

One of those as yet unproduced films is This Way to Egress. He finished the screenplay shortly before his death. Last week I filled you in on the origin of the title. Today I'd like to talk about taglines.

You know what a tagline is, right? It's that little phrase or clause that sometimes appears on a book cover or movie poster, an aphorism designed to attract attention, induce interest. Want some examples? Check these out:

Twilight

When you can live forever, what do you live for.

Jaws 2

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Alien

In space, no one can hear you scream.

Long a staple in film marketing, taglines have become increasingly visible on book covers. But I never gave them much thought until Charly and I had that conversation about the title of Egress. (See last week's blogs for more details.) That was the night that he also shared the tagline for the screenplay. It was simple, concise, and dead-on perfect for the story:

Reality is a contract we make with ourselves.

I thought it was an intriguing way of conceptualizing the story. More than the title. Not quite a summary.

Although tagline development has traditionally been the job of publishers and ad departments, it doesn't hurt to try coming up with a good one on your own. If nothing else, it might verify the marketability of your work in progress. It might also serve you well in a pitch session. Moreover, in this age of short-staffed publishers, the tag you come up with might well appear on your book.

And so we arrive at this week's question.

Do you have any advice on how to come up with tags for your book? How do you identify the most important ideas to represent and condense them down to a phrase?

We'll consider that tomorrow.

Writing Genre Fiction: Titles - Part 3

2010-01-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

01.20.10

Back in the early 90s, I sold a story to Borderlands 3, the non-theme anthology of imaginative fiction edited by Thomas F. Monteleone. I titled the story "Traumatic Descent," which at the time seemed like a darn fine title.

The story centers on a character coping with the psychological trauma of a failed marriage -- trauma that has plunged her into a world where dark shapes move about in lumbering indifference. As the story progresses, the protagonist realizes that the trauma has caused her to descend into a lower sphere of existence, one from which there is only one way out, an exit so unthinkable that even the promise of release cannot compel her to take it.

There is a pivotal scene late in the story, one in which the protagonist sees a dim sign beside a dark doorway. The sign reads: "This Way to Egress." She doesn't take the door. Instead, she opens another that plunges her into her biggest nightmare of all.

The hardback edition of Borderlands 3 was released in 1993. It had a powerful cover by Rick Lieder. That's it in the upper left.

The following year, White Wolf released the paperback edition with a cover by Dave McKean. That's it on the right. Startling, isn't it? If your taste leans toward the surreal and you see that book in the store, you are definitely going to pick it up, and that's exactly what happened when a young filmmaker entered a London bookstore in the late 90s. That filmmaker was Charly Cantor, best known for the cult horror film Blood. He finished Blood in 1999. The following year he contacted me about securing the rights to "Traumatic Descent." If we could come to an agreement, he wanted to adapt my story as his next project.

A few months later, after I'd signed the option agreement and cashed the check, Charly asked me if I'd mind going with another title for the screenplay.

"You don't like 'Traumatic Descent'?" I asked.

"It's not that I don't like it," he said. "It's just that the producers think it sounds a bit like it an airplane story."

I'd never considered that, but once he said it I knew he was right.

"We were wondering," he said, "if you'd mind very much if we went with 'This Way to Egress'?"

Did I mind? Not at all. Indeed, it struck me as perfect for the story -- so perfect that I wondered why it hadn't occurred to me before. And to think that it had been sitting there in the story the whole time, waiting for me to pull it out and use it for the title.

Therein lies my final bit of advice: sometimes the search for a perfect title need go no farther than the story itself. In fact, I am now so sold on that title that I have decided to use it for my next book -- a collection of horror stories from the multiple-award winning publisher Ash-Tree Press. The book, featuring an incredible cover by Jason Zerrillo, will be released this March. Interestingly, the film has yet to enter production.

Now there's one more piece to the story about my title-changing conversation with Charly Cantor. It involves something called a tagline. Come back on Monday, and I'll tell it to you.

But right now, if you'll follow me . . .

I think it's this way to egress.

Writing Genre Fiction: Titles - Part 2

2010-01-19T14:37:00.000-08:00

01.19.10

I heard a story once about how Orson Welles was excited about the look of the title Citizen Kane because it had both a Z and a K in it. I don't know if the story is apocryphal, but there's no denying that Citizen Kane is a great title, appealing to both the sense of sight and sound. Now I don't suggest that writers get bogged down worrying about such things. And yet, it's prudent to remember that the title you give your manuscript will (if the publisher doesn't change it) eventually appear on your book's cover. How big do you want that title to be? Do you want it to display well and still leave room for some cool cover art? If so, then you'll want to keep that title short. And if you can come up with a word or phrase that includes a few distinctive consonants, so much the better.

And don't forget the sound. I recall a reviewer once complaining about The Book of Baraboo by Barry B. Longyear. It wasn't that it was a bad book. (Indeed, as I recall it was, it was quite enjoyable.) It was just that the reviewer thought that "The Book of Baraboo by Barry B. Longyear" sounded funky. Then again, it's memorable.

The titles of my books for Fantasist Enterprises (Veins, Visions, and the forthcoming Vipers) were all selected to be short, resonant, and visually interesting. I thought that each might look good on a cover, and I'm pleased how the artists have begun using that initial V to create a uniform design, lending a bit of brand recognition to the books.

Your mileage may vary, but these are some of the things that I think of when brainstorming titles. There are no absolutes, no formulas for what makes one title better than the next, and you may have some very good reasons for going with a title that follows none of my suggestions. Sometimes a title just feels right to the author, as is the case with the title of my next book -- a title that at first might seem to disregard most everything I've covered these past two days. And yet, I think the title works.

Tomorrow, well talk about This Way to Egress.

Writing Genre Fiction: Titles - Part 1

2010-01-18T14:03:00.000-08:00

01.18.10

As mentioned in the previous installment, I'd like to devote some time to responding to questions submitted by the MFA candidates who attended my most recent talks at Seton Hill University.

So here's the first question:

How have you come up with compelling titles?

Great question. Not only does it deal with an often overlooked element of writing, but it implies that the titles I have come up with are good ones. Indeed, I'd like to think that most of them are.

In 2008 Fantasist Enterprises launched my series of supernatural thrillers set in the coalfields of western Pennsylvania. The first book is titled Veins. The second, due out this summer, is Vipers. Considering that my recently released collection of fantasy and science fiction stories is titled Visions, one might assume that I favor one word titles, and sometime I do. But there's more to it than that.

Let's consider what I was going for.

First of all, the name that you give to a book has got to do more than simply get a reader interested. It needs to inform as well.

Veins is a visceral novel. Characters are maimed along the way. Blood is shed. The reader who expects such things will not be disappointed, but the veins of the title are not human veins, not blood veins. They are, instead, the veins of the earth -- the coal veins that line the strata of exposed hillsides in western Pennsylvania. Such veins are a major part of the novel's landscape and symbolism, and as a result, the novel's title resonates in a kind of three-part harmony with the book by conveying aspects of the narrative's setting, themes, and violent conflict.

Visions functions in much the same way, not only because many of the stories deal with hallucinations, but because the book itself is presented as a visionary experience. If you've read the book, you know what I mean. If you haven't, go read it.

The title Vipers also carries multiple meanings, though I will say even less about that one here. All will be revealed when the book debuts at GenCon this summer.

So the first thing you want your title to do is accurately represent important aspects of the book's contents. Ideally, the reader should go in expecting one thing, but along the way he or she should begin to realize a deeper significance -- a sense of irony or nuance that gradually becomes evident during the reading.

You will also notice that the titles are plural nouns presented without articles (Veins, Visions, and Vipers as opposed to The Veins, The Visions, and The Vipers). Nouns are generally a good choice, and articles, since the role they serve in sentences is usually not necessary in single words or phrases, can generally be omitted.

And what about all those Vs? What's up with them? We'll discuss that aspect tomorrow.

Until then, share the vision!

The Return of TV

2010-01-14T14:01:00.000-08:00

01.14.10

I've just returned from Seton Hill University and my winter residency in the Writing Popular Fiction Program. It was a great time, a chance to get together with colleagues and some talented up-and-coming novelists. I always leave there wishing that the next residency weren't so far off. So now here I am, back home and eager for it to be June.

My lectures this time were "Exposition Through Dramatization" and "Structure and Synopsis Writing." Each ran three hours, which always seems too short.

I like to begin these lectures (or modules, as we call them in the program) by giving the students index cards to use in submitting question that occur during the presentation. The cards are not intended to replace verbal questions, which may be asked at any time. Instead, they're for tangential queries -- things that might be off-topic but worth addressing. I usually try to respond to some of them when I collect the cards , but this time -- given the volume of material that I had to cover -- I responded to fewer than usual.

And the questions are darn good.

So now that I'm back home, I'm thinking it's time to once again fire up the old TV. (That's TV as in Teaching Visions, or course.)

With the exception of a couple of book events in February, I'll probably be free enough to keep blogging until my next book comes out in March.

(That book, by the way, is This Way to Egress from Ash-Tree Press. The cover is by Jason Zerillo, design by Jason Van Hollander. I'll be telling you lots more about it before it debuts this spring at World Horror in Brighton.)

So be sure to check back here every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday -- starting March 18, for some poignant Q&A on exposition, dramatization, synopsis writing, and whatever else seems relevant at the time.

In the meantime, let your friends know that TV is coming back. Spread the word. Share the vision!

Echoes: Part 3

2009-10-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

10.21.09

These are busy days. In addition to finishing the manuscript of Vipers (the followup novel to last year's Veins), I'm looking forward to a fair number of readings and signings. The next event is tomorrow, at the Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, PA. After that I plan to finish Vipers and send it off before sending myself to World Fantasy, where, in addition to moderating a panel on rural fantasy, I plan to take part in the debut of Gaslight Grotesque, the new Sherlock Holmes anthology edited by Charles Prepolec and J. R. Campbell. Then its off to more readings in Pennsylvania and Delaware. In short, busy.

With so much happening, there's a good chance I'll be putting this blog on hold for a while, coming back to it when I can. We'll see how things shake out in the days to come, but for now I want to make good on my promise to finish a story about the origins of "Echoes." If you haven't read this week's earlier postings, go take a look. There's no point in reading the ending unless you know the beginning.

For those of you who have been here right along, the story continues:

The morning after she agreed to help my grandmother, my grant aunt told my father to get ready. They were going out for the day. “My boys, too?” my father asked. “Yes. All of you. We’re going out.” And so the five of them, my great aunt, my father, and the three river-builders climbed into a Buick and drove off into the haze of a Pittsburgh morning.

That evening, when the table was being set for dinner, only two returned.

My father looked at the table. “Who are all these plates for?”

“For the boys,” my grandmother said.

“What boys?”

My grandmother looked at my great aunt. My great aunt said nothing.

The boys were gone, never to be heard from again.

Neither my great aunt nor my father ever acknowledged what had happened to those boys, or where they had gone on that long day away from home, and it was in that mystery that I felt the stirrings of a story. In the days that followed, I must have worked out a dozen different plots, but none of them held. I wanted something different, something that hadn’t been done before, and gradually the story began to change and, as is often the case, move away from the spark that had started the kindling.

“Echoes” is about neither my great aunt nor my father, but within it is the sense of mystery that I felt when I first listened to my grandmother’s story twenty-five years ago.

The story has done well for itself, and to this day it reminds me that writers should resist shutting out the world. We must be dedicated to the process of creating stories, but we must nevertheless remain open to the stories that surround us.

And now, if you'll excuse me, that world is calling. I will resume this blog when I can.

Until then, keep the vision.

Echoes: Part 2

2009-10-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

10.20.09

I opened yesterday's post by musing about a presentation at the Kiski School, which led to some reflections on the long history of "Echoes," one of the stories that I presented there -- a story that first appeared in Twilight Zone Magazine and then went on to be reprinted in numerous anthologies, foreign and domestic. I'm always intrigued how one thing leads to another. Connect, always connect.

I make it a point to tell my students that writers need to do more than write well. They need to read widely, of course. But they also need to get out in the world, mix with people, listen and observe.

As I suggested at the end of yesterday's post, the story "Echoes" began with listening.

Here's the second part of the story I started yesterday, right where it left off:

My grandmother asked, “Did I ever yell you about your father’s sons?”

I considered the questions. “My brothers?”

“Oh, heavens! No,” she said. “He was five, then.”

I felt as if I had missed something. “Who was five?”

“Your father?”

“When?”

“When he had his son.” She spoke with a matter-of-factness that seemed to say, But of course it’s the most natural thing in the world. Why are you having trouble with it? “He called them his boys,” she said. “There were three of them, and if you ignored them he became terribly upset.”

She told me how the boys always had to have places set for them at the table, and how he would regale the dinner table with tales of their accomplishments. “Today they built a river,” he would say, and everyone would be expected to ooh and awe. Naturally, it got tired fast. “Your great aunt saw that it was going too far,” she said. “And one day she asked me if I wanted her to get rid of the boys.”

By now I was hooked. Any story with my great aunt in it was worth listening to. She was an eccentric in a family of eccentrics, an independent woman who had never married, never had children, but nevertheless had always seemed to possess a great sense of what it was to be a child.

My grandmother continued, speaking in my great aunt's voice: “I can do it, you know. I can get rid of those boys. Just let me know.”

My grandmother didn’t need much time to think it over. She told my great aunt to go ahead, give it a try. After all, there was nothing to lose but three imaginary kids -- right?

Tomorrow, I'll tell you what happened to those boys and how my grandmother's account of it became the impetus for a story that has remained in print for three decades.

Echoes: Part 1

2009-10-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve been seeing a lot of Pennsylvania lately.

Last Monday I drove two hours east through predawn darkness, traveling mostly on two-lane highways that finally led to the Kiski School’s 350-acre campus in the hills above the town of Saltsburg.

I was there to present Visions and Soundscapes, a multimedia reading designed to share highlights form Visions, Veins, and Veins: the Soundtrack – all from Fantasist Enterprises. The venue for the event was the Rogers Theatre, a nicely equipped space, perfect for a reading featuring recorded sound and projected images.

The screen and projector were in place when I arrived, all I needed was to hook up my laptop, adjust the image, and balance the sound. I also needed to set up my Stratocaster and amp (since the presentation includes a live performance of some of the music from the CD).

An hour and a half later, everything was ready to go.

An hour and a half? Actually that’s not bad for setting up and making sure all the sound and video cues work. If there’s one thing I learned about taking a multimedia presentation on the road, it’s that the setup always takes longer than you think. That morning at Kiski, I had actually hoped I might get a chance to step outside before the reading and watch the sun rise over the mountains. But it wasn’t to be. Within seconds of checking the last cue, people began arriving, and it was time to start the overture.

The readings included three of the darker stories in Visions – “Aberrations,” “Echoes,” and “Step on a Crack” – selections that, while not providing a representative cross-section of the book's contents (Visions actually contains far more science fiction and YA fantasy than horror), seemed appropriate for the month of October.

Of the three stories, “Echoes” is the oldest , and as a result it has the most interesting history – highlights of which I’d like to share with you during this week’s installments of Teaching Visions.

Let's begin with some background.

My first office was in my family’s printing business, a long narrow shop with wood floors and a high tin ceiling. The office was in the pressroom. No partitions. Just a desk sitting in the shadow of the printing press. The shop opened at eight, but the sleepy town didn’t get moving until midmorning, and I could usually plan on getting in two uninterrupted hours of writing if I got to work on time, even more if I got there early, which I often did when the writing was going well. In that print shop I learned the importance of developing a writing routine. The fact that the office boasted a good size desk, plenty of paper, ample filing space, and an IBM Correcting Selectric II (this was the late 1970s) didn’t hurt, either. Best of all, since I had yet to sell a single word of fiction, the steady (albeit low paying) work as a print-room manager paid the bills while I learned to write salable fiction.

At first the stories came back, some with form rejections, others with personal notes. I taped all of these to the wall beside the typewriter. They were signs of progress, things to point to when people asked what I was doing in the morning when the press was silent.

The personal notes told me to keep at it, and I did, falling into a steady pace that finally paid off with a sale to Elinor Mavor at Amazing Stories (who was then publishing fantasy and horror as well as science fiction). Elinor also bought my next three stories, the last of which was later optioned for film. The film was never made, but the option check convinced me that writing could actually pay better than printing….

When Amazing rejected my fifth story, I sent it to a magazine that was just then getting underway. The magazine was Twilight Zone, edited by T.E.D. Klein, and the story was “Mrs. Halfbooger’s Basement,” a twisted little horror yarn that Publishers Weekly called “the realization of every child’s fears.” Later that year it sold again to Karl Edward Wagner for Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XI.

Success led to dedication, and I grew reclusive, forgoing offers to spend time with friends and family in favor of spending long hours at the typewriter. And so it was that, when my grandmother invited me to dinner on a long ago April afternoon, my first inclination was to say, “Thanks, but no.” I had stories to write.

I don’t remember what made me change my mind, but I’m glad I did, for that night over dinner my grandmother planted the seed for a little story that has since taking on a life of its own, having been reprinted and adapted nearly a dozen times over the past quarter century.

Tomorrow, I’ll to tell you what happened at that dinner and how it led to the creation of a successful story.

Infernal Dreams: Part 3

2009-10-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

10.14.09

Before moving on to a discussion of one of the strangest scenes in Gioseppe de Liguoro's L'Inferno, I'd like to invite any of you who are in driving distance of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to drop by the Barnes and Noble superstore at 421 Arena Hub Plaza for their annual Halloween Horror Gathering. I'll be there this Saturday signing copies of Veins and Visions, sharing the spotlight with Bram Stoker Award Winner Lisa Mannetti and others. The fun starts at 2:00 PM. See you there!

I'd also like to direct your attention to some excellent comments posted to this site by Teaching Visions reader A. Alford, who reminds me that F&SF has recently run a second-person narrative titled "You are Such a One" by Nancy Springer. The same issue also contains Sean McMullen's terrific novelette "The Art of the Dragon." I'd like to try commenting on both stories sometime soon -- possibly as early as next week. And yes, that issue also contains my novelette "The Others," which is one of the stories in Visions.

More on those stories later, but I've made you wait long enough for that discussion of what may well be one of the strangest sequences in L'Inferno, a scene depicting Dante’s encounter with heretic Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti.

The episode begins with a long shot of a burning field. No trick photography here. The flames are real, lighting the foreground as they spread across the stage.

Dante and Virgil enter, walking among the flames until the glowing figure of Cavalcante rises from an open tomb in the center of the stage. The shot is alarming in a number of ways, partly for its dramatic design, but also for the real danger that the actors and crew obviously faced while filming it. Consider: Dante and Virgil are dressed in ankle-length robes, hems swaying inches from the flames. Then the scene cuts to one of the film’s few close shots. Dante, Virgil, and Cavalcante filling the foreground as flames and smoke rage behind them. Watch closely, and you’ll see streams of lighter fluid splashing over the stage right behind the actors. Such are the pyrotechnic effects of early cinema – stagehands with buckets of combustible chemicals standing out of frame, feeding real fires while robed actors converse with a nearly naked man in a glowing pit. It’s a harrowing tableau.

The film also features some moderately successful attempts at optical fades, split screens, and forced perspectives. None of the effects are quite as good as those employed by Georges Méliès during the same period, but they are fascinating nonetheless.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a peek at the vistas of hell, you may be better served by reading Dante than by watching Eye 4 Films’ restoration of L’Inferno. And if you’d like to score that reading experience, you might consider loading your audio device with Tangerine Dream’s Sorcerer tracks.

Sometimes the best classics are the ones that play in the cinema of the mind.

Or so I thought when I first viewed the film and discussed it for the journal Dissections. But the intriguing thing about art is the way it seems to change with repeated viewings. Of course, it's not the art that changes. It's the viewer, and in the past few months I find I have developed an appreciation for both the film and its new musical score. I had expected the magic of Georges Méliès and the driving beats of the Tangerine Dream. But now, I suppose, with those expectations behind me, I can appreciate Snapper's repackaging of Liguoro's early film for what it is, a sublime, meditative look back at an early feature film that attempted to capture the dark wonder of Dante's poem. And despite the music's soft tones and lyrics that fall short of the power of Dante's poetry, the DVD is worth a rental if not a purchase. And if you teach Dante (as I do) you might consider sharing a few sections with your students. It'll make for some good conversation.

That's it for now. Until next week, share the vision!

Infernal Dreams: Part 2

2009-10-13T02:44:00.000-07:00

10.13.09

I'm back from The Kiski School, where I presented Visions and Soundscapes at the campus theatre. The event was well attended, and I got the chance to talk to attendees at the book signing that followed. It was fun but exhausting.

Yesterday, we were reflecting on the restored release of Giuseppe de Liguoro's film L'Inferno (1911). If you haven't read that post, you might drop down to Infernal Dreams: Part 1 before continuing. Take your time. I'll be here when you get back.

For those of you who've read Part 1, the adventure continues:

As much as I admire Tangerine Dream’s instrumentals, I have never been a fan of their lyrics, and so I felt a sense of disappointment when the overture “Before the Closing of the Day” gave way to “Spirit of Virgil” – a song that falls considerably short of the power of Dante’s poetry.

Consider, for example, the opening lines of Dante’s Comedy. Here they are in the original Italian:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

And here are the same lines translated by John Ciardi:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

from the straight road [...] to find myself

alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives shape to fear.

Note the tension, vivid detail, and active constructions. Now here, as best as I can decipher them, are the corresponding lyrics from “Spirit of Virgil”:

One Good Friday […]

I got lost in a dark wood.

I was wondering

how I’d managed

To stray from

the straight path.

The night was full of peril.

The ellipsis in the first line is for a phrase that I simply cannot make out. The singer, long-time Tangerine Dream collaborator Jayney Klimek, has a beautiful voice, but it’s sometimes difficult to understand. No matter. The discernible words are enough to demonstrate that the lyrics represent a step down from the original poetry. The details are the same, but the tension is gone. And such is the fate of the rest of the score.

As for the film itself, Giuseppe de Liguoro’s adaptation is generally true to the poem’s structure. It features a series of scenes, each depicting Dante and Virgil descending through the regions of hell. Most scenes open as static shots, framed in the standard 4:3 ratio of early films. We see a region of hell. Dante and Virgil enter from one side, look around, gesticulate, and exit.

Some of the sets are undressed landscapes, with the hills and forests of Italy serving as the Dark Wood of Error, the slope of Mount Joy, and the banks of the rivers Acheron and Styx. Others feature rocky backdrops and foreground fires. These are the most interesting.

One of the strangest sequences depicts Dante’s encounter with heretic Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti. How strange? We'll consider that tomorrow.

Infernal Dreams: Part 1

2009-10-12T01:17:00.000-07:00

10.12.09

I'm making an early start today, heading out to the PAISTA Conference in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, for a 8:45 presentation of Visions and Soundscapes, the multimedia reading of selections of Visions and Veins, set to the music of Veins: The Soundtrack. If you're planning to attend the event, I'll look forward to seeing you at the presentation. After the reading, bookseller Michaels Associates will have plenty of copies of the books in the vendors room. Hope to see you there as well.

Last week I announced my intentions to offer some thoughts on Dante's Inferno and Tangerine Dream. I've been covering the former in my literature classes for over 20 years now, and the latter has figured prominently in my writing-session playlists over the years. Indeed, many of the stories in Visions were composed while listening to the synth melodies of Germany's premier new-age band.

Last year, I wrote a short piece on an interesting intersection between Dante and TD for the British literary journal Dissections, published by Dr. Gina Wisker at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. The focus of the essay was the Tangerine-Dream scored release of a 1911 film version of Dante's Inferno. At the time, I was a bit disappointed with both the film and the TD score, but my views have mellowed a bit over the past few months, and this morning seems like a good time to revisit my thoughts on this interesting melding of 14th century poetry, early film, and post-modern rock.

This is how that previous essay began.

I’ve been a fan of Tangerine Dream ever since they did the score for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), the film that introduced the band to people who knew nothing of the German experimental music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Other film work followed: Thief (1981), The Keep (1983), Firestarter (1984), and Legend (1986). Each score is remarkable, with the best (Sorcerer and Thief) lending a sense of dark, pulsing urgency to the action.

In 2006, Snapper Music released a DVD version of a newly scored restoration of Giuseppe de Liguoro’s L’Inferno (1911) – an early film that dramatizes Dante’s journey through the nine circles, three rounds, and ten bolge of a medieval hell. Reputed to be the first Italian feature film, L’Inferno became an early cinematic blockbuster in the US, but it soon suffered the fate of many early films, circulating in increasingly shortened versions before finally descending into archival limbo, where it remained until Eye 4 Films assembled a full-length restoration augmented with a score by Tangerine Dream. A tantalizing package, indeed!

The DVD opens with a track titled “Before the Closing of the Day,” an overture featuring electronic keyboard and a swirl of wordless chants. The sound is classic Tangerine Dream, reminiscent of the slow preludes that distinguish some of what I consider the band’s most memorable CD tracks: “Little Blond in the Park of Attractions” from Tyranny of Beauty or “Too Hot for My Chincilla” from Lilly on the Beach. Such openings often precede a torrent of pulsing bass and percussion, and L’Inferno’s score seems, at first, to work in similar fashion, with an encroaching timpani beat rising just as the restoration’s main title card appears. So far so good.

In the two minutes that come between the title card and the actual start of the film, the viewer is treated to a series of images designed to build anticipation for what is to follow. The first is a shot of the black-clad Dante following a white-robed Virgil. The image quality is what you would expect from a 100-year-old film: grainy, scratched, and framed without the aesthetic sense that would develop in the century after the film’s creation. Nevertheless, the viewer may be intrigued by how much the image of Dante (played here by Salvatore Papa) resembles the author’s portrayal in the well-known etchings of Gustave Doré.

More Doré-inspired images follow: the spirit of Beatrice Portinari standing in a heavenly garden, a mass of tormented souls bathing in a river of filth, the ferryman Charon steering toward shore, hoarders and wasters rolling sacks of money along a rocky ledge, the lovers Paolo and Francesca suspended in tempestual winds. Though scratched and faded, the images are enticingly surreal, and the music builds nicely as they appear and fade. But then the film begins.

The first shot is a degraded intertitle, white letters superimposed over a Doré landscape. The text reads:

"The ‘Divine Comedy’ of Dante was inspired by a little girl, only nine years of age, when her beauty first impressed the poet. Beatrice died at the age of twenty-four, and Dante’s plan to immortalize her resulted in one of the most stupendous achievements of human genius – the Inferno."

The text, apparently an attempt to infuse love-interest into a film about two men walking through hell, is not exactly accurate. Beatrice Portinari is indeed a character in the Divine Comedy, but she has barely a cameo in L’Inferno. In truth, the first book of Dante’s Comedy seems to have been inspired more by cruel politics than unrequited love. Nevertheless, I probably would have forgotten the overstatement if the music had swept me away when the action began. Alas, it didn’t. Instead, the score suddenly gave way to a lilting vocal performance.

Tomorrow, we'll consider what happens when the singing begins.

For now, I'm off to PAISTA. Share the vision!

Looking Back

2009-10-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

10.07.09

We're two weeks into this blog, and it seems like a good time to look back at the original plan as stated in my first post:

I hope to use the stories in Visions as departure points for the discussion of writing, science fiction, fantasy, and whatever else the stories bring to mind. Along the way I hope to pass along some strategies for young writers, lessons for writing instructors, and perhaps a few reviews of contemporary works that have proven useful in lectures over the years.

So far we’ve considered the second-person voice of "Aberrations," looked at a lesson involving "Echoes," and discussed a contemporary approach to live readings that can be employed by writers or teachers looking to enhance live performances of the written word -- all of which make me glad that I hedged my bets with that line in the first blog about “whatever else the stories bring to mind.”

Such broad intentions will give me the chance to touch on a variety of topics in the coming weeks, and along the way I hope to get a sense of what readers find most useful and what they would like to see more of. To that end, I would like to use some of these Wednesday postings to consider reader responses.

One reader writes:

LOVE the blog! Great concept and theme...lovely appearance...awesomely rich content. I just can't seem to get my comments to 'stick' when I click on 'post' (I suspect it's my web browser/cookie blocker's fault). Your blog is a sort of living breathing 'teacher's guide' -- I dig it!

The teacher’s guide element is certainly something I had in mind at the outset. Actually, the plan for posting early in the week (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays) is to give teachers and workshop leaders things to consider while planning their week's activities.

As for comments that won't "stick," I should point out that other readers have reported trouble posting comments. I hope that all those who do will consider dropping me an email.

Reader Michael Brendan was able to post, and I’m delighted to hear that he is going to be a regular follower of Teaching Visions. Michael is a rising star in the SF field. He’s a graduate of the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University and a darn fine writer. You can follow his reviews at Associated Content. I’m delighted to have him as a reader.

Also on board in the followers box are W. H. Horner and Charles Prepolec. If you get a chance, be sure to check out W. H. Horner’s thoughtful comments on the publishing industry at his blog Art .'. Design. And while you're at it, take a few more minutes and drop by Charles Prepolec’s newly launched Sherlock Holmes News, which I will be following regularly in the days to come.

Another blog that I am following is Michael A. Arnzen's long-running and wonderfully informative Pedablogue. I encourage all of you who may be interested in discussions of “the scholarship of teaching” to check out his site.

Overall, it seems that the members of TV’s audience (by which I mean the followers of Teaching Visions) are as eclectic as my original design.

I’ll return next week with further reflections on music and story with a consideration of a recently restored print of L’Inferno (1911), scored by the music of Tangerine Dream. Dante’s Inferno is on my syllabus for this semester, and Tangerine Dream is a band that I listened to while composing many of the stories in Visions. Thus, the film and its new score seem like good material for our next discussion.

Until then, enjoy the links above . . . and share the vision.

Twenty-First Century Scop: Part 2

2009-10-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

10.06.09

The technology needed for providing musical scores for live readings is as easy to carry as it is to set up and use. Naturally, nothing beats bringing along a guitar or keyboard player. If you’ve got a best friend or spouse who’s a musician, you’re all set. But perhaps you like the simplicity of working alone (and keeping the spotlight to yourself). In that case, there’s an easy alternative.

First, you need to select some music, preferably tunes that your listeners haven’t heard before. Back in the days when the big labels were regulating the flow of recorded content, you might have had a tough time finding something fresh and unfamiliar. But today, with so many artists making music available online, and with the explosion of digital music suppliers such as iTunes and DigStati on, the task is relatively easy.

The music you select does not need to play through your entire reading, a good thing to keep in mind if you plan on presenting works longer than poems or flash fiction. Of course, having music start and stop during your reading means you need an easy way to control the sound. To do that, I recommend using a laptop and a handheld remote.

To queue your sound, store the digital recordings on your laptop and link them to a Power Point presentation. The Power Points slides are for you, not the audience. I like to keep these slides simple, displaying the name of the story that I'm reading and the piece of music that’s playing. I also find it’s helpful to include a note that identifies the next slide in the sequence. I do not recommend placing the actual text of the story you are reading on the Power Point Slide. Rather than reading from the screen, I rely on a handheld book. Very traditional. Think of it as product placement.

Naturally, it’s a good idea to rehearse with this new setup before taking it on the road. In addition to getting used to working the remote and timing your delivery to the music, you will want to practice setting up the few bits of hardware involved.

And how much hardware is required?

Everything you need can be carried over one shoulder. Namely, you will need a copy of the book you’ll be reading, a laptop, a handheld remote, and a set of speakers. That’s it.

I prefer U SB speakers, which are perfect for small spaces (coffeehouses and bookstores). They draw their power directly from the computer, so you don’t need to worry about being close to an outlet. You can even (as I have done a number of times) perform in a space that has no power, such as public parks and courtyards. The speakers I use are thin enough to carry in the side pocket of my laptop case, and they put out a surprisingly good sound. For larger spaces (or for gigs when I want the sound quality to be the best it can be) I use a Roland amplifier, which produces professional quality sound in a relatively portable system. (It comes with an over-the-shoulder carrying bag, but it’s a lot heavier than those USB speakers).

Of course, the best spaces are auditoriums where the AV technology is already in place (and where a resident tech person is on hand to hook you up). That’s the setup I’ll be using next Monday when I present Visions and Soundscapes at PAISTA. As much as possible, those are the spaces I like to work in. When I do those shows, I employ projected images as well.

When all goes well (and let’s face it, with technology there’s always an adventure waiting to happen) the results are worth the effort. If you’d like to hear what I’m taking about but aren’t planning to be at the Kiski School next Monday, you might pick up a copy of Veins: the Soundtrack, which includes two of the Visions and Soundscape readings as bonus tracks. The CD also contains original instrumental tracks that I recorded with my band last summer, tunes that I composed for reading with my novel Veins, but which you might find useful in scoring your own readings. All the tracks are available for immediate download at DigStation.

Finally, for the frugally minded, you might check out an online podcast of my story “Shooting Evil” from Ash-Tree Press.

Until tomorrow, enjoy the stories . . . and share the vision.

Twenty-First Century Scop: Part 1

2009-10-05T03:33:00.000-07:00

10.05.09

Back in the days before printed books, when the live reading was the primary means of getting literature to the public, storytellers appreciated the connection between music and narrative. They knew that delivering a story was more than just reciting words, but today that seems to have been forgotten.

Have you attended a reading lately? Did the author bring a backup band? Keyboard? Boombox? Probably not. It’s easier to just bring a book.

I remember seeing Lawrence Ferlinghetti at a performance sponsored by the now defunct (and sorely missed) International Poetry Forum. It was April 3, 1968, and Ferlinghetti was reading from his newly released collection A Coney Island of the Mind. I was young and impressionable, studying the performance, learning from the master. For an hour it was just Ferlinghetti and his voice, but then, for his final piece, he produced a tape player, adjusted the podium microphone so that it hung midway between his face and the machine, and hit play. Then – in the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon scop – he read "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow" while guitar music played beneath his words.

In the years that followed, I heard others do the same. Most notably Patti Smith, who gave spoken word performances accompanied by guitarist Lenny Kaye in the early 70s, and four-time Bram Stoker Award winner Michael A. Arnzen, who released AudioVile, a CD featuring some of his stories read to original music, in 2007. But live meldings of music and spoken word remain relatively rare, even though modern technology makes it easier than ever to bring quality sound to a reading. Indeed, full multi-media accompaniment – laptop, PA, projector, and screen – can fit easily into the backseat of a Cobalt.

Last year, as Fantasist Enterprises was preparing to debut my novel Veins at GenCon, I began working on a studio CD of music inspired by the novel. Part of the impetus for the project was a CD that Poe had produced based on Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. But also in the back of my mind was that long ago performance by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If all went well, I figured the new music might enable me to score live readings from the book.

The resulting CD, Veins: the Soundtrack, was released by Fantasist earlier this year, and this summer I took music and book on the road, giving readings at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, Confluence, GenCon, and Context. Next week I will be reading at PAISTA, a gathering of educators at the Kiski School in western Pennsylvania.

Naturally, writers needn’t produce original CDs in order to score their readings. There’s a lot of music out there. More than ever before. And the technology needed to arrange and edit a playlist is probably already on the computer you are using to read this blog.

This week, I’d like to talk about bringing live readings back to their roots, how writers might consider augmenting their spoken-word performances, and how writing instructors might help train a new generation of scops by encouraging students to use the technology at their fingertips to aid in the presentation of their written works.

We'll pick up right here tomorrow.

Until then, share the vision!

Through Fiction's Fourth Wall: Part 2

2009-09-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

09.30.09

Yesterday I shared some of the inspiration behind the second-person narration in "Aberrations," the lead story in Visions: Short Fantasy and SF.

Second-person, present-tense narration is underused in fiction for some practical reasons that we can get into later, but it does lend a certain immediacy to a narrative, and it has made for some interesting results when I've asked my students to give it a try.

When introducing students to the second-person, I start by sharing a conventional piece of first- or third-person fiction. I prefer short-short stories for this activity, since they allow the class to focus on a complete work rather than an excerpt.

In the past I've had success using flash fiction from 365 Scary Stories and 100 Great Fantasy Short-Short Stories. (Naturally, you can also use some of the short-short stories in Visions, two of which also appear in those aforementioned anthologies). Your local librarian or bookseller will help you find plenty of other sources. Don’t have quick access to either? Then try the digital archives of the flash-fiction magazine The Vestal Review, which has just published its 36th issue. Your students will get a real kick out of the stories there.

Once you have found a workable story, you should contact the author and get permission to use the work in your classroom or workshop. Making contact shouldn't be hard in this day of author websites and email, and most writers are flattered to get such requests. Beyond that, they are likely to welcome the opportunity to reach a new group of readers. Trust me on this. Try it, and let me know if I'm wrong.

I also make a point of letting the students know that the author has granted permission to use the story in the activity. It makes for a sense of connection with the literary world.

Although I prefer to share such models by projecting them onto my classroom's SmartBoard, photocopied handouts can work, too. (Just be sure to get those handouts back at the end of the lesson, unless your arrangement with the author has included letting everyone keep a copy.) After reading and discussing the story, you and the class can begin going through it line by line, adjusting nouns, pronouns, and verbs as needed. With advanced classes, this process leads to discussions about the ways in which the narrative quickly changes tone. With beginning writers, it also opens discussions on the connections between pronouns and verbs.

Here's an example of what you'll notice. The text is from the opening of my short-short story "Echoes," (Twilight Zone, Feb. 1983, reprinted in Visions: Short Fantasy and SF):

Marie stood in the kitchen, staring at the magnetic birds on the refrigerator door, and after a while Billy yelled in from the living room to tell her that Paul wanted some milk.

She didn’t answer.

Paul had been dead for three months.

Now here it is again in present tense, second person:

You stand in the kitchen, staring at the magnetic birds on the refrigerator door, and after a while Billy yells in from the living room to tell you that Paul wants some milk.

You don’t answer.

Paul has been dead for three months.

See the difference? The original strikes me as quiet and haunting. The second version seems more immediate, almost desperate. It's certainly the beginning of a very different kind of story.

The activity has been a good way to help students explore a seldom used narrative voice. Your mileage may very, but if you take this one for a spin, let me know how it goes. Oh yes, and if you want to use "Echoes," just ask.

I'll be back next week with some thoughts on multimedia storytelling.

Until then, share the vision!

Through Fiction's Fourth Wall: Part 1

2009-09-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

09.29.09: V-Day

This is it! The day of the official release of Visions. Don't have a copy yet? Go ahead and get one. I'll be here when you get back.

All right. Now let's get to it.

Yesterday I touched on the private nature of writing. Let’s consider it again, this time as it relates to both writer and reader.

A writer composes a story in solitude for a reader who reads the work alone. Between the two lies a world of characters who have no awareness of either the reader or writer. But what happens when the writer’s voice shifts to second person, when the reader becomes a character in that previously self-contained world of fiction?

I remember when I first realized the potential of that mode of storytelling. It was September 16, 1963, the night that the science-fiction program The Outer Limits premiered on ABC. I sat before the set, waiting for the show to begin, when suddenly the screen went dark. A moment later, the control voice began, speaking directly to me through the 24-inch Magnavox.

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture […]. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits.

It was, of course, a ripoff of a second-person intro that had been airing on CBS since 1959 -- Rod Serling's opening for The Twilight Zone -- although I'm not sure I was aware of that at the time.

You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!

Although neither show sustained the second-person narrative beyond the introductions (unless we count the few lines at the end of each episode), both impressed me enough to start experimenting with second-person, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type stories.

Eventually, I discovered fully developed second-person narratives in books and magazines, perhaps the most successful of which was Bob Leman's “Instructions” (F&SF September 1984, and currently available as a chapbook from Tachyon Publications). Incredibly, Leman sustains the control voice through an entire 6,000 word story. Here's how it begins:

This is the only notice you will receive.
You will follow the instructions set out below.

1. Dress warmly and leave your house. Do not tell your family you are leaving. Do not talk to them at all.
Do not listen if they talk to you.
Dress warmly and leave the house.

2. Proceed at a brisk clip to the center of town.
The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, and “Instructions” were very much on my mind when I wrote “Aberrations,” the piece of second-person flash fiction that opens Visions, and writing that story (and noting the response that it gets when I read it live) started me thinking of a number of fiction-writing exercised to help break the ice and prime the pump in writing classes and workshops.

In tomorrow's installment, I'll share with you one of those lessons.

Until then, share the vision!

SF, Fantasy, and Teaching Visions

2009-09-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

09.28.09

When I started writing back in the ages of manual typewriters and carbon paper, I found that I enjoyed the private nature of the work. I wrote my first stories in silent obscurity, and even when they sold to the likes of Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, and Year’s Best Horror, I regarded writing as a private affair. I had never attended a workshop, didn’t belong to a writing group, and (it being the early 1980s) lived in a world devoid of things like tweets, texting, and blogs -- modes of communication that today put writers in close and constant contact with readers.

My perception of writing privacy changed when I was hired to teach freshman composition at a large university. “You might want to share your stories with your students,” the English chair told me. “They might like knowing they’re learning from a published writer.”

I took his advice, and soon found myself engaging in conversations with some fairly opinionated undergrads, some of whom were genuinely interested in learning how a person went about selling fiction to the magazines. I told them what I knew, and two years later I moved from covering Freshman Comp to teaching upper-division classes in Fiction Writing and Science Fiction.

Other public gigs followed: library readings, high-school workshops, book-group talks. Then came a full-time position with the Senior School English Department at Sewickley Academy, where I have been for the past twenty years, and a resident position in the Writing Popular Fiction Program at Seton Hill University, with which I have been associated since 2002. In short, writing hasn’t been private for a long time, and yet, unlike many of my peers, I have resisted cultivating a presence in that digital fishbowl provided by the Internet.

Enter Will Horner at Fantasist Enterprises.

After purchasing my novel Veins in 2008, Will expressed interest in putting out a collection of some of my stories. The result is Visions: Short Fantasy and SF, which will be officially released tomorrow, September 29. (And which received good advance notice in the August 3 issue of Publishers Weekly.)

As we were assembling the book, it occurred to me that the stories (which included my first sale to Amazing Stories as well as my most recent novelettes for F&SF) had something to say about the development of a writer. Each story represented a series of lessons learned, many of them the same lessons that I strive to pass along to my students. Although some of these lessons are shared in the introductions to the stories in Visions, as well as in the book's retrospective afterword, I felt, as I looked over the final manuscript, that I had much more to say.

Hence this blog.

In future installments, I hope to use the stories in Visions as departure points for the discussion of writing, science fiction, fantasy, and whatever else the stories bring to mind. Along the way I hope to pass along some strategies for young writers, lessons for writing instructors, and perhaps a few reviews of contemporary works that have proven useful in workshops and lectures over the years. In any event, I hope you will come back, read what you find here, and offer feedback.

Because I believe in the benefits of a routine, I’ll plan to produce three posts a week, one each Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We’ll resume tomorrow, on the day of the official release of Visions, with some musings on second-person narration.

Until then, share the vision.