Further to yesterday’s spectacular William Boyd pimping, here’s a bit more from him. I came across an article he wrote on the short story, which you can read in full here, on The Guardian’s website. How can you go wrong using Chekhov to pimp the short story? Amongst many other things, Boyd reminds us that “… in the 1920s, F Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 for a story by the Saturday Evening Post (a vast sum today – multiply by 10 to get some idea of a comparison)…”

Yes please, Saturday Evening Post!

I also like this definition of a style of short story that was more prominent before Chekhov (but is also certainly still around today):

1 The event-plot story This term was coined by the English writer William Gerhardie in 1924 in a short, fascinating book he wrote on Chekhov. Gerhardie uses this appellation to distinguish Chekhov’s stories from everything that preceded him. Up until Chekhov, all short stories, virtually without exception, were event-plot ones. In these stories the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end. The revolution that Chekhov set in train – and which reverberates still today – was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless. The stereotype of the event-plot story is the “twist-in-the-tail” famously developed by O Henry but also used widely in genre stories – ghost stories (WW Jacobs, for example) and the detective story (Conan Doyle). I would say that today its contrivances make it look very dated, though Roald Dahl made something of a mark with a macabre variation on the theme, and it is also a staple of yarn-spinners such as Jeffrey Archer.

… and on a random not, Roald Dahl was also part of the British spy set-up in the United States before Pearl Harbour, which I mentioned yesterday.

Later, speaking on the Chekhovian short story, Boyd says the following:

What is the essence of the Chekhovian short story? Chekhov wrote to a friend that, “It was time writers, especially those who are artists, recognised that there is no making out anything in this world.” I would say that the Chekhovian point of view is to look at life in all its banality and all its tragic comedy and refuse to make a judgment. To refuse to condemn and refuse to celebrate. To record the actions of human beings as they are and to leave them to speak for themselves (insofar as they can) without manipulation, censure or praise. Hence his famous retort when he was asked to define life.

… and I wonder what he thought of Vonnegut, in light of that! All writings in this style are amongst my personal favourite, and this definitely defines the style that I’m trying to steer my writing in at the moment (ergo my lack of productivity as I decide which previous and immature scribblings are within reach of this goal, but that’s another topic entirely).

There are five more definitions (including one which speculative fiction writers may find themselves more familiar with, in some cases) in the full article, and he touches on more than I’ve got time to comment on here. Even when I’m sick as hell, and sitting around all day… I’ve got stories to cull, after all, and others to rewrite! The article ends with comments on the decline and potential revival of the short story market over the last twenty years, and is somewhat hopeful. It’d be good for all of us, I guess, if Boyd is correct.

Read the article, enjoy, and for God’s sake people, I left LiveJournal, I didn’t die… some more comments please! It’s lonely on WordPress…

“Why are thy songs so short?” a bird was once asked. “Is it because thou art so short of breath?”

The bird replied: “I have very many songs and I should like to sing them all.”< ?p>

Alphonse Daudet

Years ago, an English teacher pointed our class towards a particular work by William Boyd called Long Story Short, which is on a certain level the story of William (similar to the author?), his brother Frank, and his girlfriend Louella. On a more interesting level, however, it is about the author’s control over representation and truth. For example, Boyd speaks himself about twisting fiction. He does it in the manner of a nervous lie, always reversing to try and become a bit more believable, but yet still not quite true. It’s sublime:

Frank. Frank was the sort of older brother nobody needs. Tall, socially at ease, rich, good job (journalist on an up-market Sunday). Very attractive too. He had a polished superficial charm which, to my surprise, managed to take in one hell of a lot of people. But he was a smug self-satisfied bastard and we never really liked each other. he always needed to feel superior to me.

“Pleased to meet you,” Frank said to Louella, holding on to her hand for longer than William thought necessary.
“Hi,” said Louella. “William’s told me so much about you.”

Frank laughed. “Listen,” he said. “You don’t want to believe anything he says.”

He didn’t say that, in fact. But it’s typical of the sort of thing I can imagine him saying. Anyway I only did that just to show how easy it is – and how different. I can make Frank bald, add four inches to Louella’s bust, supply William with a flat in Belgravia. But it’s not going to solve anything. Because – to cut a long story short (quite a good title, yes?) – I really did love Louella (we’ll still call her that, if you don’t mind – saves possible embarrassment). I wanted to marry her. And that bastard Frank steadily and deliberately took her away from me.

More recently, I wandered into my old house to find that Jack had been sent Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa by a friend at Penguin. I asked him what he though, and the immediate response was “he’s fucking brilliant!” Similarly, as much as I often deride wikipedia for being the product of hundreds of monkeys with typewriters, I have to give them some credit for stating that “Boyd, who is of the same generation as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, has been, some people believe, “overlooked” as a novelist, largely because he has kept a low public profile. Although his novels have been short-listed for major prizes, he has never had quite the same publicity as his contemporaries, even though many consider his novels superior in technique and content.”

More recently I’ve stumbled across articles such as this one on World War II covert operations and this review of Downfall (a film about Hitler’s last days). Boyd shows that he’s clearly a more than apt at journalism and also no fool when it comes to some of the more complex periods of modern history.

Words cannot describe how much I recommend to anyone that they take a look at William Boyd’s work. There are three fantastic collections of short stories available; On the Yankee Station, The Destiny of Nathalie X and, most recently, Fascination. His most recent novel, Restless, is largely about a British spin and propaganda operation in the United States, trying to involve the country in the war prior to Pearl Harbour. Of all of those, and his other novels, however, I’d recommend Yankee. You can find it on Amazon here.

I can hardly hope to beat Mary Robinette Kowal’s recent tails of medical madness but, seeing as I am homebound with little to do, I guess you’ll be seeing a few more updates from me. I had to go back to the doctor today and say “excuse me honourable miss, but your medicine hasn’t fixed me. In fact, my throat has become a heaving pit of puss and my ear drums are about to explode. Also? An oil prospector has decided during the night to drill for black gold inside my head, and I’m already taking more than the recommended amounts of ibuprofen to little effect.”

Or words to that effect.

We (or… she?) came to the conclusion that I need tests for Glandular Fever in the morning. That’s great, huh? (for the ninety-odd percent of people reading this that are in the North America somewhere, that’s mononucleosis, the kissing gift that keeps on giving…) Not only can I eat nothing but Thai chicken soup and overcooked pasta, but I also can’t sleep or even concentrate for the plethora of prescribed pills that I’m shoving down my throat at as regular intervals. Hurrah!

So, when the day was looking bad, my work phone went off and Bridget’s name sparked up! I hadn’t spoken to her on the phone since we were in San Diego, and she’s doing the Chicago show right now, so I figured it was something important. Well, it wasn’t… but it was an ego-booster. She was ringing to tell me that the actress I knew from Los Angeles (who normally plays a character on a popular US show that, err, ends with a north-westerly US state’s name) had come up to her in Chicago, and said “Hi Bridget” then skipped straight to “hey is Chris here? He’s lovely… and cute!” Sucks that I’m in London, then. Haha.

On the subject of shows, here’s a nice article on what we build: NAIAS 2008

On Christmas day I got up late, made a quick call back to England, and rolled around my weirdly large hotel room for a while. Eventually, I got enough energy together to go for the coffee-seeking walk around downtown San Diego, and it was a little like the I Am Legend trailers that I’ve been bombarded with the last couple of weeks. I ended up celebrating Christmas morning by grabbing some brew from a 7-11 – now there’s a chain that must be thankful that Osama didn’t strike two months earlier – and sitting out in the sun reading The Stars My Destination. Can’t argue with that, really. In the evening, I met up with Bridget and the other Chris, and we ate at Molly’s, a great restaurant in a Marriott by the water, and then slept. The show opened to the media at 5:00am the next day, and we worked seventeen hours until it closed at 10:00pm. All in all, it was an ok way to spend Christmas on a year that I would have rather just hadn’t happened, so I was fine.

I’ve been meaning to blog about various things San Diego over the last weeks, but haven’t had the time, quite simply. We were busy building the show, doing the show and, err, eating… there’s been good eating. Thai and Indian are pretty well represented around here. I’m chilling in the Air New Zealand [soul destroyingly beige] lounge at Los Angeles airport now, so I’ve finally got time to write.

I took a lot of photos when we had time off around town, and they’re pretty good. Here’s a taster:

Now I’m flying home overnight, losing most of a day, and using various chemicals and parlor tricks to kick my curvy arse back into a reasonable time zone by next week. It’s New Year, soon, and I’ll have to try and make some shit up to pass off as resolutions.

Hope you all have a good one, by the way.

On Thursday, a friend mailed a gag to an office-wide email list, which went something like this:

I bought a teddy bear for ?10. I named him Muhammad, and sold him for ?20. My question is, have I made a prophet?

Responses included comments questioning how a man of his intelligence (he’s a very, very clever guy, and one of the quickest comedians I’ve seen) could find such a thing funny. I’m not sure if I’m surprised or not, but he was made to send an official apology out afterwards. This upsets me, because it is my strong opinion that if people are of that much intelligence, then they should realise that free speech and the ability to laugh are far more important than what you call a fucking teddy bear.

I believe that you should respect a person regardless of their culture and race, and I believe that you should try and be good to people at all times, but I’m not sure where I stand on respecting religions. I used to mix them in with race, and I still defend Islam vehemently when I hear ridiculous statements about it from Christians or Zionists, but in the same way that I don’t respect the parts of Christianity that teach blind obedience in the face of logical decisions, I’m not sure that I do, or should, respect elements of Islam that wish to lock people in a Sudanese prison for making a naive mistake naming a teddy bear.

Oh, and in case this didn’t make the news in the US, you can find the news in this article.

I’m interested in people’s thoughts. In a mischievous and possible unwise bout of curiosity, I sent the above joke out (as if from me, rather than as a forward) to my small office address book after the shit hit the fan. I didn’t receive a single reply, which is, err, not normal thank you very much. My guess is that people were probably insulted, but what I wanted was responses and to understand why. I certainly don’t have all the answers on this one. Dear all knowing blog-brain, enlighten me?

In the introduction to Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, there is the following statement on the bombing of Dresden by the Allies during World War Two:

The malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone but the cellars where a hundred and thirty-five thousand Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.

This spectacular misquote comes from the middle of an otherwise accurate, astute, and typically poignant comment on humanity from Vonnegut, which makes it all the more frustrating. I’m writing this offline on the train, so can’t check, but I believe that there were between thirty and forty thousand deaths in Dresden during the (still appalling) firebombing of the city. I also believe that Vonnegut’s error comes from the now-shunned historian David Irving’s figures; an idea only backed up by Vonnegut’s mention of him in Slaughterhouse Five amongst other musings on the firestorm.

This brings me to the oft-discussed subject of research, and my belief that all writers should have a pedantic obsession about where we get our facts from. I’ve had long discussions with a friend on the subject, who has similar (and possibly stronger) opinions on these things. Searching for something on wikipedia isn’t good enough if you’re going to talk facts, and put it in writing as such. Society has embraced the Just Fucking Google It philosophy, of course, who wouldn’t? It’s piss easy to make yourself sound smart on a forum, or in a quick reply in an email or to a list, or in various other situations, but the underlying fact is that the likes of wikipedia are an unmoderated secondary source, rife with errors and lies. Also, other sources can be.

Vonnegut’s quotes were wrong, and he didn’t even use wikipedia. He got them from a trusted (at the time) historian, who just happened to later reveal himself as a holocaust denier and all round fuckwit. Thirty or forty years later, mind. How can you be sure you’re correct and safe? I’m not suggesting an answer here; I’m asking for one.

Obviously, you need to cross-reference your facts, and to get them from more than one reputable source where possible. You need to know what you’re saying is true, if you’re going to claim it is. And if not, well, do you need to inform your audience that you are not? And if you don’t, could you be the one writing one of the great masterpieces of a century, with the slight misfortune of a key point that depends on figures more than three-fold out of line?

I’m merely illustrating a point with this example, by the way. Vonnegut is off the hook in my books, seeing as how Dresden was largely denied and/or hushed by the US government for many years after the war, when he was writing both novels mentioned above. It is entirely possible, if not probably, that he had access only to the Irving book. Dresden was in fact largely revealed due to Slaughterhouse Five itself. Also, anyone who knows me will be entirely familiar with the fact that I adore Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and think he was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hell, Mild Wild Mike is pretty much an homage to his tongue-in-cheek style of social commentary. I’m not writing this as a dig at him.

Skipping further into Mother Night, Vonnegut writes this:

In preparing this edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., I have had to deal with writings concerned with more than mere informing or deceiving, as the case may be. Campbell was a writer as well as a person accused of extremely serious crimes, a one-time playwrite of moderate reputation. To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.

And, now that I’ve said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect – in the theatre, for instance, and in Campbell’s confessions, perhaps can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.

… which reminds me a lot of something I can only paraphrase from William Boyd’s mind-bending short story, Long Story Short:

You write fiction, you’re telling lies, pal.

… and how much fun can you have with them? What responsibility to do you have? The Daily Mail bends the truth if it will sell papers, and the amount of control over society’s conscience that newspaper has gives me the fuckin’ fear. I’m not kidding. So, you have the gift of the gab. Do you choose the dark side or the light side? Do you have to assume an audience knows you might be writing The Big Fib? That your book’s morals may be as weak as a warthog’s mental arithmetic? I’ve not got the answer, although I’d err towards a no on the latter. I just think it’s an interesting subject!

Discuss.

I get asked what I do a lot. I never really answer, but sorta duck n’ roll outta there before I find myself up to my formidable chest hair in nerdy technical quicksand. I’ve done all kinds of things, really, starting in film when I was an ugly awkward teenager, before I shot off round the world and went to work in events and entertainment when I got back.

Sometimes I just fix things. I started as a mercenary freelancer on an hourly rate. Kinda swung onto better projects after a year or so, and started making video conference systems for the company I was working for most often, etc. More recently, I’ve gone full time for the main client (although I still do freelance when I can) and have been having much more fun whizzing off to motorshows in Frankfurt and Los Angeles, for the latter building this system, which has been much more astutely described in the format of movie-films in the following article: Digital Stage Makes its North American Debut at the L.A. Auto Show.

As if I’m not making it easy enough for you to get a bit informed on the questions you politely ask me, and I deftly dodge, I’m going to embed a video interview. Look for me in the background… I was there, but God knows whether I staggered into the shot at any time.

I’m off to rebuild the thing (slightly modified) in San Diego over Christmas. So that’s why I’ll be in your shiny country again, humble American readers.

I think this is my favourite quote from the Prose Edda:

Then was the body of Baldr borne out on shipboard; and when his wife, Nanna the daughter of Nep, saw that, straightway her heart burst with grief, and she died; she was borne to the pyre, and fire was kindled. Then Thor stood by and hallowed the pyre with Mjöllnir; and before his feet ran a certain dwarf which was named Litr; Thor kicked at him with his foot and thrust him into the fire, and he burned. People of many races visited this burning: First is to be told of Odin, how Frigg and the Valkyrs went with him, and his ravens; but Freyr drove in his chariot with the boar called Gold-Mane, or Fearful-Tusk, and Heimdallr rode the horse called Gold-Top, and Freyja drove her cats. Thither came also much people of the Rime-Giants and the Hill-Giants. Odin laid on the pyre that gold ring which is called Draupnir; this quality attended it, that every ninth night there dropped from it eight gold rings of equal weight. Baldr’s horse was led to the bale-fire with all his trappings…

I think it’s the flippant way with which Thor just kicks an innocent little dwarf (which was named Litr!) into the fire, to his death. As far as I can recall, poor Litr was not mentioned in Snorri’s Edda before then, and Thor had no particular beef with him. It’s somewhat akin to Luke Skywalker booting an unimportant Ewok into Vader’s funeral pyre at the end of Return of the Jedi. That didn’t happen, of course, but I’m sure that George Lucas will be more than happy to do another special edition featuring my edits sometime soon.

I’m naming a character Litr, in memory of this heroic dwarf.

Since Tuesday, I have been staying at a slightly ropey Ramada hotel in Chatsworth (apparently the porn capital of the world… hey, I recognise her…) while we configure some stuff at a warehouse to take on site this weekend. I’ll be moving to the slightly nicer – read: boutique hotel with world famous rooftop bar etc. – Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow, where we’ll be next to the final site for the auto show at the Convention Center.

I was sitting in a bar just now, talking to the formidably arranged barmaid, and she brought up the slightly awkward porn industry city topic of conversation. After verbally fumbling my way through that, I asked her what went on in this place other than porn. She either misheard me, or wanted to talk about sex, because she went into a lot of detail about what goes on in the local warehouses/local homes/my hotel. Nice girl, though…

I have observed this week that Forklift trucks are evil. They are the mother-fucking offspring of Go-Karts and Daleks driven by next generation Carnies. They give me the fear. I am forever chased by these demons in the warehouse and on site. I swear I will die at their hands.