06/2/13

Gin Craze Story Drafted…

As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, I recently finished a draft of a weird novella with the working title, “In the Company of Distillers.”

I guess the best way to explain the story is that it’s set in London at that part of the 18th century Gin Craze just prior to the government’s second attempt (and the first serious one) at Gin Prohibition…

As far as the makeup of the story, it’s probably easiest to explain it more like the way one does a gin-based cocktail, that is, in the form of a recipe:

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05/27/13

Delany on “Talented Writing”

Marc Laidlaw recently shared a link on Facebook to a post on “Good Writing vs. Talented Writing”over on Brainpickings featuring some ideas by Samuel Delany. Essentially, Delany draws a line between “good writing” and superior “talented writing”:

The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed —is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires the writer carefully to arrange generalities for a page or five pages, followed by a specific that makes the generalities open up and take on new resonance. … Indeed, it might be called the opposite of “dramatic” writing, but it can be just as strong — if not, sometimes, stronger.

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05/25/13

Review in Kyoto Journal #77

New as of right now: my long-delayed review of B.R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters is out in the current issue of the Kyoto Journal (#77). Though the title is goofy — “Minjok Mama Madness! and Other Fairytales From North of the 49th Parallel” — the subject is serious, and the review is overall quite positive.

My review isn’t in the online preview, though, so you’ll have to get a copy of this fine journal in order to read it. I’m enjoying my contributor’s copy, and can recommend the issue (and the journal) without reservation.

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05/24/13

Despite All the Nostalgia for the 1980s…

… that seems to be cropping up these days, it’s not a post-80s world we live in.

It’s in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation that we dwell, today: their politics, their economics, their morality, their paradigm. This insight I ran across on the Ivebeenreading blog in a post about a piece elsewhere where Kent Jones “takes after Quentin Tarantino for a poorly thought-out slam of John Ford.”

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05/21/13

More on the Gin Craze

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Gin Lane & Soju-Ro

A long time ago, I started a planned series of posts that didn’t go very far, drawing some parallels between the England of the Gin Craze era (the early 1700s) and Korea in the first decade of the 21st century. I’m still not feeling like continuing it, but I am reading up on the Gin Craze (right now, working my way through Patrick Dillon’s wonderful Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva–The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze) as I continue working on a short story set during that period, and a number of things have struck me as fascinating.

So fascinating, indeed, that for me it’s a struggle to resist the urge to find a way to make my own narrative stretch over a couple of decades or more, just so I can work in all the neat details, an urge I’ve managed to resist so far but only barely.

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05/21/13

Out from the Sinews

In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that.

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05/20/13

Etudes for Writers, 3.1: If At First You Don’t

… succeed, remind yourself of your goal, and try attack the problem in another way.

This is a categorically different kind of statement than, “try, try again.” I think this because the reassessment and questioning of goals is crucial.

Example: Today, my crit group met to discuss a dialog etude we’d all tried (this one) and we found that despite some individual differences, nobody felt all that good about their results.

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05/13/13

Writing Etude #3: You Are What You Say

Well, the writers I live with and I tried out the last writing etude I posted, and the results were really quite interesting, but I’m going to update that post sometime with results and thoughts.

When we concluded our discussion of that etude, we decided to try another one, suggested by the inimitable E.G. Cosh. She wanted to work on dialogue, and on revealing things through dialogue–especially things like character motivation and and the nature of two characters’ relationship. She suggested the twist that we work on dialogue-intensive (or dialogue-only) scenes, and write the same scene twice, with the same motivation driving each character, but changing the nature of the two characters’ relationships when we rewrite the scene.

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04/30/13

Etudes for Writers, #2.1

This entry is part 3 of 2 in the series Etudes For Writers

In my last post in this series, I mentioned (and linked) the blog of my friend Ian McHugh, an excellent Australian SF/fantasy writer. I wanted to mention this post of his, regarding the usefulness (or uselessness) of word frequency analysis when trying to figure out what you’re doing unconsiously in your writing, as well as when thinking about character voice, but I felt it would distract from the etude I was discussion.

Hence, another post. Interesting stuff, which I recommend you go check out.

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04/29/13

Etudes for Writers, #2: A Fine Balance

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Etudes For Writers

At Clarion West, our instructor–one of my favorite authors, the brilliant Maureen F. McHugh–suggested an idea to our class that seemed, when I heard it, to be self-evidently logical and obvious… except of course I’d never heard it stated explicitly before, or thought of it myself, and when she suggested it, my mind was also blown (to tiny bits, yes).

We were discussing one of my classmates’ stories (one by this guy, and outstanding writer I must say, and no relation to Maureen…). The story was very worldbuilding-heavy, and the plot was a little convoluted, and even the SF junkies in the class found it a little hard going.

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04/17/13

Writing Etude #1: Having Pieces Left Over In Your Hand

Since coming back to the saxophone, I’ve discovered what an amazing resource the internet is for a musician who is looking into techniques, looking for ways to improve his or her playing. Within ten minutes of looking around, one finds all kinds of homegrown etudes, studies, all kinds of things one can download, print out, and try in one’s next practice session.

The same isn’t really true for writers. There are a lot of blogs that discuss writing, and even writing techniques. But one hardly finds the net overflowing with etudes of the sort young musicians can grab onto and run through to develop their chops.

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04/14/13

In With the New

In with the new project, that is. I had a little choreography to work out, since I’m planning to co-write a story with a friend soon, but just got a great idea for a screenplay that pretty much appeared in my mind, not quite fully-formed, but almost. The screenplay sort of brings together a lot of things I’ve wished I could see in a Korean SF movie, and following Justin Howe’s advice, I figure now is a good time to try write it… especially since there’s enough time to get a draft done and submit it to the PIFAN-hosted NAFF It Project 2013.

I don’t dare give too much away, but it’s basically what the film 2009: Lost Memories should have been: a meditation on the muddy ambiguities of ethics in a colonial setting, and the corruptive force of power and of coercion, and the lasting impact of war and oppression… but which actually takes into account the modern neo-imperialism in which Korea and South Koreans are participating today, and doesn’t just reinforce a narrative of Korean victimhood. I guess I’d say the impetus comes from wanting a grown-up, intelligent response to some of the questions that were posed and ignored in 2009: Lost Memories, in other words… and I hope that my script will be at least as challenging as the Bok Geo-il novel that those filmmakers ripped off, though obviously from a different angle.

Plot-wise, it’s sort of a Korean-styled mashup of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1) and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (the latter a less-famous novel, but no less wonderful), set the late 1970s in an alternate history where geomancy is a functional science, where Korea has taken over stewardship of the collapsed Japanese Empire, and… well, you know, there’s this guy…

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04/11/13

Charles on the Cthulhu Festival of Film, and What We’re Working On

I’m in the home stretch of the screenplay I’m trying to wrap up today–a project that anyway I’m not really supposed to be talking about for now, though hopefully at some point I can because it’s interesting, and relevant, and Lovecraftian, and set in Korea–but in any case, since I am busy and can’t discuss it anyway, here’s something else:

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03/15/13

Launch Pad Workshop Opens for Applications

I was swamped back in February, so I forgot to post about the application deadline for Clarion West, which was a couple of weeks ago, but for those who are working in a creative capacity–not just as a writer, mind you–the Launch Pad workshop is open for applications.

Basically, it’s a crash course in astronomy designed for people who could use some training in the area to better handle related subjects in their creative work. In my class, we had mostly fiction authors (and not all of them exclusively writers of SF), but also a science comedy team. Screenwriters, film directors… if you’re a creative person using science in your creations, and you can afford the tuition, you should definitely apply.

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03/14/13

Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in my life by that point: the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts. I think it was Tesseracts 2 or Tesseracts 3, back in 1996 or 1997, maybe, and I got a lovely rejection letter urging me to send my story on to another place, which I, foolishly, did not do. I was too crushed by the rejection.

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12/31/12

Eleven Years…

By the way, it’s been eleven years since I landed in Korea. Okay, really, I arrived on 30 December. It’s still 30 December in a lot of the world, so I’ll just ignore the fact I’m a few hours late on Korean time.

Yeah, it’s been eleven years since I flew across the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arrived in Incheon International Airport, and took a bus down to ~~Jeonju~~ Iksan, to be met by someone I’d never met–but whom I’d heard about through my friend Joleen.

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12/23/12

New (Free) Essay On Gaming, Education, and Agency in Korea, Published in The WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book

For those interested in RPGs, their use in language and other teaching, and what I see as the potential political subversiveness of RPGing in Korea, you might want to check out my newest essay, which is included in the WyrdCon Companion Book, which was just published the other day.

WyrdCon is an annual American convention focused on Interactive Storytelling–which includes LARP, ARGs, and more. I’ve never attended (or even larped, really), but the editor for the non-academic section of the book, Aaron Vanek, invited me to contribute an essay after reading what I wrote about Dread and my return to gaming.

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12/20/12

“The Bernoulli War” in Rich Horton’s Year’s Best 2013

So, after he had kind things to say about “The Bernoulli War” (he rated it among the top novelettes in Asimov’s in 2012, and given the order he mentions, apparently the best), I was delighted when I heard that Rich Horton wanted to include it in his The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition. And checking out the Table of Contents at that second link, I see several friends among the authors collected (including my Clarion West classmate Caroline Yoachim), as well as several authors whom I admire mostly from afar.

Very encouraging…

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